On Monogamy 10–16

I see that from here we are being challenged to turn to the apostle. To see his meaning more easily, it must first be impressed the more urgently that a woman is still more bound when her husband has died, so that she should the less admit another man. For let us reflect that divorce either comes from discord or produces discord, whereas death comes by the law of God, not by any offense of man, and is a debt owed by all, even by the unmarried. So if a divorced woman, who has been separated in soul and body through discord, anger, hatred, and their causes (injury, insult, or any complaint whatever), is bound to her enemy, not to say her husband, how much more will she who has not been separated from marriage but left behind, through no fault of her own or her husband's but by the working of the Lord's law, belong to him even when he is dead, to whom even in death she owes concord? From him from whom she has heard no divorce, she has not departed; with him to whom she has written no divorce, she remains; him whom she did not wish to lose, she keeps. She has with her the freedom of the mind, which presents to a person, as an imagined enjoyment, all that he does not have. Finally, I ask the woman herself: Tell me, sister, did you send your husband ahead in peace? What will she answer? In discord? Then she is all the more bound to him with whom she has a case before God. She who is bound has not departed. In peace? Then she must persevere in it with him, whom she can no longer divorce; she who would not marry again even if she could have divorced him. Indeed, she prays for his soul, asks refreshment for him meanwhile and fellowship in the first resurrection, and offers on the anniversaries of his falling asleep. For unless she does these things, she has truly divorced him as far as lies in her, and all the more unjustly in that she did so in the only way she could, because she could not otherwise; and all the more unworthily if it was because he had not deserved it. Or shall we be nothing after death, according to some Epicurus, and not according to Christ? But if we believe in the resurrection of the dead, we shall certainly be bound to those with whom we are to rise, to give account of one another. And if “in that age they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be equal to the angels,” shall we not be bound to our dead spouses, because there will be no restoration of marriage? On the contrary, we shall be bound all the more, because we are destined for a better state, to rise into a spiritual fellowship, to recognize ourselves as well as our own. Otherwise, how shall we sing thanks to God forever if the sense and memory of this debt does not remain in us, if we are re-formed in substance but not in consciousness? So we who will be with God will be together, since all are one with God (though the reward varies, though there are many mansions with the same Father), having labored for the one denarius of the same reward, that is, eternal life; and in that life he will much less separate those whom God has joined than he forbids them to be separated in this lesser life. Since this is so, how will a woman be free for another husband when she is occupied by her own even for the future? We speak to both sexes, though the discourse is addressed to one, because one discipline governs both. She will have one husband in the spirit and another in the flesh. This will be adultery: the consciousness of one woman shared between two men. If the one is separated from her in the flesh but remains in her heart, where even thought without the meeting of the flesh accomplishes beforehand both adultery by desire and marriage by will, he is still her husband, possessing the very thing through which he became so, namely the mind; and if another also dwells there, this will be a crime. Nor is he excluded because he has departed from the baser commerce of the flesh. A husband is the more honored, the purer he has become.

