Letters (complete)

You had a bond, your marriage; but the Lord has loosed it, for your good and the profit of your soul, for nothing of his is without gain. Since, then, living together brings worldly care and not godly care, "are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife", lest the venom of a woman poison you, bewitching you into another union of pleasure and teaching you the flatteries of the flesh and useless anxieties and suspicions. Rather, save your soul by all means, and come to our mountain.

[Why the lawgiver allowed husbands to give a bill of divorce to wives they hated.] You seem neither to have grasped the wisdom that the lawgiver Moses received from God nor to have tracked down his meaning, but to fall as far short of his greatness of mind as of his way of life. For he did not allow it on the ground that wives who do not transgress against the ordinance of marriage ought to be put out; rather, wishing to check a greater and more grievous evil, he did not command the lesser but permitted it. He judged an open marriage better than the secret adultery they would have dared (for they would not have hesitated to use one another's wives), and he also thought it better that the women be put out of doors than slaughtered inside. So he separated those who could not live together. For men who had tasted the blood of the prophets would not have spared wives they hated; and those who more than once openly tried to kill the lawgiver himself would not have refrained from killing these women, openly or by treachery, or from indicting them for adultery. So, checking the greater evil in advance, he conceded the lesser rather than ordained it. That I am not merely guessing at the mind of that all-wise man is clear above all from the fact that the prophets expressly accuse these people of thirsting for blood and of breaking into other men's marriages, and not least from what will now be said. For Christ, when he came among us and was asked this question, not only did not blame Moses but even defended him, turning the charge against those because of whom Moses had been forced to overlook what befits nature and to allow a man to put away his wife. For he said: "Moses, because of your hardness of heart, allowed you to put away your wives", that is, because of your disobedience and lack of discipline; "but from the beginning it was not so." Wives who transgress against the ordinance of marriage he himself also commanded to be put out; but where this does not happen, he ordered all the other faults of wives to be borne, or rather declared it necessary. And not simply or without reason. For each of the other sins of those who come together by the law of marriage looks only to the one who commits it; but adultery looks to the covenant of marriage itself: it outrages the good birth of the children, tears kinships apart, and overturns the whole of human life.

[On Herod the tetrarch, the Baptist, and Herodias.] Not few nor small but many and great were the sins of the tetrarch. He was the base offspring of a savage lion. As if afraid that he might be thought not the true son of his own father, who killed the infants in Bethlehem, he wove a tragedy such as almost to rival his begetter. And I think he was called tetrarch for this reason too: not only because he ruled a fourth part of his father's kingdom, but because he was ruled by the four general kinds of vice. First, he takes Herodias unlawfully; then, rebuked by the Baptist, when he ought to have come to his senses, he throws into prison not a lawbreaker but one who rebuked lawbreaking. Next, wanting to kill him, he fears the crowd, without fearing the incorruptible eye. Then he swears rashly and without limit to give the daughter of the woman who had contrived the drama, and who thought she had prepared parts worthy of the marriage, whatever she might ask; he did not add that he would give what was right and just, but had his reason so unadvised as to promise even half of his kingdom, not reckoning that it is worse to fall from righteousness than from a kingdom. Then, under the pretext of keeping his oath, he goes beyond every perjury. For in wicked matters it is better to break well what was badly promised than to seem to keep an oath badly; or rather this was a pretext of his fear. For as a worthless servant fears his master's rebuke, so he feared the Baptist; for the true master is the one who does and commands what is right, not the one clothed in purple and holding the power of arms. So, putting forward his oath as a screen for his fear, and fortifying his resolve with the danger of seeming to forswear himself, he rushed to murder. He did not even set up the form of a court, as many have done, nor put up accusers nor hire witnesses; for he knew he was punishing not a wrongdoer but one who denounced wrongdoing. He wrought the crime without trial, meaning to hide the rebuke. But the rebuke was not silenced; it is proclaimed more brightly. For throughout all the world under the sun it still cries out even now: "It is not lawful for you to have your brother Philip's wife." Since you wish to learn the cause (for it is said to be of several kinds): some say that he profaned the law of Moses, for he took his brother's wife although his brother had offspring, which was not lawful. When a brother was childless, the law permitted him to take her, so as to raise up seed for the dead man; for childlessness was thought the greatest evil, as if the memory of the dead were wholly extinguished. But how, then, did the daughter leave her father, live with the adulterer and the adulteress, and seek to kill the man who had spoken on her father's behalf? Grant that the mother was drunk with desire; how did the daughter too join in contriving the drama? Others, among whom is Josephus, say that he had the woman while her husband was alive and had a little daughter. Josephus says, in his eighteenth book, that after Salome's birth Herodias, minded to confound the ancestral customs, married Herod, separating from his brother by the same father. Someone might answer this by saying: Then why did John charge him not as an adulterer but as one who had married unlawfully? To him one might reply: Perhaps she had left him by a bill of divorce. But he will answer again: Then how does John call unlawful what the law allowed? For the oracle of the Gospel, which declares such a union adultery, had not yet been given. Others say that he killed his brother out of desire for the kingdom and took his wife as well (for he had long loved her); against them this refutation lies ready: Then why did the Baptist not reproach him with the murder? It seems so much worse, as fratricide is more accursed than murder. Whether the rebuke had the first cause, as I think, or the second or the third, let the brave and noble man who rebuked and died, as an advocate of the divine laws, be sung. And if someone says, "Why, then, was he allowed to suffer this?", I would say that he himself was harmed in nothing; for if one must leave life in any case, the one who passes through it gloriously would be the more blessed. Then, divine providence grants sinners a time for repentance, and if not even so they repent, it will appoint harsher punishments. And, as some say, vice reigning in the world sets itself against the good, dreaming of bearing off the glory; therefore the wicked man wars against the best man, but is easily taken. To show all the glorious examples in one: against the King of righteousness when he appeared here the shield-bearers of injustice made war; but they were so taken and extinguished that he is praised in hymns everywhere, while those who thought his life fruitless are defeated by every vote.

[On "Every sin that a man commits is outside the body."] Many doors of meaning, blessed one, can be opened for whoever wishes on "Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against his own body." First this one: he did not say, "He sins through the body", which many suppose and so give trouble to interpreters, but "He sins against it": he offends against it, defiles it, makes it accursed; as one might say, "So-and-so insults himself while he thinks he insults another." For here the apostle's word looks not to the punishment that will follow the sin afterwards, but to the outrage done to the body in the act by the union, that is, the defilement. The murderer kills another; the fornicator outrages himself. The man who commits other offences commits them against another; the lecher shames himself, defiles himself. Hence people wash, thinking of the defilement and loathing the indecency. Other offences look to the one wronged; this one to the wrongdoer. The others are outside the body of the doer; this defiles the doer. In the others one wrongs others; in fornication, oneself.

If you wish a second door to be opened to you, consider that often, when we exhort a man who has sins greater than can be pardoned, we say, "Brother, keep away from this disease; it is worse than all", not because it surpasses all, but because we want to free him from that one too; perhaps the apostle said this too about fornication, for he burst out with this saying when he wished to correct the man who had committed fornication among the Corinthians.

If a third: consider that as one who throws grain or any other seed into the sea sins against the sowing, preventing it from coming to birth, so one who throws his seed into a harlot sins against his own body, since she not only destroys what is born but prevents it from being born.

If a fourth: one must consider that in what he does he also suffers. For if he did not suffer, he would not have flowed; if he flowed, he was corrupted; if he was corrupted, he was outraged. Indeed, in no other act but only in the union of man with woman are the virgin and the young man said to be corrupted when they have had experience of it.

If a fifth: consider that if a child is born to one who goes in to a harlot, it is brought up for harlotry, and whoever sees it afterwards will say: "Truly that man wronged himself; see, his seed, or rather his body, plays the harlot."

If a sixth: observe that if a man has intercourse with a slave woman, what is born will be a slave; how then does he not sin against himself who takes pains to beget a slave?

If a seventh: see that the child too is wronged, being called a bastard and dishonoured everywhere; whether he enters a council chamber or a law court, he is thrown out; so his begetter shares the shame, for he has left behind a memorial of his own lust.

If an eighth, let us test what will be said: since the fornicator becomes one with the woman with whom he fornicates, making his own members the members of a harlot, he truly sins against himself. Some have used killing well (as Moses and Phinehas), and anger well (Peter and Paul); but no one has ever used fornication well. Therefore it defiles the doer. I pass over the fact that people judge those who kill in war worthy even of monuments and proclamations.

If you wish us also to turn to the road of allegory, let the ninth be what follows. Since the church is one body, and we are each members of one another, the fornicator sins against all; for his fault runs back to the fullness of the church, from which he also commanded him to be cut off until he repents.

If you wish a tenth too, it might be said: since those who come together by the law of honourable marriage become one body (for "the two," it says, "shall become one flesh"; therefore "the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband; nor does the husband have authority over his own body, but the wife"), it is fitting that the husband who commits fornication sins against his wife, that is, against his own body, and the wife who commits fornication sins against her own body, that is, against her husband, who has become her body. Therefore the other sins are outside the body that is one's own, the one joined to oneself lawfully into one. For if the husband perjures himself, or kills, or steals, or does any other grievous thing, the sin does not reach his wife; nor again, if the wife kills or perjures herself, does the sin run back to her husband. But fornication alone touches the marriage and the union: each wrongs the other if one commits it; it makes the legitimacy of the children suspect and shakes the whole house from its foundations. Therefore Christ said that the husband must accept all the faults of his wife, for what is done does not look to him; but for fornication alone he commanded her to be put away, since this injustice … [the rest of the letter is lost in the scan].