January 28, 1947prev home next
Concerning the dictations on August 24, 29, and 30 and September 2, 1944. In the pre-Gospel.
Jesus says:
“Given the obstinate responses of some to these luminous points in my teaching - which ought to open up many horizons for you and help your souls and the souls administered by you to tend towards this rejoicing, which is the recollection, knowledge, and recognition of what God is, and enjoy a little bit of Heaven on earth and receive therefrom great assistance for progressing in perfection - let us deal with the topic as if we were facing stubborn children with whom one must never grow tired of teaching, and with arguments which cannot be rejected.
“What is man? The Catechism says, ‘A creature endowed with reason composed of soul and body.’
“What is the soul? The Catechism says, ‘The noblest part of man because it is a spiritual substance endowed with intellect and will, capable of knowing God and possessing Him eternally’
“Who created man? The Catechism says, ‘God created him.’
“Why did He create him? The Catechism says, ‘So that man may know, love, and serve Him in this life and enjoy Him in the other forever.’
“How did He create him? Genesis 2:7 says, ‘And the Lord formed man from the mud of the earth and breathed the breath of life into life, and man became a living creature.’ And Genesis 1:27 says, ‘God created man in his image.’ The Catechism confirms, ‘Man was created in the image and likeness of God.’
“And how? Perhaps in his face? In the shape of his body? God does not have a body or a face. To become man I had to take on your shape, for I had no bodily shape of my own. God is most perfect Spirit - simple, eternal, with no beginning or end. The Catechism thus teaches that ‘man is said to have been created in the image and likeness of God, for the human soul is spiritual and endowed with reason, free in its working, capable of knowing and loving God and of enjoying Him eternally - perfections which in man reflect a ray of the infinite greatness of the Lord.’
“A ray of the infinite greatness of the Lord. A great truth, since only We, as Triune, know Ourselves and enjoy Ourselves with the fullness of joy, generating Ourselves through this joyful love, which is knowledge of our most perfect Perfection. And We wanted you to have Us as an example to create in you the divinized creature that is man as a son of God. For this reason we placed Love in you, which is our Essence, and we proposed Love as the goal of Perfection in order for you to come to be with Us without end, just as you were in Us before Creation existed, when We contemplated you, before you emerged from nothingness, so as to be, according to our will, the creature in whom God, who divinely conceived this creature for his glory, is reflected. Now, in God there can be nothing except what pertains to God. Man thus belongs to God and in full justice can call Him ‘Father’ and in right and proper justice must want to reach and possess Him after having striven to love Him and know Him.
“Blessed are those who are able to ascend to the summit of blessedness, which is union with God - that is, knowledge of God, fusion with Love, contemplation of the Trinity, which is One, of the Fire that does not consume, but recreates and supercreates, making the human creature what he was conceived to be by Love: a god who is a son of God. The Father has truly placed the seal of his paternity in his son: the capacity to know and love God, in both this life and the next.
“God, then, created man as composed of two substances, one called the body - initially created with mud and subsequently procreated with the flesh and blood of man - and one called the soul, which, uniquely created in each case, only once and for one flesh, descends to unite itself to the flesh forming in a womb. Without the soul man would be an animal creature guided by instinct and natural gifts. Without the body man would be a spiritual creature with the supernatural gifts of intelligence, will, and grace, like the angels.
“In addition to existence, what had God given to the masterwork of creation, represented by man, in whom the two creatures, animal and spiritual, are joined? Gratuitous gifts which theologians divide into natural, preternatural, and supernatural.
“Natural: a healthy, beautiful body, with five perfect senses and a rational soul endowed with intelligence, will, and freedom.
“Preternatural: integrity - that is, the perfect subject of sense, free from incitements of every kind, to reason; the immortality of the body, which would not have experienced the horror of death; immunity from all pain; and knowledge in keeping with his state as a chosen creature and thus great knowledge, which his perfect intellect assimilated without effort.
“Supernatural: the beatific vision of God, the Grace making man a son of God, and the destiny of enjoying God eternally.
“Man, then, by virtue of both his origin and the gifts received, could truly call himself a ‘son of God’ and know Him as a son knows his father.
“What is Grace? The Catechism says, ‘Grace is a supernatural gift which illumines the mind and moves and comforts the will so that man will do good and refrain from evil.’ But it is love, above all. God’s Love for his favorite creature, who is man, a love elevating the creature to the nature of the Creator through deification, in such fashion that the words of Wisdom are fitting: ‘You are gods and sons of the Most High.’288 It is, moreover, a means of salvation, since man needs means of salvation, having remained weak through the consequences of sin. Indescribably active, when it does not encounter impediments or inertia in you in regard to the work it seeks to carry out in you, it sanctifies the creature and the creature’s actions and has three lesser branches emerging from its sublime trunk which are called actual, sufficient, and efficacious grace. But it is a single Grace: a transforming principle, a divine quality inherent in the soul, like light whose splendor, enveloping and penetrating souls, cancels out their stains from sin and communicates a radiant beauty to them.
