VISIO QUARTA, cap. LX
The Muddy Earth and the Soul's Body
The earth's seasonal muddying is likened to the soul's relationship with the body, which serves yet often overcomes it, though the soul still works every good.
For the earth, broken up as it is by summer's heat and winter's cold, is always muddied, and that mud, meant for sprouting, impregnates it. In this way too the body of the soul, like a handmaid to a lady, ought to lie beneath her; and the soul, through the body, is often overcome, just as a lady is overcome through her handmaid, yet the soul herself works every good thing in a person, just as summer's season brings all fruits to ripeness.
The Excuse of the Hardened Heart
When the sinful body opposes the soul, a person excuses himself, claiming he cannot deny the flesh but that his limited effort is enough.
But when the body, wrapped in the rottenness of sins, stands opposed to the soul, a person says within himself: "I cannot live in such hardness that I am able to deny my flesh what it desires, but what I am able to do is enough for me."
Return from the Mire
The sinner remembers former virtues, repents of muddy sins, and returns joyfully to righteous works, adorning them more beautifully than before.
He himself, however, lying in the rottenness of his own sins, sometimes remembers the former virtues he had practiced, and doing penance for his muddy sins, he returns with joy to righteous works and holy virtues he had once possessed before. And just as muddy earth keeps all the fruits within itself throughout winter's season, which in summer's time it brings forth for people's joy, so a person adorns and renders more elegant his former virtues as though with precious stones.
Memory as the Chest of the Soul
Just as the chest holds heart, liver, and lung, and air holds heat, dryness, and moisture, so memory holds the soul's thoughts and works.
Because just as a person's chest contains the heart, liver, and lung, so the air also comprehends heat, dryness, and the moisture of the breezes within itself, and in this way too, by arranging them, memory contains the soul's thoughts and its works.12
Read the original Latin
Terra enim de calore aestatis et de frigore hiemis semper lutulenta est, et lutum istud ad germinandum eam impraegnat. Hoc modo et corpus animae, velut ancilla dominae, subjacere debet, quae per corpus, sicut domina per ancillam, multoties superatur, ipsaque omnia bona in homine operatur, velut etiam aestivum tempus omnes fructus ad maturitatem perducit. Sed cum corpus in putredine peccatorum involutum contrarium animae existit, homo intra se sic dicit. « Ego in tanta duritia vivere nequeo, ut carni meae quae desiderat prorsus negare valeam, sed idipsum quod possum facere mihi sufficit. » Ipse vero in putredine peccatorum suorum jacens, priorum virtutum quas operatus est interdum reminiscitur, et de lutulentis peccatis suis poenitentiam agens ad justa opera et sanctas virtutes quas prius habuerat cum gaudio revertitur. Et quemadmodum lutulenta terra omnes fructus per hiemis tempus in se servat, quos aestivo tempore ad gaudium hominum profert, ita homo priores virtutes quasi pretiosis lapidibus exornat et elegantiores reddit.
Quia sicut pectus hominis, cor, jecur, pulmonem, sic et aer calorem, siccitatem et humiditatem aurarum in se comprehendat, et hoc etiam modo memoria, animae cogitationes et opera sua disponendo contineat.
Notes
- 1 ↩The Latin syntax is elliptical: pectus hominis is nominative but its listed organs (cor, jecur, pulmonem) mix nominative and accusative forms, likely governed by an implied retinet from the previous section. The translation normalizes this to a single list of objects contained by the chest.
- 2 ↩Memoria is taken as the subject of contineat, parallel to aer, with disponendo as a gerund ('by arranging') modifying its action. An alternative reading takes memoria as ablative ('by memory'), but the parallel structure favors the nominative.
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