1. But for the rest, if those who abstain from quadrupeds enjoy pheasants, fatted fowls, or other costly birds, or fish; they seem to me not to cut off the delights of their body, but to change them; and not for abstinence's sake, but as it were for some uncleanness—or rather, what is truer, for the squeamishness of a fastidious stomach—to cast away those common and cheap delicacies, so that they may fill their pleasures with other and even more delicate and costly flesh: since, as has already appeared above, it is not the natures of any flesh which have been granted for human use, which God instituted, that are to be condemned by us; but the carnal concupiscences are to be fled, which the devil introduced into the sense of the flesh.
But those who wish to seem more frugal, and seek glory for themselves as it were from stricter abstinence, judge that one should abstain from all animal foods in such a way that with exotic fruits, dainty little sips, and other foods they fill the enormous appetite of their body: whereas spiritual abstinence counsels not the use of any foods, but the desire, to be restrained; and those rather are to be reckoned to serve frugality who forbid themselves not the taking of certain things, but the bodily delights. 2. Those also who, having denied themselves the taking of wine, are flooded with draughts of various drinks, seem to me by no means to fulfill abstinence:
because perhaps for this reason they hold themselves back from wine, that they may purchase praise from men, and compensate for the wine forbidden themselves with sweeter draughts of pleasures. For in the use of wine one must abstain not only from wine, but from all things which intoxicate those who take them, or even from others which, though they bring not drunkenness, certainly procure sweetness when taken, so that he may be perfectly consummated in the truth of abstinence; not, in its mere image, outwardly splendid, inwardly hollow, to men as it were pure, and to God full of the filth of a feigned virtue. And no less must we abstain from the greed of possessing superfluous things than from the pleasure of partaking.
For since we have all the things we possess for our own uses, to wish ardently to have those things which we use, or even to increase them with gains sought from this side and that, is nothing else than to serve, not a necessity that cannot be borne, but a cupidity that ought not to be borne. Nor can I say: 'I possess my own things that there may be something whence to dispense daily to the poor;' since no one will have dispensed more perfectly than he who, with the intention of perfection, leaves nothing of his own to himself.