Keeping Abstinence in Balance

If we weigh everything we do by the sound judgment of the mind, and in the purity of our heart always consult, not other people’s opinions, but our own conscience, that interval of refreshment will certainly not interfere with our proper strictness. That holds, as I said, only if our pure mind impartially considers the right limits of indulgence and of abstinence and fairly checks excess on either side. It must judge with real discernment whether the weight of rich food is a burden on our spirit, or whether too much severity in abstaining weighs down the other side of the scale, that is, the body; and then it must lower whichever side it sees raised, or raise whichever side it sees weighed down. For our Lord wants nothing done for his honor and glory that is not tempered by judgment, since “the king’s honor loves judgment.” That is why Solomon, the wisest of men, urges us not to let our judgment lean to either side, saying: “Honor God with your righteous labors, and offer him of the fruits of your righteousness.” For we have living in our conscience a true and incorruptible judge, who sometimes, when everyone else is mistaken, is the only one not deceived about the state of our purity. So with all care and effort we should keep a steady purpose in a watchful heart. Otherwise, if the judgment of our discernment goes wrong, we may be fired with the desire for an ill-considered abstinence, or lured by the wish for excessive relaxation, and so weigh the substance of our strength on the pointer of a dishonest scale. Instead we should put our purity of soul in one pan of the scale and our bodily strength in the other, and weigh them both by the true judgment of conscience. Then we will not perversely tip the balance of fairness to either side, toward undue strictness or toward excessive relaxation, out of an overwhelming desire for the one or the other, and so have this said to us because of our excessive strictness or relaxation: “If you offer rightly, but do not divide rightly, have you not sinned?” [a]

For those offerings of fasts that we thoughtlessly wring from ourselves by violently tearing at our own insides, and imagine we are rightly offering to the Lord, are detested by him who “loves mercy and judgment,” and who says: “I the Lord love judgment, but I hate robbery in a burnt offering.” And those who take the main part of their offerings, that is, of their duties and actions, for the benefit of their own flesh, and leave the remains and a tiny portion for the Lord, the divine Word condemns as dishonest workmen: “Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord deceitfully.” It is not without reason, then, that the Lord rebukes the man who deceives himself by such unfair reckoning, saying: “But the sons of men are vain; the sons of men are liars on the scales, so that they may deceive.” That is why the blessed apostle warns us to keep hold of the reins of discernment, and not to be drawn by excess and swerve to either side, when he says: “your rational service.” The giver of the law likewise forbids the same thing, saying: “Let the scale be just and the weights equal, the dry measure just and the pint measure equal.” And Solomon gives a similar judgment on this matter: “Large and small weights and double measures are both unclean before the Lord, and the one who uses them will be hindered in his schemes.”

Besides the way we have described, we must also strive in this further way not to have unequal weights in our hearts or double measures in the storehouse of our conscience. That is, we must not overwhelm those to whom we are to preach the word of the Lord with commands that are too strict, heavier than we ourselves can bear, while we take it for granted that, for ourselves, whatever belongs to the rule of strictness may be softened by a freer allowance of relaxation. When we do this, what are we doing but weighing and measuring the goods and fruits of the Lord’s commands with a double weight and a double measure? For if we hand them out one way to ourselves and another way to our brothers, the Lord rightly blames us for having unequal scales and double measures, as Solomon’s saying tells us: “A double weight is an abomination to the Lord, and a deceitful scale is not good in his sight.” We also plainly incur the guilt of a deceitful weight and a double measure if, out of a desire for the praise of men, we make a show before the brothers of greater strictness than we practice in private in our own cells, trying to seem more abstinent and holier in the eyes of men than in the eyes of God. This is an evil we should not merely avoid but actually loathe. But since we have wandered some way from the question before us, let us return to the point from which we started.