The Discipline of Self-Control

Let us learn how training and discipline shape a person toward whatever we desire and meditate upon. Habituate yourself to self-control, and in time it will become an unforced, constant companion to you. But if, on the contrary, you have companions and friends for your pleasures and banquets, you will never love fasting; instead, it will appear to you as heavy as a stranger or something unusual.

A self-controlled life is an icon of the coming and incorruptible life. For just as when we stripped off this passion-filled flesh, we shall live freely, having no necessity to serve the stomach and no slavery to other passions, so also if we now cast off the great necessity and matter of ourselves, we shall be near the expected incorruption. To speak briefly: let us flee from love of pleasure toward strength; for it is impossible to be both a lover of pleasure and a lover of God.

For the lover of wisdom will be, by necessity, also a lover of money, and the lover of money will be unjust; and he who has fallen into injustice will easily transgress the laws of piety and trample the rules of the wise, and will easily lay hands on what is forbidden, thereby gathering for himself the materials of pleasure and offering all the spoils of injustice to hedonism as to a mistress.

Do not flee from the hardship of self-control, but set hopes against the present toil, and when the lightness of the reward has passed by, avoid the abstention. Say to yourself words of piety: Fasting is bitter, but paradise is sweet; thirst is heavy, but near is the spring from which the drinker will never thirst for all eternity. The body is frail, but the soul, which is without a body, is stronger. Power is dead, but near is the resurrection.

Say to your approaching stomach and to yourself the word of the Lord: 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God' (Matt 4:4). It is not a famine, but a small temptation; it is not a necessary punishment, but a voluntary abstention; it is not a slavery-like necessity, but a free philosophy. Pray and you will be strong; call upon Him, and the Helper stands ready for you.

Take up in your memory an ancient history and learn how those who, through piety, press down the body, compared to those living in luxury and pouring out much of the unmixed wine, are neither weaker in strength, nor are they more gloomy or having lost their grace.

14.13.2 For that King of the Assyrians, who lived entirely in the flesh and was bound to a luxurious life like a glutton, commanded his cupbearers and cooks and all the simple servants of pleasure to be chosen for their intelligence and to appear graceful, so that not only the mouth and taste, but also his eye might enjoy through what was seen; then indeed the three youths, having been selected from the captivity of Israel according to the roster of the servants, abstaining from the sight of the king...