VISIO QUARTA, cap. CII
The Lord's Throne and Man's Seat
God reigns powerfully over heaven and creation, while man is seated on earth as ruler over the rest of creation, marked with the signs of God's omnipotence.
For the Lord reigns powerfully in heaven by his own power, and he looks upon the stars that are kindled through him and upon the rest of creation. And so man sits upon the seat that is the earth, and he rules over the rest of creation, because he is marked with the signs of God's omnipotence.
The Five Senses and the Angelic Choir
The five senses enable man to venerate the Trinity in right faith, which adorns the nine angelic orders, while man himself is the tenth choir restored by God to replace the fallen angels through the Incarnation.
These signs are indeed the five senses of man, through which he understands and perceives, by the power of God, that he ought to venerate the Trinity in unity and the unity in Trinity in God through right faith; and this veneration is the ornament of the nine orders of angels, from which the diabolical crowd fell when it was expelled.1 Man, however, is the tenth choir, which God restored in himself in the original creation to replace the lost angels, because he willed to become man; in whose humanity there is a tower, in which those walk who belong to the tenth choir.2
The Soul's Fiery Breath and Loving Knowledge
God marked all creatures in man, and when the soul was breathed into him, he rose to know and embrace all creation with the strongest love; the soul is fiery in nature, knowing God, governing itself, and animating the body.
Therefore, as has been said above, God marked both the higher and the lower creatures in man. After he was breathed into through the breath of life, which is the soul, he rose up, and he knew all creatures, and he embraced them in his mind with the strongest love.✦ That the nature of the soul is fiery and of manifold efficacy in its own powers, by which it both knows God and understands — or governs — itself, and endows its own body with sense and moves it to act.
Read the original Latin
Dominus etenim in coelo in potentia sua potenter regnat, et sidera quae per ipsum accenduntur et reliquam creaturam inspicit. Sic et homo super sedem, quae terra est, sedet, et reliquae creaturae dominatur, quia signis omnipotentiae Dei insignitus est. Signa vero haec quinque sensus hominis sunt, per quos ex potentia Dei intelligit et sentit quod trinitatem in unitate, unitatem in trinitate in Deo venerari per rectam fidem debet; et veneratio ista ornamentum novem ordinum angelorum est, de quibus diabolica turba expulsa corruit. Homo autem decimus chorus est, quem Deus in semetipso in prima constitutione perditorum angelorum reparavit, quoniam homo fieri voluit, in cujus humanitate turris est, in qua illi ambulant qui in decimo choro sunt. Itaque, ut supradictum est, Deus in homine tam superiores quam inferiores creaturas signavit. Qui postquam per spiraculum vitae, quod est anima, inspiratus est, surrexit, omnesque creaturas cognovit, ac in animo suo fortissima dilectione illas amplexatus est.
Quod natura animae ignea et multiplicis efficaciae in viribus suis sit, quibus et Deum cognoscit, et se ipsam intelligit vel regit, et corpus suum sensificat et ad operandum movet.
Scripture echoes
- ↩Gen.2.7 — Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Notes
- 1 ↩The syntax 'diabolica turba expulsa corruit' places the causal circumstance (expulsa) before the main verb (corruit), emphasizing that their fall was a direct consequence of their expulsion.
- 2 ↩'In prima constitutione perditorum angelorum reparavit' implies God restored the number of the choirs by creating man as a replacement for the fallen angels at the very beginning.
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