[Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae]

Since you were blessed and eternally existing,
and from your supreme goodness you wished
others to become participants of your
beatitude, you disposed to communicate
the good itself, which you yourself are and
in which you are blessed, to others by
goodness alone, not by necessity. And because
no one is able to become a participant
of this your ineffable beatitude except
through intelligence, which the more it understands,
the more fully it possesses, you created
a rational creature, honoring and exalting it
among other creatures, and ennobling it
with the light of your countenance, that it might
understand you, the supreme good, by understanding
love you, and by loving you, possess you,
and by possessing you, enjoy you. And you distinguished
it in this way: that one part should remain
in its purity and not be united to a body,
namely the angelic part, and another part
that should be joined to a body, namely the rational soul.
When you made it capable of you, it is sufficiently
given to be understood how noble and how excellent
you created it, since from this nothing can
suffice it for blessed rest, whatever is less
than you. For even if it can be occupied
by other things, it cannot be filled at all
by created things. Saint Augustine says:
"So great a good is the rational nature
that there is no good by which it may be
blessed except God." You made, moreover, man,
benign Lord God, innocent, upright, decorated
with every virtue, and adorned with all

goods, 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 magnificent thanks to him.
Indeed, according to the body he made an
outstanding creature, but according to the soul
even more so, inasmuch as it is marked by the
image of the Creator, a participant in reason,
and capable of eternal beatitude, which is man.
O my God, most high Father of
mercies, most powerful creator, how
magnificent you make him, magnificent indeed,
because you enrich him with the generosity of reason,
you vivify him with the splendor of grace,
and you exalt him with the honor of conferred virtue.

The third, about the transgression of the

precept of God by our parents,

Adam and Eve

Who will grant to my eyes a
fountain of tears so that I may
weep for such a miserable fall
of our first parent? O what a
mournful ruin it was! For our
first parent was constituted under such a
condition of law, by the unsearchable wisdom
of the Creator, that if he had remained
immovably bound to the best Creator of his
in that summit of uprightness in which he was formed,
he would be blessed with the strength of such
health, and fortified with such solidity, that by no
impulse of harmful mutability...