The Instructor 2.10.83–2.10.106

Only the married are left to consider the right time for intercourse; and for the married the aim is the begetting of children, and the end is good offspring, just as for the farmer the reason for sowing seed is to provide food, and the end of his farming is the gathering of the fruits. But far better is the farmer who sows living soil; for the one farms seeking food for a season, the other providing for the continuance of the whole; the one plants for himself, the other for God. For he said, “Multiply,” and we must obey. In this the human being becomes an image of God, in that a human being cooperates in the coming into being of a human being. Not all ground is suitable for receiving seed; and even if all were, not for the same farmer. Nor must seed be sown on rocks, nor seed be outraged, since it is the originating substance of generation, having the principles of nature sown within it. To shame the principles of nature irrationally in unnatural passages is utterly godless. See how the all-wise Moses symbolically rejects unfruitful sowing, saying, “You shall not eat the hare nor the hyena.” He does not want the human being to share their quality, nor to taste a like licentiousness; for these animals are excessively excited about mating. They say that the hare each year increases the number of its anal openings, having as many holes as the years it has lived; so the prohibition of eating the hare shows a turning away from pederasty. And they say the hyena changes alternately from male to female each year; and it hints that one who abstains from the

hyena should not rush into adultery. I agree that the all-wise Moses, by this prohibition, clearly hints that we should not become like these animals; but I do not assent to this interpretation of what was said symbolically. For nature could never be forced to change; what has once been formed cannot be reshaped by a passion; for passion is not nature; passion is accustomed to counterfeit, not to remodel, the form. For even if many birds are said to change both their color and their voice with the seasons (the blackbird, for example, becoming tawny from black, and chattering instead of singing; likewise the nightingale changes both color and song with the turning of the year), they do not change their very nature, so that a female comes from a male by transformation. The new growth of feathers, like a new garment, blooms with a dye of feathers, and a little later fades in the threat of winter, the color withering like a flower. The voice too, in the same way, worn down by the cold, withers; for when the surface of the body is contracted by the surrounding air, the arteries around the neck, compressed and contracted, squeeze the breath, and this, greatly confined and choked, gives out a stifled sound.

When it becomes like the surrounding air again and is relaxed in spring, the breath is freed from confinement, carried through the widened arteries that were before closed; the song no longer warbles faintly withered, but already blooms clear, and their voice pours out more fully, and the song of the birds becomes the springtime of their voice. So neither must we ever believe that the hyena changes its nature. Nor does the same animal have both organs, male and female, as some have supposed, telling tales of hermaphrodites and inventing this third, man-woman nature between female and male. They are much mistaken, not understanding the artistry of nature, mother and creator of all. Since the hyena is a very lustful animal, it has under the tail, in front of the passage for excrement, a fleshy growth resembling in shape the female organ. This formation of flesh has no passage leading to anything useful, either to a womb or to the rectum; it has only a large cavity, which receives the empty lust when the

passages are turned away, occupied with bearing young. This same thing grows on both male and female hyena because of their excessive perversion; for the male too mounts the male, so that very rarely can one catch a female hyena; for pregnancies are not frequent in this animal, since unnatural sowing abounds unrestrainedly among them. That is why, it seems to me, Plato too, in the Phaedrus, rejecting pederasty, called it a beast, because the lustful, given up to pleasures, “taking the bit in their teeth, go after the manner of four-footed beasts and try to beget children.” And God “gave up” the godless, as the apostle says, “to dishonorable passions; for their women exchanged natural use for what is against nature, and likewise the men too, leaving the natural use of women, were inflamed in their desire for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error.”

(… penalty of their error.) Yet nature has not permitted even the most lustful of animals to mount the passage of excretion. Urine is discharged into the bladder, liquefied food into the bowel, tears into the eye, blood into the veins, wax into the ears, mucus into the nose; and the anus, through which the residues are expelled, is continuous with the end of the rectum. Only in hyenas has varied nature, for their excessive matings, devised this superfluous part. So it is hollow for a certain distance, to serve the itching members, and then the hollow is blind; for it was not made for generation. From this it is plain to us that we must reject intercourse of males with males, fruitless sowing, intercourse from behind, and unnatural man-woman unions, following nature itself, which forbids them by the structure of the parts, having made the male a man for emitting seed, not for receiving it. And when Jeremiah says, that is, the Spirit through him, “My house has become a hyena's den,” loathing food from dead bodies, he condemns idolatry by a wise allegory; for truly the house of the living God must be pure of idols.

