What shall I say to you about food, sister Florentina, I think, you who by reason of the frailty of your body do not even take as much as you are taught by reason? Let it nevertheless remain fixed in your mind, that even if something must be relaxed from strictness for an infirm body, yet the soul is not in the meantime released, if the infirm body merits something more indulgent. For there is no use of eating that is blameworthy, but rather the concupiscence, the immoderation, if you take more than is needful, if you desire that without which you could live. Threefold indeed is the intemperance of gluttony: if you greedily crave what is not lawful; if you too anxiously seek out lawful things prepared at exquisite expense; if you cannot abide the lawful time of eating.
Men of the first kind, for this reason, lost the delights of paradise and the rewards of immortality, because they coveted unlawful things. But Esau, because he too greedily sought after lawful things, lost the privileges of the firstborn. And because animals do not keep the time of eating, therefore they are irrational. We have proved, then, the threefold excess of intemperance: when the first men tasted of the unlawful thing; when Esau by his appetite for the pottage lost the birthright; when animals do not keep the time of eating, and are irrational. He, therefore, is not abstinent who greedily devours even cheap food. Their throat is an open sepulcher, says the Psalmist (Ps. V). For he too is soft and dissolute who, despising present things, delights in precious and foreign banquets.
A fish is caught by the hook through enticement. A bird, set against the bait, falls into the snare. Beasts which are rigid by natural strength rush into the pit through desire of food; and those whom nature does not soften, the bait deceives. But you, learn temperance and frugality, whether by oracle or by the examples of your forefathers. By oracle, because the Lord says: Let not your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness (Luke XXI). By examples, because David would not drink the water he longed for, which he understood to be the peril of another's blood (2 Sam. XXIII); or because Daniel, despising the king's dainties, lived on pulse (Dan. I). Let those things be acceptable to you that are common to your companions, and be not to others a cause of intemperance;