VISIO QUARTA, cap. LXXIV
The Body's Veins and the Soul's Vigilance
The soul is compared to the veins that serve the stomach, showing how it animates the body and permeates every part of a person's life.
For from the heart, the liver, and the lungs, certain veins extend like small tubes, positioned to help the stomach receive and expel food. In this way the soul, with great power, rouses the body it finds sleeping as it travels along its many paths, and it is aware of God. And just as the veins serve the stomach as it fills and empties, so the soul itself is present to a person in every good and bad situation, so that a person begins and carries out thoughts, the hardness of malice and the softness of carnal desire, through her; and as bloody little streams run to the stomach, so she herself passes through the whole body by her own powers.
The Danger of Unceasing Indulgence
Just as a stomach harmed by constant fullness or emptiness, the soul is damaged when the body lives without restraint in fleshly pleasures.
Just as it would not benefit the stomach to be always full or always empty, so it would also harm the soul if the body always lived in the pleasures of fleshly desire, since by exercising its powers it would fail in the hunger of its natural desires, so that one who sins without ceasing in the fatness of his own flesh also often fails in sense and in body.
The Soul as a Discerning Stomach
The soul, like a stomach, must receive what is clean and reject what is foul, finding purification through penance after the pleasure of sin.
Because just as the flesh of a person is harmed if it receives food and nourishment either too much or too little, so also the soul, if it gives itself over to too much or too little — to strictness or to laxity — signifies the stomach: receiving what is clean, yes, but rejecting what is foul, the person who takes pleasure in sins, yet is afterwards purified through penance.
Read the original Latin
Nam et de corde, et de jecore, et de pulmone, quaedam venae quasi fistulae extenduntur, quae ad receptionem et ad emissionem ciborum stomacho subvenientes adsunt. In hunc modum anima, quae magna vi corpus quod dormiens invenit exsuscitat, in multis itineribus suis Deum sentit. Et quemadmodum venae stomacho adsunt, cum impletur et evacuatur, sic ipsa in omni bono et malo homini adest, ita ut homo cogitationes, duritiam malitiae et mollitiem carnalis desiderii incipiendo et perficiendo per eam exerceat; et sicut sanguinei rivuli ad stomachum currunt, sic ipsa viribus suis totum corpus pertransit. Sicut etiam stomacho non prodesset, si semper plenus vel vacuus foret, sic etiam animae obesset, si corpus in deliciis desideriorum carnis semper viveret, quoniam in viribus esuriem desideriorum naturae suae habendo deficeret, ut etiam sensu et corpore saepe deficit, qui in pinguedine carnis suae incessanter peccat.
Quia sicut caro hominis laeditur si vel superflue vel minus necessario ciborum alimenta percipiat, sic et anima si plus vel minus justo districtioni vel remissioni insistat; et quod stomachus mundos quidem recipiens, sed fetentes cibos rejiciens, hominem qui in peccatis delectatur, sed postea per poenitentiam purgatur, significet.
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