Giving Up the World Without Love

This is why, in the case of some who have despised the greatest possessions of this world, not only large sums of gold and silver but large estates as well, we have afterward seen them upset and agitated over a knife, or a pencil, or a pin, or a pen. Yet if they kept their gaze steadily fixed out of a pure heart, they would certainly never let such a thing happen over trifles, when, so as not to suffer it over great and precious riches, they chose rather to renounce those riches altogether. Often, too, some guard their books so jealously that they will not let anyone else move them, or even touch them, in the slightest. From this they meet with occasions of impatience and of death, which warn them that they need to gain the patience and love they lack. They have given up all their wealth for the love of Christ, yet they keep their old disposition in the matter of trifles and are sometimes quickly upset over them. And so they become barren and unfruitful in every way, like those who are without the love the apostle speaks of. [a]

The blessed apostle foresaw this in spirit, and he says: “Though I give all my goods to feed the poor, and give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.” From this it clearly follows that perfection is not reached simply by self-denial and the giving up of all our goods and the casting away of honors, unless there is that love whose details the apostle describes, which consists in purity of heart alone. For “not to be envious,” “not to be puffed up, not to be angry, not to do any wrong, not to seek one’s own, not to rejoice in iniquity, not to think evil,” and the rest: what is all this but always to offer God a perfect and clean heart, and to keep it free from every disturbance?