Tractates 1.9.1–1.12.9

It is no singular or trivial crime, brothers, especially for a Christian, to be bound in the fetters of greed and, blinded by the deadly darkness of deep night, to be carried pitiably down to the depths. But because the whole world has caught fire with the burning of an inextinguishable plague, avarice, as people think, has ceased to be a crime, because it leaves no one who could rebuke it: for all everywhere are hurled with insatiable fury into shameful gains; nor can anyone at all be found who would put the reins of justice on it even for a single moment. Always restless, it seethes, rages, fights, seizes, gathers, hoards, tenacious of its own, craving another's, content neither with its own, nor with another's, nor with the world itself: it possesses everything and always complains of want. In the end its wishes never reach their goal. The more it has increased, the more wretched it becomes, without rest, without satiety. By right and wrong, armed with many arts, ways and tricks, it rages like a bacchant, despising its own and others' safety, fearing only that someone may lack what it can scrape away. Hence all nations fall from moment to moment by mutual wounds; shaken cities groan; worn-out countryside cannot breathe; the seas are more savage through pirates than by nature. Roads barred by swords grow fat with human blood; wills marvel that unknown heirs are read out from them; under the deceit of a friendly hand a draught of poison drunk off securely finishes off innocent souls; by the new rage of hatred an unknown offspring is buried before it is born, no longer in its mother's womb but in her tomb, which could feel neither a lawful death nor life. Rightly then does the Apostle say: 'The root of all evils is avarice'; for with this as mother and teacher, everything we have said, and much else too, indeed all the evils that gush out everywhere without pause, are born and celebrated, which humanity falsely pretends to condemn: for swallowing the camel, it strains out the gnat; it rejects the drops of crimes, and drinks up the fountain of avarice from which the streams of crimes are poured.

No rights, no laws, no honour of any kind stand in its way, because whatever is either bought or sold is not free: not nobility, because nobility trusts in it, cultivates it, and through it finds its very name; not holiness, not fortification, because nothing is so holy that it cannot be violated, nothing so fortified that it cannot be stormed by money; not the bond of blood, not friendship, because a man is loved or hated not for his own merit but by the benefit of gold, silver and resources. In short, this is why we see the pious names of brothers more often friendly to swords than to each other; why rich parents, the holiness of their name abolished, let their children wander, subject to the street-corner coin, to the disgrace of both; why children, judging their parents' life their own loss, laying violent hands on nature itself, seize inheritances before their time and compel their parents to live in misery and to die by their means. Oh, the wickedness! What do you take away from your own, unhappy man? What would you do to a stranger, you who are avaricious against yourself? O evil more detestable than the detestable! While they rob one another, persecute, deceive, they approve enemies, praise robbers, excuse brigands; and it never comes into their minds that tomorrow is not in human power, nor even the very day on which business is done; because what always turns, what it may bring in a moment is doubtful. But, blind with eyes open, they enlarge barns, narrow lands, join woodland to woodland, and if they possessed the whole world, they would hate its boundaries: they think it unlawful to have a neighbour. They build estates, dig tombs, fear an omen who do not fear death. Thus, thus they often lie slain, given to dogs, birds and beasts, scattered everywhere, lost in every way, their bones half-eaten, stripped even of their own flesh. Behold an end worthy of the avaricious man. He, he who had a large estate, does not have a small tomb. Such men the distinguished prophet rebukes, saying: 'What has pride profited us? Or what has the ambition of riches brought us? All these things have passed away like a shadow.' And the Lord himself says: 'What does it profit anyone to gain the world and suffer the loss of his own soul?'

Go now, insatiable man, and with new arts compel even the elements themselves into the deadly gains of detestable heaping-up. Though your inner rooms shine, filled with the many-coloured shapes of precious stones, though the earth groan under the weight of silver, though your whole house, blazing with gold, fight the sun with its flames, and the ranks of honours, emptied out on you, find you, whatever it may give you; yet you ought to remember that death fears neither riches nor honours. O blind mind of men, how variously, yet towards one death, it strives: the poor man, when he unhappily seeks the wealth he happily does not have; the rich man, when he thinks he does not have the riches he has. Avarice strains in the one, rages in the other, grows in both, and does not stop in either. Yet in one moment a little earth both makes them equal and fills them, which gold with all its ambition cannot do.

