VISIO SECUNDA, cap. XLVI
The Radiant Threads of Divine Love
From the mouth of the visionary image, threads of surpassing light extend to measure and order every circle, figure, and human limb within the wheel, revealing love's elegant governance of the cosmos.
You see also that from the mouth of the aforementioned image, in whose breast the aforementioned wheel appears, a light brighter than daylight goes out in the likeness of threads, because from the power of true love — whose knowledge encompasses the circuit of the world — its most elegant ordering, shining above all things and containing all things and holding them together, proceeds.12 By which threads the signs of the aforementioned circles and the signs of the remaining figures, which are distinguished within the same wheel, and the individual signs of the limbs of the human form — that is, of the same image, which also appear in the wheel itself, as was said before — are measured by a straight and distinct measure, just as is revealed in the preceding and subsequent words of it, where through it the powers of the elements and of other higher ornaments, which look toward the fortification and adornment of the world, and all the joinings of the limbs of the human being, who namely rules in that world, it fittingly distinguishes and suitably adapts to the just measure, as has been shown to you many times.34
Love's Right Judgment and the Prophetic Voice
True divine love weighs all human works and heavenly desires with right judgment, and the prophet Jeremiah is invoked to illuminate this same truth.
But also concerning true love, which is wholly divine: the good that is more precious than every desirable thing, gathering to itself all who seek it and drawing them, comes — and the merits of heavenly desires and spiritual groans proceeding by divine instinct, as well as all the works of the human being brought forth for the love of God, it weighs with right judgment, just as it is clear to all who perfectly love God — as I speak through Jeremiah my servant, saying:567 The words of the prophet Jeremiah that bear on the same reasoning, and how they are to be understood.
Read the original Latin
Vides etiam quod ex ore praedictae imaginis, in cujus pectore praefata rota apparet, lux clarior luce diei in similitudine filorum exit, quoniam ex virtute verae charitatis, in cujus scientia circuitus mundi est, elegantissima ejus ordinatio super omnia lucens, omniaque continens, et constringens procedit. Quibus filis signa praedictorum circulorum, signaque caeterarum figurarum, quae in eadem rota discreta sunt, et singula signa membrorum formae hominis, scilicet ejusdem imaginis, quae etiam in ipsa rota apparent, ut praefatum est, recta et distincta mensura metitur, quemadmodum in praecedentibus et subsequentibus verbis illius manifestatur, ubi per eam vires elementorum aliorumque superiorum ornamentorum, quae ad munimentum et ad ornatum mundi spectant, omnesque compagines membrorum hominis, qui in illo scilicet mundo dominatur, decenter distinguit, convenienterque justae mensurae coaptat, ut tibi multoties propalatum est. Sed etiam de vera charitate, quae tota divina est, bonum quod omni desiderabili pretiosius existit, omnes ipsum quaerentes ad se colligens et trahens venit, atque coelestium desideriorum spiritaliumque gemituum divino instinctu procedentium, merita, nec non et omnia hominis opera, pro Dei amore prolata, recto judicio pensat, sicut et omnibus qui Deum perfecte diligunt patet, velut per Jeremiam servum meum loquor, dicens:
Verba Jeremiae prophetae ad eamdem rationem spectantia, et quomodo intelligenda sint.
Notes
- 1 ↩charitatis rendered 'love' per lexeme policy; context is divine love as the animating power of the vision.
- 2 ↩The quoniam-clause's attachment is ambiguous in the Latin: it could modify the light's brilliance or the whole preceding vision. Attached here to the light's going out, as the causal thread runs through the image's ordered power.
- 3 ↩The relative clause structure is densely nested; 'through it' (per eam) refers back to the wheel/image as the mediating principle of divine ordering.
- 4 ↩hominis here is generic ('human being'), not gendered in the modern sense; rendered to reflect the vision's symbolic anthropology.
- 5 ↩charitate rendered 'love' per lexeme policy; the passage personifies divine love as drawing and gathering seekers.
- 6 ↩velut per Jeremiam servum meum loquor introduces a prophetic voice attributed to God; candidate Jeremiah allusion pending Moses resolution.
- 7 ↩nec non et functions as inclusive emphasis ('as well as'), not double negation.
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