So, in order to marry “in the Lord,” according to the law and the apostle (if indeed you care even about this), what sort of person are you, asking for a marriage which those from whom you ask it are not allowed to have: from a monogamous bishop, from presbyters and deacons bound by the same sacred obligation, from widows whose way of life you have refused for yourself? And they, plainly, will hand out husbands and wives as they hand out morsels of bread. For with them this is what “Give to everyone who asks you” means. And they will join you in the virgin church, the one bride of the one Christ. And you will pray for your husbands, the new and the old. Choose to which of them you will present yourself as an adulteress. To both, I think. If you are wise, you will say nothing of the dead one. Let your silence be his bill of divorce, written already on another man's dowry-deed. In this way you will win the new husband's favor, if you forget the old. You owe it to him more to please the man for whose sake you chose not to please God. These are the things the psychics would have it that the apostle approved, or did not think about at all, when he wrote: “A woman is bound as long as her husband lives; but if he dies, she is free: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord.” From this passage they defend the license for a second marriage, and indeed for very many, if for a second; for what has once ceased to be “once” is open to any number. But in what sense the apostle wrote will shine out once it is first established that he did not write in the sense in which the psychics use it. And it will be established if one recalls the things that differ from this passage, in his teaching, in his wishes, and in Paul's own practice. For if he permits second marriages, which did not exist from the beginning, how does he affirm that all things are gathered back to the beginning in Christ? If he wants us to repeat marriages, how does he maintain that our seed is in Isaac, whose father was married once? How does he arrange the whole order of the church from monogamous men, if this discipline does not come first among the laity, from whom the order of the church is drawn? How does he call those who are still in marriage away from the fruit of marriage, saying that the time is drawn in, if he calls back into marriage those who have slipped out of it through death? If these things differ from the passage in question, it will be established, as we said, that he did not write it in the sense in which the psychics use it; for it is easier for that one passage to have some explanation that agrees with the rest than for the apostle to seem to have taught things that contradict each other. That explanation we can recognize in the subject matter itself. What was it that led the apostle to write such things? The novice state of a new church, just then rising, which he was bringing up with milk, not yet with the solid food of stronger doctrine, so that in that infancy of faith they did not yet know what they should do about the necessity of the flesh and of sex. We understand the very questions from his replies, when he says: “Now concerning what you write: it is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of acts of sexual immorality let each one have his own wife.” He shows that there were some who, found by the faith in marriage, feared that it might not be lawful for them to make use of their marriage thereafter, because they had believed in the holy flesh of Christ. And yet he grants it by way of concession, not of command, that is, indulging it, not prescribing that it be so. Moreover, he would rather that all were what he himself was. So too, in replying about divorce, he shows that some had been thinking about this as well, especially because they did not think they ought to remain, after coming to faith, in marriages with heathens. They also asked his counsel about virgins (for there was no command of the Lord): that it is good for a person to remain as he is, that is, as he was found by the faith. “Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek release. Are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you take a wife, you have not sinned”: because for a man loosed from a wife before faith, a wife taken after faith will not be counted a second, being the first after faith. For our very life is reckoned from faith. But here he says that he is sparing them; otherwise, affliction of the flesh would follow, because of the straits of the times, for those who do not refuse the hindrances of marriage; indeed, one should rather earn merit by being anxious about the Lord than about a husband. And so he revokes what he permitted. In the same passage, then, in which he lays down that each should remain in the calling in which he was called, he adds: “A woman is bound as long as her husband lives; but if he falls asleep, she is free: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord.” From this too he shows that she is meant who was herself found by the faith already loosed from a husband, as the man was loosed from a wife: loosed through death, of course, not through divorce, since he would not permit the divorced to marry, contrary to the earlier command. And so the woman, if she marries, will not sin, because here too a husband will not be counted a second one who is the first since faith. And this is so much the case that he added “only in the Lord” for this reason: that he was dealing with a woman who had had a heathen husband and, having lost him, had come to believe, so that she should not presume that even after faith she could marry a heathen; though the psychics do not care even about this. Let us be quite clear that the authentic Greek does not read as the text in common use has it, through a crafty or naive alteration of two syllables, “But if her husband shall have fallen asleep,” as though it spoke of the future and so seemed to apply to a woman who has lost her husband when already in the faith. If this were so, a license let loose without limit would have given her a husband as often as she lost one, with no shame in marrying, as befits even heathens. But even if it were so, as though of the future (“If anyone's husband shall have died”), the future would apply just as well to a woman whose husband is to die before she comes to faith. Take it whichever way you like, so long as you do not overturn the rest. For since those sayings also belong here, “Were you called as a slave? Do not be concerned”; “Were you called uncircumcised? Do not be circumcised”; “Were you called circumcised? Do not draw on the foreskin”; and with them agrees, “Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek release; are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife”; it is clear enough that these things apply to those who, placed in a new and recent calling, were asking about the conditions in which they had been found by the faith. This will be the interpretation of that passage; it is to be tested by whether it fits the time and the occasion, both the examples and arguments that precede and the sayings and meanings that follow, and above all whether it agrees with the apostle's own counsel and practice; for nothing is to be guarded against more than being caught contradicting oneself.