Hence one man puts out his money like a hook to draw other people's resources to himself, and never stops nursing it while it is abroad by a deadly reckoning, so as to seek a sum not that the loan gave, but that days, months and fingers have borne it by the yearly count. But often the moneylender is himself stripped by his own industry, when by some chance fraud, want, flight or death has wrested the debtor from him: for it is natural to avarice to make one more avaricious; it has often taken more from the avaricious man than it gives; and so it often happens that he who desires what is another's deservedly loses even his own. There another closes the roads to travellers; he keeps them from the grasses, keeps them from the woods, keeps them from the waters. And indeed, though very much lies vacant and plentiful, he denies to men what he cannot deny to birds, serpents and beasts. It is surely sheer madness to envy the benefits of nature. Another then buys up the supply of all goods, watches for the time to sell, smaller in measure, greater in price; he denies he has anything to sell, so as to be asked, so as to cut throats; and would that the goods sold were at least uncorrupted. Besides, he groans if the year is barren, much more if it has been fertile: in the one case because he sells little, in the other because he is not the only one. Do you want to know in what darkness he is wrapped? He is angry with God if he is not always made rich by public mourning. Well, well, when someone seeks gold, he finds the sword.

Amid these things no one considers the condition of human frailty, no one the enemy, no one the treasury, no one the robber, no one the servant of the house, who by knowing its secrets is worse than all, no one the flames of the day of judgment that threaten, through which we shall all pass naked. Only that is worshipped of which it is said: 'The idols of the nations are silver and gold,' for which a man is either killed or kills. Yet I should like to know what pleasure so great a madness for it holds, what it gives its worshipper? It does not extinguish fever, does not drive away diseases, does not heal wounds, does not take away pains, does not repel death, except that it kills the healthy; it is surely never eaten, nor drunk, nor will it go down into hell with its plunderer; only it hurls unhappy eyes and an empty conscience into the dire desire for its baleful glitter, with the hope of getting it, lest a man seem to have been killed for nothing.

But we have made our sermon not to the avaricious but about the avaricious, brothers: otherwise we should have had to conclude with divine examples alone, if any such man were here. But since in you faith and devotion, which is a fit expeller of avarice, remains and glories, you are all worthy not so much to have gold and silver as to be them; for you are God's living gold, you are Christ's silver, you are the riches of the Holy Spirit; you, if you despise earthly metals, are by far a greater treasure of your life than these. For you that heavenly city built of gold is destined: there is no delay for those who wish to enter; twelve gates stand open, dwellings without number have been prepared, let no one be anxious about a lodging. It will be a distinguished mark of our sure glory if we make the city of God narrow by the happiness of our numbers. So be secure: nothing is ever lacking in it, nothing is taken away from its state or declines; all good and everlasting things abound everywhere. Certainly, what is first, no one is in need, no one envies, no one is anxious, no one robs, no one confiscates, no one kills, no one dies: all are happy, all of one mind, all immortal, all always equal: what is one's is all's, what is all's is each one's. Do you want to know what blessedness dwells there? No one hides his clothing, no one his pearls, no one precious stones, no one gold, no one silver, and yet no one fears theft.

Would that avarice could be as easily not loved as it is easily reproved by all: for it is a crafty and sweet evil, and always hostile to all men. To those who do not have riches it brings the desire of having; from those who have them it takes away satiety. So it hurls all into madness in one storm, so that you do not know where it is greater. It is like a fire feeding on dry fodder, which does not end unless the fodder ends. The middling cultivate it with frauds, the rich with lawlessness, judges with favour, the eloquent with a mercenary and double tongue, kings with pride, merchants with cunning, the poor with an empty wish, worshippers of God with feigned hatred, and whole peoples and all nations with the sword. It rages madly through the whole world, burning with new and varied arts: never quiet, not by day, not by night, not in war, not in peace; never full; more wretched for the enormity of its gains. It is a new kind of calamity, which only grows and does not know how to grow old. Neither the devotion of parents breaks it, nor the sweetness of children, nor conjugal affection, nor dear brotherhood, nor the right of friendship, nor the tender orphan, nor hard widowhood, nor pitiable poverty, nor the contemplation of God: for see, with all these, as far as it can, by various arts it either flatters or harms, if they have anything, only to take it away. And whom would it spare, when it hastens to die at every moment even for trivial and shameful gain?

