The Spiritual Combat
The spiritual handbook of the Theatine Lorenzo Scupoli (c. 1530-1610), the favorite book of St. Francis de Sales: Christian perfection as a war against oneself, in sixty-six chapters. Distrust of self and trust in God, the exercise of intellect and will, the governing of the senses and the tongue, the devil's snares, the gradual acquisition of the virtues, prayer, meditation on the Passion, Communion, the examination of conscience, and the combats of the last hour. The Italian is the Naples 1842 'fourth edition, collated and corrected', from an OCR scan (some residual reading errors remain), with the end of chapter 66, missing from that volume, completed from the Venice 1770 edition. The English is the anonymous 1875 Rivingtons 'new translation', which follows the Italian chapter for chapter. The Supplement and the other opuscules are not included.
Contents
Source: The 66 capi of the Combattimento. The dedication, Vita di Scupoli and licence are not imported. The OCR was cleaned by script (page furniture, line-end hyphens, drop caps, spacing, paragraph breaks from line length) and spell-corrected against the corpus's Italian vocabulary and against the Venice 1770 edition (https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_v6CR_PzdBAcC, same text, long-s OCR); about 3% of words (rough estimate) still carry OCR errors. Chapter titles whose OCR was unreadable were reconstructed by hand from the surviving fragments and the English; the last lines of capo LXVI (the volume breaks off mid-sentence) are completed from the 1770 edition with its long s resolved. The spelling is the 1842 edition's, not Scupoli's own. · The 66 chapters of the Combattimento, in the same chapters as the Italian. The Supplement and 'Interior Peace' on the neighbouring Wikisource pages are not imported. The series was Anglo-Catholic, but the Catholic content (Marian and sacramental chapters) is kept.