Can a Parrot Be Worth More than an Orphan?
Some men, instead of learning how to keep house and look after themselves, have recourse to domestic servants, and get themselves cooks and housemaids.
Others, womanisers, spend whole days with their lady loves, telling lewd stories and corrupting them with their remarks and their deceitful actions.
Others still, become slaves to lust through the influence of high-ranking prostitutes and behave like pigs in the trough.
Some of our women are happy to spend their lives in the company of effeminate men.
Other women, more sophisticated, amuse themselves bringing up as pets such creatures as birds or peacocks. They play with them and find their pleasure in them.
But they neglect the widow, who is obviously worth much more than a thoroughbred lapdog and they despise the elderly who in my opinion are more deserving of love than an animal is. They do not entertain orphans, but they do bring up parrots. Or they completely abandon their offspring out of doors while they coddle their pet birds in the house.
And they do not give any food to the hungry even though they are more beautiful than a monkey and know how to say something more interesting than the song of the nightingale.
Clement of Alexandria
The Teacher, 3, 4 (PG8, 592)
From Egoism to Pride is Not Far
Egoism is the source of the passions.
From egoism spring gluttony, avarice, conceit. From gluttony springs lust, from avarice greed, from conceit springs pride.
All the other vices, without exception, are merely consequences of this one thing: anger, melancholy, rancour, sloth, envy, slander and so on.
At the beginning of all the passions there is egoism, just as at the end there is pride.
Egoism is an irrational attachment to self. If anyone succeeds in destroying it, he is destroying all the passions which derive from it at one stroke.
Parents are unhealthily attached to the children they have produced: so is the intelligence to the arguments it has thought up.
Passion pure and simple! The wise are not dogmatic in their reasonings. If they are persuaded that they are true, they find in this a reason to be more distrustful of their own judgment and to submit their considerations to the judgment of other, wise people.
Maximus the Confessor
Centuries on Charity, 3, 56 (SC9, pp.14off.)
~ Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain, A Patristic Breviary: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
