Bl. Angela of Foligno: “We need nothing but God alone”

Dec 01, 2025

Blessed Angela of Foligno:

Now here, my children, is what I have to tell you: Know (and remember it well) that YOU HAVE NEED OF NOTHING BUT GOD ALONE. To find God, to gather your heart and unite it to Him—this is your single task of consequence and necessity.

And here is what you must practice to reach this great point.

(3) I. First of all, in order to recollect your heart well and draw it closer to God, you must absolutely dismiss all your old customs and useless habits, all your friendships, visits, and vain conversations with either sex; all your learning and knowledge of the same sort, all curiosity, all desire for novelty and to know what is happening in the world, all unnecessary cares and occupations—in a word, you must rid yourself entirely of everything that only distracts and scatters the mind outward.

(4) II. After this, you must, with every effort of which you are capable, try to enter into and penetrate the inner abyss of our great misery, and there consider well:

how unfortunately we have spent the past;
in what state our inclinations and actions now are;
how we will continue to live; and
how, as soon as we have given up our spirit, we will receive for all eternity a lot corresponding to all we shall have done on earth.

These considerations must not be passed over lightly and without thinking on them well each day; at least let us take them to heart during the night, to repair in this way what may have been lacking in our reflections by day.

(5) III. No less must we strive to know well the great mercy of GOD, and not forget the immense goodness which moved Jesus Christ to come and make Himself the companion of all our miseries; since all our perfection consists only in these two points, that is, in the KNOWLEDGE OF GOD and in that OF OURSELVES.

(6) As for me, it is impossible for me to speak to you of anything except this double knowledge—first that of GOD, and then that of ourselves—which shows us that man, being always in a kind of prison that deprives him of all good, must not rely on himself, but seek outside himself the good that cannot be found in his sad condition.

(7) O my dearest children, hold it for certain that all heavenly visions, all divine revelations, all contemplations and all possible gifts are nothing at all to us without the true and solid knowledge of God and of ourselves. I repeat it to you and assure you again in truth that without this knowledge, nothing profits anyone. Therefore I am surprised that you ask me for letters, since words cannot give you either profit or consolation unless I use them to speak to you of this saving knowledge. I also have distaste for any other subject; and I am even commanded from above to keep silence on every matter except this one. Pray, then, that God may give you, as to all His other children, His divine light on this subject, as well as the grace to remain firmly grounded on such an important truth.

(8) It is indisputable that the knowledge of God is absolutely necessary for you. For since our last end is the Kingdom of Heaven, and since we can and should obtain it only by the same means and by the same ways by which Jesus Christ, the adorable God-Man, acquired it, it appears that it is absolutely necessary to know well this God-man, His life, His works, and the ways by which He entered into glory; so that by imitating His works and transforming ourselves into Him, we may, assisted by His grace and merits, become after Him and with Him possessors of this divine Kingdom.

(9) But above all it is necessary to know this God-man as afflicted and crucified for us, and as having left us the pattern and form of living well that we must imitate: For it is in this that He has given us, by the most incontestable proofs, the knowledge of the infinity and the incomprehensibility of His Love—much more clearly than by any other of all God’s benefits. Consequently, if we do not wish to be monsters of ingratitude, we must become wholly changed and transformed into His divine Love, to the point of loving Him as He has loved us, loving likewise all our neighbors, and having supreme compassion for our Beloved who has suffered so much for us, and who, out of very pure love for us, willed to embrace for our salvation the sufferings and death of the CROSS.

(10) The meditation and knowledge of this pure Love, which moved God to do so many things for us and for our redemption, is also without doubt a motive and a very powerful means to advance us in the knowledge of ourselves: for considering that God, the Most High and Sovereign Being, willed to deliver Himself to death for us—does this not incite and dispose us to think a little of who we are, and that we must indeed be creatures of excellent nature and great price? And in fact, if man were not one of the noblest creatures and of very great worth before God, would the Lord have wished to do and to suffer so much on his account?

