On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.14–2.29

You see, then, how he asks us what the devil recognizes as his own in the sexes, through which those who are born of whatever parents are under him unless they are reborn in Christ: whether we say that the difference of the sexes belongs to the devil, or their union, or fruitfulness itself. We answer, then: none of these; for the difference of the sexes belongs to the vessels of those who beget, the union of both belongs to the sowing of children, and fruitfulness itself belongs to the blessing of marriage. And all these are from God. But among all these he was unwilling to name the concupiscence of the flesh, which is not from the Father but is from the world, of which world the devil is called the prince; and he did not find it in the Lord, because the Lord as man did not come to men through it. Hence he himself also says: “See, the prince of this world comes, and in me he finds nothing”—nothing of sin, that is, neither what is contracted by one being born nor what is added by one living. This he was unwilling to name among all the natural goods that he mentioned; and at it even marriage is ashamed, though it glories in all these goods. For why is that act of married people withdrawn and hidden even from the eyes of their children, except because they cannot be in the praiseworthy union without the shameful lust? At this even those blushed who first covered their shameful parts, which had not been shameful before but were to be proclaimed and gloried in as works of God. They covered them, then, when they blushed; and they blushed when, after their own disobedience, they felt their members disobedient. At this even this praiser of it blushed; for he mentioned the difference of the sexes, he mentioned their union, he mentioned fruitfulness, but he was ashamed to mention that. No wonder if those who praise it are ashamed of what we see even those who beget are ashamed of.

But he adds, saying: “Through what, then, are those whom God made under the devil?” And he answers himself as if in our voice: “Through sin,” he says, “not through nature.” Then, setting his own reply against ours: “But just as,” he says, “there cannot be offspring without the sexes, so there cannot be sin without the will.” Yes indeed, so it is. For so “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” Through the evil will of that one man all sinned in him, when all were that one man, from whom therefore each has contracted original sin. “For you say,” he says, “that they are under the devil because they are born of the union of both sexes.” I say plainly that they are under the devil because of sin; but that they are not free from sin because they are born of that union which cannot accomplish even what is honorable without shameful lust. Ambrose too, of most blessed memory, bishop of the church of Milan, said this, when he said that the carnal birth of Christ was free from sin because his conception was free from the union of the two sexes, but that no human being conceived from that union is without sin. For these are his words: “Therefore,” he says, “as man he was tempted in all things, and in the likeness of men he endured all things; but because he was born of the Spirit, he abstained from sin. For every man is a liar, and no one is without sin except God alone. It has therefore been kept,” he says, “that no one born of man and woman, that is, through that mingling of bodies, is seen to be free from sin. But he who is free from sin is free also from conception of this kind.” Will you dare, Pelagians and Caelestians, to call him too a Manichee? That is what the heretic Jovinian called him, against whose impiety that holy man defended the virginity of holy Mary as remaining even after childbirth. If, then, you do not dare to call him a Manichee, why do you call us Manichees, when we defend the catholic faith in the same cause with the same statement? Or if you boast that that most faithful man too thought this in accord with the Manichees, boast away, boast away, so that you may fill up more completely the measure of Jovinian; we, with that man of God, patiently endure your curses and insults. And yet your heresiarch Pelagius so praises the faith of Ambrose and his most pure understanding of the Scriptures as to say that not even an enemy dared to criticize him. Consider, then, how far you have gone, and at last restrain yourselves from the audacities of Jovinian. Although he, by praising marriage too much, made it equal to holy virginity, he still did not deny that the fruits of marriage, even those fresh from the womb, need Christ the Savior and Redeemer from the power of the devil. This you deny; and because we resist you for the salvation of those who cannot yet speak for themselves and for the foundations of the catholic faith, you boast that we are Manichees. But now let us look at what follows.

For he asks again: “Whom, then, do you confess to be the author of little children? The true God?” I answer: the true God. Then he adds: “But he did not make evil”; and he asks again whether we confess the devil to be the author of little children, and again answers: “But he did not create the nature of man.” Then he as it were concludes and infers: “If the union is evil, the condition of bodies is also foul, and therefore you ascribe bodies too to an evil author.” To this I answer: I do not ascribe bodies to an evil author, but sins, because of which it came about that, while everything in bodies, that is, in the works of God, was pleasing, there nevertheless befell male and female something to be ashamed of, so that their union was not such as it could have been in the body of that life, but such as we see with blushing in the body of this death. “But God,” he says, “divided in sex what he would join in operation. From him, then, is the union of bodies, from whom is the origin of bodies.” We have already answered above that this is from God, but not sin, not the disobedience of the members through the concupiscence of the flesh, which is not from the Father. Then he says that “the fruits of so many good things, that is, of bodies, sexes, and unions, cannot be evil, nor are human beings made by God for this purpose, that they should be held by the devil by lawful right, as you say.” It has already been said that they are held not because they are human beings, which is the name of nature, of which the devil is not the author, but because they are sinners, which is the name of guilt, of which the devil is the author.