“This is taught by the Church in the conclusions of the Council of Trent. And I, the Teacher of teachers, contemplating Grace for what it is, in the eternal is of God, say that Grace is a principle transforming the creature into a son of God, a divine quality which is thus similar to the Light from which it comes, whose splendor, enveloping and penetrating souls - whether it is a gift given (as it was to Adam) or a gift given back (as with the Catholic Christians restored to Grace through the merits of my Sacrifice and the Sacrament instituted by Me) - communicates to them not only a radiant beauty, but the capacity to see and know God, just as the First Man knew Him by seeing and comprehending Him with his spirit filled with innocence and Grace.
“Grace, then, means restoring man to the capacity to love and know God. Grace, then, is a light to see what is Immense Darkness for man’s thought; but Infinite Light for the spirit in grace. It is, then, a voice, and a very wise voice; sight, most luminous sight to contemplate God; a gift given to assist the soul’s desire to know God; a means to remember the Origin just as that Origin wishes to be remembered; and an instrument for the deification of the creature. And the more creatures, through their own will and through the justice attained by way of a loving will, grow in Grace, the more what is union with the Divine will grow in them, along with wisdom, which is one of the divine attributes, and, with wisdom, the capacity to comprehend, know, and love Truth and truths. For Grace is the Spirit of God, who enters into man with all his gifts, transforming, elevating, and sanctifying man’s faculties and actions. And, among these, the first one and the main one is love. The action through which you were created.
“To love is to know. Only those known are loved. The more one knows, the more one loves. No one could claim to love an unknown relative or a man living worlds away just as a relative living nearby or a family friend is loved. Love for the former will not go beyond an abstract feeling of brotherhood or kinship which brings no joy if it lasts or pain if it ceases. Whereas the loss of a relative who is known well or a friend is real pain. And when it has occurred, people try to preserve every reminder of him in order to feel the loss less intensely, or, if it is only a case of being far away, they try in every manner to make it less complete so as to perceive the absence as less serious. Observe the eagerness with which boys who have become orphans in childhood seek to reconstruct for themselves an ideal image of their deceased parents through memories left by them or garnered from the lips of relatives and friends.
“Creatures need to love and must remember to feel less alone and love. Memory is like a chain hurled into the distance joining one to the beloved. The end is not visible, but the movements which are felt to be arriving along the loving chain of mutual memory tell us that we are loved as we love.
“For this reason God gave the first human beings knowledge of Himself. So that they would be perfectly happy in the period of Grace and Joy and then receive a reminder which would further unite them to the Father, hidden behind the haze of sin, rising up like a wall between the fallen and Perfection, but not definitively lost because love endured. Adam and Eve knew God, received the spiritual beatific vision of Him, and understood his Essence because their spirits - I say ‘spirits’ - in Grace were able to grasp his incorporeal, supreme Beauty and understand his Wisdom in God’s voice ‘in the freshness of the evening.’
“Oh, sweet conversations, the raptures of creatures deified with God, their Maker, in the peace of the earthly paradise, divine teachings learned without effort by two intellects unflawed by physical imperfections or moral imperfections, accepted without that stubbornness which makes it hard for you to accept the divine lessons, for you are no longer able to love like the Innocents, O poor men, mutilated by too many holy things and filled with too many others that are useless and harmful, poor men, who could become perfect again if you possessed a perfect love!
“O lessons of God, wisdom flowing from the Paternal Source into his blessed children, received as a gift, loved as a feast, mutual love which was a word; which was a question anticipated by an answer, which was trust, which was a smile, which was peace! A page of joy forever destroyed, a page written in the books of life and at the dawn of life and then sullied - and no longer continued - by the indelible imprint of Sin - who can read you to those living in exile so that they will understand what they have lost and be humble? Humble, seeing how far they have fallen, considering how good God is in still giving so much love and wisdom, in spite of the fact that the serpentine head of unsubdued pride is always ready to rise up in them to argue with God, who reveals Himself, counsels, or commands for a good purpose.
