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Fathers and the first article of faith in theology.
    It is the sin of Lucifer.
    Pride.
     
    I went on, watching myself as if in a mirror, paying n,o heed to the little outlets running down to the sea, in the shape of a conch shell formed by the coasts of Sorrento, Vesuvius and Ischia at the entrance to the incomparable gulf, where the isle of Capri, afloat in a dazzling mist, hovers like a rosy flamingo hesitating to settle on the blue waters. But everybody knows that view, it has been printed on millions of postcards. I saw myself advancing, as if in a mirror, allowing nothing, not even the grandiose but hackneyed landscape, to distract or absorb my attention, and I was laughing at myself and wondering who I was and what I was doing in the world. I was laughing and I felt like committing suicide. What was the point of living?
    The world is a formidable and complex place. It is made up of poor samples of our fellow-beings, of widespread doctrines held in common, generalized and contagious ideologies, persuasions of all kinds against which each individual must battle continuously. Yet how can the heart of man be a battlefield ? Why these intimate and inevitable contradictions which exist in us, which are, indeed, ourselves? Is this our primitive condition, or is it to be explained by some initial catastrophe, a downfall, a hidden drama in the origin of our species? Is man insane by nature, or is it the toil, the bread that he must earn by the sweat of his brow, that makes him insane? Is he an energumen, possessed by spirits? A fanatic? A melancholic?
    According to Cassien, all beings, apart from God, are necessarily composed, if not of form and matter, at least of essence and existence, potentiality and present action, substance and accidents. God is the unique principle, and everything, without exception, draws its existence, and even possibility of existence, from Him. Only God is perfectly 'simple', compounded of nothing but 'pure spirit', and, as Thomas Aquinas was to say, pure action. All other beings need a support for their existence, and this support can only be corporeal matter, more or less tenuous. We call the most tenuous matter spirit: spiritus. This word means: wind, or air in motion. Therefore, our soul must be a kind of air, certainly not the same as the air we breathe, but far more rarefied still. And the angels, good or bad, must also be intelligent forces united to an air that is even more tenuous than the air which constitutes our souls, or at any rate much more intangible than our bodies. . . .
    Let us not be too hasty in dismissing this doctrine as childish. The ancients lacked terms of comparison between spiritual energy and physical energy. And do we really know what matter is, and in what way it differs from spirit?
    ... So God created, long before the beginning of our terrestrial world, spiritual forces. It follows that the angels must have been created since all eternity. The creation of the angels preceded the creation of the human race. It was through their error (the sin of pride) that the devils fell from the rank they occupied in the hierarchy of spirits. . . .
    And Abbe Cassien declares: 'Certainly, the law which ordains that we shall eat by the sweat of our brow is a spiritual law, referring not to that material bread which the rich obtain without any effort on their part , but that bread which fell from the heavens and which all of us, rich or poor, can acquire only through great efforts. But although this law is spiritual, we ourselves are carnal, since we are "sold into sin" as David says in Palm 51 : "I am flesh, sold into sin!'"
    And the great mystic-materialist declares: 'We are right to say that spiritual natures exist, for it is true: there are the angels, archangels and other celestial beings, also our souls and that rarefied air that surrounds us, but we must not imagine that they are incorporeal. They have a body through which they live, although it is much more tenuous than our