Miscellanies 3.11.71–3.14.95

These things having been shown thus, come, let us now set out the Scriptures that oppose these sophists of the heresies, making known the rule of self-control kept according to reason. The one who understands will choose the Scripture that properly opposes each of the heresies and use it at the right time for the destruction of those who teach contrary to the commandments. From the beginning, then, the law, as we said before, “You shall not covet your neighbor's wife,” proclaimed beforehand the Lord's closely related saying in the new covenant, the same voice speaking in person: “You have heard the law commanding, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say, ‘You shall not desire.’” For that the law wished husbands to use their wives with self-restraint and only for the begetting of children is clear from its forbidding an unmarried man to have intercourse at once with a captive woman; but if he once desired her, it permitted her to mourn for thirty days with her hair shorn; and if not even so the desire withered, then to beget children with her, the impulse that had mastered him having been tested by the set time and turned into reasonable appetite.

Hence you could not show that any of the elders in Scripture approached a pregnant woman; but you would find that wives were known again by their husbands later, after the pregnancy and after the nursing of the child. For example, you will find Moses' father keeping this aim, leaving an interval of three years after Aaron's birth before begetting Moses. And the tribe of Levi, keeping this law of nature from God, entered the promised land fewer in number than the others; for a race does not easily grow to great numbers when the men who have accepted marriage according to the laws sow their seed, but wait not only through the pregnancy but also through the nursing.

Fittingly, then, Moses too, leading the Jews on little by little to self-control, commanded them to abstain from sexual pleasure for three days in a row before hearing the divine words. “We, then, are temples of God; as the prophet said, ‘I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they will be my people,’” if we live according to the commandments, whether each of us or the whole church together. “Therefore come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean; and I will receive you, and I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.” He commands us prophetically to be separate not from the married, as they say, but from the Gentiles who still live in sexual immorality, and further from the heresies mentioned before, as unclean and godless.

That is why Paul too, aiming at people like those mentioned, says: “Having, then, these promises, beloved, let us cleanse our hearts from every defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.” The church, having the Bridegroom, marries no other; but each of us has the right to marry, according to the law, whomever he wishes, I mean the first marriage. “But I fear lest, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts may be corrupted from the simplicity that is toward Christ,” the apostle said, very cautiously and as a teacher.

That is why the admirable Peter says: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from fleshly desires, which wage war against the soul, keeping your conduct good among the Gentiles; for thus is the will of God, that by doing good you should silence the doings of foolish men, as free people, and not having your freedom as a cover for evil, but as slaves of God.” Likewise Paul too writes in the letter to the Romans: “We who died to sin, how shall we still live in it? Because our old man was crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be done away,” as far as “nor present your members as weapons of unrighteousness to sin.”

Having reached this point, I think I should not leave unremarked that the apostle proclaims the same God through the law, the prophets, and the gospel. For in the letter to the Romans he attributes to the law “You shall not covet,” which is written in the gospel, knowing that the Father proclaimed through the law and the prophets and the one proclaimed as good news through himself are one. For he says: “What shall we say? Is the law sin? By no means. But I would not have known sin except through the law; for I would not have known desire if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’” And even if those of the heterodox who oppose the Creator suppose that Paul said what follows as aimed at the Creator, “For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh,” let them read what precedes and what follows. For he said before, “but the sin that dwells in me,” because of which it was consistent to say that “good does not dwell in my flesh.”

Consistently he added: “But if I do what I do not wish, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me,” which, “waging war against the law of God and of my mind,” he says, “takes me captive in the law of sin that is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” And again (for he never tires of helping) he does not hesitate to add: “For the law of the Spirit has set me free from the law of sin and death,” since through the Son “God condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Besides this, making clearer what he had said, he cries out: “The body is dead because of sin,” showing that it is not yet a temple, but still a tomb of the soul; for when it is sanctified to God, “the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, who will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

Again, then, rebuking the lovers of pleasure, he adds: “For the mind of the flesh is death, because those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh; and the mind of the flesh is enmity toward God, for it does not submit to the law of God. And those who are in the flesh cannot please God,” not as some teach, but as we have said before. Then, in contrast to these, he says to the church: “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his. But if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” And against the noble birth and freedom introduced so contemptibly by the heterodox who boast in licentiousness, he adds: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery again to fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, in which we cry, ‘Abba, Father’”; that is, we received it for this, that we might know the one to whom we pray, the true Father, the only Father of what exists, who trains us for salvation as a father and … fear.