Why then, wretched man, burning with vain desire for the metal of gold and silver, are you tortured by vain care? Why do you heap up great piles of talents? Why do you guard untouched what will remain here, sleepless with empty anxiety, not even granting yourself anything from it? Besides, you complain of want, you who do not know what you have. Whatever you do, you will carry none of these things with you to the underworld; for what belongs to nature can be carried from place to place, but cannot be taken from it. In fact, the gold and silver that is dug with great effort out of the bowels of the earth is again committed to the earth to be hidden: for it is a thing whose possession is a false joy, whose display is a most certain danger. But there is no need to go through each point, since all its evils are known from one example, as the prophet says: 'The idols of the nations are silver and gold.' Hence it appears that he who loves gold and silver not only worships the gods but imitates their ways and deeds, of which the proof is easy. Meanwhile let us look at what concerns us.

Gold and silver, Christian, if the truth must be told, you curse only in the images, not in your own inner rooms; for there too, in countless gold and silver coins struck in round form, as in so many temples, you likewise recognise the faces and emblems of kings; and there is no other difference except that in your house they are small, in the temple larger: if you spend them, they are money; if you hoard them, they are idols. Handmaid of Christ, you spit out the false idol: believe me, you worship in yourself the one whose ornament, whose image you do not lay aside. You come forward to the church of God with your whole body gilded with various work, loaded with the accursed metal, delicate everywhere, strong under your necklaces. In short, by the very stiffness of your attire you do not bend in prayer, you do not stretch out your hands, you disdain to prostrate a breast swollen with necklaces. Indeed you bow your neck, not from religion but from weight. When will you make your confession, you who are more anxious for your ornaments than for your salvation? What do you believe you can obtain from God, you who entreat him by means of that which angers him? Open at last the eyes of your heart; you will find that you are insulting rather than asking. In the end, brothers, she cannot fear her husband who does not fear Christ.

Hence it is that spouses, resisting the most holy nuptial yoke, each striving for himself, out of excessive love, of course, each hunts for the other's inheritance; that parents hate their children and children their parents; that friendship plays on the face rather than dwells in hearts; that the whole human race delights in its own ruin and its own calamities, holding the soul cheaper than money. Hence it is that justice, honour, devotion, faith and truth perish; that God himself suffers insult at every moment, whose commandments are despised, to whose worship and love the love of the world is preferred; for whoever's heart implacable greed has filled with its pestilent flame willingly commits any sin, crime, disgrace or wickedness.

But these things are not for you, brothers, whose generosity is known to all the provinces, whose pious seeds are scattered, as it were, through the members of the whole world. Many redeemed by you, many freed from deadly edicts, many released from hard conditions give thanks. Your houses are open to all strangers; under you no living or dead person has ever long been seen naked. Already our poor do not know how to ask for food. Already widows and the needy make wills. I could say more in praise of this blessedness of yours, were you not my own. Yet one thing I cannot keep silent for joy: by lending to the poor, you transfer all the subdued resources of avarice into your own estate without envy. For what can be richer than a man whose debtor God professes himself to be? Who is blessed for ever and ever.

Rightly, brothers, as you have heard, God hates avarice: for it is a deep lust, a blind greed, an insane storm, a rapacity without end, an anxiety without rest, never reaching its wishes, because it does not know how to be filled: it breaks faith, neglects love, denies justice, does not know affections, despises divine laws, shuts out human laws with cunning arguments, so as to seize the whole world if it could. Do you want to know what kind of calamity it is? Plainly it rages more against the one who loves it; but he who conquers it will have eternal life.