“Adam and Eve, then, possessed the gift of Grace, which is love, light, wisdom, and knowledge of God, and this gift, since they were at once public and private men and progenitors of the whole human family, would have been transmitted by them together with the other gifts to their descendants, and there would have been no need for them to labor to remember God, to climb back up from the darkness to the Light with exertion, going against the stream of temptations, with the haze of ignorance, with all the wretchedness deriving from the fall from Grace. There would have been no need for a reminder because the Good lost would not have had to be remembered, but there would have been only joyful delighting in the Beloved.
“Adam and Eve then sinned, and God cast them from his sight and excluded them from his friendship and from Eden, ‘placing two Cherubim at its entrance,’ as Genesis says, and condemning Humanity to work, pain, ignorance, and death, as regards its material part, and to privation of Grace, knowledge of God, and the heavenly Paradise, as regards its spiritual part. The Catechism says, ‘Adam and Eve lost the Grace of God and the right they had to Heaven; they were cast out of the earthly paradise, subjected to many forms of indigence in their souls and bodies, and condemned to die,’ and ‘their descendants, by inheriting sin, suffered the harm of being deprived of grace, losing paradise, ignorance, the inclination towards evil, all the wretchedness of life, and, finally, death,’ in such fashion that ‘if God had not shown mercy, men would not have been able to be saved.’
“What form of mercy did God show the human race? Genesis further replies in its pages, and the Catechism, in its answers:
‘The mercy of immediately promising Adam the Divine Redeemer or Messiah and sending Him in due time to free men from the slavery of the devil arid sin, restoring them to the state of children of God by giving them back the state of Grace’ through my merits and my Passion.
“So, tell me, then: if at the very moment of the condemnation God the Father was already tempering it in its severity with the hope of a Redeemer, with the promise of forgiveness, doesn’t this serve to demonstrate that He Himself, always Mercy, even in Justice, for He is eternal and perfect Charity, wanted some sparks of light to remain in man’s soul, enveloped in darkness and pain – reminders - which would impede the despair, discouragement, abandonment, and anguish of those who no longer have a purpose and drag on their days without the energy of hope? Yes, in reality, that’s the way it was.
“And, summarizing what has been said up to this point, taken from Genesis - a book written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and thus having God as its author, as the Vatican Council289 explains - and from the Catechism, in the text prescribed by my true Vicar and Pastor, who is now with Me in Heaven after having loved Me perfectly and thus remembered Me on earth - a truth which no one can reject without declaring himself to be a heretic - one can conclude that innocent man in grace received the gift of grace to know, love, and enjoy God eternally and fallen man received the gift of mercy through a promise, a reminder, then, of the Divine, which would help him to act properly so as to be able to enjoy, in a secure future, after the pain of punishment, the vision and possession of God.
“And now, after having dealt with the topic in general, let us get down to considering it in the points which you are unable - or, rather, do not want to - accept, in the dictations of the Pre-Gospel on August 24, 29, and 30, 1944 and September 2, 1944 (Childhood of Most Holy Mary).
“On September 2, 1944 I said, ‘These are mysteries which are too lofty for you to be able to understand them fully’ The learned, above all, cannot comprehend them. The simple-hearted, instructed by Love and Wisdom alone, understand them better because they do not criticize them. For them, a supernatural word communicating peace is a true word and they welcome it with humility and gratitude. But I repeat: there are mysteries which cannot be comprehended if they are dissected on the basis of a human analytical method. Either one has great faith and inflamed charity - and then they become sufficiently clear - or one does not understand them. But I advise you at least to accept the lights I give you to make your science less incomplete. Always remember that even the most learned man remains too little and finite in comparison to the Infinite and the Wisdom of the Infinite. And I also advise you not to alter my words or deform their meaning so as to cause the spokesman affliction. It is not charitable to sadden one’s brothers and sisters and accuse the innocent.
“You want to know how it could be said that souls pre-exist. Where did you find that word, which I did not say? In the bottom of your thought, not in my pages. Souls do not pre-exist. They are not objects piled up in warehouses to be carried off at the right time. God does not need stocks to have the material ready.
“In the dictation on August 24, 1944 I say to little John, ‘You have seen the continuous generation of souls by God.’ I used that term to give all of you a more intense sensation than ever that man is a son of God because the father is the one who begets and also to bring you to understand the beauty of the part in you that is like God. There is nothing in God which is not God. Your souls, then, in coming from God, are supernaturally divinized through both their Origin and Grace, which is infused into believers in the true God and Christ the Redeemer by Holy Baptism and conserved by fleeing from sin.
