What then will be the remedy? Let us all join in prayer, and let us lift up our voice with one accord in their behalf as for those possessed, for indeed these are more wretched than they, inasmuch as their madness is of choice. For this affliction needs prayer and much entreaty. For if he that loves not his brother, even though he empty out his money, yea, and have the glory of martyrdom, is no whit advantaged; consider what punishment the man deserves who even wars with him that has not wronged him in anything; he is even worse than the Gentiles: for if to love them that love us does not let us have any advantage over them, in what grade shall he be placed, tell me, that envies them that love him?
For envying is even worse than warring; since he that wars, when the cause of the war is at an end, puts an end to his hatred also: but the grudger would never become a friend. And the one shows an open kind of battle, the other a covert: and the one often has a reasonable cause to assign for the war, the other, nothing else but madness, and a Satanic spirit. To what then is one to compare a soul of this kind? To what viper? To what asp? To what canker-worm? To what scorpion? Since there is nothing so accursed or so pernicious as a soul of this sort.
For it is this, it is this, that has subverted the Churches, this that has gendered the heresies, this it was that armed a brother's hand, and made his right hand to be dipped in the blood of the righteous, and plucked away the laws of nature, and set open the gates for death, and brought that curse into action, and suffered not that wretch to call to mind either the birth-pangs, or his parents, or anything else, but made him so furious, and led him to such a pitch of phrenzy, that even when God exhorted him and said, “Unto you shall be his recourse, and you shall rule over him”; he did not even then give in.
Yet did He both forgive him the fault, and make his brother subject to him: but his complaint is so incurable, that even if thousands of medicines are applied, it keeps sloughing with its own corruption. For wherefore are you so vexed, you most miserable of men? Is it because God has had honor shown Him? Nay, this would show a Satanical spirit. Is it then because your brother outstrips you in good name? As for that, it is open to you in turn to outstrip him. And so, if you would be a conqueror, kill not, destroy not, but let him abide still, that the material for the struggle may be preserved, and conquer him living.
For in this way your crown had been a glorious one; but by thus destroying you pass a harder sentence of defeat upon yourself. But a grudging spirit has no sense of all this. And what ground have you to covet glory in such solitude? For those were at that time the only inhabitants of the earth. Still even then this restrained him not, but he cast away all from his mind, and stationed himself in the ranks of the devil; for he it was who then led the war upon Cain's side. For inasmuch as it was not enough for him that man had become liable to death, by the manner of the death he tried to make the tragedy still greater, and persuaded him to become a fratricide.
For he was urgent and in travail to see the sentence carried into effect, as never satisfied with our ills. As if any one who had got an enemy in prison, and saw him under sentence, were to press, before he was out of the city, to see him butchered within it, and would not wait even the fitting time, so did the devil then, though he had heard that man must return to earth, travail with desire to see something worse, even a son dying before his father, and a brother destroying a brother, and a premature and violent slaughter. See you what great service envy has done him? How it has filled the insatiate spirit of the devil, and has prepared for him a table great as he desired to see?
Source: Homilies on Romans (New Advent)