On occasion you may find wounded yourself by a fall, be it from weakness or even through will and malice. Let not your courage falter, nor your confidence shake. Rather,

• Turn yourself immediately to God and say this: “Ah, Lord, you see? I have acted according to what I am, nor can you expect anything from me other than falls.”
• Here, with a short pause, humble yourself in your eyes. Mourn the offense against the Lord and, without puzzling over it, 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.”
• Here give him thanks and love him more than ever, entertaining wonder at such great mercy that God extended his hand to stop you from falling anew even though you had offended him.
• At the end, say with great confidence in his infinite mercy: “Lord, act according to what you are; forgive me, let me not be separated from you, nor let me offend you again.”

Having done this, do not start wondering whether God has forgiven you. This is nothing other than pride, a troubled mind, a waste of time and a demonic deception under the appearance of various good pretexts. For this reason, you must abandon yourself freely to God’s merciful hands and continue your activity as if you had never fallen. Even if you should fall again and suffer wounds on many occasions that very same day, do as I have instructed on the second, the third, and even the last occasion, with no less confidence, or even more confidence than the first. Disdaining yourself all the more and hating sin more than ever, make an effort to live more prudently.

This exercise displeases the demon greatly, both because he sees how much it pleases God and because it confuses him to find himself overcome by someone he had conquered. He thus adopts many fraudulent techniques to convince us to omit it; thanks to our careless negligence, he often succeeds. If you have difficulty with this, that is all the more reason to do yourself violence by resuming this exercise several times, even for just one fall.

If, after your failing, you feel confused, downcast, and disheartened, the first thing to do is to recover that prior peace, confidence, and calmness of heart. Armed with these weapons, turn to your Lord. You see, the disquiet you feel from your sin stems not from any concern of having offended God, but from the damage to yourself.

To recover this peace, you must forget the fall completely and consider God’s indescribable goodness: how he is ready and desirous beyond all telling to forgive whatever sin, regardless of how serious. In many ways and by many paths, he calls the sinner to hasten back to him, to unite himself to him, to be made holy by his grace in this life, and to be eternally blessed with glory in the next.

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

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“Ah, Lord, you see?”: The Italian is, Ecco, Signore. This is easy to into Latin (Ecce, Domine) but not so much English. William Hudon translates it in Theatine Spirituality as “Alas, my Lord,” but that doesn’t sound right to me. That probably says more about my Italian ear than his; he’s certainly right that it requires a mournful tone.

The way I see it, ecco can mean “here”, “look”, or “behold”, so that ecco il problema can mean “here is the problem,” “look at this problem,” or “behond the problem.” I don’t think an English-speaking tongue would put an interjection there, so my earlier translation dropped it altogether. While revising this it occurred to me that “Ah, Lord, you see?” seems to capture ecco in its mournful quality, so I’ve gone with that.

“I have acted according to what I am”: The Italian is, mi sono comportata da quella che sono: “I have behaved myself according to who I am.” (Note, again, the feminine: once again, Scupoli is counseling consecrated women.) Likewise, he later writes: “Lord, act yourself according to who you are;” this has the mild ring to it of I AM WHO AM, though I doubt Scupoli intended this.

I am half tempted to translate it, “I have acted no better than what I am,” but that departs so far from the text that it loses more than it gains.

“with glory”: The Italian is, beato nell’altra con la gloria, “blessed in the other [life] with glory,” but that doesn’t roll off an English-speaking tongue well. Note the interesting switch to masculine for peccatore (“sinner”), rather than using the feminine peccatrice.