The most divine Author says,
«It is an established truth that the Progenitors had, besides sanctifying Grace and innocence at their creation, other gifts from their Creator. And these were integrity, that is, the perfect subjection of sense to reason, knowledge proportioned to their state, immortality and immunity from every sorrow and misery.
I spoke on immunity and on the loss of this immunity yesterday. Today, I recall your mind to the gift of knowledge proportioned to their condition. A vast knowledge, true, capable of illuminating man in all things necessary for his condition as king upon all other natural creatures and of creatures created in the image and likeness of God for the soul which is spiritual, free, immortal and reasoning, capable of knowing God, and therefore, of loving Him, destined to enjoy Him eternally, a soul endowed with the free gifts of God, the first amongst all of these being Grace which elevates man to the supernatural order of a child of God, heir to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Through this gift of knowledge, man luminously and supernaturally knew which actions to perform and what paths to keep in order to achieve the end for which he had been created. He loved God with all his capacity, that is, with the perfect knowledge according to his degree as man full of Grace and innocence. However, he loved Him with an ordered love which was ardent, but he did not go beyond that reverential respect which even the holiest creature must always have for His Creator.
This powerful love, which in its power, however, does not ever overflow from its embankments of the dutiful reverence of the creature towards His Creator, has no longer been found, a flower of perfection beloved by God, other than in Jesus and Mary, because the Son of Man and the Immaculate were the new Adam and Eve, repairers of the first offence and comforters of God the Father, using with perfection all the gifts received from God without ever prevaricating with pride for having been favoured amongst all the creatures.
This gift of knowledge, just as it regulated the love of the creature towards the Creator, so too did it regulate the love of the creature towards the creature: first towards his mate and fellow creature, by having a love for her without the disorder of lust, the ardent love of the innocent that only the lustful and the corrupt believe [are] incapable of loving.
Oh, blindness produced by the ferments of corruption! The innocent, the chaste, know how to love, truly love. To love the three orders that are in man and with the three orders that are in man, but by beginning from the highest and going to the lowest - the natural one - that virginal tenderness that is in the most ardent maternal love and in the most ardent filial love. That is, of those two sole loves that are without sensual attraction: love of the soul, love of the creature-child for the living tabernacle who has carried him, love of the creature-mother for the living testimony of her quality as procreator, glory of the woman who through the pains and sacrifice of her maternity elevates herself from a female to a co-operator of God by "obtaining a man with the help of God." (Genesis c.4, v. 1)
It regulated the love of man towards other creatures useful or beloved to him. In all created things, he saw the loving power of God who had created them for man, and he saw them just as God saw them, "very good". (Genesis c.1, v. 31)
It would have also regulated the love of man for the creatures born from his holy love with Eve. However, Adam and Eve did not achieve this love because - even before "the bone of the bones of Adam and the flesh of his flesh, for which a man will leave his father and mother and will join himself to his wife and the two will become one flesh only" and there would have blossomed forth a child for them, just as in a plant kissed by the sun and that is untouched by others, flowers and fruits are born - Disorder had corrupted with its poison the holy love of the Progenitors who wanted to know more of what was just and sufficient for them to know, hence Justice said, "Let us take care that man now does not stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eats of it and lives forever."
This phrase leaves many perplexed, and to many others, it serves to show the most Good and Generous One as one who is avariciously cruel. It also serves to deny one of the religious truths: that of one of God's gifts to the progenitors, that is, immortality.
A gift is a gift, and it must be given. God had given immortality as He had given the other gifts, and amongst those was that of a knowledge proportioned to the condition of man. Not all the Knowledge. Only God is most wise. So He had given immortality, but not eternity. Only God is eternal.
Man was to be born, be procreated by the Man created by God and no longer die, but was to cross over from the terrestrial paradise to the celestial one, and there, he was to enjoy the perfect knowledge of God.
However, man abused it. He wanted more than what he had received in the free gift. He wanted all of the Knowledge, by not reflecting that even good things are to be used with a measure proportioned to one's own capacities and that only the Immense and most Perfect One can know everything without danger because His infinite Perfection can know all the Evil without having any corrupting perturbations.
God suffers the Evil that He sees. However, He suffers for what it produces in you. Not for Himself, for He is above every endeavour of Evil, and not even the untiring and astute power that has the name of Satan can cause an offence to His Perfection.
Satan offends God in you. However, if you are strong, Satan would not have a way of offending God through you. If you were to think about this, you would never sin, you who love God more or less strongly, because none of you who glorify yourselves with the name of Catholic-Christians would want to feel yourselves to be the accomplices of Satan in order to offend God.
And yet you do so. You never reflect on Satan as being astute, that he is predatory, that he is never content with tempting or conquering you, but that he aims more than towards you, to scorn God, to snatch souls away from Him, to deride and disperse the Sacrifice of Christ by rendering it non-existent for many of you and for the many others just enough to spare them damnation.
Satan knows, he has all the tears and the drops of blood of the Son of Man numbered. Upon every tear or drop, he saw the true name, the true motive of them: the inert lukewarmness of a Catholic for the tears, the damnation of a Catholic for the drops of divine Blood. He knows what the sorrow was made up of which drew tears and the bleeding perspiration from Christ, of his divine Adversary, Adversary from the moment of his Rebellion, the eternal Adversary and forever Victor for the millions of spirits to whom Christ gives and gave Heaven.
However, let us return to the lesson, and for the gifts which the Sacrifice of Christ has given to you, each of you complete the thought which I have left incomplete.