A married couple giving themselves to prayer for a time by mutual consent is a lesson in self-control. For he added “by consent” so that no one might dissolve the marriage, and “for a time” so that the married man, practicing self-control by constraint, might not slip into sin, sparing his own wife but falling into desire for another. For this reason he also said that the man who thinks he is behaving improperly in keeping his daughter a virgin does well to give her in marriage. And the purpose of each, both of the one who has made himself a eunuch and of the one who has joined himself in marriage for the begetting of children, ought to remain unyielding toward the worse. For if he is able to raise the level of his life, he will gain greater worth before God, having exercised self-control purely and with reason; but if he goes beyond the rule he chose, aiming at greater glory, he may then fall short of his hope. For as the eunuchate, so marriage too has its own offices and services for the Lord that differ: I mean caring for children and wife. For the intimacy of the union becomes, it seems, an occasion for the one perfect in marriage, who has taken on the care of everything in the common household. For example, he says that bishops should be appointed who have practiced presiding over their own household and so over the whole church. Let each, then, fulfill his ministry in the work in which he was called, so that he may become free in Christ, receiving the proper reward of his ministry.

Again, discussing the law and using allegory, he says: “For the married woman is bound by law to her living husband,” and so on. And again: “A wife is bound as long as her husband lives; but if he dies, she is free to be married, only in the Lord. But she is happier if she remains as she is, in my judgment.” In the first passage he says, “You were put to death to the law,” not to marriage, “so that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead,” as bride and church; and she must be pure both from inner thoughts contrary to the truth and from those who tempt from outside, that is, those who follow the heresies and persuade her to commit fornication away from her one husband, the Almighty God; so that we may not, as the serpent deceived Eve, who is called Life, transgress the commandments through the greedy cunning of the heresies. The second passage establishes monogamy. For we must not suppose, as some have explained it, that the binding of a woman to a man signifies the entanglement of flesh with corruption; for he accuses the invention of godless men who plainly attribute the discovery of marriage to the devil, by which the lawgiver is in danger of being blasphemed.

I think it is Tatian the Syrian who dares to teach such things. He writes, at any rate, word for word in his work On Perfection according to the Savior: “Agreement fits prayer, but fellowship in corruption breaks off intercession. By the permission, at any rate, he forbids very shamingly; for in permitting them to come together again because of Satan and lack of self-control, he declared that the one who would comply was going to serve two masters: God through agreement, and through disagreement lack of self-control, sexual immorality, and the devil.” He says this in explaining the apostle; but he sophistically twists the truth, constructing a lie by means of a truth. For we too confess that lack of self-control and sexual immorality are devilish passions; but agreement mediates self-restrained marriage, leading with self-control to prayer and, with reverence, joining in marriage for the begetting of children. Indeed Scripture has called the time for begetting children “knowledge,” when it says: “And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore a son, and called his name Seth: ‘For God has raised up for me another seed in place of Abel.’” Do you see whom those blaspheme who loathe the self-restrained sowing of seed and attribute birth to the devil? For the one who used the article before it did not say “a god” simply, but showed that he meant the Almighty.

And the apostle's addition, “and come together again because of Satan,” cuts off beforehand any turning aside to other desires. For temporary agreement does not entirely repel the desires of nature, though it restrains them; because of them he brings back the union of marriage, not for lack of self-control, sexual immorality, and the devil's work, but so that one may not fall into lack of self-control, sexual immorality, and the devil. Tatian also separates the old husband and the new, but not as we say. We too agree with him in calling the law the old husband and the gospel the new, but not as he wishes, abolishing the law as belonging to another God; rather, the same Husband and Lord, making the old new, no longer allows polygamy (for God required it then, when there had to be increase and multiplying), but introduces monogamy for the begetting of children and the care of the household, for which the wife was given as a helper. And if the apostle, by concession, allows someone a second marriage because of lack of self-control and burning, it is because this person too does not sin according to the covenant (for it has not been forbidden by the law), but does not fulfill the heightened perfection of the gospel way of life. But the one who remains single and keeps undefiled the union dissolved by death, gladly obeying the divine arrangement, gains heavenly glory for himself; by it he has become free from distraction for the Lord's service. Nor indeed does divine providence through the Lord now command the one rising from the marriage bed to be washed, as it did of old. For the Lord does not keep believers from begetting children by necessity, having washed them completely for their intercourse by one baptism, he who has also summed up Moses' many washings in one baptism.

