Despising Great Things, Clinging to Trifles

How can we show how absurd it is? We see some who, in the first enthusiasm of their renunciation, left their estates and vast wealth and the service of the world and went off to the monasteries, yet they are still earnestly attached to those things that cannot be cut off altogether, and that we cannot do without in this state of life, small and trifling though they are. So in their case the anxiety over these trifles is greater than their love of all their property was. It will certainly do them little good to have disregarded greater riches and property if they have only transferred to small and trifling things the very affections for whose sake they were meant to make light of those riches. For the sin of greed and avarice, which they cannot commit in the matter of truly valuable things, they keep up with regard to commoner things. So they show that they have not got rid of their former greed, but have only changed its object. If they are overly careful about their mats, baskets, blankets, books and other trifles like these, the same passion holds them captive as before. They actually guard and defend their rights over these things so jealously that they get angry with their brothers about them, and, what is worse, they are not ashamed to quarrel over them.

Still troubled by the bad effects of their former greed, they are not content to possess the things that the needs and requirements of the body compel a monk to have, according to the common number and measure. Here too they show the greed of their hearts. They try to have the things they are obliged to use better made than other people’s. Or, going beyond all proper bounds, they keep as their own special property, and guard from the touch of others, what ought to belong to all the brothers alike. As if it were the difference in metals that mattered, and not the passion of greed! As if it were wrong to be angry about big things, while one might be angry about trifles and still be innocent! And as if we had not given up all our precious things just so that we might learn more readily to think nothing of trifles! For what difference does it make whether one gives in to greed over large and splendid things or over the merest trifles, except that we ought to think a man all the worse if he has made light of great things and then is a slave to little ones? And so that sort of renunciation of the world does not reach perfection of heart, because though it ranks as poverty, it still keeps the mind of wealth.