The Battle for the Soul

Contents

Reading pages: 0.1–1.541 · 1.571–1.871

1. 0.1The preface presents Abraham, who offered his only son and armed his 318 servants to rescue Lot from the kings, as the example of the fight the soul must wage before it can bear offspring pleasing to God.
2. 0.31After Abraham rescued Lot, Melchizedek fed him and the three angels visited him, and Sarah bore Isaac; so the soul must free every captive part by an inner war, and then Christ, the true Priest, will enter it and the Spirit will make it fruitful.
3. 1.1The poet asks Christ, one God with the Father, to tell how the virtues fight the vices in the soul; Faith enters the field unarmed and strikes down the Worship of the Old Gods.
4. 1.31Faith kills the Worship of the Old Gods and crowns her martyrs; Chastity then fights Sodomite Lust, disarms her and runs her through, recalling Judith’s victory over Holofernes.
5. 1.61Chastity taunts Lust: if Judith under the Law could overcome it, much more now that the Virgin has borne Christ, God and man, the Word made flesh who remained what he was and raised human flesh to the divine; Lust is to be cast into hell.
6. 1.91Chastity washes her sword in the Jordan and consecrates it at the altar of the baptismal font; Anger attacks Patience, who stands calm and untouched amid the battle.
7. 1.121Anger’s weapons glance off the armor of Patience, who waits calmly; when Anger’s sword shatters on her helmet, Anger in frenzy kills herself with one of her own javelins.
8. 1.151Patience, whose law is to overcome by enduring, goes on with Job, who is told to rest and receive back double what he lost; Patience is the companion of every virtue; Pride rides out on a horse covered with a lion’s skin.
9. 1.181Pride, with towering hair and billowing mantle, rides between the lines and mocks the small, poorly armed army of Lowly Mind, whose ally is Hope.
10. 1.211Pride boasts that she and the vices have ruled man from his birth and since Adam’s fall, and scorns the virtues as idle dreamers of a future good, unfit for war.
11. 1.241Pride, charging to trample Lowly Mind, falls with her horse into a pit dug by Fraud, one of the vices, and is crushed.
12. 1.271Lowly Mind, helped by Hope, beheads Pride; Hope mocks the fallen vice, citing Christ’s saying that the humble are exalted and the proud brought low, and David’s victory over Goliath.
13. 1.301Hope flies up to heaven; Luxury, drunk from an all-night banquet, rides into battle in a jeweled chariot, fighting with flowers and perfume, and the Virtues begin to lay down their arms in admiration.
14. 1.331The Virtues begin to desert to Luxury, until Sobriety plants the standard of the Cross and rebukes them for exchanging the anointing and the tunic of baptism for garlands, perfumes and silks.
15. 1.361Sobriety reminds the deserters of the water from the rock and the manna, now fulfilled in the body of Christ, of their descent from Judah through which God became man by the Mother of God, and of Samuel, who would not spare the conquered king.
16. 1.391Sobriety cites Jonathan, whose repentance saved him, and turns the Cross against Luxury’s horses; the chariot overturns, and Sobriety kills Luxury with a stone that smashes her mouth.
17. 1.421Sobriety taunts the dying Luxury; Jest, Petulance, Love, Pomp, Charm, Discord and Pleasure flee, strewing their finery, which Sobriety’s soldiers refuse to touch; Avarice appears.
18. 1.451Avarice gathers up the spoils of Luxury, attended by Care, Fear, Perjury and other vices; her offspring, the Crimes, set brother against brother and son against father, and she strikes down multitudes.
19. 1.481Avarice blinds, deceives and burns her victims and is the most destructive of vices; she dares to attack even the priests, but Reason shields them, and Avarice complains that her power fails.
20. 1.511Avarice boasts that she has conquered every kind of person and fills hell, yet Christians despise money; she recalls her triumphs over Judas Iscariot and over Achan at Jericho.
21. 1.541Avarice ends her boast with Achan, of noble Judah yet destroyed, and resolves to deceive by fraud; she disguises herself as the virtue Thrift and cloaks her greed as care for one’s children, so that the Virtues waver.
22. 1.571Good Works, who has given all her wealth to the poor, leaps into the battle and strangles Avarice.
23. 1.601Good Works distributes the hoarded wealth to the poor and tells the Virtues that the greatest peace is to want no more than need requires, taking no thought for tomorrow, as Christ taught, since God feeds the birds.
24. 1.631With Avarice dead, the vices flee, Peace drives out war, and Concord leads the victorious army back to camp, singing psalms and hymns as Israel sang after crossing the Red Sea.
25. 1.661As the Virtues sing their psalms of victory and enter the camp, Discord, disguised as an ally, stabs Concord in the side through a gap in her armor.
26. 1.691Concord is only grazed; the Virtues seize the culprit, who names herself Discord, surnamed Heresy, whose god is now lesser, now greater, now double, now single, now a phantom; Faith silences her by piercing her tongue.
27. 1.721Heresy is torn to pieces and thrown to the beasts; Faith and Concord mount a tribunal in the middle of the camp, and the whole assembly gathers to hear them.
28. 1.751Concord tells the Virtues that peace in the commonwealth and in the soul rests on unity; as Christ the mediator unites God and man, so one Spirit must unite all we do; no gift, not even martyrdom, pleases God without peace.
29. 1.781Peace forgives before sunset and is the offering most pleasing to Christ; but the Virtues must also detect the wolves in sheep’s clothing, Photinus and Arius; Faith comforts them and announces that, as Solomon built the temple after David’s wars, they must now build a temple.
30. 1.811Faith urges the Virtues to build a temple in the soul for Christ, as Jerusalem received God when the ark came to rest; Faith and Concord measure out a foursquare temple with twelve gates, each a single gem, bearing the names of the twelve apostles.
31. 1.841The four sides of the temple with three gates each signify the fourfold human ages entering by the threefold name; the walls are set with twelve precious stones, and the inner house rests on seven crystal columns.
32. 1.871In the inner shrine, on a throne of a great pearl bought by Faith, sits Wisdom holding an ever-green sceptre like Aaron’s budding rod; the poet thanks Christ for teaching us the soul’s inner warfare between flesh and spirit, which lasts until Christ makes the soul a temple where Wisdom reigns.