The five and fifty chapitre. How thei ben disseived, that folowen the fervour of spirite in reprovyng of sinne withouten discrecion.

The five and fifty chapitre. How thei ben disseived, that folowen the fervour of spirite in reprovyng of sinne withouten discrecion.

The devil will deceive some people in this way. He will wonderfully inflame their brains to uphold God's law and to destroy sin in everyone else. He will never tempt them with anything that is openly evil. He makes them like busy prelates, watching over the lives of Christians of every rank, as an abbot watches over his monks. They will reprove everyone for their faults, just as if they had the care of their souls. And yet it seems to them that for God's sake they dare not do otherwise. But they point out the faults they see, and they say they are moved to do so by the fire of charity and of God's love in their hearts. And truly they lie, for it is the fire of hell welling up in their brains and in their imagination. That this is true is clear enough from what follows. The devil is a spirit, and by his own nature he has no body any more than an angel does. But even so, whenever he or an angel takes on a body with God's permission to perform any ministry to anyone in this life, the quality of that body matches, in some respect and by likeness, the work he is going to do.¹² We have an example of this in Holy Scripture. Whenever any angel was sent in bodily form in the Old Testament, and in the New as well, it was always made clear—either by his name or by some instrument or quality of his body—what his errand or his message was in spirit.³ It is the same with the devil: when he appears in a body, he represents in some quality of his body what his servants are in spirit.⁴ We can see an example of this in one case that stands for all the rest. For as I've learned from some practitioners of necromancy—who practice it as a craft for summoning evil spirits—and from some to whom the devil has appeared in physical form, whatever physical form the devil appears in, he always has only one nostril, and that one is large and wide.⁵ And he'll gladly tilt it up so that a person can look in through it to his brain inside his head. And that brain is nothing other than the fire of hell, because the devil can have no other brain. And if he could make someone look in there, he'd want nothing better, because by that look the person would lose their wits forever.⁶ But a fully trained apprentice in necromancy knows this well enough, and can arrange things accordingly, so that the devil does not harm him.⁷ This is why I say, and have said, that whenever the devil takes a person, he always shows in some quality of that body what his servants are like in spirit. For he so inflames the imagination of his contemplatives with the fire of hell that suddenly, without any discernment, they shoot out their overly curious notions, and without any deliberation they take it upon themselves to blame other people's faults too soon.⁸ And this is because, spiritually, they have only one nostril. For that partition in a person's physical nose, which separates one nostril from the other, signifies that a person should have spiritual discernment and know how to distinguish good from evil, evil from worse, and good from better, before passing any full judgment on anything he has heard or seen done or spoken around him.⁹ And spiritually, a person's brain refers to the imagination; for by nature it dwells and works in the head.