Sermons to the People 51.23–52.2

So, my brothers, attend. Great men who have wives for the procreation of children, such as we read the patriarchs to have been, and find by many proofs, with the holy pages proclaiming it without any doubt: if, then, any men have wives only for the begetting of children, and if it could be granted them to have sons without intercourse, would they not embrace so great a benefit with unspeakable joy? Would they not receive it with immense gladness? For there are two works of the flesh by which the human race is sustained; to these two works the wise and holy come down out of duty, while the foolish rush into them out of desire. For it is one thing to come down to something out of duty, another to fall into something out of desire. What are these by which the human race is sustained? The first concerns ourselves, and has to do with taking nourishment (which certainly cannot be taken without some pleasure of the flesh): eating and drinking; if you do not do it, you will die. By this one support, then, eating and drinking, the human race stands, according to the measure of its nature. But by this support people are sustained only as regards themselves; they do not provide for succession by eating and drinking, but by taking wives. For this is how the human race is sustained: first, that people may live; but because, however much care is given to the body, they certainly cannot live for ever, the next provision is that those who are born should succeed those who die. For the human race is, as it is written, like leaves on a tree; but on a tree like the olive or the laurel or some such tree, which is never without foliage, and yet does not always have the same leaves. For, as it is written, it puts forth some and casts off others; because those that spring up succeed the others as they fall. For it is always casting off leaves, and always clothed with leaves. So too the human race does not feel the losses of those who die each day, because of the replacement by those who are born; and so, in its own measure, the whole species of the human race stands; and as leaves are always seen on the tree, so the earth is seen to be full of people. But if people only died and were not born, the earth would be stripped of all people, as certain trees are of all their leaves. Since, then, the human race subsists in such a way that the two supports of which enough has been said are necessary, the wise, prudent, and faithful man comes down to both out of duty; he does not fall into them out of lust. How many rush greedily into eating and drinking, putting their whole life there, as if it were the very reason for living! For although they ought to eat in order to live, they think they live in order to eat. Every wise man rebukes these, and above all divine Scripture: the gluttons, the drunkards, the gormandizers, “whose god is their belly.” Nothing brings them to the table but the desire of the flesh, not the need of refreshment. So these fall into food and drink. But those who come down to it from the duty of living do not live in order to eat; they eat in order to live. So if these prudent and temperate people were offered the chance of living without food and drink, with what joy they would embrace this benefit, that they need not even come down to that into which they were not accustomed to fall, but might always be held up in the Lord, and the need of propping up the body’s decay would not draw down their attention! How do you think holy Elijah received it, when he received a jar of water and a cake of bread, so that it was enough to nourish him for forty days? With great joy, surely; because he ate and drank for the duty of life, not in slavery to desire. Try to give this, if you can, to a man who has set his whole blessedness and happiness in feasting, like a beast at the manger. He hates your benefit, pushes it away, thinks it a punishment. So too in that marital duty, lustful men seek wives for nothing else; and so they are hardly content even with their own wives. And would that, if they cannot or will not remove their lust, they would at least not let it go beyond what the marital debt prescribes, even that which is conceded to weakness. But if you asked such a man, “Why are you taking a wife?”, he might perhaps answer you, out of shame, “For the sake of children.” If someone whom he believed without any doubt said to him, “God is able to give you children, and will certainly give them to you, even if you do not perform that act with your wife,” then surely he would be cornered and admit that it was not for children that he was seeking a wife. Let him confess his weakness, then, and receive what he pretended to receive out of duty.

So those earlier saints, men of God, sought sons, wanted to receive sons. For this one purpose they were joined to women; for this they had intercourse with women: to beget sons. That is why they were permitted to have several. For if unrestrained lust pleased God, it would have been permitted at that time for one woman to have several husbands, just as one man had several wives. Why did all chaste women have no more than one husband, while a man had several wives, unless because for one man to have several wives serves the number of offspring, whereas one woman, however many husbands she had, could not bear more children? Therefore, brothers, if our fathers were joined to women and had intercourse with them for no other reason than to beget children, it would have been a great joy to them if they could have had sons apart from that carnal act, since in order to have them they did not rush into it from lust but came down to it out of duty. Was Joseph, then, not a father on this account, because he received a son without the desire of the flesh? Far be it from Christian chastity to think what even Jewish chastity did not think. Love your wives, but love them chastely. Seek the carnal act only so far as to beget children. And since you cannot have children otherwise, come down to it with sorrow. For it is the punishment of that Adam from whom we are sprung. Let us not pride ourselves on our punishment. It is the punishment of him who deserved to beget mortal offspring, because he was made mortal by sin. God has not taken away that punishment, so that man may remember from where he is being called back and to where he is being called, and may seek that embrace where there can be no corruption.

Among that people, then, because there had to be an abundant propagation until Christ, through the numerousness of the people in whom all the teachings of the Church that were to be prefigured were prefigured, they had the duty of taking wives, through whom the people might grow in whom the Church was foreshadowed. But when the King of all nations himself was born, the dignity of virginity began with the Mother of the Lord, who was found worthy both to have a son and not to be corrupted. As, then, that was a marriage, and a marriage without any corruption, so why should the husband not chastely receive what his wife had chastely borne? For as she was chastely a wife, so he was chastely a husband; and as she was chastely a mother, so he was chastely a father. Whoever, then, says, “He ought not to be called father, because he did not beget the son in that way,” is looking for lust in begetting children, not the affection of love. He fulfilled better in his mind what another desires to fulfil in the flesh. For those who adopt sons also beget in their hearts, more chastely, those whom they cannot beget in the flesh. See, brothers, see the laws of adoption: how a man becomes the son of one from whose seed he was not born, so that the will of the one who adopts has more right over him than the nature of the one who begot him. So Joseph not only ought to be a father, but all the more ought to be. For men also beget sons from women who are not their wives, and these are called natural sons; and sons born in marriage are preferred to them. As far as the work of the flesh is concerned, they are born alike; why are the latter preferred, unless because the love of a wife, from whom children are begotten, is more chaste? There the carnal union is not considered, for it is equal in both women. Where does the wife prevail, unless in the affection of faithfulness, the affection of marriage, the affection of a purer and more chaste love? If, then, anyone could receive sons from his wife without intercourse, ought he not to be all the more glad, the more chaste she is whom he loves the more?

From this, see now also how it can happen that one man has not only two sons but also two fathers. For now that adoption has been mentioned, it may occur to your minds that this can happen. For people say: a man can have two sons, but he cannot have two fathers. On the contrary, it is found that he can have two fathers too, if one begot him by seed and another adopted him in love. If, then, one man can have two fathers, Joseph too could have two fathers, begotten by one and adopted by the other. And if he could, what are they slandering, those who say that Matthew followed one set of generations and Luke another? And indeed we find that the one followed one line and the other another. For Matthew said that Joseph’s father was Jacob, but Luke said Heli. It might indeed seem that one man, whose son Joseph was, had two names. But since they list different grandfathers and great-grandfathers and other forebears further back, and in the count itself one has more and the other fewer, it is clearly shown that Joseph had two fathers. The slander of this question is now removed, since clear reasoning has shown that it can happen that the father who begot is one and the father who adopted another. Once two fathers are established, it is no wonder if the grandfathers and great-grandfathers and the other ancestors going upward are counted differently from different fathers.

And do not let the right of adoption seem foreign to our Scriptures, as if it were known only in the practice of human laws and could not agree with the authority of the divine books. For it is an ancient thing, and customary in the very scriptures of the Church, that not only the origin of the seed but also the gift of the will should make a son. For women too, if they had not given birth themselves, used to adopt as sons those born of their husbands’ seed by slave women; indeed, they even directed their husbands so that sons might be begotten for them in this way: as Sarah did, as Rachel did, as Leah did. In this duty the husbands did not commit adultery, because they were obeying their wives in a matter that belongs to the marital debt, according to what the Apostle says: “The wife does not have power over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have power over his own body, but the wife does.” Moses too, born of a Hebrew mother and exposed, was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter. There were not, indeed, the same legal formulas then as now; but the decision of the will was held as the rule of law; as the Apostle says in another place, “For the Gentiles who do not have the law do by nature the things of the law.” But if women were permitted to make sons of those whom they had not borne themselves, why not men also, of those whom they had not begotten from carnal seed but from the love of adoption? For we read that the patriarch Jacob himself, father of so many sons, nevertheless made his grandsons, the sons of Joseph, his own sons, saying: “These two will be mine, and they will receive the land with their brothers; those others whom you beget will be yours.” Unless perhaps someone says that the very word “adoption” is not found in the holy Scriptures. As if it mattered by what word it is called, when the thing itself is there, that a woman has a son whom she did not bear in the flesh, or a man one whom he did not beget in the flesh. And, without objection from me, let him not call Joseph adopted, provided he grants that he could be the son even of one from whose flesh he was not born. Although the apostle Paul constantly uses even the word “adoption,” and of a great mystery. For while Scripture testifies that our Lord Jesus Christ is the only Son of God, it says that the brothers and co-heirs whom he deigned to have are made so by a kind of adoption of divine grace. “But when the fullness of time came,” he says, “God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive the adoption of sons.” And in another place: “We groan within ourselves,” he says, “awaiting the adoption, the redemption of our body.” Again, speaking of the Jews: “I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites; to whom belong,” he says, “the adoption, and the glory, and the covenant, and the giving of the law; whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is above all, God blessed for ever.” There he shows that among the Jews either the name of adoption or the thing itself was ancient, just as the covenant and the giving of the law were, which he mentions together with it.

Add to this that there was another way, proper to the Jews, by which someone became the son of one from whom he was not born in the flesh. For relatives used to marry the wives of their relatives who had died without children, in order to raise up seed for the dead man. So the one who was born was both the son of him from whom he was born and the son of him in whose succession he was born. These things have been said so that no one, thinking it impossible for two fathers to be rightly mentioned for one man, should think either of the Evangelists who narrated the Lord’s generations open to a sacrilegious slander, as if guilty of a lie; especially since we see that we are alerted by their very words. For Matthew, who is understood to be naming the father by whom Joseph was begotten, lists the generations in this way, “He begot him,” so as to arrive at what he says at the end, “Jacob begot Joseph.” But Luke, because one who becomes a son by adoption, or who is born in succession to a dead man from her who was his wife, is not properly said to be begotten, did not say, “Heli begot Joseph,” or, “Joseph, whom Heli begot,” but, “who was,” he says, “the son of Heli”; whether by adoption, or by being born, begotten by a relative, in succession to the dead man.

Enough has now been said to show that it ought not to disturb us that the generations are counted through Joseph and not through Mary: because as she was a mother without carnal desire, so he was a father without carnal union. Let the generations, then, descend through him and ascend through him. And let us not separate him because carnal desire was lacking. Let his greater purity confirm his fatherhood, lest holy Mary herself rebuke us. For she was unwilling to put her name before her husband’s, but said, “Your father and I have been looking for you in sorrow.” So let perverse grumblers not do what a chaste wife did not do. Let us count, then, through Joseph; because as he is chastely a husband, so he is chastely a father. But let us put the man before the woman, by the order of nature and of God’s law. For if we set him aside and put her in his place, he will say, and say rightly, “Why have you separated me? Why do the generations not ascend or descend through me?” Shall it be said to him, “Because you did not beget by the work of your flesh”? But he will answer, “Did she give birth by the work of her flesh? What the Holy Spirit worked, he worked for both.” “Being,” it says, “a just man.” A just man, then, and a just woman. The Holy Spirit, resting on the justice of both, gave a son to both. But in the sex that was fitted to give birth he worked this, so that the son was born to the husband also. That is why the angel tells both of them to give the child a name, by which the authority of both parents is declared. For Zechariah too, while he was still mute, the mother gave the newborn son his name; and when those present made signs to the father asking what he wanted him called, he took a writing tablet and wrote what she had already said. It is said to Mary, “See, you will conceive a son, and you will call his name Jesus”; and it is said to Joseph, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For what is born in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus: he will save his people from their sins.” It is also said, “And she bore him a son”: there the father is confirmed not by the flesh but by love. So he is father, just as he is. For the Evangelists most carefully and most wisely count through him, whether Matthew descending from Abraham to Christ, or Luke ascending from Christ through Abraham to God. The one counts descending, the other ascending; both through Joseph. Why? Because he is father. Why father? Because he is the more firmly father, the more chastely he is father. He was indeed thought to be the father of our Lord Jesus Christ in another way, namely, like other fathers who beget in the flesh, not receiving children by spiritual affection alone. For Luke also said, “who was thought to be the father of Jesus.” Why “thought”? Because human thinking and opinion went in the direction of what is usually done by men. So the Lord was not of Joseph’s seed, though this was thought; and yet to Joseph’s devotion and love a son was born of the Virgin Mary, who is also the Son of God. But why does the one count descending and the other ascending? Listen, I pray, attentively, as far as the Lord helps, with minds now at ease and free from all the trouble of knotty slanders. Matthew descends through the generations to signify our Lord Jesus Christ descending to carry our sins, so that in the seed of Abraham all nations might be blessed. That is why he did not begin from Adam, for the whole human race is from him; nor from Noah, because from that family too, after the flood, the whole human race arose. Nor could the man Christ Jesus belong to the fulfilment of prophecy as coming from Adam, from whom all men come, or from Noah, from whom again all men come; but as coming from Abraham, who was chosen at the time when the earth was already full of nations, as the one in whose seed all nations would be blessed. But Luke ascends, beginning to list the generations not at the very start of the Lord’s birth but at the place where he narrates that he was baptized by John. For as in the Lord’s incarnation the sins of the human race are taken up by him to be carried, so in the consecration of baptism they are taken up to be cleansed. So the one, signifying him descending to carry sins, lists the generations descending; but the other, signifying the cleansing of sins (not his own, of course, but ours), lists the generations ascending. But the one descends through Solomon, in whose mother David sinned; the other ascends through Nathan, another son of the same David, through whom he was cleansed of sin. For we read that Nathan was sent to him to rebuke him, so that he might be healed through repentance. The two meet in David, the one descending, the other ascending; and from there to Abraham, or from Abraham to David, they differ in no generation. So Christ, both son of David and son of Abraham, passes up to God. For we, renewed in baptism, must be led back to God through the abolition of sins.

In the generations that Matthew lists, the number forty stands out. For the divine Scriptures have this custom, that they sometimes do not count what goes beyond certain round numbers. Thus four hundred years are said to have passed, after which the people of Israel went out of Egypt, though there were four hundred and thirty. So too the one generation that goes beyond the number forty does not take away the predominance of this number. This number signifies the life in which we labor on this earth, as long as we are pilgrims away from the Lord, during which the dispensation of the truth preached in time is necessary. For the number ten, by which the perfection of blessedness is signified, multiplied four times because of the fourfold division of time and the fourfold world, makes the number forty. That is why there was fasting for forty days by Moses, by Elijah, and by the Mediator himself, our Lord Jesus Christ: because in this time continence from bodily allurements is necessary. The people also wandered forty years in the desert; the flood lasted forty days. The Lord lived with his disciples for forty days after the resurrection, persuading them of the reality of his risen body; by this he signified that in this life, in which we are pilgrims away from the Lord, which the number forty, as has been said, mystically suggests, the remembrance of the Lord’s body, which we make in the Church until he comes, is necessary for us. Since, then, our Lord came down to this life, and the Word became flesh, to be handed over for our offenses and to rise for our justification, Matthew followed the number forty: so that the one generation that there exceeds forty either does not hinder it, as those thirty years do not hinder the completeness of the four hundred; or it even signifies that the Lord himself, with whom added there are forty-one, came down to this life to carry our sins in such a way that he is nevertheless found to be set apart from this life by his own singular excellence, by which he is man in such a way that he is also God. For of him alone is said what could not and cannot be said of any holy man, however perfect in wisdom and justice: “The Word became flesh.”

But Luke, who ascends through the generations from the Lord’s baptism, completes the number seventy-seven, beginning to ascend from our Lord Jesus Christ himself through Joseph and arriving at God through Adam; because in this number is signified the abolition of all sins, which takes place in baptism: not because the Lord himself had anything to be forgiven in baptism, but because by his humility he commended what would be useful for us. And although that baptism was John’s, yet in it the Trinity of Father and Son and Holy Spirit appeared to the senses, by which the baptism of Christ himself was consecrated, with which future Christians were to be baptized: the Father in the voice that came from heaven; the Son in the man himself, the Mediator; the Holy Spirit in the dove.

Why the number seventy-seven should contain all the sins that are forgiven in baptism, this probable reason seems to suggest itself: because the number ten holds the perfection of justice and blessedness, when the sevenfold creature cleaves to the Trinity of the Creator; hence also the Decalogue of the law was consecrated in ten commandments. The transgression of ten is signified by the number eleven; and sin is understood to be transgression, when a man, seeking something more, goes beyond the rule of justice. Hence also the Apostle calls avarice the root of all evils. And to the soul that goes whoring away from God it is said, in the person of the same Lord: “You hoped that if you departed from me you would have something more.” Since, then, the one who sins refers his transgression, that is, his sin, to himself, because he wants to delight in some private good of his own (which is why those are also rebuked “who seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ,” and love is praised which “does not seek its own”), therefore this number eleven, by which transgression is signified, is multiplied not ten times but seven, and makes seventy-seven. For transgression belongs not to the Trinity of the Creator but to the creature itself, that is, to man himself, which creature the number seven shows: three because of the soul, where there is a certain image of the Trinity of the Creator (for it is there that man was made in the image of God); and four because of the body. For the four elements of which the body consists are very well known. And anyone to whom they are not known can easily notice that the body of the world itself, in which our body moves from place to place, has, as it were, four principal parts, which divine Scripture also constantly mentions: East and West, South and North. And since sins are committed either in the mind, as in the will alone, or also by works of the body, now visibly, therefore the prophet Amos constantly represents God threatening and saying, “For three and for four impieties I will not turn away,” that is, I will not overlook it. Three, for the nature of the soul; four, for that of the body: of these two man consists.

So eleven times seven, that is, as has been said, the transgression of justice referred to sinful man, makes the number seventy-seven, by which all sins that are forgiven through baptism are signified to be contained. Hence Luke ascends to God through seventy-seven generations, showing that man is reconciled to God through the abolition of all sins. Hence the Lord himself said to Peter, when he asked how often he ought to forgive his brother, “I tell you, not seven times, but up to seventy-seven times.” And if anything more can be drawn out of these secrets and treasures of God’s mysteries by those more diligent and more worthy, still we, according to our capacity, as far as the Lord helped and granted, and considering also the shortness of time, have said what we could. If any of you can grasp more, let him knock at the door of him from whom we too take whatever we can grasp and say. Above all, hold to this: do not be disturbed by holy Scriptures that you do not yet understand; and when you understand them, do not be puffed up; but what you do not understand, put off with reverence, and what you do understand, hold with love.

The Gospel reading has set before us what we are to speak about to your Charity, as if by the Lord’s command, and truly by the Lord’s command. For my heart waited for it from him, as a command to deliver a sermon, so that from this I might understand that I ought to want to speak about what he himself had willed to be read. Let your zeal and devotion, then, listen, and help my labor before the Lord our God himself. For we see, and as if a divine spectacle were set before us we gaze upon it, our God commended to us in Trinity at the river Jordan. For when Jesus came and was baptized by John, the Lord by the servant (which he did as an example of humility; for in that very humility he shows that justice is fulfilled, when John said to him, “I ought to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”, and he answered, “Let it be so now, so that all justice may be fulfilled”): when, then, he had been baptized, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit came down upon him in the form of a dove; and then a voice from above followed: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” So we have the Trinity distinguished in a certain way: the Father in the voice, the Son in the man, the Holy Spirit in the dove. This needed only to be mentioned, for it is very easy to see. For this Trinity is commended to us plainly, without any shadow of doubt. For the Lord Christ himself, coming to John in the form of a servant, is certainly the Son; for it cannot be said that he is the Father, or that he is the Holy Spirit. “Jesus came,” it says: certainly the Son of God. As for the dove, who would doubt, or who would say, “What is the dove?”, when the Gospel itself testifies most plainly, “The Holy Spirit came down upon him in the form of a dove”? Likewise about that voice there is no doubt that it is the Father’s, when he says, “You are my Son.” So we have the Trinity distinguished.

And if we consider places, I dare to say (though I say it timidly, still I dare) that the Trinity is, as it were, separable. When Jesus came to the river, he came from one place to another; the dove came down from heaven to earth, from one place to another; the very voice of the Father sounded neither from the earth nor from the water, but from heaven. These three are as it were separated in places, separated in functions, separated in works. Someone may say to me: “Show the inseparable Trinity. Remember that you are a Catholic speaking, and speaking to Catholics.” For our faith, that is, the true faith, the right faith, the Catholic faith, gathered not by presumptuous opinion but by the testimony of the Scripture read, not made uncertain by heretical rashness but founded on apostolic truth, teaches this: this we know, this we believe. Though we do not see this with our eyes, nor yet with our heart, as long as we are being cleansed by faith, yet by that faith we hold most rightly and most firmly that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are an inseparable Trinity, one God, not three gods; yet one God in such a way that the Son is not the Father, the Father is not the Son, and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. This ineffable Godhead, abiding in itself, making all things new, creating, re-creating, sending, recalling, judging, delivering: this Trinity, then, we know to be at once ineffable and inseparable.