The Highest Good Is Not Done for a Lesser One

For we ought not to practice compassion, patience and love, and the commands of the virtues mentioned above, in which there is what is good in its own nature, for the sake of fasting; rather, we should fast for their sake. Our effort must be that the virtues that are truly good may be gained by fasting, not that the practice of those virtues should lead to fasting as its end. This, then, is what the affliction of the flesh is useful for, and this is why the remedy of abstinence must be used: that by it we may succeed in reaching love, in which there is what is good without change, and continually, with no exception of time. For medicine, the goldsmith’s craft, and the methods of the other arts in this world are not practiced for the sake of the tools that belong to each particular work; rather, the tools are made for the practice of the art. And as they are useful to those who understand them, so they are useless to those who do not know the method of the art in question. They are a great help to those who rely on them to do their work, but they cannot be of the slightest use to those who do not know what they were made for, and are content simply to own them; for such people make all their value consist in merely having them, and not in doing the work. That, then, is the best thing in its own nature, for whose sake things indifferent are done; but the very highest good is done not for the sake of anything else, but because of its own goodness.