But among so many names of good things—bodies, sexes, unions—he does not name lust or the concupiscence of the flesh. He is silent because he is ashamed; and with a wonderful shamelessness of shame, if one can say so, he is not ashamed to praise what he is ashamed to name. See, finally, how he preferred to indicate it by circumlocution rather than to say it. “But after the man,” he says, “knew his wife by natural appetite.” See, again he was unwilling to say, “knew his wife by the concupiscence of the flesh”; he says “by natural appetite,” where we could still understand the just and honorable will by which he willed to procreate children, not that lust at which this man so blushes that he prefers to speak to us ambiguously rather than plainly express what he thinks. What is “natural appetite”? Is not the will to be well, and the will to take up, nourish, and educate one's children, a natural appetite, and one that belongs to reason, not to lust? But because we know his intention, we do not think he meant by these words anything but the lust of the genital members. Do not these words seem to you fig leaves, under which lies hidden nothing but what is shameful? For in this way he has sewn himself the coverings of this circumlocution, as they sewed themselves aprons. Let him weave on and say: “But after the man knew his wife by natural appetite, the divine Scripture says, Eve conceived and bore a son and called his name Cain. But let us hear,” he says, “what Adam says: ‘I have acquired a man through God.’ Hence it is certain that he is the work of God, whom the divine Scripture testifies was acquired through God.” Who doubts this? Who denies it, especially a catholic Christian? Man is the work of God; but the concupiscence of the flesh—without which, had sin not gone before, man would have been sown by genital members obedient to a tranquil will like the other members—is not from the Father but is from the world.

But now, I beg you, look a little more attentively at the name he has found with which to cover again what he blushes to disclose. “For Adam had begotten him,” he says, “by the power of the members, not by a difference of merits.” What he meant by “a difference of merits,” I confess I do not understand; but by “the power of the members” he meant, I believe, what he is ashamed to say plainly. For he preferred to say “the power of the members” rather than “the concupiscence of the flesh.” Clearly, even if he did not intend it, he has indicated something that seems relevant to the matter. For what is more powerful than a man's members, when they do not serve the man's will? Though they may be bridled by temperance or continence, so that their use is to some extent in man's power, their motion is not. Adam, then, begot children by this “power of his members,” as he calls it, at which he blushed after sin, before he begot them. But if he had not sinned, he would not have begotten them by the power of his members but by the obedience of his members. For he himself would have been powerful, commanding them as subject to his will, if he himself, subject to the one more powerful, had served him with that same will.

After some other things, again: “The divine Scripture says,” he says, “‘Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Seth, saying, The Lord has raised up for me another seed in place of Abel, whom Cain killed.’” Then he adds: “As proof that intercourse was instituted, the Deity is said to have stirred up the seed itself.” This man has not understood what is written; he thought that “The Lord has raised up for me another seed in place of Abel” was said so that God might be believed to have stirred up in him the lust for intercourse, by whose motion the seed would be stirred up so that it could be poured into the woman's lap. He does not know that “He has raised up for me a seed” was said to mean nothing but “He has given me a son.” And indeed Adam did not say this after his intercourse, in which he emitted seed, but after his wife's childbirth, in which he received a son by God's gift. For what cause for rejoicing is there—except perhaps for the lustful, who possess their vessel in the disease of concupiscence, which the apostle forbids—if seed is poured out in the extreme pleasure of intercourse and neither conception nor birth follows, in which the true fruit of marriage lies?

