De arte praedicatoria

If the preacher wishes to invite his hearers to flee gluttony, he can use this authority: I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection.¹ Likewise: Let us live soberly, and justly, and piously in this world.²

The body, I say, must be chastised so that it may serve us; it is to be indulged, not served, for whoever serves the body must serve many things, since he who fears too much for it refers everything to it. What is worthless becomes honorable to the one for whom the body is too dear. The Lord says in the Gospel: Take heed lest your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life.³ Paul also says: Be not drunk with wine, in which is excess.⁴ Solomon also says: Wine is a luxurious thing, and drunkenness is riotous; whoever is delighted by these is not wise.⁵ Jesus son of Sirach says: A drunken laborer will not become wealthy. Wine and women make the wise fall away, and reprove the sensible.⁶ A small amount of wine is enough for a wise and learned man; you will not suffer from it in sleeping, nor will you feel its burden. Wine drunk in moderation is health for the body and the soul.⁷ Isidore says: "Wherever there is fullness and drunkenness, there lust holds sway." So then you must conduct yourself, o man, in such a way that you do not seem to live for the sake of the body, but as though you could live without a body; make use of yourself and of the best part of yourself, and consider the flesh a thing more necessary than great; for from it are born, in a merely passing way, pleasures that are brief, regrettable, and (unless kept in check) unrestrained, and destined to turn into their opposite. Chastise, then, the flesh, which is like a dog, a servant, a beast of burden.

The more a servant is indulged, the more he grows slack through idleness; the more a dog is struck, the more it indulges in barking; the more a beast of burden is fed, the more it kicks back against its master. With how much care, then, must gluttony be fled, which reduces to a dung-heap the dwelling of the body, the receptacle of the spirit and the soul, and reduces the mass of our flesh to mud, and which bends the soul, the true school of virtues, the rule of reason, the temple of the Godhead, the foundation of immortality, into a parade of vices, a banquet of crimes, the mud of sin, a theater of filth.

This is gluttony, for whose sake you take part in lawsuits, labor in the camps, serve the rich, endure their haughtiness, cloak flattery, and soften your speech. In avoiding gluttony, then, do not serve the flesh; but indulge it moderately; sustain it, do not nourish it excessively; govern it, do not exalt it. O man, do you know what gluttony is? Surely gluttony is the tomb of the mind, a heap of dung, the origin of lust, the mother of nausea. O man! the stomach would complain about gluttony if it could speak, saying: O man, what belongs to necessity I demand, what belongs to excess I refuse: do not give me what are burdens to me, but what are nourishment to one who asks; I ask for what nature seeks, what necessity requires; whatever is more than that comes from evil. For,

A river and grain are enough for the people.

O man, what care is it of yours from what dung is made, and from what dung-heaps are increased? Consider your own nature, look at the measure of your stomach. Do you know from what bodily illnesses and mental derangements arise? Certainly from expense of food, from a flood or overflow of drink. Whence does fever come, if not from gluttony? Whence the falling sickness, if not from excess? Does not paralysis arise from drunkenness, and dropsy from wine-soaked living? What is drunkenness, but a deranging of the mind, a plundering of virtues, an image of death, a likeness of madness? Through drunkenness insolent pride grows, cruelty in the servant, malice in the envious. Drunkenness tangles the speech, distorts the eyes, causes the wandering one to degrade himself, produces torments of the stomach, distends the very entrails, works dizziness of the head; it drives out the very modesty of mind and the guarding of the mouth, casts off the mark of shame, breaks the seal of chastity. This is drunkenness, through which, whatever evil lay hidden emerges, once too much wine has taken possession of the mind; and just as a cask bursts when the must ferments, and whatever is in the wine rises to the top, so, once drunkenness floods in, the secret that lay hidden in the mind goes out from the depths of the heart to the tip of the mouth; for just as wine passes from the stomach of the body up to the mouth, so from the stomach of the mind the secret comes forth in words, so that, just as the drunk man cannot hold back the wine, so he vomits out the secret externally.

This is one daughter of idolatry, for whom the god is the belly,⁸ which offers worship to Bacchus, whence it can be called, by a made-up word, "Bacchus-worship."

For he is idolatrous enough who prefers the belly to God, who worships Bacchus more than God, who rots in his own excess, and grows foul like a beast of burden in its own dung.

O man, consider the rich man⁹ who feasted splendidly every day; consider, by contrast, Lazarus, who lay before his gate full of sores! The rich man rejoiced at the banquet, and was afterward buried in hell; he feasted splendidly in life, and after life he thirsted for a drop of water: at first he was clothed in purple, afterward he was surrounded by the flame of hell; Lazarus, however, was a beggar in life, and after life was placed in the bosom of Abraham; here poor, there rich; here full of sores, there comforted with blessed hope.

Consider, o man, how Adam through gluttony lost paradise;¹⁰ Elijah through abstinence ascended into heaven; Noah through gluttony uncovered his thighs;¹¹ Moses through abstinence merited conversation with God; Lot through drunkenness fell into incest; David through the abstinence of penitence obtained his remedy. O man, consult nature; it will tell you what the law of living ought to be. The law of nature is that you drive away hunger and thirst; for this it is not necessary that you cross the seas, that you follow the camps; what nature desires is easy to obtain and close at hand. Take up, then, weapons against gluttony, arm yourself against excess. Take up the remedies of fasting against the assaults of so great a sickness; fast from food, lest the flesh grow wanton; fast from temporal pleasure, lest the mind grow faint; fast from sin, lest the spirit grow sluggish. With this threefold fast we must chastise our beast of burden, that is, our flesh, lest it raise its heel against us: our beast of burden must be corrected with the stick, with spurs, with the bridle, with the goad.

For if our flesh wishes to stray into what is forbidden, it must be checked back with the bridle of discretion, corrected with fasts as though with certain spurs, chastised with vigils as though with certain sticks, roused with the goad of fear.