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

Benefits of Christ

of the Gospel proclaims it. "In the beginning," says God, "He created heaven and earth, and all things were made through Him." Could Christ have conferred any benefit more excellent upon the human race than that which He imparted on the altar of the cross? While He offered Himself as a living and acceptable host to the Father on the altar of the cross so that He might redeem him who was brought into all miseries through the sin of the first parent, and might rescue him from the servitude of the devil. Can a more expectable gift be desired

What to expect from
Christ

Highest felicity

than that which has been promised to us so often: the gift, I say, of eternal felicity, so rare, so sublime, which, as we have learned from the prophecy of Isaiah and the teaching of the Apostle to the Corinthians, neither has eye seen, nor ear heard, nor has it ascended into the heart of man. Who, therefore, would not love the Creator and Redeemer, the highest good Himself? Who would not pursue the giver of felicity with the whole fire of love? But

The greatest
love of Christ
toward us

that also ought to inflame us more intensely: that He still loves us so much (although provoked and offended by our continuous failings) that, with the infinite charity that is His, if it were necessary to give His own blood again for the salvation of men, He would willingly and spontaneously dispose Himself to suffer every kind of torment. For it is of the same clemency and the same commiseration. Which, without doubt, must be chewed over by us continually and held in the mind, and we shall have accomplished this if we imagine His Cross more often. For in it all these things shine back, since from that most precious blood shed most abundantly for us we weigh His highest goodness. When

Why His own?
all obedient?
follows?

He gave Himself to be killed so that the human race—and indeed, an unjust one, though obedient to divine precepts—would not perish eternally. By the perception of this benefit, the rest with which we are accumulated come to the mind. For by His very death He restored eternal life, the entrance to which had been closed due to the sin of Adam, and He rendered us apt for attaining it. Because of this constant imagination of Christ, who filled us with so many goods by His death, our love toward Him arises and catches fire. For it cannot be doubted that love for a loved thing is increased by assiduous treatment and that the habit is confirmed. Although concerning the mode

Controversy
about the increase
of habit

of increase, different people have brought forth different things, and great wars have been fought over this controversy between later philosophers and the Parisian theologians (which does not escape the learned). The same also must be said about the retention which is made in the senses: since nothing can be understood