After having wanted all the Knowledge, Adam could have wanted all the life, that is, the possession of life not as a gift given and preserved with love, but through violence which mocks respect, destroys order, and who self-creates himself eternal without deserving to be equal to God. Wanting to be equal to God would have been to have committed the same sin as Lucifer. And for the sin of Lucifer, there is no forgiveness.
God wanted to be able to forgive man. He wanted to be able to give him immortality, the possession of Heaven, the Knowledge sufficient to his condition, Grace, and Himself. And He intervenes with condemnation in order to save. He gave death in order to give Life. He gave exile in order to give the eternal Fatherland. He gave - this is the beginning of the lesson that goes back to being the subject - He gave a law in the place of the free Knowledge that man had lost with the death of Grace in his heart. The Law is the fruit of the consequences of the Sin.
The Sin made man dull in his intelligence of discerning good from evil, and in uprightness. Like smoke, it had clouded the known Truth. Like a noise, it had covered the sound of the divine words heard in the cool of the evening in the beautiful garden of Eden. Having fallen from an adoptive child of God to the degree of a reasoning animal, man felt by instinct that to kill must have been "evil", that corrupting himself in obscene behaviours must have been evil. However, he did not know how to distinguish up to what point it was bad to kill and what lusts were most objectionable to God.
Hence God, after having punished and again re-punished with the flood and having, after this, given the first rules to be less violent (the ban of eating flesh with blood: Genesis c. 9, v. 4); and afterwards with the dispersion of the peoples and the confusion of the languages (Genesis 11 v. 8), the origin of the future peoples and realms and wars which still torment you; and punished once again with the fire from Heaven on Sodom and the other sinful cities; after having given to a just Abraham a clearer law of subjection to the Lord (Genesis c. 17, v.10), He calls Moses to Himself, and with successive orders and appeals, He guides him to the celebration of the first paschal sacrifice - the perpetual sacrifice until the end of the centuries so that in the hour of Grace, the one year old lamb could be substituted with the divine Lamb, the perpetual Host on all the altars of the world and for all centuries - and from this paschal law, He guided Moses to the Decalogue.
However, the Decalogue would not have existed if reason had always dominated the senses, that is, if the Sin had not been committed in Eden. And it would not have existed if from the disorder of the senses, there would not have come the loss of Grace and Innocence, and therefore, also of Knowledge. And the Decalogue is both mercy and punishment. Mercy to the weak, and punishment to the deriders of God who do evil with the knowledge of doing so.
The Decalogue, with its affirmative part "You shall" and negative "You shall not", creates sin with all its consequences. Since one sins when one knows that he is sinning, man, after the Law, no longer had the excuse of saying,"I did not know that I was sinning."
The Decalogue is mercy, punishment, and a test. As the "test", it was the tree that rose up in the middle of Eden. Without a test, there cannot be wisdom in man. It is said that God tries man just as the goldsmith tries the gold in the crucible.
Only strong virtues, and charity above all, adhere to the negative command of the Law. Because man, in general, out of satanic insinuations and latent foments, covets that which is forbidden. Hence, truly heroic are those who crush sense and temptation under the weight of their strong love and who do not stretch out their greedy hands towards the forbidden fruit.
And these are the true Christians, those who do not make bad use of the infinite merits of Christ, of the Grace obtained by His means, and wild branches grafted to the true Vine, they bring to God the copious fruits of active virtues, and consequently, they are certain of having eternal life.
These are the true Christians in whom are the living gifts of the Holy Spirit who completes Jesus by communicating the knowledge to men on account of God, that is, the great gift lost with the Sin of Adam, the knowledge without which the Law given so that it be "life", can become "death".
Because a man who does not possess knowledge proportioned to his condition does not have an ordered love for God nor towards creatures, whatever they may be; he falls into various idolatries, into the triple concupiscence, (the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh and the pride of life); he distorts the same religion into a hybrid jumbled with sinful practices all the more - being that the Christian has received with Baptism, the infinite gift of Grace - with pharisaical practices condemned by the divine Word; he does not know himself, and therefore, mistakens his own pleasure with a deference towards the divine will; he alters within himself the image and likeness of God; he directs and uses the gifts received for his good, to do evil and to do evil to himself; if he gives alms, he does not do it out of mercy to the poor, but to have human praise; if he scrutinizes the mysteries of the Creation, he does it in order to be glorified by men, not in order to give glory to the Creator. In this way, his actions lose that scent which renders them holy in the eyes of God and he has his fleeting good on Earth; however, the "cold and the gnashing of teeth", as the Word used to say, awaits him there where appearances are not valued, only the truths of human actions.
And if for having done badly the good that he could have done, and through the mercy of God he evades the infernal cold and infernal torture, then waiting for him is a long stop in the school of Purgatory where he will learn true charity which is not a "heresy of the works", the flagellation of your days where many busy themselves by serving Christ only with exterior practices and actions, who leave the good exactly as they are and perhaps scandalize them, and do not serve to improve the wicked and convert them. True charity. The example, therefore, of a life deeply and consciously Christian, in everything. True charity. That which Jesus wanted from Martha who became too worked up by giving exterior honours to the Son of God.
The life of this century does not permit contemplation as many conceive it to be. However, God does not bless the one action. He wants the active and contemplative life to complete one another and that works be not only clamourous, agitating, and even diatribe with enemies, that they be not "heresies" but religion, that is, work which is a prayer for the continual offering of ones' own actions to God, performing them all solely for His glory, and for prayer to be work; continuous work on themselves, re-chiselling themselves always more according to the divine Model of Jesus Christ, and on others, with their example.
Men needlessly agitate themselves if God does not bless their actions. But how could you expect that God be with you, He who blesses, and that your actions triumph, if in them the gift of knowledge is not active through which a man guides himself in all his actions according to a holy end and not for his own glory?»