“If I was already illuminating the purpose by showing the principle, which is the heavenly life of possession of God, and did so while showing the principle - the creation of the soul by God, to become incarnate in flesh and be sanctified during existence so as to be a victor in Heaven - I ought to have been under stood, for you are not fools, but learned, and are so concerned about this science of yours. Comprehend, then, with good will, the thought of your Lord, which is clear and comprehensible for all those willing to understand it. What about it? You would be like those who accused Me, in my mortal days, and still accuse Me because I say it is preferable to do violence to oneself by removing a sinning eye or hand or foot rather than conserve them while sinning? Do you not understand the metaphor, then? Are you unable to transfer a material comparison into the spiritual domain? Well then, if you are so limited, I shall make provision by replacing the term ‘generation’ with the other, ‘creation’ (Pre-Gospel, p. 13).
“I gave the spokesman the vision of the creation of souls.290 Read the vision described by the spokesman (notebook s.t., p. 63, May 25, 1944). A vision which, as I state further on (notebook XY, pp. 794-796, May 31, 1944), was given in such fashion as to make the immaterial act of creation visible to the seer. In describing that vision, the spokesman uses the term ‘create’ (line 30, p. 63, notebook s.t.), just as he states, with truth and simplicity, that he ‘does not see, because he is in Paradise - an utterly precise conclusion by the seer - when original sin sullies souls.’ In Paradise, in fact, that cannot occur. From this you see that the spokesman is truthful. And he further declares that he ‘does not see the spirits who, when their time on earth is over, separate from the flesh and return to be judged.’ Maria says that she ‘comprehends how they are judged from the changes in Jesus’ expression’ (line 74 on the same page).
“To return to the Origin, to present oneself before Jesus the Judge, does not mean to go to a given place or exactly to go to the foot of the eternal throne. These are formulas used to assist your thought. The soul that leaves the flesh which it animated finds itself immediately before the Divinity, who judges it, with no need to ascend and present itself at the threshold of the Blessed Kingdom. The catechism holds that God is in Heaven, on the earth, and everywhere. And the encounter thus takes place everywhere. The Divinity fills Creation with Itself. It is present, then, in every place in Creation. It is I who judge. But I am inseparable from the Father and the Holy Spirit, omnipresent in every place.
“Judgment is swift, as creation was swift: less than a thousandth of your smallest unit of time. But, as in the atom of the instant of creation the soul has time to glimpse the Most Holy Origin that creates it and take this memory with it so that it will be an instinctive religion and guide in the search for faith, hope, and charity, which, if you observe carefully, are, in a nebulous fashion, like unformed seeds, even in the most imperfect religions - faith in a divinity, hope in a reward given by this divinity, love for this divinity - in the atom of the instant of the private judgment the spirit has time to comprehend what it has not wanted to comprehend in earthly life and has hated as an enemy or mocked or denied as a vain fable or served, perhaps, with lukewarmness which demands reparation and bear with it, to the place of expiation or to eternal damnation, this memory, to prompt flames of love for Eternal Beauty or the torture of punishment, with rage over the Good that has been lost, regarding which the intelligent conscience will bring reproach for having wanted freely to lose it. For they will remember it, and as terrible, without being able to contemplate it, together with their sins.
“The creation of the soul and the private judgment are two atoms of instants in which the souls of the children of men intellectually know God to the extent which is proper and sufficient to give them an instrument to tend towards their Good, barely glimpsed, but remaining impressed upon their substance, which, as intelligent, free, simple, and spiritual, has immediate comprehension, free will, simple desires, and movement or inclination or appetite, if you prefer, to reunite itself with love to Him from whom it came and reach its end, whose beauty it has already intuited, or separate from it with perfect hatred, reaching him who is their damned king, and possessing in the memory ‘of hatred’ a torment, the greatest of the infernal torments, an indescribable despair and malediction (remember the dictation on January 15, 1944 291).
“My saying, ‘Be perfect as the Father is perfect’ was not a vain or exaggerated statement. Man was about to be elevated again to the state of Grace. I could, then, very rightly give this command of perfection. Because you had been created for perfection. And this desire of the just for perfection is a spiritual desire coming directly from God, who goes so far as to give you the command ‘Walk in my presence and be perfect’ (Genesis 17:1). And, more broadly, though implicitly, He repeats it to you in the laws of Sinai and in the lessons of the Sapiential Books and in the words of the patriarchs, the prophets, and all of the inspired, in whom it is I who speak. And, finally, as directly and explicitly as can be, in my command: ‘Be perfect as your Father is perfect.’ And, like an echo of my Eternal Word, it is in the words of my Saints, from Peter on.
