Greed Lies Outside Our Nature

Greed and anger are not of the same character, for the first is something outside our nature, while the second seems to have its seedbed, as it were, within us. Yet they spring up in the same way, since in most cases they find the causes that stir them in something outside us. Often men who are still rather weak complain that they have fallen into these sins through irritation and the urging of others, and they are plunged headlong into the passions of anger and greed by other people’s provocation. But that greed is something outside our nature, we can clearly see from this: it is shown not to have its first starting point inside us, and it does not arise from what serves to keep body and soul together and to sustain life. For it is plain that nothing belongs to the actual needs and necessities of our common life except our daily food and drink. Everything else, however eagerly and carefully we keep it, is shown by the needs of life itself to be something apart from what a person requires. So this temptation, being something outside our nature, attacks only those monks who are lukewarm and built on a bad foundation, whereas the faults that are natural to us do not stop troubling even the best of monks and those who live in solitude. [a]

This is shown to be so true that we find there are some nations altogether free from this passion of greed, because they have never taken this fault and weakness into themselves by use and custom. And we believe that the old world before the flood was ignorant of the madness of this desire for long ages. In the case of each of us who makes a thorough renunciation of the world, we know that it is rooted out without any difficulty, if, that is, a man gives up all his property and seeks the monastic discipline in such a way as not to let himself keep a single penny. We can find thousands of men to bear witness to this, who in a single moment have given up all their property and have so thoroughly rooted out this passion that they are not troubled by it in the slightest afterward, though all their lives they have to fight against gluttony, and cannot be safe from it without striving with the utmost watchfulness of heart and bodily abstinence.