Temptations, Discernment, and Spiritual Warfare

You already know how Eve was corrupted and how Adam became corrupt through her. Satan kissed the woman’s eyes and bewitched them, so that every aspect, so far pure, became impure for her and aroused strange curiosities. Then Satan kissed her ears and opened them to the words of a new science: his own. Eve’s mind also wanted to know what was not necessary. Then Satan showed her eyes and mind, now awake to Evil, things that previously they had not seen or understood, and everything in Eve became sharp and corrupt. And the Woman went to the Man, revealed her secret and persuaded Adam to taste the new fruit, so beautiful to the eye and so strictly forbidden so far. And she kissed him and looked at him with mouth and eyes already fouled by Satan’s gloomy disorder. And corruption penetrated Adam who saw, and through his eyes he craved for what was forbidden and he bit it with his helpmate and fell from such height into mud.

A corrupt person will draw another person to corruption, unless the latter is a saint in the true sense of the word.

Watch your eyes, men. Both the eyes of your bodies and the eyes of your minds. If they are corrupt, they can but corrupt all the rest. The eye is the light of the body. Your thought is the light of your heart. But if your eye is not pure — because since the organs are subject to thought, a corrupt thought will corrupt also senses — everything in you will become obscure, and a seducing haze will create impure phantasms in you. Everything is pure in him who has a pure thought which causes a pure look, and the light of God descends as a master where there is no obstruction of senses. But if out of ill will you have accustomed your eyes to disorderly visions, everything will become darkness in you. In vain you will look at the most holy things. In the darkness they will be nothing but blackness and blackness will be the deeds accomplished by you.

• Adam and Eve
• Bible - Book of Genesis
• Corruption
• Defense of the Work
• Lucifer - Satan
• Original sin
• Temptation
• The Fall

Watch your eyes, men. Both the eyes of your bodies and the eyes of your minds. If they are corrupt, they can but corrupt all the rest. The eye is the light of the body. Your thought is the light of your heart. But if your eye is not pure — because since the organs are subject to thought, a corrupt thought will corrupt also senses — everything in you will become obscure, and a seducing haze will create impure phantasms in you. Everything is pure in him who has a pure thought which causes a pure look, and the light of God descends as a master where there is no obstruction of senses. But if out of ill will you have accustomed your eyes to disorderly visions, everything will become darkness in you. In vain you will look at the most holy things. In the darkness they will be nothing but blackness and blackness will be the deeds accomplished by you.

• Bible - Gospel of Matthew
• Disorder
• Impurity
• Light
• Light from God
• Purity
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment
• Sons of Darkness
• The body's lamp is the eye
• The struggle between light and darkness
• Will

O children of God, defend yourselves against yourselves. Look after yourselves diligently against all temptations. There is no evil in being tempted. An athlete prepares himself for victory fighting. But it is evil to be overcome because you are not prepared and you are negligent. I know that everything serves as a temptation. I know that defence is exhausting. I know that it is tiring to have to struggle. But think of what you will gain through these things. And for one hour of pleasure, whatever kind it may be, would you like to lose an eternity of peace? What does the pleasure of the flesh, of gold, of thoughts leave you? Nothing. What do you gain by rejecting them? Everything. I am speaking to sinners, because man is a sinner. Well, tell me the truth: after satisfying your senses, your pride, your greed, have you felt fresher, happier, safer? In the hour following your satisfaction, which is always the time of meditation, have you sincerely felt that you were happy? I have never tasted the bread of sensuality. But I will reply in your stead: “No. Languor, unhappiness, uncertainty, nausea, fear, restlessness: that was the juice squeezed out of the hour spent in pleasure”.

• Anxiety - Fear - Fearfulness
• Chair
• Children of God - Sons of God
• Fighting temptation
• Fishermen
• Gold
• Jesus Christ's words to a sinner
• Mal
• Restlessness - Preoccupation
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment
• Sin
• Spiritual warfare
• Temptation
• The fruitfulness of suffering
• Vigilance

I beg you: while I say to you: “Never do that”, I also say to you: “Do not be inflexible with those who make mistakes”. Remember that you are all brothers, made of one flesh and one soul. Consider that there are many reasons why one is led to sin. Be merciful towards sinners and kindly help them and take them back to God, showing them that the path they have followed is full of dangers for the flesh, the mind and the spirit. Do that and you will receive a great reward… Because the Father Who is in Heaven is merciful to good people and He knows how to give you one hundredfold to one.

