PROLOGUE OF BROTHER ARNALD Brother Arnald (or Arnaud) was a Franciscan friar and Angela’s relative who recorded her spiritual journey, translating her local Umbrian dialect into Latin.

Lest the pride of worldly wisdom This refers to the "Sagesse du monde"—human intellectual vanity that ignores spiritual truths. should fail to receive the confusion it deserves from the eternal God, the Lord has raised up a woman accustomed to the things of the age [this world], bound by the obligations of the world, who had a husband, children, and a fortune; a simple woman, lacking in formal learning and strength; but who, having received and accepted deep within herself, along with the cross of Jesus Christ, the infused power infused power: a theological term for grace or wisdom poured directly into the soul by God, rather than learned through study of God, broke the bonds of the world, climbed the summit of evangelical perfection, renewed in its absolute fullness the folly of the cross A reference to the biblical idea in 1 Corinthians that the message of the cross seems like "folly" to the world but is wisdom to believers., which is the wisdom of the perfect, and showed, in the abandoned path of the good Jesus—in that path declared impossible and unbearable by the words and examples of those who play the "great person"—showed, as I was saying, not only a possible life, not only an easy life, but unheard-of delights: the delights of the heights.

O Divine and Perfect Wisdom, how you have revealed in your servant the folly of all wisdom The text ends mid-sentence, contrasting God's wisdom with the perceived "wisdom" of the secular world.