“‘Be perfect,’ I said. To free the spirits of those in ancient times from that anguishing sense of fear which prohibited them from being able to think they were worthy to resemble their Father. For too many centuries the Most High had been the terrible God for them, and love and hope and faith had trembled before the severe Immensity of God. But the time of Mercy, Forgiveness, Peace, Friendship, and filiation with God had now come. The command of unlimited perfection was thus given: ‘Be perfect as the Father is perfect.’ And, with the command, the implicit assurance encouraging you to be daring, ‘for, if you only want to, you can become so.’
“God does not carry out vain acts or say vain words. I did not give a vain command, then, or provide a vain stimulus for your hearts with this command. I reawakened a desire in you which had diminished, which my Father and yours had placed in an intense way in the spirit of man and which man was to transmit with every other gift of God to his descendants: the desire to possess God, to enjoy Him in Heaven after a lifetime spent in his service. This desire, intensely reawakened, would have been vain if it had not been destined to turn into reality. But creatures can reach this reality. It is, indeed, God’s desire that they reach it. And it is for this reason that God leaves in the soul - even of the most savage - a reminder of God whereby that soul, as best it can, may in a more or less distant future arrive at its goal: the knowledge of God, which is blessedness, through having loved and served Him as well as it could so as to possess Him afterwards.
“And if most souls then live in a way which seems to belie my assertion, that is not a negation of what I am saying, but a demonstration of how perverted man is in his affections and desires, because of his alliances with Evil. There are truly many who strangle their souls with the noose of vices and sins after making them slaves of Satan, with whom they have allied themselves. They strangle them definitively so as not to hear them cry out and weep any longer, recalling that Evil is not licit and that there is a punishment for those carrying it out. They are the ones who change from children of God into human creatures through the loss of Grace and then change from men into demons, for man, when separated from Goodness, is bindweed which clings to Evil in order to prop itself up. Where there is no supernatural law, it is hard for there to be moral law, and always imperfectly. And where human morality is imperfect or absent, the threefold concupiscence is alive, in whole or in part.
“But if most souls seem to deny the natural memory of and desire for God and their will, which involves tending towards a joyful end, with their way of acting, it must be recalled that in man there is the carnal creature, as well as the spiritual one, and that man has free will, which always serves the stronger part. Now, if one weakens one’s soul with vices and sins, it will certainly become weak while the animal part will become fortified and overcome the weaker part to the point of killing it. But not on this account can it be denied that the soul is created with a capacity for remembering and desiring its end naturally.
“The soul’s nature is a spiritual nature. The soul thus has spiritual desires even if, because of the privation of Grace (those who are not regenerated by Baptism), it has only natural desires for the spiritual kingdom from which it comes and where it instinctively feels the Supreme Spirit to be present. Furthermore, in the souls regenerated in the Grace of Baptism and maintained and fortified therein by the other Sacraments, the soul’s being attracted to its end takes place in divine fashion because Grace - that is, God Himself - draws his beloved children to Himself - ever closer, more and more in the light, the more they rise by degrees in spirituality, so that separation diminishes and seeing is more intense; knowledge, vaster; comprehension, broader; and love, more perfect, to the point of arriving at contemplation which is already fusion and union of the creature with the Creator, a temporary, but indelible, transforming act, for the embrace of the Fire of the Divinity closing over its enraptured creature impresses a new character on these living beings, who are already separated from Humanity and spiritualized into seraphim, expert in the Wisdom God gives them, for He gives Himself to them as they give themselves to Him.
“For this reason, it is proper to specify that the inspired writer ‘has God as the author.’ God, who reveals or illuminates mysteries or truths, as He pleases, for these instruments of his, ‘spurring and moving them with supernatural virtues, assisting them in writing in such fashion that they rightly conceive with their intelligence and faithfully seek to write and, with suitable means and infallible truth, express all of the things, and only those things, which are commanded by Him, God.’ It is God who, with a threefold action, illuminates the intellect so that it will know the truth without error, by either revelation - in the case of still unknown truths - or exact recollection, if they are truths already established, but still rather incomprehensible for human reason; it moves so that what the inspired one comes to know supernaturally will be written faithfully; it assists and directs so that the truths will be stated in the form and number which God wills, with veracity and clarity, so that they will be known to others for the good of many, with the very words of God in the direct teachings or with the words of those inspired when they describe visions or repeat supernatural lessons.
“The work which is given to men through little John is not a canonical book. But it remains an inspired book which I am giving to help you understand certain passages in the canonical ones and especially to comprehend what my time as Master was like and know Me - I, the Word, in my words. Neither I nor, much less, the spokesman, who, because of his utter ignorance in this field, is not even able to distinguish between dogmatic theology and mystical or ascetical theology and does not know the subtleties of definitions or the conclusions of Councils, but is able to love and obey - and this is enough for Me, nor do I want anything else from the spokesman - neither I nor he say that the Work is a canonical book. In all truth, though, I tell you that it is an inspired book, for the instrument is not capable of writing pages which he does not even understand unless I Myself explain them to him to take away his fear.