Nor would I say this as though anyone other than the supreme and true God were to be thought the creator either of human seed or of man himself from seed; but this seed would have come forth from man through the tranquil obedience of the members at the nod of the will, had sin not gone before. Nor is the question now about the nature of man, but about its fault. For the former has God as its author; but from the latter original sin is contracted. For if the seed itself has no fault, what is the meaning of what is written in the book of Wisdom: “Not being ignorant that their race was wicked and their malice natural, and that their thinking could never be changed; for their seed was cursed from the beginning”? Of whomever it says this, it surely says it of human beings. How, then, is the malice of any human being natural and his seed cursed from the beginning, unless one looks back to this, that “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned”? And whose evil thinking can never be changed, unless because it cannot change by itself, but can if divine grace comes to its aid? Without that aid, what are human beings but, as the apostle Peter says, like dumb animals, born by nature for capture and destruction? Hence the apostle Paul, mentioning both in one place—the wrath of God with which we are born and the grace by which we are set free—says: “And we all once lived in the desires of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and of the affections, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest; but God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, made us alive together with Christ, by whose grace we have been saved.” What, then, is the natural malice of man, and seed cursed from the beginning, and born by nature for capture and destruction, and by nature children of wrath? Was that nature so created in Adam? Far from it; but because it was corrupted in him, it has so run, and runs, through all by nature that nothing sets it free from this perdition but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

What, then, is this that he adds, saying of Noah and his sons that they were blessed like Adam and Eve, when God said, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over it”? To these words of God he adds his own: “This pleasure, then, which you want to seem diabolical, already existed in the spouses mentioned above, and as it was good by its institution, so it remained by blessing.” For there is no doubt that it was of this union of bodies, the practice of which was by then well established, that it was said to Noah and his sons, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” There is no need to repeat the same things at length. The question here concerns the fault by which a good nature was depraved, of which fault the devil is the author; not the goodness of nature itself, of which God is the author, who has not withheld his goodness even from that corrupted and depraved nature so as to take away human fruitfulness, vitality, health, the very substance of mind and body, sense and reason, food, nourishment, and growth; who also makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust; and whatever good there is in human nature is from the good God, even in those human beings who will not be set free from evil.

Here too he said “pleasure,” since pleasure can also be honorable; he did not say concupiscence of the flesh or lust, which is shameful. But in what follows he disclosed his embarrassment and could not hide from what nature itself has forcefully laid down. “And that saying,” he says, “‘For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh’”; and after these words of God he adds his own: “To express the reality of the works,” he says, “the prophet came near the danger of shame.” O confession wholly open and wrung out by the force of truth! The prophet, then, to express the reality of the works, came near the danger of shame, because he said, “The two will be in one flesh,” by which he meant the union of male and female to be understood. Let him state the reason why, in expressing the works of God, the prophet came near the danger of shame. Is it really so, that human works ought not to be shameful, but plainly matters of glory, while the divine works are shameful? Is it really so, that in speaking of and expressing the works of God the prophet's love or labor is not honored, but his modesty is endangered? For what could God make that his herald should be ashamed to speak of; and, what is graver, how should a man be ashamed of some work that not man but God made in man, when all craftsmen strive with all the labor and industry they can not to blush for their works? But surely what makes us ashamed is what made those first human beings ashamed when they covered their shameful parts. That is the penalty of sin, that is the wound and trace of sin, that is the enticement and tinder of sin, that is the law in the members warring against the law of the mind, that is the disobedience from within ourselves against ourselves, paid back with most just requital to the disobedient. Of this we are ashamed, and rightly ashamed. For if it were not so, what would be more ungrateful, more irreligious, than to be confounded in our members not by our fault or our punishment, but by the works of God?

He also says much to no purpose about Abraham and Sarah, how they received a son by promise, and at last he names concupiscence, yet he does not add “of the flesh,” because that is shameful. In the name of concupiscence one may sometimes glory, since there is also the concupiscence of the spirit against the flesh, and there is also the concupiscence of wisdom. He says, then: “Certainly you have defined this concupiscence, without which there is no fruitfulness, as naturally evil. Why, then, is it stirred up in the old by a heavenly gift? Prove now, if you can, that what you see God confer as a gift belongs to the work of the devil.” He says this as though the concupiscence of the flesh had been lacking in them before and God had given it to them, when it was without doubt present in the body of this death; but fruitfulness was lacking, of which God is the author, and it was given when God willed. Far be it from us, however, to say what he thought we would say, that Isaac was begotten without the heat of intercourse.

