The Elder and the Philosophers

The nature of this fault was admirably expressed under the cover of a riddle by one of the elders, in a discussion with some philosophers who thought they could make fun of him as a country bumpkin because of his Christian simplicity. He said: “My father left me in the clutches of a great many creditors. All the others I have paid in full, and I have freed myself from all their pressing claims. But one I cannot satisfy even with a daily payment.” They could not see the meaning of the riddle and urgently begged him to explain it. He said: “By nature I was surrounded by a great many faults. But when God inspired me with the longing to be free, I renounced this world and at the same time gave up all the property I had inherited from my father. So I satisfied them all, like pressing creditors, and freed myself from them entirely. But I was never able to get rid altogether of the incentives to gluttony. For though I cut down the amount of food I take to the smallest possible quantity, I cannot escape the force of its daily demands. I must be forever hounded by it for payment, making endless payments, as it were, by continually satisfying it, and paying a toll that never ends whenever it demands.” [a]

Then they declared that this man, whom until then they had despised as a simpleton and a country bumpkin, had thoroughly grasped the first principles of philosophy, that is, training in ethics. They marveled that he could have learned by the light of nature what no schooling in this world could have taught him, while they themselves, with all their efforts and their long course of training, had not learned it. That is enough on gluttony in particular. Now let us return to the discussion in which we had begun to consider the general relation of our faults to one another.