Three Books on the Death of Christ and Self-Reflection, and Two Books on the Study of Divine and Human Philosophy

enticed by corporeal pleasures, it enters the snares of the devil or escapes them only with great difficulty. We find that those most holy monks living in the Egyptian deserts held this opinion about the stabilization of the soul, with Cassian as our authority. For they said that the edge of the mind ought to be directed toward what is right, and that it would necessarily happen that the mind itself would be changed according to the variety of onslaughts and transformed into that state which would first occur to it, if it did not have a place to which to return or something to which it could primarily adhere.

That the object which ought to be proposed to the soul is Christ, and this one crucified and dead. Chapter v.

But what that object is which the soul ought to set before itself, we must now execute. We have said that its place (for so it has pleased us to call that by whose help it may rest and be blessed) is God, and that another place close to it ought to be sought by us at present, since it cannot perfectly enjoy Him while it remains glued to a body subject to corruption. For although, with Damascene as an authority, God is innate in the minds of all and as if inscribed, and the same was proven first by Plato and then by Aristotle, both in physics and in first philosophy (not to mention our theologians and the sacred letters), through whom we know not only this but also learned that there is a Trinity of persons in one and individual essence, which is one and true God, still the human intellect is blind in such great light and will always be darkened until, stripped of its fleshy and perishable toga, it is flooded with the light of glory. For since the nature of God is incorporeal, most simple, and infinite, it is impervious to our thoughts while we inhabit this sublunary region. This is both because everything we can conceive of concerning Him exceeds the immense (as the divine Dionysius teaches) and because we do not understand without the help of phantasms, as Aristotle writes and experience teaches. Wherefore, we must return to imagining Christ, and this one especially crucified; for by meditating on His passion and proposing it to the soul as an object around which it may turn, we arrive more easily at the cognition of the goodness of God. Which, although...