“Do you, however, using all care, provide virtue in your faith.” He has used virtue in this place not for courage or miracles but for a good way of life which must be joined to proper faith, lest without works it be worthless and dead. He properly admonishes us to use all care in this, because the person who is soft and profligate in his work is brother to him who destroys his works. In your virtue, however, provide knowledge, according to that saying of Isaiah, “Learn to do what is right, seek judgment (Is 1:17).”
“In your devotion, however, provide love of the brotherhood”, that one may bestow the works of devotion on his adversaries for no other consideration than love of the brotherhood, seeking this, namely, with his whole purpose, that by praying and doing what is right he may convert to the disposition of devotion those whom he is unable to move by teaching alone or by refuting. In your love of the brotherhood, however, provide charity. In this place he calls charity particularly that by which we love our creator. This is rightly joined to love of the brotherhood for those who are progressing in the steps of the virtues, because neither can God be loved perfectly without one’s neighbor nor one’s neighbor without God. And indeed the love of God is loftier than the love of one’s neighbors, because them we are ordered to love as ourselves; but God with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole strength. But nonetheless it is fitting for us to ascend to the love of God by the habit of love of the brotherhood. For he who does not love his brother whom he sees daily, how can he love God whom he does not see (1 Jn. 4:20)?