VISIO TERTIA, cap. XVI
The Abomination Hidden in Israel
God reveals the spiritual fornication of Israel, showing how one who should have beheld God with a pure heart instead wallowed in defiling sin like a pig in mud.
In the house of Israel I saw a horrible thing: there Israel was defiled by fornication.✦ This becomes clear to the understanding as follows: In those hiding places where that man — who ought to have looked upon God with a pure heart — lay as if resting in his sins, I, who search out all the hidden transgressions, saw a most abominable abomination: he was wrapped in fornication with the most unclean and stinking transgressions, defiling himself in them like a pig rolling in mud — he who should have sought cleanness and gazed upon and embraced it, since he had made himself contemptible and dissolute in all things.✦1
How Uncleanness Dries Up the Soul
Uncleanness paralyzes the inner person, banishing him from sound judgment, and this spiritual collapse is mirrored in the body when disturbed humors dry up the marrow of the bones.
Uncleanness enervates a person and, as it were, banishes him from his own mind, so that he can attend neither to the things that pertain to the world nor to the things that pertain to God with the perfection of integrity, because the fire of the flesh, together with his own will, suggests pride, vainglory, and every evil, as if by breathing them in.2 Because the veins of a person's kidneys, when disturbed by humors that have been stirred up abnormally, are sometimes affected, and by shaking other veins they even dry up the marrow of the bones, and the harm indicated by these things takes hold of the person inwardly.
Read the original Latin
« In domo Israel vidi horrendum, ibi fornicatione contaminatus est Israel . » Quod sic intellectui patet: In latibulis illis, in quibus iste, qui Deum puro corde inspicere deberet, quasi quiescendo in peccatis jacebat, ego qui omnia occulta delictorum perscrutor, vidi abominationem nefandissimam, scilicet quod fornicatione immundissimarum et fetentium praevaricationum ille involutus est, se in his polluens velut porcus luto involvitur, qui munditiam quaerere et intueri atque amplecti debuit, cum se in omnibus contemptibilem et dissolutum fecit. Immunditia enim hominem enervat, eumque quasi a mente sua eliminat, ita ut nec illa quae ad saeculum, nec ea quae ad Deum respiciunt, cum perfectione honestatis attendere valeat, quia carnis incendium cum voluntate ipsius superbiam, vanamque gloriam, et omne malum quasi insufflando suggerit.
Quod venae renum hominis ab humoribus injuste aliquando commotis nonnunquam tactae alias venas concutiendo etiam medullas ossium arefaciunt, et quae incommoditas per haec designata interius hominem apprehendat.
Scripture echoes
Notes
- 1 ↩The cum clause (cum se in omnibus contemptibilem et dissolutum fecit) is read as causal ('since he had made himself…'), which best supports the logical contrast with what he 'should have' done. A temporal reading ('when he made himself…') is syntactically possible but weaker here.
- 2 ↩The phrase 'cum perfectione honestatis' is rendered as 'with the perfection of integrity.' 'Honestas' in this theological-moral context carries the sense of moral honor or uprightness rather than mere respectability.
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