Again, Moses forbids eating the hare. The hare mates at every season, and mounts the female from behind as she crouches; for it mates from behind. It conceives every month and conceives again while pregnant; it mates and gives birth, and as soon as it has given birth it mates with whatever hare it happens on; for it is not content with one mate. And it conceives again while still suckling, for it has a double womb. Not only is the emptiness of the womb a spur to intercourse (for everything empty desires filling), but when they are pregnant, the other part of the womb is gripped by desire and in heat; that is why they conceive again while pregnant. The prohibition in this riddle, then, advised abstaining from violent desires, from repeated intercourse, from intercourse with pregnant women, from homosexual acts, from the corruption of boys, from adultery, and from lust.

So the same Moses forbade it openly, no longer through riddles, with bare head, saying, “You shall not commit sexual immorality, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not corrupt boys.” The ordinance of the Word must be kept with all our strength; nothing must in any way be transgressed, nor the commandments made void. For insolence is the name of evil desire, and Plato called the horse of desire “insolent,” having read, “You have become horses mad for females.” The angels who came to Sodom will show you the punishment for insolence. Those who wished to shame them they burned up with the city itself, marking out a clear example: fire, the fruit of lust. For what happened to the ancients has been written, as we said before, for our admonition, so that we may not

be caught in the same things, but may guard against falling into like ones. We should regard boys as sons, and look on other men's wives as our own daughters, master the pleasures of the belly, and most commandingly rule what is below the belly. For if the Word does not permit the wise man, as the Stoics agree, to move even a finger at random, how much more must those who pursue wisdom master the organ of intercourse? That is why, it seems to me, it is called aidoion (“the part of modesty”), because we must use this part of the body, more than any other, with modesty (aidōs). For nature has permitted us, as with food, so with lawful marriages, what is proper, useful, and seemly; and it has permitted us to desire the begetting of children. Those who pursue excess stumble concerning what is natural, harming themselves in unlawful intercourse. Above all it is right never to have sexual relations with youths as if with women.

So too “do not sow on rocks and stones,” says the philosopher who learned from Moses, “where it will never take root and find its fertile nature.” Most clearly the Word commanded through Moses: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; for it is an abomination.” And besides, “abstain from every female field” except one's own, the good Plato advised, gathering from the divine Scriptures and taking the law from there: “And you shall not give your bed of seed to your neighbor's wife, to be defiled with her.” “The seed of concubines is unhallowed and bastard.” Do not sow where you would not wish what is sown to grow; and do not touch anyone at all except your own wedded wife, from whom alone it is right to reap the pleasures of the flesh for legitimate descendants. For these alone are lawful by the Word.

Those who have received a share in the divine creative work must not throw away seed, nor outrage it, nor sow it on barren ground. This same Moses forbids husbands even to approach their own wives if they happen to be in their monthly cleansing. For it is not reasonable to defile with the body's refuse the most fertile part of the seed, which will soon be a human being, nor to wash away with the filthy flow and refuse of matter the seed of a well-born generation, deprived of the furrows of the womb. Nor did he bring forward any of the ancient Hebrews having intercourse with his wife when she was pregnant; for bare pleasure, even if taken in marriage, is unlawful, unjust, and irrational. On the contrary, Moses keeps husbands away from pregnant wives until they give birth. For in fact the womb, lying above the bladder and upon the intestine called the rectum, stretches its neck between the shoulders into the bladder; and the mouth of the neck, by which it admits the seed, closes when it is filled, and is emptied again when cleansed by childbirth; and having delivered its fruit, it then receives the seed.

It is not shameful for us, for the benefit of our hearers, to name the organs of childbearing, whose creation God was not ashamed of. The womb, then, thirsting for childbearing, receives the seed and refuses the blameworthy part of intercourse, shutting out licentiousness entirely after the sowing by closing its mouth. Its appetites, formerly stirred by loving embraces, turn away and, occupied within with bearing the child, cooperate with the Creator. It is not right to disturb nature further when it is already at work, going to excess in insolence. Insolence, which has many names and many forms, when it turns aside in this part of disorder, that concerned with sexual love, is called lagneia (“lust”), the common, vulgar, and impure. The proneness to mating, as the name shows: from these, when they increase, comes the great multitude of diseases: love of delicacies, love of wine, love of women, and indeed profligacy and every love of pleasure, over which desire tyrannizes. Countless kindred passions grow with these, from which the licentious character comes to its height. Scripture says: “Scourges are prepared for the licentious, and punishments for the shoulders of fools,” calling the strength of licentiousness and its vigorous endurance “the shoulders of fools.” That is why: “Remove from your servants vain hopes,” it says, “and turn away from me unseemly desires; let not the appetite of the belly and sexual lust take hold of me.” We must keep far off the great villainy of those who plot against us. For not only into the wallet of Crates, but also into our city, “sails no foolish parasite, nor dainty lecher glorying in his buttocks, nor deceitful harlot,” nor any other such beast of pleasure. Let great dignity of conduct be sown in us throughout our whole life.

Whether, in general, one should marry or keep entirely pure of marriage (for this too is a subject of inquiry) we have explained in our work On Self-Control. But if even the question whether one should marry needed consideration, how could it be permitted to use intercourse freely on every occasion, like food, as a necessity? One can see from it the sinews being worn out like the threads of a warp and broken in the strain of the act; it also spreads a mist over the senses and cuts down the strength. This is plain in irrational animals and in bodies in training: those who abstain overcome their opponents in contests, while the animals are led away from mating dragged about, all but drawn along, completely emptied of all strength and vigor. The sophist of Abdera called intercourse “a minor epilepsy,” thinking it an incurable disease. Do not faintings follow, attributed to the greatness of the loss? “For a human being grows from a human being and is torn from him.” See the greatness of the harm: a whole human being is torn away in the loss of intercourse; for it says, “This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” A man is emptied by the seed as much as is seen in the body; for what departs is the beginning of generation. And the agitation of matter too disturbs and jars the harmony of the body.

Very witty, then, was the man who, when asked how he stood with regard to sexual pleasures, said: “Hush, man; I have most gladly escaped them, as from a raging and savage master.” But let marriage be accepted and given its place; for the Lord wishes humanity “to multiply,” but he does not say “be licentious,” nor did he wish them to give themselves up to pleasures as if born for mating. Let the Instructor put us to shame, crying through Ezekiel, “Circumcise your sexual immorality.” Even irrational animals have a proper season for sowing. But to have intercourse not for the begetting of children is to outrage nature, which we should take as our teacher, observing the wise instructions of her times, I mean old age and childhood, which she introduces (for she has not yet allowed the one, and no longer wishes the other, to marry); nor should one marry at all times.

Marriage is the desire for the begetting of children, not the disorderly, unlawful, and irrational emission of seed. Our whole life would go according to nature if we mastered our desires from the start and did not kill, by evil devices, the human race born by divine providence. For women who, to hide their sexual immorality, use abortive drugs that bring on complete ruin, cast out their humanity together with the embryo. But those who have been permitted to marry need an Instructor, so that they may not perform the mystic rites of nature by day, nor, say, coming from church or from the market at dawn, mate like a rooster, when it is the time for prayer, reading, and the good works of the day. In the evening it is fitting to rest after the meal and

after thanksgiving for the good things enjoyed. Nature does not always give opportunity for fulfilling the intercourse of marriage; indeed, union after a longer interval is more desired. Nor should we be licentious at night, as if in darkness, but should keep modesty shut up in the soul, like the light of reason. For we will be no different from Penelope at her weaving if by day we weave the teachings of self-control and by night unravel them when we go to bed. For if we must practice dignity, as we must, we should show dignity much more to our own wife, refusing indecent embraces; and let trustworthy faithfulness toward our neighbors begin at home. For it is not, it is not possible to be thought dignified by a woman before whom dignity is not shown to be witnessed in those very sharp pleasures. Affection that confesses a slippery tendency toward intercourse blooms a little and ages with the body, and sometimes grows old before it, when desire has withered, whenever courtesan-like pleasures outrage marital self-control. For the hearts of lovers have wings, and their love charms are quenched by regret; and love often turns to hate when satiety perceives its own condemnation.