“And yet, since in the hours when he is a ‘spokesman’ - that is, he is seized by Me as if by a Divine Eagle carrying him into the kingdom of Light so that he will see and come back into your midst, bringing you gems of supernatural value - little John is in the wise truth of vision and comprehension, he uses the term ‘create’ to speak of the formation of souls by God’s will (notebook s.t., p. 63). I repeat once more: I used the term ‘generation’ in the dictation to give you the measure of your dignity as children for God. But - I repeat this, too - if that is an obstacle for you to believe, go ahead and replace ‘generation’ with ‘creation’ and be at peace over this trifle, which makes you skittish.
“The continuous creation of souls by the Father does not mean ‘pre-existence,’ as you say, stating that I said so. And the souls’ remembering does not mean ‘pre-existence.’ But it cannot be denied, either, that, though the instant of creation is extremely rapid, the soul, an intelligent spiritual substance, created by the Most Perfect One, can be formed with awareness of its origin. Mustn’t God the Creator - who has given relative reason to lower creatures and extremely vast reason to human creatures and very swift, as well as vast, intelligence to angelic creatures - have given immediate, vast intelligence to the created soul? Isn’t it created by Him, like angels, men, and animals? Can it alone, then - this flame begotten by Fire - be darkness or ice? Can it alone be so slow, stupid, blind, deaf, forgetful, and brutish as not to possess even the rudimentary motions of instinct spurring animals to choose foods and elements and climates which are favorable for them to live and procreate? Inferior even to vegetables, that sense there is life in the sun and that, even when planted in a dark place, lean towards a hole through which light is descending and come out into the open air through it in order to live? O men! And just to deny, so as to bring pain to my spokesman, can you go so far as to call the soul inferior to plants? The soul: this wonderful substance, which I, in a sublime metaphor, called ‘the spiritual blood of eternal, powerful, holy God,’ blood of the Father (I am speaking in metaphors, I repeat), which is alive in you and makes you immortal, powerful, and holy as long as it is alive - that is, as long as it is joined to God by Charity. The soul: this part of Heaven - and Heaven is Light and Wisdom - which is contained in you, so that the Infinite would have a throne in you that was still Heaven, and which contains you so that the sanctifying embrace of Heaven will remain protective around your humanity as it fights the good fight.
“Do you perhaps object that it no longer has the integral intelligence of the first soul because it is stained and damaged by original sin? I reply, first of all, that nothing impure emerges from Creative Thought. Original sin is in man and in the children of man, not in God. Not in the being created by God, then, but on becoming incarnated in the man conceived by man the soul contracts the inheritance connected with the descendants of Adam, except in the case of an exceptional, singular decision by God. Secondly, I remind you that the most impure being, he who was Lucifer and is now Satan, did not lose his powerful intelligence because he changed from an archangel into a demon, but uses his very sharp intelligence for evil rather than good, as he would have used it if he had remained an archangel.
“How do you answer, then, if I ask you why Satan remembers God and is intelligent? Do you have no reasons to set against my assertion? Do you have nothing to object? No, you can make no objection. For one must either deny what you teach or admit that Satan is intelligent and remembers God, to the point that he hates Him as he does precisely because he remembers Him as he does, with the power of his spiritual intellect, and torments you as he does precisely because he is perspicacious in knowing how to choose the methods suitable for making you fall, in accordance with your human self. The Catechism specifies that the sinful angels were excluded from Paradise and condemned to Hell, but no definition deals with the loss of intelligence in demons because the fact that their intelligence subsists is demonstrated by the perspicacity of their actions to harm you.
“Souls remember. Why? Because as God, to temper the severity of the condemnation, at the same time gave Adam the hope of a redemption, and of that redemption, so, too, He left him the memory of the blessed time so that it would be of assistance to him in the pain of exile and a holy stimulus for the children of Adam to love Him who, for them, was the Unknown One.