• Chair
• Fishermen
• God the Father
• God's mercy and forgiveness
• Intelligence
• Kindness
• Mercy and forgiveness
• Reward
• Severity - Intransigence - Toughness
• Sin
• Soul

I told you to be faithful to the Law, to be humble and merciful, to love not only your brothers by the flesh but also those who are brothers because they were born, like you, of man. I told you that forgiveness is better than hostility, that compassion is better than stubbornness. But now I tell you that you must not condemn unless you are free from the fault you wish to condemn. Do not behave like the Scribes and Pharisees who are severe with everybody except themselves, who call impure what is exterior and can only contaminate what is exterior and then they receive impurity in the very depths of their hearts.

• Bible - Gospel of Luke
• Bible - Gospel of Matthew
• How to perfect and sanctify yourself
• Humility
• Jesus Christ's reproaches to the Pharisees
• Judgment
• Loyalty
• Man - God's creature
• Mercy and forgiveness
• Modern self-righteousness (quibbling and bickering)
• Phariseeism
• Pharisees
• Scribes
• Severity - Intransigence - Toughness
• Sin
• Word of God - Law of God

God does not stay with the impure. Because impurity corrupts what is the property of God: souls, and in particular the souls of children who are angels spread over the earth. Woe to those who tear off their wings with the cruelty of devilish beasts and throw those flowers of Heaven into the mire, by letting them taste the flavour of material things! Woe… It would be better if they died struck by thunderbolts rather than commit such sin!

• Bible - Gospel of Luke
• Bible - Gospel of Mark
• Bible - Gospel of Matthew
• Children - Innocents
• Cruelty
• Reproaches of Jesus Christ
• Scandal
• Sin
• Soul

Woe to you, rich and fast living people! Because it is amongst you that the greatest impurity thrives and idleness and money are its bed and pillow! You are now sated. The food of concupiscence reaches your throats and chokes you. But you will be hungry. And your hunger will be terrible, insatiable and unappeasable forever and ever. You are now rich. How much good you could do with your wealth! Instead you do so much harm both to yourselves and to other people. But you will experience a dreadful poverty on a day that will have no end. You now laugh. You think you are triumphing. But your tears will fill the ponds of Gehenna. And they will never cease.

• Concupiscence
• Damnation - Perdition - Hell and the damned
• Laziness - Idleness
• Material wealth
• Reproaches of Jesus Christ
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment
• Silver
• The rich man

Where does adultery nestle? Where does the corruption of young girls hide? Who has two or three licentious beds, in addition to his own matrimonial one, on which he squanders his money and wastes the strength of a healthy body given to him by God that he may work for his family and not to wear himself out through filthy unions which place him below unclean beasts? You heard what was said: “You shall not commit adultery”. But I tell you that he who looks at a woman lustfully, that she who wished to go with a man, has already committed adultery in his or her heart, simply by that. There is no reason which can justify fornication. None. Neither the abandonment nor the repudiation of a husband. Nor pity for the repudiated woman. You have one soul only. When it is joined to another soul by a pact of faithfulness, it must not lie. Otherwise the beautiful body for which you sin will go with you, o impure souls, into the inexhaustible fire. Mutilate your body, rather than kill it forever by damning it. Come to your moral senses, o rich men, verminous sinks of vice, so that you may not disgust Heaven…

• Adultery
• Bible - Book of Deuteronomy
• Bible - Book of Exodus
• Bible - Book of Job
• Bible - Book of Leviticus
• Bible - Gospel of Matthew
• Concupiscence
• Damnation - Perdition - Hell and the damned
• Debauchery
• Desire
• Family
• Fornication
• If your hand is an occasion for falling, cut it off; if your eye is an occasion for falling, pluck it out.
• Lie
• Loyalty
• Repudiation
• Soul
• Thou shalt not bear false witness - Thou shalt not lie
• Vice
• You shall not commit adultery - You shall not covet another's wife

An adulterer sins with regards to himself, he sins with regards to his accomplice, and sins causing the betrayed wife or husband to sin, they may in fact be led to despair or to commit a crime. That with regards to the accomplished sin. But I will say more. I say: “Not only the accomplished sin, but the desire to accomplish it is already a sin”.

• Desire
• Despair
• Sin
• Words of wisdom

What is adultery? It is to crave for him, who is not ours, or for her, who is not ours. One begins to sin by wishing, continues by seduction, completes it by persuasion, crowns it by the deed.

How does one begin? Generally with an impure glance. And that is connected with what I said before. An impure eye sees what is concealed from a pure eye and through the eye thirst enters the throat, hunger enters the body and fever the blood. A carnal thirst, hunger, fever. Delirium begins. If the person looked at is honest, the delirious looker-on is left alone on tenterhooks, or will denigrate in revenge. If also the person looked at is dishonest, he will reply to the look and the descent into sin begins.

• Concupiscence
• Desire
• Dishonesty
• Honesty
• Impurity
• Libel - Slander
• Purity
• Sin
• The body's lamp is the eye