Licentious words, indecent postures, courtesans' kisses [whorish names], and such lustful acts must not even be mentioned, if we obey the blessed apostle, who says plainly: “But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is fitting among saints.” Someone seems to have said well: “Intercourse has never benefited anyone; one must be content if it has done no harm.” For lawful intercourse is risky, except so far as it is for the begetting of children; and of unlawful intercourse Scripture says: “A hired woman will be counted as a hog, and a married woman a tower of death to those who use her.” It likened the courtesan's passion to a boar or a sow, and called adultery with a woman under guard a seeking of death.

Your own poetry too writes reproachfully of a house and city in which they live licentiously: “Adulteries are with you, and lawless union of males with males, womanish and unjust, evil city, wholly unclean.” On the other hand it admires the self-controlled: “having no shameful desire for another's bed, nor rushing into the hateful and abominable outrage on a male,” because it is against nature. The many consider these things, their own sins, to be luxuries; those more reasonable than they recognize them as sins but are overcome by pleasures. And darkness is a cover for their passions. For the one who treats his own marriage as a courtesan's affair commits adultery against it, and does not hear the Instructor crying out: “The man who goes up on his bed, who says in his soul, Who sees me? Darkness is around me, and the walls are my shelter, and no one sees my sins; what should I fear? The Most High will not remember.” Most wretched is this man, fearing only the eyes of men and supposing that he will escape God's notice. “For he does not know,” says Scripture, “that the eyes of the Lord Most High are ten thousand times brighter than the sun, looking upon all the ways of men and perceiving the hidden places.” So again the Instructor threatens them through Isaiah, saying: “Woe to those who make plans in secret, and will say, Who sees us?” One may perhaps escape the perceptible light, but the intelligible light is impossible to escape, or as Heraclitus says, “How could anyone escape that which never sets?”

Let us by no means, then, cover ourselves with darkness, for the light dwells in us: “And the darkness,” it says, “does not overtake it,” and night is lit up by self-controlled reasoning. Scripture has named the thoughts of good men unsleeping lamps. Indeed, trying to escape notice in what one does is admitting that one sins; and everyone who sins at once does wrong, not so much to his neighbor, if he commits adultery, as to himself, because he has committed adultery. He certainly shows himself worse and more dishonorable. For the sinner, insofar as he sins, is worse and more dishonorable than himself; and licentiousness is present in one who is overcome by shameful pleasure. So the fornicator is altogether dead to God, abandoned by the Word as by the Spirit, a corpse. For the holy loathes being defiled, as is natural; and it is always right for the pure to touch the pure. Let us never, when we take off our tunic, take off modesty too; for it is never right for the righteous to take off self-control. For behold, this corruptible will put on incorruption, when the insatiability of desire, which flows into licentiousness, trained by self-control and no longer in love with corruption, yields the human being to eternal self-control. “For in this age they marry and are given in marriage”; but having done away with the works of the flesh, putting on incorruption in the pure flesh itself, we pursue the measure of the angels.

So Plato too, the pupil of the barbarian philosophy, in the Philebus mystically called godless those who, as far as in them lies, corrupt and defile the God who dwells in them, the Word, by becoming familiar with the passions. Those who are sanctified to God must never live as mortals; nor, as Paul says, must we make the members of Christ members of a harlot, nor make the temple of God a temple of shameful passions. Remember the twenty-four thousand rejected for sexual immorality; the sufferings of those who committed sexual immorality, as I have already said, are “examples,” instructing our desires. The Instructor advises us most clearly: “Do not go after your desires, and restrain yourself from your appetites”; “For wine and women will make the intelligent fall away, and he who cleaves to harlots will become more reckless; decay and worms will inherit him, and he will be removed as a greater example.” And again (for he does not grow weary of helping): “He who shuts his eyes

