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

by us while the soul remains glued to the body unless some vision or likeness associates itself with such business, as we experience at every moment. For even if we wish to contemplate God, nothing is done without a phantasm we cannot contemplate God—that is, the pure act, the most simple spirit—without a likeness or a phantasm as an individual companion of the intellect and the affections: representing to us, that is, a certain light, or some other thing of this kind from those things which we have known and perceived by sense, as little corporeal as possible. Added to this is that whatever is received into the intellect was first in the sense (we speak of cognition which proceeds through the traces of nature) according to the common dogma of the Peripatetics and the Parisian theologians, who almost always imitated them, although those who follow Plato and some other outstanding theologian of ours, already celebrated for many centuries, could put forth enough against this dogma. However, we experience that love, once born and adult, is kept and guarded if we turn the loved thing continually in the mind. If, that is, we form it by assiduously treating the intellectual species either drawn out or illuminated from the thing itself by light or the action of the agent intellect and received into the intellect of the potency, whether by the intellect alone (as the common school wants) or with the intellect at the same time and the phantasm as partial agents (as it pleased Herveus), or however else that business is done. Assiduously, I say, we form it. For we have need of that exercise, lest the images of other things, rushing together, either obscure or dissipate the likeness or specter of the loved thing. For those, reserved in the sensitive and intellective memory, often agitate either by the force of the intellect or of external things striking the senses themselves. And sometimes they seethe with certain whirlwinds. Although there were those who denied that any intellective memory exists as a receptacle of intelligible species and as a sort of case Theological reason and little ark, this physical reason and experience itself proves it. But a theological one can also be assigned. For the enemy of the human race who is named in the Gospel, this enemy—that is, the evil Angel—who How the devil can tempt us fell from those empyrean seats with his companions, cannot slip into the superior part of the soul. However, he can slip into the organs of the senses, both interior and exterior, but he attempts to deceive us most of all from within: when this prestige of his more