But let him now say why the child's soul would perish from his people if he had not been circumcised on the eighth day—what he himself had sinned, how he had offended God, that he should be punished by so severe a sentence for another's neglect of him—if there were no original sin. For God commanded thus concerning the circumcision of infants: “The male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin on the eighth day, his soul shall perish from his people, because he has broken my covenant.” Let him say, if he can, how that child of eight days broke the covenant of God—an innocent infant, as far as he himself is concerned; and yet God, or holy Scripture, would by no means say this falsely. He broke the covenant of God, then, not this one about the commanded circumcision, but that one about the forbidden tree, when “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” And this was signified as expiated in him by the circumcision of the eighth day, that is, by the sacrament of the Mediator who was to come in the flesh; because through the same faith in Christ—who was to come in the flesh, to die for us, and to rise on the third day, which was to be the eighth, following the seventh, the Sabbath—the righteous of old too were saved. For “he was handed over for our offenses and rose for our justification.” From the time circumcision was instituted in the people of God, being then the seal of the righteousness of faith, it availed for little children too as a sign of cleansing from the original and old sin, just as baptism too began to avail for the renewal of man from the time it was instituted. Not that there was no righteousness of faith before circumcision—for Abraham himself, the father of the nations who were to follow his faith, was justified by faith while still uncircumcised—but in earlier times the sacrament of justification by faith was entirely hidden. Yet the same faith in the Mediator saved the righteous of old, the little ones with the great—not the old covenant, which bears children for slavery, not the law, which was not given as one that could give life, but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. For just as we believe that Christ has come in the flesh, so they believed he would come; as we believe he died, so they believed he would die; as we believe he has risen, so they believed he would rise; and both we and they believe that he will come to judge the dead and the living. Let this man not, then, by defending human nature badly, hinder it from salvation; for we are all born under sin and are set free only through the one who was born without sin.

“This union of bodies,” he says, “with heat, with pleasure, with seed, was made by God and is approved as praiseworthy in its own measure; and sometimes it even becomes a generous gift to the godly.” He said “with heat,” he said “with pleasure,” he said “with seed,” but he did not dare to say “with lust.” Why, unless because he blushes to name what he does not blush to praise? The gift to the godly, however, is the fruitful propagation of children, not the shameful stirring of the members, which a healthy nature would not have in begetting children, but which a corrupted nature now has. For this reason both he who is born of it needs to be reborn, so that he may be a member of Christ, and he of whom he is born, if he has already been reborn, needs to be set free from that law of sin which is in the body of this death. Since this is so, how can he go on to say, “You must then confess that the original sin you had invented has perished”? I did not invent original sin, which the catholic faith has believed from of old; but you, who deny it, are without doubt a new heretic. All who are generated with sin are under the devil by the judgment of God, if they have not been regenerated in Christ.

But since he was speaking about Abraham and Sarah, he added: “But if you say, ‘Intercourse flourished in them, and there was no offspring,’ I will answer: the one whom the Creator promised, the Creator gave; the one who is born is the work not of intercourse but of God. For he who made the first man from dust fashions all from seed. Just as the clay that was taken up then was the material, not the author, of man, so now that force of pleasure, which produces and mixes the seeds, does not do the work itself, but offers to God from the treasuries of nature that from which he may deign to make a man.” All these things that he said, except where he says that the seeds are produced and mixed by pleasure, he would say rightly if he were striving to defend a catholic sense in them; but because we know what he is trying to achieve by them, he says even right things perversely. That one statement, apart from which I do not deny that the rest is true, is not true, because the pleasure of carnal concupiscence does not produce the seeds; they are already in bodies, created by the true God, by whom the bodies themselves are created; they are not made by pleasure, but are stirred up and emitted with pleasure. Whether the seeds of both sexes are mixed with pleasure in the woman's womb, let women consider what they feel in their hidden parts; it is not fitting for us to be idly curious even to that point. Yet that lust which is to be blushed at—from which the members themselves have been called shameful—did not exist in the body of that life which was in paradise before sin, but began to exist in the body of this death after sin, disobedience being paid back for disobedience. Without that lust the work of spouses in begetting children could have been done, just as many works are done by the obedience of the other members, which are moved at the nod of the will, not roused by the heat of lust.

