[Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae]

...nor by any infirmity or weakness of age could he have flowed away from the integrity of his innate health. Certainly, he had been placed in paradise, as Gregory testifies, so that if he had bound himself to the obedience of the Creator through the bond of charity, he would have passed to the celestial fatherland of the angels even without the death of the flesh. But woe, sorrow, because he rendered the law decreed by the celestial majesty void, and deserted the path of his station through the love of his Creator, and by a mournful impulse of mutability, he was pushed away from his innate solidity and fell from the glory and splendor of his status and dignity. So that to him, who before the violation, was given the sense to feel nothing of trouble, nothing of indigence in paradise, being surrounded by fragrant apples, supported by flowers, living crowned in glory and honor, and flowing immediately through diverse kinds of divine mysteries, the Scripture remembers his fall, saying: "Man when he was in honor did not understand; he was compared to senseless beasts and became like to them." O sad and tearful change! Man, inhabitant of paradise, lord of the earth, citizen of heaven, domestic of the Lord of Hosts, brother of the superior spirits and the celestial cohort, by a sudden conversion changes his glory into the likeness of a calf eating hay. O sad fall, which comes to us the more greatly the more it is recognized to have killed the minds of many.

For the stain of this evil was increased
and poured out into the origin of the whole posterity.
It was clearly an original sin, which
we contracted from our first parent,
in whom we all sinned, in whom the whole
human race was moved. For not only that
first man but the whole human race was killed,
because from him we received simultaneously
the damage and the guilt. Therefore, David says
he was conceived in iniquities, because in all
people iniquity is drawn from Adam,
a bond of death, so that we are all born,
as the Apostle testifies, children of wrath,
that is, children of vengeance, children of
punishment, and children of hell. O sad
legacy of Adam, through whom sin entered
the world, and through sin death passed
to all men. O tearful inheritance of the
children of Adam, in filth we are generated,
we are fostered in darkness, and in pains
we are born. Why, O most sad Eve, was your
concupiscence so raging that you spared
neither yourself, nor your husband, nor your
children who were to be born, adding them
all simultaneously to terrible curses?
Behold, you have begotten us children of sorrow,
children of bitterness, and of indignation,
and of eternal weeping. But you, Father
Adam, who through the lapse and the dignity
which your Creator had made more splendid
than your own fortune, you ought to have
been a firmer observer of the law. What
have you done to us? You have irritated the law of heaven,
and behold, you have destined all of us as heirs
to the shadows of death. Who now, O faithful
soul, in the meditation of these