VISIO QUARTA, cap. LXXV
The Body's Hunger and the Soul's Hunger
Just as the flesh is harmed by too much or too little food, the stomach rightly dispenses what is received and released.
So if food is taken in excess, a person's flesh is weakened by a toxic kind of envy; but if less than what's needed is consumed, the flesh is worn down by its deficiency. In the same way, the stomach is the rightful dispenser of receiving and releasing food.
Pride Blinds the Soul's Joy
When ascetic effort gives way to pride, the soul is blinded and stripped of the heavenly desires it once knew.
When the fiery soul has so overcome a person by its power that they mortify themselves by abstaining from carnal desires and from their own will, then, puffed up with pride at the devil's suggestion and looking down on others, they often say: 'I am holy, and I deserve to be praised and honored by everyone.' And so, with the eyes of its soul blinded by pride, because of excessive grief it cannot have joy and heavenly desire; and so, troubled within the person itself, it says: 'Ah, ah, I am blinded by stinking pride from the heavenly desires in which I once saw and understood God, and I am left stripped bare.'
The Warning Against Elation in Good Works
Those who do good through the soul must guard against elation, for pride and immoderate abstinence both weaken the soul as excess and deficiency weaken the flesh.
Therefore let the person who does good not through flesh and blood but through the powers of the soul — the soul by which one knows and perceives God — be most careful about elation in good works, lest through that elation they lose the rewards of eternal blessedness. For just as a person's flesh is weakened if they have taken food excessively or less than needed, so too the soul fails through the elation of pride and through immoderate abstinence practiced without discretion.
The Humble Soul and Its Grief Over the Flesh
The life-giving soul is a humble spirit that rejoices as long as the person is not stirred toward sin, grieving over fleshly desires.
But the soul that gives life to the body and understands God in the unity of the Trinity is a humble spirit — and it shows its own humility in the early stages of a person's life, when they do not yet have pride or hatred in their taste for sin. In this state it also rejoices, as long as the same person is not stirred toward sin through the desires of the flesh — desires for which the soul itself grieves and continually laments.
The Soul Tormented in Its Earthen Vessel
The soul cannot fully work in the body, for the flesh torments it with sin and pain, just as the stomach that receives and expels food signifies the sinner who delights in sin and is later turned to distress through repentance.
And so the soul can never fully work according to the desire of its own nature in this earthen vessel of the body, since the flesh is an exile and seeks life for itself, but the body — which is often afflicted by sin — torments it with the foul and filthy sins that cling to it, and with pain forces it to recognize those same sins with sorrow. For the stomach that receives food and then sends it out again in stench signifies the person who delights in sins, and who afterward through repentance is turned into the distress of sinners.
All Things Look Back to the Soul
As the navel is the strength of the inner parts and the earth holds all creatures, so all deeds of body and soul look back to the soul, whether one sins through pride or negligence.
For just as the navel is the strength of all the inner parts that cling to it, and the circuit of the earth is the holding-place of the other creatures, so too all things done through body and soul, whether they be good or evil, look back to the soul itself — and because there is a great distance between those who sin through pride and those who sin through negligence,12
Read the original Latin
Si igitur cibi superflue accipiuntur, caro hominis ex indigno livore infirmatur; vel si minus necessario sumuntur, caro in defectu attenuatur. Sic itaque stomachus recte dispensator receptionis et emissionis ciborum est. Cum etiam anima ignea vi sua hominem ita superaverit, ut a carnalibus desideriis et a propria voluntate sua abstinendo se maceret, tunc per suggestionem diaboli superbia inflatus, alios spernendo saepe dicit: « Sanctus sum et ab omnibus laudari et honorari merito debeo. » Sicque oculis animae ejus per superbiam obcaecatis, pro nimia tristitia gaudium et coeleste desiderium habere non potest, et ideo in ipso homine turbata dicit: « Ach, ach, ego per fetentem superbiam obcaecata coelestibus desideriis, in quibus Deum vidi et intellexi despoliata sum. » Unde etiam homo, qui non per carnem et sanguinem, sed per vires animae, qua Deum scit et sentit, bona operatur, elationem in bonis operibus diligentissime caveat, ne per illam praemia aeternae beatitudinis amittat. Sicut enim homo si cibos superflue vel si minus necessario receperit, caro ejus infirmatur, sic etiam anima per elationem superbiae et per nimiam abstinentiam quae sine discretione est, deficit. Anima vero quae corpus vivificat, et quae Deum in Trinitate unitatis intelligit, humilis spiritus est, humilitatemque suam in pueritia hominis ostendit, qui necdum superbiam vel odium in gustu peccatorum habet. In quo etiam tandiu laetatur quousque idem homo per desideria carnis ad peccata moveatur, pro quibus ipsa dolendo semper lamentatur.
Neque enim secundum desiderium naturae suae in fictili vase corporis nunquam pleniter operari potest, cum caro exsilium et ipsam vitam quaerat, sed corpus, quo peccante saepe affligitur, immunda illi et fetida peccata cum dolore proponendo affligit, atque eadem peccata in tristitia cognoscere facit. Stomachus enim qui cibos recipit, quos iterum in fetore emittit, hominem qui in peccatis delectatur significat, et postea per poenitentiam in molestiam peccatorum convertitur.
Quod sicut umbilicus omnium interiorum sibi adhaerentium fortitudo et ambitus terrae caeterarum creaturarum retentaculum existit, sic et universorum quae per corpus et animam geruntur, sive bona, sive mala sint, ad ipsam animam respiciunt, et quia magna distantia sit inter hos qui per elationem et hos qui per negligentiam delinquunt
Notes
- 1 ↩retentaculum is rare; rendered as 'holding-place' to capture the sense of a structure that retains or contains, consistent with the navel/earth analogy.
- 2 ↩elationem rendered as 'pride' (the figurative sense of elatio as spiritual exaltation turned disordered), which the following context supports over the literal sense 'lifting up'.
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