Consider the rest: “This too,” he says, “the authority of the apostle confirms. For when blessed Paul was speaking of the resurrection of the dead, he said, ‘Fool, what you sow is not made alive,’ and below, ‘But God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body.’ If, then,” he says, “God assigns to human seed its own body, as he does to all things—which no one, whether prudent or godly, denies—how will you prove that anyone is born guilty? Look back at last, I beg, and see by what snares the assertion of natural sin is strangled. But come,” he says, “deal more gently with yourself, I pray. Believe me, God made you too; but, as must be admitted, a grave error has infected you. For what more profane thing can be said than that God either did not make man, or, as you say, made him for the devil, or at least that the devil fashioned the image of God, that is, man—which is seen to be no less foolish than impious? Is God, then,” he says, “so poor, so shameless, that he had nothing to give as a reward to holy men except what the devil poured into the deceived as a fault? But do you want to know that God is proved to have granted this power of generation even to those who are not holy? At the time when Abraham, struck with fear of a barbarous people, said that Sarah, who was his wife, was his sister, Abimelech, king of that region, is related to have taken her for the use of the night. But God, who cared for the honor of the holy woman, came to Abimelech in his sleep and curbed the king's audacity, threatening him with death if he went on to violate the marriage. Then Abimelech said: ‘Lord, will you destroy an ignorant and righteous nation? Did they not themselves say that they were joined as brother and sister?’ Abimelech therefore rose in the morning and took a thousand didrachmas of silver, and sheep and calves and menservants and maidservants, and gave them to Abraham, and sent the woman back from him untouched. And Abraham prayed to God for Abimelech; and God healed Abimelech and his wife and his maidservants.” Why he narrated these things at such length, learn briefly. For in what he added next he says: “At Abraham's prayer God healed, by the power of a secret dispensation, what is known to the modesty of even common women; for God had closed from outside every womb in the house of Abimelech. See, then,” he says, “whether what God sometimes takes away when angered, and gives back when appeased, ought to be called naturally evil. He himself,” he says, “makes the children both of the godly and of the ungodly; for that they become parents belongs to nature, which rejoices in God as its author, but that they are ungodly belongs to the depravity of their pursuits, which befalls each from free will.”

To all these many things that he said we answer that nothing in the divine testimonies he inserted was said about the shameful lust which we say did not exist in the bodies of the blessed when they were naked and not ashamed. For the first, the apostle's words, was said of the seeds of grain, which first die so that they may be made alive. With what design he was unwilling to complete this statement of the apostle I do not know; for he quoted it only this far: “Fool, what you sow is not made alive.” But the apostle adds: “unless it dies.” But he, as I suppose, wanted what was said of grain to be taken of human seed by those who read these things and either do not know the holy Scriptures or do not remember them. In fact, he not only cut this statement short, not adding “unless it dies,” but also passed over what follows, where the apostle made clear of what seeds he was speaking. For the apostle says: “And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some other kind.” Passing over these words, he joined on what the apostle says next: “But God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body”—as though the apostle had said of a man lying with a woman, “Fool, what you sow is not made alive,” so that we should understand that human seed is made alive not by the man who sows children by intercourse but by God. For so he had said beforehand, that that pleasure “does not do the work itself, but offers to God from the treasuries of nature that from which he may deign to make a man”; and he added the testimony as if the apostle had said, “Fool, what you sow is not made alive,” that is, is not made alive by you, but God makes a man from your seed—as though the middle words that he passed over had not been said by the apostle, and the apostle's statement ran thus, as if speaking of human seed: “Fool, what you sow is not made alive; but God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body.” Then after these words of the apostle he brings in his own: “If, then, God assigns to human seed its own body, as he does to all things—which no one, whether prudent or godly, denies”—as though the apostle had spoken of human seed in that testimony.

When I considered somewhat more attentively what his purpose gained by this deceit, I could find nothing except that he wanted to bring in the apostle as a witness to prove that God makes a man from human seed, which we too say. And since no testimony occurred to him, he misused this one deceitfully—fearing, no doubt, that if it appeared that the apostle had said those things not of human seeds but of grain, we might be reminded by it of something with which to refute him, who is ashamed to name, and shameless to proclaim, not a religious will but a lustful pleasure. For he can be refuted from the very seeds that farmers sow in their fields. Why should we not believe that God could have granted to blessed man in paradise, in regard to his own seed, what we see granted to farmers in regard to the seed of wheat: that it should be sown without any shameful lust, the genital members obeying the nod of the will, just as the wheat is sown without any shameful lust, the farmers' hands obeying the nod of their will—the desire of parents to beget children being more honorable than that of plowmen to fill their barns; and that then the almighty Creator, with his undefilable presence everywhere and his creative power, should work from human seeds in the woman as he willed—as he does even now—just as he works as he wills from the seeds of grain in the earth, blessed mothers conceiving without lustful pleasure and giving birth without painful groaning? For in that happiness, and in a body not yet of this death but of that life, there would have been nothing to shame women in receiving seed, as there would have been nothing to pain them in bringing forth offspring. Whoever does not believe, or does not want it believed, that this could have been granted by the will and kindness of God to human beings living in that happiness of paradise before any sin, is not a praiser of fruitfulness to be desired but a lover of pleasure to be ashamed of.