XXVIIII. De oblivione.

XXVIIII. De oblivione.

And you see the third image, which shows oblivion, here walking after sloth, because in the service of God and in other necessities, sluggish people eventually arrive at the point where they hand God over to oblivion, as if they didn’t know Him, and they don’t desire to come to Him because of the many inquiries of diabolical mockeries; but they have their own conscience within themselves for God, from which they even apprehend the Devil in place of God. Its head is like the head of a lizard, and its remaining body resembles that of a serpent, because those same people who are devoted to this vice are stubborn in their minds and wills, and they defiantly oppose all their actions to God, so that they turn all their deeds headlong and into excess, since this aforementioned vice sometimes frightens them through envy and unbelief, leaving them unsure of what they can do. And before that, a cloud appears, which is dark, turbulent, and misty, mixed with a dense white cloud, because they surrender God to forgetfulness, proposing to themselves various thoughts of their own institutions, where now they are black in impiety, now turbulent in disbelief, and now they are nebulous in various changes. Yet all these things please them, like a bright cloud, as they mix all their works according to the desire of their will; where they do nothing else but what their desires show them. However, the same image places its former feet upon the aforementioned cloud, which means that those in whom there is forgetfulness of God do not direct their steps, which should first lead to the salvation of their souls, toward good, but rather toward evil. They divide themselves in all their works and in all their journeys into two paths, namely, into the oblivion of God and the hardness of heart, paying attention only to those things that their mind leads them to, just as the same vice also shows in their words, as has been said. VIII. il 162 S.