The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus 1:28 Commento

How should we deal with the body when it is encircled in misery when the will, which is joined together with the body, is diminished in its desire for the good and loses the strength it had at the beginning? This happens generally to those who follow God but have only partially escaped from the world while they also remain partially in it. Therefore their heart is not cut off from things here. Instead, they are divided within themselves, sometimes looking ahead, sometimes looking back. I believe that the sage exhorted such divided individuals as these who come near to the way of God when he says, “Do not come to the Lord with two hearts” but approach his way as one who sows and one who reaps. Our Lord—seeing that among those who want to totally renounce the things of this world there are some whose wills are prepared to do so but whose thoughts are still turned back because they fear tribulation and because they have not left behind the love of their bodies—nonetheless spoke definitively to them in a desire to disperse the hesitancy in their minds when he said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself.”