Prologue

The most cunning Serpent, bent on utterly destroying the whole human race, attacked the very First-formed themselves, so that, their stock left undealt with, the virus conceived might diffuse itself more widely through all their posterity; in no other way do Heretics — especially in our own age, the most prolific of sectaries — have dared by impious audacity to cast a deadly Aconite into the very fountain of truth itself, so that from where the edifice of the Christian empire has risen the higher,¹ from there it might fall to the ground root and branch; and with faith denied — resting upon the veracity of the First Truth — all the rest might readily be shown suspect of falsehood. Hence they insinuate into the credulous vulgar, in place of faith an empty confidence, in place of hope a presumption to be despaired of, and finally, in place of charity, an Impossibility of loving. So did these eminent little theologians learn to speak of God; thus Luther with his followers, while he grows insolent over his tumid certainty of salvation, concludes by an impious dogma that Christ the Lord underwent the penalties of the Abyss, no less in soul and body than in divinity; for so he proclaims his madness on Psalm 16, as our Boverius notes in his second examination on the unity of faith, article 5. Calvin, indeed, while he swells with the presumption of having justice imputed to himself, cries out that Christ the Savior was desperate in the very vestibule of his glory and amid the heaps of his merits: so he barks on Matthew 26, as Boverius also notes, exam. 1, Atheism 9. Finally, both hold the same view of charity, that with shameless brows they assert it was only ironically that God, as well as the commandments, prescribed it in those words of the Gospel: If you would enter into life, keep the commandments. Very many have professedly taken care to root out these, and others like them, errors, and indeed effectually; but by what means, or by what arguments, will become clear in the course of this treatise, whenever it falls to discuss each opinion or error according to the mind of St. Bonaventure. ¹ Editor's note: the print reads 'Christiani Iuperij moles'; rendered 'of the Christian empire' ('imperii') because 'Iuperii' is not a Latin word and the antithesis (heretics casting poison into the very fountain from which the Christian edifice rose, that it might collapse from its source) requires 'imperii'.