Hear too a most subtle argument on the other side. “The apostle,” they say, “so far permitted repeating marriage that he bound only those in the clergy to the yoke of monogamy. For what he prescribes for some he does not prescribe for all.” Then does he not also prescribe for bishops alone what he commands to all, if what he prescribes for bishops he does not also command to all? Or is it for all because it is for bishops, and for bishops because it is for all? For where do bishops and clergy come from? Is it not from all? If not all are bound to monogamy, where will monogamous men for the clergy come from? Or will some separate order of monogamous people have to be set up, from which selection for the clergy may be made? But when we are exalted and puffed up against the clergy, then we are all one, then we are all priests, because “he has made us priests to God and the Father.” When we are summoned to an equal share in priestly discipline, we lay down our fillets and are all on a level. The passage concerned the orders of the church: what sort of men should be ordained. It was fitting, therefore, that the whole pattern of the common discipline should be displayed in front, as an edict, so to speak, to be impressed on all in the future, so that the people might know all the better that they must themselves observe the rule that makes their leaders, and so that the honor itself should not flatter itself into any license, as if by a privilege of rank. The Holy Spirit foresaw that some would say, “All things are lawful to bishops,” just as that Utinensis of yours did not fear even the Scantinian law. For how many twice-married men preside among you, insulting the apostle, surely, and certainly not blushing when these passages are read out beneath them! Come now, you who think that monogamy is an exception made for bishops: withdraw also from the other items of discipline that are ascribed to bishops along with monogamy. Do not be irreproachable, sober, of good conduct, orderly, hospitable, apt to teach; rather be given to wine, quick with your hand to strike, quarrelsome, a lover of money, neither ruling your house nor caring for your children's discipline, and not even seeking a good reputation among outsiders. For if bishops have a law of their own concerning monogamy, the other things too that must go with monogamy will have been written for bishops. To laypeople, to whom monogamy does not belong, the rest also is foreign. You have escaped, psychic, if you please, the bonds of the whole discipline. Maintain consistently that not everything commanded to some is commanded to all; or else, if the rest is common, but monogamy alone is imposed on bishops, are they alone to be declared Christians, on whom the whole discipline has been conferred?

But writing to Timothy too, he wishes young women to marry, to bear children, to be mothers of households. He is addressing those he described above, young widows who, found in widowhood and having kept to it for a while, after they have grown wanton against Christ, wish to marry, incurring condemnation because they have broken their first faith: that faith, namely, in which they were found in widowhood and which, having professed it, they do not keep. That is why he wishes them to marry: so that they may not afterwards break the first faith of the widowhood they took up; not so that they may marry as often as, in a widowhood tried and even trifled with, they refuse to persevere. We read him writing to the Romans too: “The woman who is under a husband is bound to the husband while he lives; but if he dies, she is released from the law of the husband.” Clearly, then, while her husband lives she will be held to commit adultery if she is joined to another man; but if her husband has died, she is freed from the law, so that she is not an adulteress if she becomes another man's. But look at what follows too, to see where this meaning that flatters you ends up. “So, my brothers,” he says, “you too have been put to death to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may become another's, namely his who rose from the dead, that we may bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were worked through the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death; but now we have been released from the law, having died to that in which we were held, so as to serve God in newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” So if he commands us to be put to death to the law through the body of Christ, which is the church, which consists in the spirit of newness, not in the letter of oldness, that is, of the law, then, in taking you away from the law, which does not prevent a wife whose husband has died from becoming another man's, he brings you into the opposite condition: that, having lost your husband, you should not marry. And just as far as you would not be counted an adulteress for becoming another man's after your husband's death, if you still had to live under the law, so far, because your condition is now the opposite, he condemns you beforehand for adultery if you marry another after your husband's death. For since you have now been put to death to the law, it cannot be lawful for you, since you have withdrawn from the law under which it was lawful for you.

Now, even if the apostle had permitted outright that one might marry when a marriage has been lost in the faith, he would have done so just as he did other things contrary to the pattern of his rule because of the circumstances of the time: circumcising Timothy because of false brothers brought in secretly, and bringing certain men with shaved heads into the temple out of regard for the Jews; he who rebukes the Galatians for wishing to live under the law. But circumstances required him to become all things to all, to gain all; to be in labor with them until Christ was formed in them; to cherish the little ones of the faith like a nurse, teaching some things by concession, not by command (for to indulge is one thing, to command another); and so to allow a temporary license to marry again because of the weakness of the flesh, as Moses allowed divorce because of hardness of heart. And here, then, we shall supply the completion of this thought. If Christ removed what Moses commanded, because from the beginning it was not so, and Christ is not for that reason reckoned to have come from another power, why should not the Paraclete also have removed what Paul allowed, since second marriage too was not from the beginning? And why should he on that account be held suspect as an alien spirit, provided only that what is added is worthy of God and Christ? If it was worthy of God and Christ to restrain hardness of heart when its time was fulfilled, why is it not more worthy of God and Christ to shake off the weakness of the flesh now that the time is more drawn in? If it is just that marriage should not be separated, it is certainly honorable that it should not be repeated. Even in the world both are counted as good discipline, the one under the name of concord, the other of chastity. Hardness of heart reigned until Christ; let weakness of the flesh have reigned until the Paraclete. The new law removed divorce (it had something to remove); the new prophecy removed second marriage, which is no less a divorce of the former one. But hardness of heart yielded to Christ more easily than weakness of the flesh does. This weakness claims Paul for itself more than the other claimed Moses; if indeed it can claim him when it seizes on him indulging and refuses him prescribing, when it evades his weightier sayings and lasting wishes, and does not allow us to render to the apostle what he prefers. And how long will this most shameless weakness persist in fighting against what is better? Its time was until the Paraclete should work, to whom the Lord deferred the things that could not then be borne; things which it no longer befits anyone to be unable to bear, since he through whom the power to bear them is given is not lacking. How long shall we plead the flesh because the Lord said, “The flesh is weak”? But he said first, “The spirit is willing,” so that the spirit may conquer the flesh and what is weak may yield to what is stronger. For he also says, “Let him who can receive it, receive it”; that is, let him who cannot, depart. That rich man, too, departed, who had not received the command to divide his substance among the needy, and he was left by the Lord to his own opinion. Nor will harshness be imputed to Christ on account of the fault of anyone's free will. “Behold,” he says, “I have set before you good and evil.” Choose what is good. If you cannot, because you will not (for he has shown that you can if you will, since he set both before your choice), you must depart from him whose will you do not do.

What harshness of ours is this, then, if we renounce those who do not do the will of God? What heresy, if we judge second marriages, as unlawful, to be next to adultery? For what is adultery but unlawful marriage? The apostle censures those who forbade marriage altogether and who also forbade foods that God created. We, however, no more abolish marriage by refusing second marriages than we condemn foods by fasting more often. To abolish is one thing, to moderate another; to lay down a law of not marrying is one thing, to set a limit to marrying another. Plainly, those who reproach us with harshness or think this a heresy: if they cherish the weakness of the flesh so much that they think it must be tolerated in marrying often, why, in another case, do they neither tolerate it nor cherish it with pardon, when it has been overcome by tortures into denial? Surely the weakness that fell in battle has a better claim to be excused than that which fell in the bedroom; that which gave way on the rack than that on the couch; that which yielded to cruelty than that which yielded to lust; that which was overcome groaning than that overcome in heat. Yet the former they drive from communion, because it did not endure to the end; the latter they receive, as though it too had endured to the end. Set out what each failed to endure to the end, and you will find the cause more honorable of the one that could not endure savagery than of the one that could not endure chastity. And yet the weakness of the flesh does not excuse even a bloody defection, much less an unchaste one.