If anyone, from zeal either to know or to attack the nature of the sacred law, has unrolled the book of Moses on the creation often in reading, perhaps, as are the wits we see daily, glad of cunning disputes, he may bring against us a slanderous question from the Apostle's saying: 'The first man was from the clay of the earth, the second from heaven': since there is no doubt that one man only was formed by God from the clay of the earth, and the woman was taken from his side as conjugal comfort, from whom the whole human race has flowed; but the heavenly man cannot be shown to be mentioned there, or made, or born. Add to this the very reversed order of mention, since it is an incongruous and absurd thing that the second should be immortal and the one who is mortal the first, since immortality does not admit the order of time, mortality does; or if the heavenly one is first, what need was there for the earthly one too to be made? The Gospel saying too may be struck by a similar argument; for it is written: 'No one has ascended into heaven except him who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who was in heaven.' How could the Son of Man, or of what man, be born in heaven so as to descend from heaven, when both the possession and the nature of humanity are far removed from heaven? Come, rouse your understanding, reader, and you will find the truth. He who was in heaven descended from heaven; he who descended is the same who ascended into heaven, the Son of Man, who was in heaven: Son of Man by name, not by nature: for the Lord did not put on flesh twice; but it was fitting that he should be so preached, because before he was what he had willed to become, he published it both by figure and by frequent oracles. So 'Son of God' belongs to his ineffable origin, 'of man' to the sacrament; the secret of this sacrament I shall try to open by plain reasoning, as with a kind of key, so that anyone may very easily recognise both the providence of God, and the force of the union of flesh and soul, and where man's highest good has been placed.

After God, brothers, had with wonderful skill completed this world, as a kind of house for the future human race, fitted and furnished in many ways with elements, riches, living creatures, foods, and various, great and numerous useful things, so that the inhabitant should have no cause for complaint, then he made in his own image and likeness a sentient and intelligent likeness of himself: for taking clay of the earth he shaped man, and poured into him the soul by which we breathe from the proper fountain of his own spirit; and he gave him the name 'man' from the ground: I believe, as the matter itself teaches, so that by contemplating the maker and the material he might always both fear and revere his craftsman. After this he subjected to him all the good things of the world; and because he was already created with wisdom, equipped with senses for choosing death or life, and admonished by the instruction of a commandment, he entrusted him to his own will. But that envious accuser, who received the name of serpent because he creeps along gradually, inflamed with detestable envy, since he could not prevail by himself, flattering him in another's form, through the woman, by persuading him to transgress God's commandment, slew him miserably: and from then on, worn out by an inherited condition, the whole human race uniformly perished. Nor was there any place for any comfort: for labour, groaning, impiety, pain, sickness and misery consumed man living, as they still do; and when he was dead, the devouring earth blotted out for ever his body and that most flourishing form; and the implacable underworld afflicted his soul too, banished to deadly darkness, with the perpetual penalty of an everlasting prison. Neither those above nor those below spared the image of God: for death had claimed for itself the whole empire.

When things had long been so, that most skilful craftsman of the world, the Son of God, whose wisdom has no end nor his strength measure, out of love for his image came down from heaven; he made glorious the lodging of a virgin's womb; and there he enclosed God in man. He used both a mortal form and a mortal condition. He teaches that justice is the procurer of immortality; he completes his precepts by deeds. Finally he took on death, so that, having conquered it, rising again, he might bring to man, through the man he bore, both the hope of conquering death and admission to the rewards of immortality. So it came about that, as through one man's condemnation condemnation came to all men, so through one man's justification the justification of eternal life ran to all men. Do you not now see plainly that there was providence in assuming man, a sacrament in the passion, the highest good in the resurrection?

Here now first of all we must know that the structure of man is made of two different and opposing things, joined by a discordant concord, and that the soul is enclosed by the outlines of the body. Hence two lives too have been given to us by God: one, by which, without knowing it, we are poured forth by nature under a law common with the beasts, which is bodily and therefore also brief; the other, of the mind, which we procure for ourselves in this life through faith from the living flood of the sacred fountain, noble and eternal: because the mind which has conquered the world by recognising and keeping the true religion and true justice must, as the reward of its labour, enjoy the immortal blessedness of immortality. Hence it is that within man a hidden war rages at every moment, as each part strives to subjugate the other, as the Apostle says: 'The flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; these two are opposed to each other.'

