VISIO NONA, cap. XIII
The Darkening of the West
The western region appears as smoking shadows and pitch-black fire because it represents the places of punishment for those who turn from God through unbelief and wickedness.
Across the whole western region you see, as it were, the darkest smoking shadows, because there are places of punishment that contain within themselves different kinds of torments; for when a person heads toward the setting of the sun through the downward slopes of sin, he draws to himself, through wickedness, the blinding darkness of unbelief that emits a foul vapor, and so, falling into the very punishment of those shadows, he plunges himself into confusion when he neglects his Creator. But near the corner of that same region, toward the north, a pitch-black fire with sulfur and the densest darkness surges up, stretching nearly to the middle of the northern area as it curves back on itself, because that same place is a pit of punishment and a lake of destruction for the souls of those who, despising God, refused to know him through good works. And so there too a fierce fire, with the bitterness of sulfur and inescapable darkness, spreads out and extends toward its appointed places, so that no matter how long a person lives in this mortal world, human knowledge cannot fully grasp the variety of those punishments. A person who has reached the sunset of unbelief, which looks toward destruction, to the point where he neither does just works nor loves God—the fire of perversity meets him, with its bitterness and moral blindness, and leads him to the fullest depth of misery and ruin, so that destruction pulls him entirely into itself, since he has no hope of life.
The Folly of Ignoring the Future Life
A person who follows folly condemns himself by refusing to consider the future life, unable to comprehend the soul's immortality or the changes of old age.
For a person who follows folly and detests the wisdom through which God created everything condemns himself, since, having no restraint in what is evil, he gives no thought to the future life, does not even want to know whether there is another life, and does not carefully consider how changeable his condition is. A person can grasp his own infancy and childhood, his youth and mature age, but what becomes of him in old age he can in no way comprehend, or how he is going to change. Through the reason of the soul, a person knows that he has a beginning, but how it is that the soul does not die and has no end, he can neither know nor grasp at all.
God's Wisdom as Answer to Evil
God created all things through wisdom to refute the devil's malice and made humanity in his own image so that the invisible God might be known through faith and his works.
Because God made all things through wisdom to refute the devil's malice, and so that, since he is invisible to man, he might be understood through faith and known through his work; and whatever ordering of his whole work he had in himself before time—work which he founded temporally—he also in this constituted man according to himself, so that he might first arrange within himself by thinking whatever he would afterwards carry out by working.1
Read the original Latin
Per totam autem occidentalem plagam velut teterrimas tenebras fumigantes aspicis, quoniam ibi poenalia loca sunt, quae diversa genera tormentorum in se habent, quia cum homo per declivia peccatorum ad occidua tendit, caecitatem infidelitatis per nequitiam malum vaporem emittentem sibi attrahit; et sic etiam earumdem tenebrarum poenas incidens, se ipsum in confusionem mittit, cum creatorem suum negligit. Sed prope angulum ejusdem plagae, qui versus septentrionem est, nigerrimus ignis cum sulphure et densissimis tenebris ebulliens, fere usque ad medietatem septentrionalis partis se recurvando extendit, quia idem locus est poenalis profunditas, et lacus perditionis animarum illorum, qui Deum contemnentes eum bonis operibus scire noluerunt. Quapropter et ibi acer ignis cum amaritudine sulphuris, et inextricabilibus tenebris evaporat, et ad destinata loca se dilatat, ita ut diversitatem earumdem poenarum humana scientia ad perfectum scire non possit, quandiu homo in mortali saeculo vivit. Homo quoque cum ad occasum infidelitatis pervenerit, quae ad perditionem respicit, ita ut nec justa opera nec Deum diligat; ignis perversitatis cum acerbitate et caecitate morum illi occurrens, ad plenitudinem infelicitatis et submersionis eum perducit, ita ut spem vitae non habentem, perditio ipsum per omnia in se trahat. Nam homo qui stultitiam sequitur, et sapientiam per quam Deus omnia creavit abominatur, se ipsum condemnat, cum nullam moderationem in malis habens, de futura vita nihil cogitat, nec si alia vita sit scire desiderat, nec quomodo mutabilis sit perspicaciter perpendit. Infantiam enim suam et pueritiam, juventutem et maturam aetatem homo capere valet, quid vero in decrepita aetate de ipso fiat, nequaquam comprehendere potest, aut quomodo mutandus sit. Per rationalitatem quippe animae se initium habere cognoscit; sed quomodo sit quod anima non moritur, et quod finem non habet, nequaquam scire aut capere potest.
Quia Deus omnia per sapientiam ad confutandam diaboli malitiam fecerit, et ut cum sit invisibilis ab homine per fidem intelligeretur, et per opus suum cognosceretur; et quid ordinationem totius operis sui ante aevum in se ipso habuerit quod temporaliter condidit, in hoc quoque hominem secundum se constituens ut prius in se cogitando disponeret, quidquid postmodum operando exerceret.
Notes
- 1 ↩The Latin 'quid' (what) is translated as 'whatever' to smoothly govern the indirect question and its correlative 'quidquid' (whatever) later in the sentence, resolving a syntactic ambiguity in the source.
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