But I laugh when weakness of the flesh is put forward, when it ought rather to be called the height of strength. To marry again is a matter of vigor; to rise again to the works of the flesh from the leisure of continence takes loins of substance. Such weakness is equal even to a third and a fourth and perhaps a seventh marriage, being stronger each time it has been weaker; and it will now have for its authority not the apostle but some Hermogenes, who is accustomed to marry more women than he paints. For matter abounds in him; and so, presuming that the soul comes from it, much less does he have the Spirit from God; he is no longer even a psychic, since he is not a psychic from the breath of God. What if someone pleads poverty, so as to profess openly that his flesh is prostituted, marrying for the sake of support, forgetting that one must not take thought for food and clothing? He has God, who feeds even the ravens and clothes even the flowers. What if he makes the loneliness of his house a pretext? As though one woman gave company to a man ever ready for flight! He has a widow, of course, whom he may take. To have not one wife of this kind but even several is allowed. What if someone thinks of posterity with the same mind as Lot's wife with her eyes, so that he seeks marriage again because he had no children from the former one? A Christian, of course, will seek heirs, he who is disinherited from the whole world! He has brothers; he has the church as his mother. It is another matter if they believe that with Christ too things are done under the Julian laws, and think that the unmarried and the childless cannot take the whole inheritance under God's testament. Let such people marry, then, right to the end, so that in this confusion of the flesh, like Sodom and Gomorrah and the days of the flood, they may be caught by that final end of the world. Let them add a third to the saying: “Let us eat and drink and marry, for tomorrow we die,” not reflecting that the “Woe” to those who are pregnant and nursing will come much heavier and more bitter in the shaking of the whole world than it came in the devastation of one small part, Judea. Let them gather from repeated marriages fruits well suited to the last times: overflowing breasts, nauseous wombs, and whimpering infants. Let them prepare for Antichrist things on which he may rage the more lustfully. He will bring them executioners for midwives. They will certainly have a fine privilege to plead before Christ: the weakness of the flesh at every point. But this will be judged no longer by Isaac, our monogamous father, nor by a John, Christ's eunuch, nor by Judith, the daughter of Merari, nor by so many other examples of the saints. Heathens are usually appointed as judges. The queen of Carthage will rise and pass sentence on Christian women: she who, a fugitive on foreign soil, and at that very time founding so great a city, when she ought to have been eager for marriage with a king, yet, so as not to experience a second marriage, preferred on the contrary to burn rather than to marry. Beside her will sit the Roman matron who, though she had known another man only through violence at night, washed the stain from her flesh with her own blood, to vindicate monogamy in herself. There have also been women who preferred to die for their husbands rather than marry after their husbands. For idols, certainly, both monogamy and widowhood are found. No one but a once-married woman places the crown on Fortuna Muliebris, as also on Mater Matuta. The Pontifex Maximus and the Flaminica marry once. The priestesses of Ceres, even while their husbands are alive and consenting, are widowed by an amicable separation. There are also those who will judge us concerning complete continence: the virgins of Vesta, of Achaean Juno, of Scythian Diana, and of Pythian Apollo. Even the priests of that Egyptian ox will judge the weakness of Christians in continence. Blush, flesh, you who have put on Christ! Let it suffice you to marry once, for which you were made from the beginning, to which you are called back by the end. Return to Adam, at least the first, if you cannot to the last. Once he tasted of the tree, once he desired, once he covered his shame, once he blushed before God, once he hid his blushing, once he was exiled from the paradise of holiness, once thereafter he married. If you were in him, you have your pattern; if you have passed into Christ, you ought to be better. Show me a third Adam, and him twice married, and then you may be what you cannot be between the two.