Letter 1090: The spiritual life is a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
On the passage, "One must not practice righteousness before men." Neither your own prudence, nor what is fitting, do I think you lack. For I do not admonish you as one who has fallen through negligence and folly — those who perform works of mercy for display are worse than those who do not perform them at all. But I will set forth what I think on this matter. That saying properly belongs most of all to the one who practices a certain beneficence, yet does not distribute his goods to those in need out of love for the thing itself. If anyone does it for the sake of the thing itself, he has a better reward than the one who does the same thing for pay. And if he distributes the reward divinely, he will be placed in a higher rank. But if anyone does it for the sake of gaining praise among men, he will have little, because he acted for the sake of human praise alone. But the one who acts neither for the sake of the thing itself, nor for divine reward, nor for human praise, does not even seem to be a good person at all.
AI-assisted translation — This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
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