Chapter I.
How our warfare with covetousness is a foreign one, and
how this fault is not a natural one in man, as the other faults
are.
Our
third conflict is against
covetousness which we can describe as the love of money; a foreign
warfare, and one outside of our nature, and in the case of a monk
originating only from the state of a corrupt and sluggish mind, and
often from the beginning of his renunciation being unsatisfactory, and
his love towards God being lukewarm at its foundation. For the rest of
the incitements to sin planted in human nature seem to have their
commencement as it were congenital with us, and somehow being deeply
rooted in our flesh, and almost cœval with our birth, anticipate
our powers of discerning good and evil, and although in very early days
they attack a man, yet they are overcome with a long
struggle.