(11) Another benefit of the knowledge of the God incarnate and crucified for us is that we find ourselves moved to take very great care of our eternal salvation. For if a God so great and so supremely exalted above us took so much to heart the matter of our Redemption and salvation as to work so many wonders in order to obtain it for us, then with even greater reason must we ourselves take to heart that same salvation, which is our own affair, and cooperate with all our power through penance to the good will God has to bring us into it.

(12) There are many other divine benefits contained in this knowledge of Jesus Christ, God-Man and crucified for us; but the principal one is that the consideration that we are saved by His sufferings kindles in hearts the fire of very great love.

(13) But to come to this great Love, it is absolutely necessary that these reflections pass into continual meditation and into a very deep knowledge of this adorable God-Man dying on the cross: for we love Him only in proportion to how well we know Him; therefore the more knowledge we have of Him, the more perfect and more pure also will be the love we have for Him, as well as our transformation into Him. Likewise, insofar as we love Him and are transformed into His love, we shall also be transformed into the state of sufferings that our soul contemplates in this adorable Man-God so afflicted and so full of sorrows. For as it usually happens that one loves an object in proportion to how much one sees and knows it, so the soul feels through tender love the pains and sorrows of its Beloved and is transformed into them to the extent that it is struck by their sight and their knowledge.

(14) The soul therefore is no less transformed into conformity with the bitter sufferings of its sweet crucified Lover than it is into His love through the perfect knowledge and contemplation of God and of itself.

(15) For in considering well on one side the super-infinite height of the Majesty of God (which seems to me to be rather blasphemed than defined by any expression), and seeing on the other side the dreadful baseness and extreme unworthiness of sinners, with whom nevertheless this sublime Majesty willed to make friendship and alliance by the bond of kinship, and even to give His life for them by dying shamefully on a gibbet—the more the soul penetrates and deepens this infinite wonder, the more profoundly and passionately does it feel itself changed and transformed entirely into the love of this adorable God-humanized.

(16) When then the soul considers that its sins and those of other men are such that all it could know of them is rather ignorance than knowledge, so far are their greatness and number beyond its comprehension; when enlightened by divine light it perceives that it alone has been the cause of the extreme and infinite pains that afflicted the Son of God; when it sees how this super-infinite Goodness and Majesty willed to become mortal man for such a wretched creature, and to endure for it unspeakable pains and torments for as long as His divine Majesty lived in this world—He who, though Creator of heaven and earth, willed nevertheless to end His life here so ignominiously—when, I say, a soul sees and considers well all these things, it becomes wholly transformed into sorrow; and the more it deepens and considers them, the more it feels itself wholly penetrated with sadness and affliction.

(17) Furthermore, when the soul discovers that man, this miserable creature, has by his sins incurred the loss of all good, has merited eternal pains, and has become a just object of laughter for God and His Angels, as well as for demons and all creatures; perceiving moreover that this high Majesty, the God-man JESUS CHRIST, from being very rich became very poor to lift men from their poverty; that from being very happy and enjoying all delights, He became the man of sorrows to deliver men from their eternal and infinite pains by the immensity of those He endured in satisfying for them; and that finally this God of glory, who is infinitely exalted above all praise, became humble, abject, and obedient, and willed to be despised, debased, and insulted; willed to appear and be regarded as the most wretched and most contemptible of all creatures in order to withdraw man from his state of shame and restore him to that of glory and honor—when, I say, the soul contemplates and considers all these things closely, it must necessarily be deeply struck at heart and become as though wholly transformed into sorrow; and the more it contemplates and considers these things, the more is this feeling and this sorrowful transformation redoubled in its heart.

(18) Thus, the more a soul knows on one side the Greatness and dignity of God, the mercy and immense goodness that He has made known to us both by real effects and by revelation; and on the other side, the more that soul knows the misery of man, his faults, his unworthiness, his ingratitude, his infidelity, his baseness; the more also is it touched and penetrated by the love of the God-man Jesus and by His sufferings, and the more it feels itself wholly transformed into His likeness, in which consists the whole Perfection of man.