“And not only this, but, on creating souls for these children of man, God did not deprive them of that natural inclination towards the Divinity which by itself alone can help to reach the end for which man has been created: to love the Lord, the omnipotent and omnipresent God whose incorporeal All fills the infinite and which man senses, more or less precisely, and sees to be in everything surrounding, penetrating, or striking him. In savages it will be in the blast of lightning or the enduring radiance of the aurora borealis; for idolaters it will be in the power of the lion or the amphibious life of the alligator; for believers in revealed, but not perfect, religions, in natural phenomena assumed to be the actions and manifestations of individual gods; in the educated man who is a thinker or scientist, in astral occurrences or in the extraordinary organization of bodies; in the believer, in addition to doctrine, in the very life of the soul, which manifests itself with its lights and pulsations corresponding to other more ardent pulsations of an Eternal Love that loves it, in the wonder of being born and the mystery of dying, one, part of the human, and the other, to live through a truer life; but all human beings in all things sense an invisible, powerful Presence, whether they deny it - and in denying it they already admit that it exists, for one denies only what exists and knows to be believed in by many others - hate it, confessing with hatred that It exists, or love It, proclaiming with love that they believe it is real and hope one day to be able not, indeed, to believe in It, but to enjoy It.
“God has done this: He has left the inclination towards Supreme Good in man. And what is this, if not memory? And what do you think about it? That He could not do so, He who is omnipotent and has been governing Creation for millennia, without effort or fatigue, and, without pausing for an instant, creates and judges souls and simultaneously knows all their actions, foreknows them, since Past, Present, and Future are a single is before his Thought; He follows their development and judges them with no confusion or error, judging the souls that at his command leave the flesh to which they were sent and return to the heavenly world supercreated, recreated, or, I would have to say, destroyed by the free desire of the will? But this term, for you that always grasp the material sense of words and not their spirit, would prompt you to cry out your anathema. I will thus say ‘ugly,’ ‘filthy,’ ‘mutilated,’ and ‘deformed’ from having voluntarily erased the memory of the Divine. For it is this memory, above all, more than any lesson that can be learned in schools of any kind, which teaches the soul to pursue virtues out of love for its God and in the hope of possessing Him one day, beyond life, in the Life without end.
“Among all many gifts which Love has preserved for fallen man, this is truly the highest and most active. I am speaking of souls in general, not of those of Catholic Christians, members of the Mystical Body, vivified by Grace, which is the gift of gifts. This natural inclination towards Supreme Good, which is the spiritual memory of God - sometimes so faint that the other two parts of man do not notice it, though guided by it in thought and governed by it in action - is a stimulus towards seeking the Divinity, acting so as to be worthy of it, and, in a word, living in such a way as to come to be reunited with it. Because of it souls create a religion for themselves - if they do not already possess one - which may be mistaken, through ignorance of the Truth, but which remains love for the divinity - that is, conformity to the end for which man was created: to love and serve God on earth and enjoy Him eternally, immediately and completely or after a more or less lengthy period.
“Memory creates love; love, justice. The justice of the creature generates a greater love for it on God’s part. And the more love and justice increase in the creature, the clearer knowledge becomes. With love, then, the memory of God grows more and more, for, as I said, memory is knowledge of love, and where love is, God is present. Moreover, when souls have Grace as a light for remembering and a voice for learning, what do you say? That this Grace does not make you very much like innocent Adam and thus capable of knowing God? What do you say? That when good will and the work of sanctification are joined to Grace, which is restored to you through my merits, your knowledge of God does not come ever closer to that which was Adam’s joy? In truth, in truth I tell you that this is what happens, and memory, in the saints still living on earth, is no longer a memory, but knowledge.
“Are you astonished at my assertion? Weren’t the patriarchs and prophets, deprived of Grace, but just, transported into the vision of God, and didn’t they hear his voice? Didn’t they gaze upon the glory of God and wonderful Heaven? ‘Now, when Abraham reached the age of ninety-nine, the Lord appeared to him’ (Genesis 17:1). ‘And the Lord appeared to Moses in a fiery flame in the midst of a bush’ (Exodus 3:2). ‘And when Moses had ascended the mountain, the cloud covered the mountain and the glory of the Lord.... And Moses, having entered into the cloud...’ (Exodus 24). ‘...I saw someone resembling a man, and within him and around him I saw a sort of electrum’ (Ezekiel 1:26-27). ‘And I heard a man’s voice shouting from the midst of the Ulai and saying....’ ‘There appeared Gabriel..., and he instructed me...’ (Daniel 8:16; 9:21-22). Just to recall some points where it is stated in the canonical books that even those deprived of Grace were granted heavenly visions or words.
“To know God and ‘converse with Him’ in the interior Eden is, indeed, to see and foresee. For God has not changed over the course of millennia, and his lessons for his chosen ones are vast, full, and luminous, as with the two innocents who were naked and were not ashamed because they did not know the poor sciences of matter, but only the sublime wisdom of love.
