  By corporealizing the spiritual and spiritualizing the corporeal,  the intellect, in tandem with the imagination, enables individuals to gain knowledge of the divine world. Unlike Maimonides and other medieval Aristotelians who equated the natural world with impermanence and evil, Judah argues that this world is the natural receptacle of heavenly powers: “Hence earth is the proper and regular consort of heaven, whereof the other elements are but paramours. For it is upon the earth that heaven begets all on the greater part of its  progeny.”[57]   In an interesting passage, Judah, like Maimonides before him, compares matter to a  harlot.[58]   Yet, unlike Maimonides, he reaches a radically different conclusion. For Judah, “it is this adulterous love that beautifies the lower world with such wondrous variety of the fair-formed  things.”[59]   In keeping with Judah’s claim that “the lower can be found in the  higher,”[60]  this world becomes one gigantic mirror that reflects spiritual beauty, and in which one can grasp divine  intelligibles.[61]   Just as Philo is enthralled by Sophia’s beauty, the individual, upon contemplating physical objects that are beautiful, apprehends the divine: