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

lies hidden from us while our senses wander and exercise themselves around their own proper and natural objects. For he could not conveniently deceive us outwardly unless we entirely wished to acquiesce to the suggestion. But if he persuaded and permeated our hidden senses, either by suggesting obscene likenesses—especially of the venereal kind, so that they might incite the exterior members—or by fashioning and imprinting new ones upon the imagination, we would more easily fall into vices. Therefore, if we arm our senses, both exterior and internal, with the cross of Christ—which, for us to do, there is no need of anything else except that we wish it—

Two offices are demanded of the imagination (which also Thomas touches upon intercurrently and in passing in his questions concerning truth: that, that is, it preserves sensitive species and ensures that they are present whenever the intellect wishes to contemplate). If, I say, we accomplish this, two benefits will come to us from it. First, that the evil Demon will immediately flee, or will not plot against our salvation quite so perniciously. For the depraved will of that prideful one is so much that it wishes in no way to be conquered, especially by Christ, whose death had such power that it took away from him much of the faculty of harming, since he cannot tempt men in the way he could before it, even if he always goes around (as the prince of the apostles says) seeking whom he may devour. Second, that from that very imagination, we will be moved toward loving more propensely with both men; that is, we will burn with mind and body—burn, I say, with a sweet ardor, which is a certain altar of the heavenly fatherland. And it will happen that we can truly sing along with the prophet: "My heart and my flesh have exulted in the living God," and again, "My soul has thirsted for you; how multiply, O God, has my flesh longed for you."

That the causes of sins are cut down most easily by the thought of the death of Christ. Chap. viii.

From this frequent meditation of His death, being made in a certain way familiar and warmed by the memory of His most stupendous benefit, we shall forbid the foundations of vices from being laid, and we shall tear down those already laid. For among the causes of sins commemorated by our theologians, these are detected as the most principal