[Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae]

Since you were eternally blessed and, out of your supreme goodness, wished for others to become participants in your beatitude, you disposed to communicate to others, out of goodness alone and not necessity, the Good itself that you are and in which you are blessed. And because no one is able to become a participant in your ineffable beatitude except through intelligence, which has it more fully the more it understands, you created the rational creature, honoring and exalting it among other creatures, and ennobling it with the light of your face so that it might understand you, the supreme good, and by understanding, love you, and by loving, possess you, and by possessing, enjoy you. You distinguished it in this way: that one part should remain in its purity—not mixed with a body, namely the angelic part—and the other part, which would be joined to a body—namely the rational soul—you made capable of you. It is sufficiently understood how noble and excellent you created the soul, since nothing can suffice for its blessed rest except that which is you. For even if it can be occupied by other things, it cannot be filled by them at all. Concerning created things, Augustine says: "The rational nature is such a great good that there is no good by which it may be blessed, except God." Furthermore, you made man, O benign Lord God, innocent, upright, decorated with every virtue, and adorned with every good, and as it were a king of those things that are upon the earth, simultaneously celestial and terrestrial, temporal and immortal, visible and intelligible. Think, O faithful soul, how God made man, and give thanks for his magnificence. Truly, according to the body, he made an excellent creature; but according to the soul, even more so, as it is distinguished by the image of the Creator, a participant in reason, and capable of eternal beatitude. This is man. O my God, most high Father of mercy, most potent Creator, you magnify him; you magnify him clearly because you enrich him with the breadth of reason, you vivify him with the infusion of grace, and you exalt him with the honor of conferred virtue.

The third, concerning the transgression of God's commandment by our parents, Adam and Eve

O, who will give my eyes a fountain of tears that I may weep for the miserable fall of our first parent? O how mournful was the ruin! Indeed, our first parent was established by the inscrutable wisdom of the Creator under such a condition of law that if he had remained immovably in that pinnacle of uprightness in which he was formed for his best Creator, he would have been blessed with the strength of such great health, and established with such great solidity, that by no impulse of harmful mutability...