to pleasure crowns his life.” It is not right, then, to be overcome by sexual pleasure, nor to gape after desires, nor to be driven wild by irrational appetites, nor to desire to be defiled. Only the married man is permitted to sow, like a farmer, at the time when the season receives the seed. For the rest of incontinence the best medicine is the Word; and lack of surfeit helps too, by which desires, inflamed, leap after pleasures. Nor, then, should we lay claim to costly clothing, any more than to varied food. The Lord himself, dividing his precepts into soul, body, and third, external things, advises us to provide external things for the body, and to govern the body by the soul; and he instructs the soul, saying: “Do not be anxious for your soul, what you will eat, nor for your body, what you will put on; for the soul is more than food, and the body more than clothing.” And he adds a clear example of the teaching: “Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have no storeroom or barn, and God feeds them. Are you not worth more than the birds?” This about food; and likewise he gives charge about clothing, which belongs to the third class, external things: “Consider the lilies, how they neither spin nor weave; and I tell you, not even Solomon was clothed like one of these.” And King Solomon prided himself greatly on his wealth.

What is lovelier and more blooming than flowers? What more delightful than lilies [or perfumes] or roses? “If God so clothes the grass that is in the field today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more you, you of little faith. And do not seek what you will eat or what you will drink.” Here the word “what” has thrown out variety of food; for this is what is meant by the Scripture: do not be anxious about what sort of things you will eat or drink; for to be anxious about these is greed and luxury. Eating alone, understood simply, is a sign of necessity, the filling, as we said, of want; but the “what” comes from excess, and Scripture has declared that excess comes from the devil. The following words make the meaning plain. Having said, “Do not seek what you will eat or what you will drink,” he added, “and do not be anxious” (literally, “up in the air”); for pretension and luxury put people up in the air, away from the truth, and voluptuousness occupied with superfluities leads away from the truth. So he says very beautifully, “For all the nations of the world seek these things.” The disorderly and foolish are the nations. What does he mean by “these things”? Luxury, voluptuousness, sauces, gourmandise, gluttony: these are the “what.” But about plain food, both dry and liquid, as necessary things, he says, “Your Father knows that you need them.” And if we have become seekers at all, let us not waste our seeking on luxury, but rekindle it for the finding of the truth.

“For seek the kingdom of God,” he says, “and the things of food will be added to you.” If, then, he removes anxiety about clothing and food and superfluities in general as unnecessary, what must we think he would say about love of finery, dyeing of wool, variety of colors, elaborate stones, working of gold, and besides, artificial locks and curled ringlets, and further, painting the eyes, plucking hairs, rouge, white lead, dyeing the hair, and the mischievous arts that go with these deceptions? Should we not rather suspect that what was said just before about the grass was said of these tasteless lovers of adornment? For the world is a field, and we are the grass, watered by the grace of God, and, cut down, we spring up again, as will be shown more fully in our work On the Resurrection. But “grass” is a figure for the vulgar crowd, at home with the pleasure of a day, blooming for a little, loving finery and glory and everything rather than truth, fit for nothing but kindling for the fire.

“There was a certain man,” the Lord says in a story, “very rich, who was clothed in purple and fine linen, feasting splendidly every day”: this was the grass. “And a poor man named Lazarus had been laid at the rich man's gate, covered with sores, longing to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table”: this is the herb. But the rich man was punished in Hades, sharing in the fire, while the other flourished again in the Father's bosom. I admire the ancient city of the Spartans: it permitted only courtesans to wear flowered clothing and gold ornaments, taking away love of finery from respectable women by allowing only prostitutes to beautify themselves. At Athens, on the contrary, the rulers who aspired to refined city life, forgetting their manliness, wore gold and put on robes reaching to the feet, and tied up their hair in a krōbylos, a kind of braid, adorned with golden cicadas inserted in it, truly displaying their “earthborn” descent by the tastelessness of effeminacy.

The emulation of these rulers spread to the other Ionians too, whom Homer, making them womanish, calls “trailing-robed.” Those who revere love of finery, an idol of the beautiful, instead of the beautiful itself, and so again commit idolatry under a lovely name, must be banished far from the truth, since they dream of the nature of the beautiful by opinion, not by knowledge. For them life here is a deep sleep of ignorance; we must wake from it and hasten to what is truly beautiful and orderly, and long to lay hold of this alone, leaving the ornaments here to the world itself, before we fall fast asleep. I say, then, that the human being needs clothing for nothing else than to cover the body, to ward off excessive cold and intense heat, so that the immoderation of the air may not harm us.