1. Many learned teachers treat next, after the tyrant just described, the thousand-headed demon of avarice. We, unlearned as we are, did not wish to change the order of the learned, and we have therefore followed the same convention and rule. So let us first say a little about the disease, and then speak briefly about the remedy.
2. Avarice, or love of money, is the worship of idols,[240] a daughter of unbelief, an excuse for infirmities, a foreboder of old age, a harbinger of drought, a herald of hunger.
3. The lover of money sneers at the Gospel and is a wilful transgressor. He who has attained to love scatters his money. But he who says that he lives for love and for money has deceived himself.
4. He who mourns for himself has also renounced his body; and at the appropriate time he does not spare it.
5. Do not say that you are collecting money for the poor; with two mites the Kingdom was purchased.[241]
6. A hospitable man and a money-lover met one another, and the latter called the former unintelligible.
7. He who has conquered this passion has cut out care; but he who is bound by it never attains to pure prayer.
8. The beginning of love of money is the pretext of almsgiving, and the end of it is hatred of the poor. So long as he is collecting he is charitable, but when the money is in hand he tightens his hold.
9. I have seen how men of scanty means enriched themselves by living with the poor in spirit, and forgot their first poverty.[242]
10. A monk who loves money is a stranger to idleness[243] and hourly remembers the word of the Apostle: Let an idle man not eat,[244] and: These hands of mine have ministered to me and to those who were with me.[245]
This is the sixteenth struggle. He who has won this victory has either obtained love or cut out care.
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Desert Fathers (251 AD - 500)
The Desert Fathers (along with Desert Mothers) were early Christian hermits, ascetics, and monks who lived mainly in the Scetes desert of Egypt beginning around the third century AD. The Apophthegmata Patrum is a collection of the wisdom of some of the early desert monks and nuns, still in print as Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The most well known was Anthony the Great, who moved to the desert in 270–271 AD and became known as both the father and founder of desert monasticism. By the time Anthony died in 356 AD, thousands of monks and nuns had been drawn to living in the desert following Anthony's example — his biographer, Athanasius of Alexandria, wrote that "the desert had become a city." The Desert Fathers had a major influence on the development of Christianity.The desert monastic communities that grew out of the informal gathering of hermit monks became the model for Christian monasticism. The eastern monastic tradition at Mt. Athos and the western Rule of St. Benedict both were strongly influenced by the traditions that began in the desert. All of the monastic revivals of the Middle Ages looked to the desert for inspiration and guidance. Much of Eastern Christian spirituality, including the Hesychast movement, had its roots in the practices of the Desert Fathers. Even religious renewals such as the German evangelicals and Pietists in Pennsylvania, the Devotio Moderna movement, and the Methodist Revival in England are seen by modern scholars as being influenced by the Desert Fathers.