“And after this can you still impugn the words written by the instrument, as if they were errors? I do not even consider the possibility that you could deem them an error by the Master or fail to recognize who the One dictating is, from the abundance and wisdom of the gift. After this can you still impugn the truth that souls have a memory of God - as if it were an error of the instrument - which, the more the soul evolves in justice, is more intense, and very intense when the state of grace is joined to the justice of the creature - that is, filiation received from God, perfect when, as in Most Holy Mary, there is an eternal virginity of the spirit, uncontaminated by contact with Sin, and there is a fullness of Grace, complete innocence, possession of Wisdom, and perfect charity? So perfect in Mary Most Holy that no other creature will ever have it.
“Tell me, Servants of my Mother, what is Most Holy Mary for you? The new Eve who knows God as the ancient one did? No, more than Eve. For, in addition to being the Innocent One, Daughter, Spouse, and Mother of God, contemplated as such by God from all eternity, She is the Ewe alongside the Lamb, the Victim, consumed with the Divine Host to make you ‘knowers of God.’
“And now reread - stripping your minds of your ‘fig-leaf robes,’ which you have sewed around your intellects and which intercept your vision - reread the passages where there is mention of memory, knowledge, and sweet conversations of the Threefold Unity, gathered into the Immaculate Heart of the Woman Full of Grace, with her adoring soul. Reread the passages where I speak of the operations of Grace, which is Light and Wisdom and which makes the memory of God more and more luminous and, when joined to justice, makes memory increasingly perfect knowledge, sometimes lofty, always holy, in the spirit of the saints. And then pray that a new Pentecost will take place in your intelligence and that all the gifts of the Spirit, the Teacher of every truth, will enter to renew you and set you aflame once more in that divine likeness which is supernatural love with supernatural Beauty, without which union and likeness and comprehension are impossible.
“On your knees, in the humble spirit of the humble, before Him who speaks to you because He has mercy on you, pastors, and lambs, and takes a ‘nonentity’ precisely because she is such and because He loves to repeat the gesture He made before the concupiscent humanity of the Twelve, to confound, with his Divine Wisdom, the poor human science of the learned, who linger to count the threads on the ziziths, which are dusty after having been closer to the ground than to heaven, and, because of this futile, hair-splitting work, cease to gather and conserve the luminous pearls whose context the work is. Ziziths - for those not understanding the metaphor - are the useless wasting of time and the even more useless displays of human knowledge used to determine whether the physical capacity of a place or the number of its inhabitants - deduced from human work long after my time and thus inexact - correspond to what an instrument has asserted or whether the period and stay in a place to which he refers - always collated according to a measure which men have created for themselves - correspond to the infinitesimal fraction of time which they deem perfect. But, tell me! Is it the number of days, the size of a country, or the total of its inhabitants that interests you, or is it the work’s doctrine? As regards the former, thousands and thousands of human authors can give you abundant fodder; as for the latter, only I can give you what ought to be sought in the first place. For only what I give you is of use to you for eternal life. The rest is hay which, after being digested, is expelled and becomes refuse. You will not enter Heaven because you know how many days someone was in a place or how many citizens were in a city, but because you have perfected yourselves by drawing luminous life from Word who is Life and Light.
“Love Me more than science. Bless Me and not your knowledge. And also love the ‘boy’ I have taken to set him in your midst. And, along with Me, bless the Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, for having revealed Himself once more to a little one instead of revealing Himself to the learned. A little one, a boy, a nonentity. Yes, but a nonentity consumed by the desire to serve and love God and make Him known, a nonentity who by himself alone has awakened in himself the memory of God, ever more intense, a nonentity who has consumed the diaphragms of humanity with his love and voluntary holocaust, a nonentity who has come to love the Light more than existence and honors, a nonentity who has plunged so deeply into the total freedom of contemplating God alone that he has lost sight of everything that is not God, a nonentity dead to all that for most is a vital concern, but eternally alive because he has died to live in the Lord.
“God - I am telling you so - shows his kingdom not to the learned, but to those who are illuminated by grace and are living in love, and it is God alone who chooses, takes, and comes to rest on the summit of the mountain, in the place where Heaven is so close that the spirit, burning, can cry out what should have been the cry of every man: ‘Here is my God. I see Him! I understand Him! I know Him! I am devoured and recreated by Love.’
“Little John, you can also remind them that man has a guardian angel and that this spirit is not inactive alongside man, upon whom he reflects the lights which he, as an angel, mirrors when worshipping Infinite Light. Be at peace, soul of mine.”
288 Psalm 82:6, John 34:10.
290 See the entries for May 25 and 31 in The Notebooks. 1944
291 See The Notebooks. 1944.