This is one in a series from Jaques-Benigne Bossuet’s Elevations on the Mysteries, and specifically the Fifth Day. There is more here on the Bossuet Project.
In the day that you eat the forbidden fruit, you will die of death. In the very end you will die of the death of the soul, which will be immediately separated from God, who is our life, and the soul of the soul itself. But even though your soul is not currently separated from even body at the very moment of sin, nevertheless, at this moment, it deserves to be so; it is thus separated from it, because of the debt, though not yet by the effect. We become mortal; we are worthy of death; death dominates us, our body from there becomes a yoke to our soul and overwhelms us with all the weight of mortality and infirmity that accompanies it. Rightly, Lord, justly, because the soul that has willingly lost God, which was its soul, is punished for its defection by its inevitable separation from the body which is united to it; and the loss which the body experiences, by necessity, of the soul which governs and perfects it, is just torment of that which the soul voluntarily made of God, who gave it life by his union.
God’s justice, I adore you! It was only right that, composed of two parts of which you had made the union unchangeable, so long as I remained united to you by the submission I owed you, after I rose against your inviolable orders, I saw the dissolution of the two parts of myself so well matched beforehand, and that I see my body in a state to go rot in the earth, and return to its original dust. O God I submit to the sentence! And each time sickness attacks me, small as it is, I will only think that I am mortal, I will remember this saying: You will die of death, and of this just condemnation you have pronounced against all human nature. The horror I naturally have of death will be a proof of my abandonment to sin; for, Lord, if I had remained innocent, there would be nothing that could horrify me. But now I see death chasing after me, and I can not avoid his hideous hands. O God! give me the grace that the horror that I feel, and that your holy son Jesus did not disdain to feel, inspires me the horror of the sin that introduced it on earth. Without sin, we would have seen death perhaps only in animals; still a great and saintly doctor seems to say that she would not have entered them in Paradise, lest the innocent eyes of men should have been struck by this sad object. Whatever it is, O Jesus! I hate sin more than death, since it is through sin that death has reigned over all mankind from Adam, our first father, until those who will see you arrive in your glory.
Positive Infinity 