By a kind of minute daily work we may thus loosen the innumerable bonds that fetter us to the earth. It would be false to assume that ascetical renunciations are relevant to a virtue inasmuch only as they imply a material reference to that particular virtue. The practices of fasting, of silence, of restraining the delight of the eyes, and others like them—they all have no direct nexus, for instance, with the virtue of charity, but yet they create space in our souls for charity. For our slavery to the interests of the body, as well as our concupiscence from which we are to free ourselves by fasting, thwarts the path of charity within us.

Again, the practice of silence serves to prevent us from lapsing into a certain kind of irrelevancy, an absorption by peripheral concerns. For supernatural love cannot thrive in us unless we are composed, that is, concentrated in a dimension of depth. All easygoing and dispersive states of mind draw us away from the fountainhead of charity. Complacency, sloth, and love of comfort are so many forms of egoism which make our lives unfree and narrow, an arid soil for charity; it is to rid us of these impediments that the mortification of the flesh is largely intended.

However, we must never consider ascetical practice as a means effective by itself, nor use it, so to speak, as a medicine which in a purely causal sense is certain to produce the desired effect. No asceticism can make us free for God and for transformation in Christ unless it is permanently animated and directed by our longing for God and our firmly settled determination to become a new man in Christ.

While applying these means we must well keep it in mind that they cannot do more than clear the path for more direct and positive operations in the framework of our striving for perfection; that their effectiveness, far from being automatically given, always depends on our inward dedication to God, and above all, on the help accorded us by God. That is why the Church prays in the time of fasting (Collect of Tuesday after the first Sunday in Lent) in these terms: “Look down upon Thy household, O Lord, and grant that our minds which have been chastened by the tormenting of our bodies may be made to glow with desire of Thee.” (In the next chapter, we shall have more to say about the close relationship between true freedom and charity, and, accordingly, the function of ascetical practices—which are directed to our liberation from the manifold shackles of inordinate attachment to created goods—in clearing the ground for charity and also for other virtues.)

Transformation calls us to shun the shallow and trivial