Suppose that you find wounded yourself by a fall, be it from some weakness or even through will and malice, as may happen sometimes. Do not allow your courage to falter; do not allow your confidence to shake. Rather,

• Turn yourself to God and speak thus: “Lord, I have acted according to what I am, nor could anyone expect anything other than a fall.”
• Pausing momentarily at this point, humble yourself in your eyes. Weep over your offense against the Lord and, without confounding yourself, move yourself to disdain your depraved passions, above all the one that caused your fall.
• Continue thus: “Nor, my Lord, would I have stopped at that, had your goodness not held me back.”
• Now give him thanks and love him more than ever, entertaining wonder at such great mercy that God extended his hand to prevent another fall even though you had offended him.
• As you conclude, say with great confidence in his infinite mercy: “Lord, act according to what you are; forgive me, and never allow me to live far away from you, nor to offend you ever again.”

Having done this, do not start wondering whether God has forgiven you. This is nothing more than pride, mental disquiet, a waste of time and a demonic deception under the appearance of various good pretexts. On account of this, you must abandon yourself freely to the merciful hands of God, and continue your activity as if you had never fallen. Even if repeated falls wound you throughout the day, do as I have instructed on the second, the third, and even the last occasion, with no less confidence than the first time. Holding yourself ever more in contempt, and hating yourself all the more, force yourself to live more prudently.

This exercise displeases the demon greatly, both because he sees how pleasing it is to God, and because it confuses him to find himself beaten by one whom he had conquered. For this reason, he adopts many fraudulent means to convince us to omit it; thanks to our careless negligence, he often succeeds. Thus, if you have difficulty with this, all the more reason you must do yourself violence by resuming this exercise several times, even for one fall.

If you feel yourself confused, downcast, and disheartened, the first thing to do is to recover your prior peace, confidence and calmness of heart. Armed with these weapons, turn to your Lord. The disquiet you feel from your sin stems not from any concern of having offended God, but from the very fear of damnation. To recover peace, you must forget the fall completely and consider the indescribable goodness of God: how he is ready and desirous beyond all telling to forgive whatever sin, regardless of how serious. In many ways and through many means, he calls the sinner to take recourse in him, to unite herself to him, in this life to be made holy by his grace, and in the next life eternally blessed by glory.

Once you have calmed your mind with these or similar considerations, turn away your fall, acting as I have said above. Then, at the sacrament of confession — which I exhort you to visit frequently — consider all your falls anew. With renewed sorrow, with displeasure at having offended God, and with the resolution never to offend him again, reveal every one of these falls frankly to your spiritual father.

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“Lord”: Literally, Scupoli has written Ecco, Signore. I know how I would translate that into Latin (Ecce, Domine) but not into English. William Hudon translates it in Theatine Spirituality as “Alas, my Lord,” but that doesn’t sound right to me. This probably says more about my Italian ear than his.
    I see it this way: Sometimes ecco means “here”; sometimes it means “look” or “behold”; other times it means “now”, as in eccoci al problema: “now we come to the problem” or “here we are at the problem.” All of these translations seemed to work equally well with Ecco, Signore — and they worked equally badly, too. I don’t think that an English-speaking tongue would put an interjection there anyway, so I dropped it altogether. I don’t like this solution, either, because in Italian the interjection conveys a strong sense which Hudon’s “Alas” imitates.
    If you have some thoughts on this, email me. I am at wit’s end.


“I have acted according to what I am”: Literally, Scupoli has written, mi sono comportata da quella che sono: “I have behaved myself according to who I am.” Likewise, he later writes: “Lord, act yourself according to who you are;” this has the mild ring to it of I AM WHO AM, although I have no idea if Scupoli intended this.
    I am half tempted to translate it, “I have acted no better than what I am,” but I think it departs so far from the text that it loses more than it gains.


“by glory”: Literally, Scupoli writes beato nell’altra con la gloria, “blessed in the other [life] with glory,” but that doesn’t roll off an English-speaking tongue very well at all. To tell the truth, my choice of words doesn’t roll all that great, either.