The new creation teaches stripping the soul, not the body

What then does he command as something new and proper to God, the only thing that makes alive, which did not save those who came before? If the new creation, the Son of God, reveals and teaches something exceptional, he is not commanding the outward thing that others have done, but something else signified through it, greater and more divine and more complete: to strip bare the soul itself and its disposition of the passions that underlie it, and to cut out and cast away root and branch the things alien to the judgment. For this is the lesson proper to the believer, and the teaching worthy of the Savior. Those who came before despised external things and let their possessions go and wasted them, but the passions of their souls, I think, they even increased. For they fell into arrogance and boastfulness and vainglory and contempt for other human beings, as if they themselves had done something beyond human. How then would the Savior advise those who are to live forever to avoid the things that harm and ruin them for the life he promises? And there is also this: a person can unload his possessions and nonetheless still have the desire and craving for money ingrained and living with him. He has thrown away the use of it, but being at a loss and at the same time longing for what he squandered, he is grieved twice over—both by the absence of the service it gave and by the presence of regret. For it is impossible and impracticable for someone who lacks the necessities for living not to have his judgment broken down and not to be drawn away from better things, trying to procure them somehow and from somewhere.