From of old, then, the law, prophesying our regeneration through fleshly birth, applied baptism to the generative discharge of seed, not abhorring human birth; for what appears as a man born, this is what the discharge of seed is capable of. So it is not the many acts of intercourse that are fruitful, but the womb's reception that testifies to birth, when the seed is formed into an embryo in nature's workshop. And how is marriage merely old and an invention of the law, while marriage according to the Lord is different, when the same God is kept by us? For a man could never rightly dissolve what God has joined. Much more will the Son keep what the Father commanded. And if the same one is lawgiver and evangelist, he never fights with himself. For the law lives, being spiritual and understood in the way of knowledge. “And we were put to death to the law through the body of Christ, so that we might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead,” who was prophesied by the law, “so that we might bear fruit for God.”

“So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.” We were put to death, then, to the law, that is, to the sin made known by the law, which the law shows but does not beget, exposing the underlying sin by commanding what must be done and forbidding what must not, “so that sin might be shown to be sin.” And if marriage according to the law is sin, I do not know how anyone will say he has known God while saying that God's command is sin; but since the law is holy, marriage is holy. The apostle, then, refers this mystery to Christ and the church. As what is born of the flesh is flesh, so what is born of the Spirit is spirit, not only in birth but also in learning. So the children are holy, the good works pleasing to God, when the Lord's words are wedded to the soul. Sexual immorality and marriage, at any rate, are distinct, since the devil stands far from God. “And you too were put to death to the law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead”; for it is understood as well that you have become directly obedient, since, according to the truth of the law too, we obey the same Lord who commanded from afar.

And does not the Spirit fittingly say plainly about such people that “in later times some will depart from the faith, paying attention to deceiving spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars seared in their conscience, forbidding to marry, commanding to abstain from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” One must not, then, be forbidden by constraint to marry, nor indeed to eat meat or drink wine. For it is written: “It is good not to eat meat or drink wine,” if one eats with offense; and “it is good to remain as I am.” But let both the one who uses them, with thanksgiving, and again the one who does not use them, also with thanksgiving,

live according to reason with self-controlled enjoyment. And in general all the apostle's letters, teaching self-restraint and self-control, and containing countless commandments about marriage, the begetting of children, and household management, nowhere rejected self-restrained marriage; but, preserving the continuity of the law with the gospel, they accept both: the one who uses marriage with self-restraint and thanksgiving to God, and the one who lives in celibacy as the Lord wills, each as he was called, having chosen without stumbling and perfectly. “And the land of Jacob was praised above all the earth,” says the prophet, glorifying the vessel of his spirit. But someone runs down birth, calling it corruptible and perishing, and forces the text, saying that the Savior spoke about the begetting of children when he said not to store up treasure on earth, “where moth and rust destroy”; and he is not ashamed to add the prophet's words to these: “All of you will grow old like a garment, and a moth will devour you.” But neither do we contradict Scripture, that our bodies are corruptible and by nature fluid; and perhaps he was prophesying corruption to those he addressed as sinners. The Savior did not speak about the begetting of children, but was urging to sharing and fellowship those who wished only to acquire an abundance of wealth, but not to help those in need.

That is why he says: “Work not for the food that perishes, but for that which endures to eternal life.” Likewise they bring forward this saying too: “The sons of that age neither marry nor are given in marriage.” But if one reconsiders this question about the resurrection of the dead and the questioners themselves, he will find that the Lord was not rejecting marriage but curing the expectation of fleshly desire in the resurrection. And “the sons of this age” he said not in contrast to the sons of some other age, but equivalently to “those born in this age, being sons by birth, beget and are begotten,” since no one will pass into this life without birth; but this birth, receiving a like corruption, no longer awaits the one who has once departed this life. “One is your Father in heaven”; but he is also Father of all by creation. “So call no one on earth your father,” he says, as if to say: do not consider the one who sowed you by fleshly sowing the cause of your being, but a joint cause of birth, or rather a servant of birth.

So he wishes us, having turned back, to become again like children, having come to know the true Father, reborn through water, this being a different sowing from that in creation. “Yes,” it says, “the unmarried man cares for the things of the Lord, but the married man how he may please his wife.” What then? Is it not lawful for those who please their wives according to God to give thanks to God too? Is it not permitted to the married man, together with his wife, to care for the things of the Lord? But as the unmarried woman cares for the things of the Lord, “that she may be holy in body and spirit,” so too the married woman cares in the Lord for the things of her husband and the things of the Lord, that she may be holy in body and spirit; for both are holy in the Lord, the one as wife, the other as virgin. And to shame and restrain those prone to a second marriage, the apostle fittingly speaks in a high tone, and at once says: “Every sin is outside the body; but the one who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.”