On this side the flesh, flowing all over with delights, crowned with the various gifts of the seasons, promises, displays, offers and gives manifold and deep riches, and sets forth its own beauty; and its face, always uncertain, as the mirror helps, it changes daily with foreign colours into whatever shapes it pleases: cultivated by the toil of the gullet, sleek from the bath, smeared with ointments, varied in dress, picked out all over with necklaces, merry with the crowds of banquets, soaked with wine, crowned with gems or flowers, wanton with the festivity of eyes and jests, blind with avarice, excited by lust, proud in the feathered tomb of a delicately swelling and puffed-up couch: it tosses itself playfully through groves, springs, meadows, Baiae, cities and countryside: hedged about with all pleasures, inviting both sexes, all souls, all ages to desire for itself with this song: 'Short and wearisome is the time of our life, and there is no relief at a man's end, and no one is known to have returned from the underworld: for we were born from nothing, and after this we shall be as though we had not been; and there is no return from our end, because it is sealed, and no one returns.' And below: 'Come then, let us enjoy the good things that are, and let us use creation swiftly as in youth; let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments, and let not the flower of the season pass us by. Let us crown ourselves with roses before they wither. Let there be no meadow that our luxury does not pass through. Let us leave signs of gladness everywhere: for this is our portion and this our lot.'

On the other side the spirit, like a most skilful general, forewarns flight from all these things: that one must stand most readily in arms, keep careful watch, fortify the camp on every side, defend the royal standards bravely and tenaciously; bear heat, cold, hunger, thirst and all dangers with an even mind; trample the world by renouncing it; and that death itself, followed by everlasting blessedness, is the prize of victory rather than death. In a brilliant speech through John it harangues thus: 'Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him: for all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the ambition of the age, which is not from the Father but from the lust of the age: and the world will pass away, and its lust. But he who does the will of God abides for ever, as God too abides for ever.'

But someone says: if this is so, why is the spirit most often overcome in itself? First, because the human race consents to pleasure more than to virtue; then because it loves delights more than toil. Add that it finds the goods of the flesh without seeking them, and prefers to enjoy even small present goods rather than huge goods that are slow in coming. But the goods of the spirit are not only invisible, slow and hidden, but also set in such a very steep place that no one can reach them except with the greatest difficulty, toil and great dangers. Add that the flesh lives on its native soil, while the spirit is a stranger. The flesh crams its gifts on anyone indiscriminately, without regard to merit, especially on the unworthy, so as to gather crowds to itself; the spirit never rewards anyone unless he first, as victor, passes beyond the laws of death. This is what makes us, whether from fear or unbelief, prefer present things to future, evil to good, fragile to solid, false to true, earthly to heavenly, temporal to eternal.

O blind mind of men! Why do you mock yourself with the fleeting flattery of present carnal things? Why do you compel the better to be subject to the worse? For you know it is written: 'All flesh is grass, and its glory like the flower of grass'; and if you care for it, you recognise that you are a beast. Or do you love its strength? Any pain breaks and undermines it. Or its beauty? It is a light and changeable thing, and is very easily destroyed by one fever or any injury. See, the eyes, its stewards or pilots, sink down extinguished by some blow. Is it not a living corpse? See, a wasting lung, eaten away by thick spittle, strips all the bones of its bearer with detestable leanness. Will not that fleshless shadow, still to be handled, shudder in a way even at itself? It is long to go through each thing. See, some fatal disease lays the whole machine low on the bed. See, the storm of death presses on from every side. Does not that which was the mistress of pleasures at once become the prey of diseases? Finally death claims the remains as they lie, besides preparing for them the punishments of Gehenna. Then that carnal enemy is ended, and all those ornaments, now of no help, are no remedy to the bloodless body, except that they are snatched by false mourners while it is still alive.

Therefore, brothers, as true Christians, as guests and strangers, abstain from carnal desires, which war against the soul; and let it not break your affection that you do not know the soul's secret and form; if you despise it because you do not see it, you could likewise despise God too, who is invisible; for he who does not love his likeness, it follows, hates the truth. Hence it is that fools put the body before the soul, the idol before God. But we who have cast off Adam have put on Christ; we who, with God as teacher, have learned what the force, the end and the reward of the flesh is, and what of the soul; we who are not ignorant that by the victory of the flesh both are extinguished, by the victory of the soul both are saved; let us follow better things, at least with the zeal with which we follow evil things. No excuse applies to anyone, especially since the matter has been entrusted to our will, as the prophet says: 'Before man are good and evil, death and life; whatever he chooses will be given him.' Hence there is no doubt that our will gives the victory to whichever side it joins itself, and in the resurrection either enjoys an everlasting reward with it, or is punished with a like penalty.