[Dicta de arbore quae dicitur Imago hominis]

...your wisdom, which is poured by God only into clean hearts, when they only have science, which is priced cheaply by the wise. For science inflates, but wisdom humbles. Whence Augustine: "If you are wise truly, do not be wise in high things, but fear." O wisdom, delicate food of the soul, which if it begins to inflate someone, it would be better for him not to have tasted it. Whence Gregory: "The first man, while he desired the science of pride, also lost himself." For what does a man exist today thinking he knows, tomorrow, once the light of wisdom is tasted, he understands himself to have been ignorant. For just as manna in the mouth of the eater provided the taste of his own will, so the reading of Sacred Scripture descends to the quality of the readers. To this purpose, Ezekiel expresses his vision when he saw a wheel in the middle of a wheel, and the living creatures standing above them, and when the creatures were lifted up, the wheels were lifted up, and when they went, they went, and when they stood, they stood. The wheel in the middle of the wheel is the inseparable understanding of the Old and New Testaments. But the living creatures standing above the wheels are the hearts of the perfect, by whose rising the wheels rise, and by whose standing they stand, and whatever is carried by the impulse of the Spirit, thither go the living creatures and the wheels. Because while our spirit is turned by impetuous motions in an unordained way toward the error of its own opinion, it presumes to buttress even the veil of its own error with the authority of Sacred Scripture. Whence Augustine: "Every heresy arises from understanding, and it is not the speech but the sense that becomes criminal." I lift up, therefore, the simplicity of my sense to you, God, Father of Lights, with pure faith and devotion, as I am able, begging that through your only-begotten Son, crucified for me, an unworthy one, the hardness of my parched heart may be irrigated from above by the abundant fountain of the sevenfold Spirit that rested upon Him, so that in this work I may be able to be made fruitful with grateful produce to the praise of Your name, so that I may be able to know myself and rise to the light of true understanding. Let no one, therefore, imagine me to this work as...