After Gluttony, the Other Virtues

So while we are practicing fasting and abstinence, we must take care, when we have gotten the better of the passion of gluttony, never to let our mind remain empty of the virtues we need. Rather, we should all the more earnestly fill the inmost recesses of our heart with them, for fear that the spirit of desire should return and find us empty and bare of them. Then he would not be content to secure an entrance there for himself alone, but would bring in with him into our heart this sevenfold incentive of sins, and make our last state worse than the first. For the soul that boasts that it has renounced this world, together with the eight faults that hold sway over it, will afterward be fouler and more unclean, and visited with more severe punishments, than it was when it was at home in the world before, when it had taken on itself neither the rules nor the name of a monk. These seven spirits are said to be worse than the first one that went out for this reason: the love of good things, that is, gluttony, would not be harmful in itself if it did not open the door to other passions, namely to sexual immorality, greed, anger, dejection and pride, which are clearly harmful to the soul in themselves and domineer over it. And so a man will never be able to gain perfect purity if he hopes to secure it by means of abstinence alone, that is, by bodily fasting, unless he understands that he ought to practice it for this reason: so that when the flesh is brought low by fasting, he may more easily enter the contest against the other faults, since the flesh has not been made used to gluttony and overeating. [a]