But if anyone dares to call marriage sexual immorality, he blasphemes, running back again to the law and the Lord. For as greed is called sexual immorality, being opposed to contentment, and as idolatry is a distribution from the one God to many gods, so sexual immorality is a falling away from the one marriage to many. For, as we have said, both sexual immorality and adultery are taken in three senses by the apostle. About these the prophet says: “You were sold for your sins”; and again: “You were defiled in a foreign land,” considering defiled the union joined with a foreign body and not with the one given in marriage for the begetting of children. That is why the apostle too says: “I wish, then, younger women to marry, bear children, manage their households, give the adversary no occasion for reproach; for some have already turned aside after Satan.”

Indeed he fully accepts “the husband of one wife,” whether he is a presbyter, a deacon, or a layman, if he uses marriage blamelessly; “and she will be saved through childbearing.” Again, the Savior, calling the Jews “an evil and adulterous generation,” teaches that they had not known the law as the law intends, but, following the tradition of the elders and the commandments of men, committed adultery against the law, not having received it as husband and lord of their virginity. Perhaps he also knew them to be enslaved to strange desires, because of which, continually enslaved to sins, they were sold to foreigners; since among the Jews wives were not declared common, but adultery too was forbidden. And the man who said, “I have married a wife and cannot come to the supper,” was a divine example to convict those who turn away from the divine commandment for the sake of pleasures; since on this reasoning neither the righteous before the coming nor those married after the coming, even if they were apostles, will be saved. And if they bring forward again what the prophet says, “I have grown old among all my enemies,” let them understand the enemies as sins; and one sin is not marriage but sexual immorality; otherwise let them call birth a sin, and the Creator of birth too.

Julius Cassianus, the founder of Docetism, attempts such arguments. In his work On Self-Control, or On Eunuchhood, he says word for word: “And let no one say that, because we have such parts, the female shaped in this way and the male in that, the one for receiving and the other for sowing, intercourse has been permitted by God. For if this arrangement were from the God toward whom we hasten, he would not have blessed eunuchs, nor would the prophet have said that they are ‘not a fruitless tree,’ transferring the image from the tree to the man who by choice makes himself a eunuch of such a thought.”

And, contending further for his godless opinion, he adds: “And how could someone not reasonably blame the Savior, if he refashioned us and freed us from error and from the fellowship of the parts, the appendages, and the genitals?” In this he teaches things similar to Tatian; but he came out of the school of Valentinus. That is why Cassianus says: “When Salome asked when what she had asked about would be known, the Lord said: ‘When you tread on the garment of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female neither male nor female.’”

In the first place, then, we do not have this saying in the four Gospels handed down to us, but in the one according to the Egyptians. Then he seems to me not to know that by “male” it hints at anger, the impulse, and by “female” at desire; and when they have acted, repentance and shame follow. When, then, someone does not gratify either anger or desire, which, increased by habit and bad upbringing, overshadow and cover reason, but, stripping off the mist that comes from them and being put to shame by repentance, unites spirit and soul in obedience to the Word, then, as Paul too says, “There is among you neither male nor female.” For the soul, departing from this form by which male and female are distinguished, is transferred into unity, being neither. But this noble man thinks, rather in Plato's way, that the soul, being divine and made female by desire above, comes down here into birth and decay.

He forces Paul, for example, to say that birth arose from deception, in these words: “But I fear lest, as the serpent deceived Eve, your thoughts may be corrupted from the simplicity that is toward Christ.” But the Lord admittedly came to those who had gone astray; gone astray, however, not from above into birth here (for birth is created, and the creation of the Almighty, who would never bring a soul down from better things to worse), but the Savior came to us who had gone astray in our thoughts, which were corrupted by disobedience to the commandments, because we loved pleasure; perhaps the first-formed man anticipated the time and desired the grace of marriage before the hour, and sinned; since “everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her,” not having waited for the time of the will.

So the same Lord was judging then too the desire that anticipated marriage. When, then, the apostle says, “Put on the new man, created according to God,” he says it to us who were formed by the will of the Almighty as we were formed; and he speaks of old and new not with regard to birth and rebirth, but with regard to the life of disobedience and the life of obedience. Cassianus thinks the “garments of skin” are bodies; we will show later that he and those who teach as he does are in error about these, when we undertake the explanation of man's origin, following what must be said first. Further, he says: “Those ruled by earthly things both beget and are begotten, ‘but our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also await a Savior.’” We too know that this is well said, since we ought to live as strangers and sojourners: those who marry as though not marrying, those who acquire as though not acquiring, those who beget children as begetting mortals, as those who will leave their possessions, as those who will live even without a wife if need be, not using creation with passion, but with all thanksgiving and magnanimity.