On Monogamy

Heretics abolish marriage; the psychics heap it up. The former do not marry even once; the latter, not only once. What are you to do, law of the Creator? Between strangers who make themselves eunuchs and your own people who drive on like charioteers, you have as much to complain of in the service of your own household as in the disdain of outsiders. Those who abuse you hurt you just as those who do not use you. But neither is continence of that kind to be praised, because it is heretical, nor is license to be defended, because it is psychic. The one blasphemes, the other runs riot; the one destroys the God of marriage, the other puts him to shame. With us, however, whom the recognition of spiritual gifts rightly causes to be called spiritual, continence is as religious as license is modest, since both are with the Creator. Continence honors the law of marriage, license tempers it; the one is not compelled, the other is ruled; the one has free choice, the other a limit. We know one marriage, as we know one God. The law of marriage brings greater honor where it also has modesty. But to the psychics, who do not receive the Spirit, the things that are of the Spirit are not pleasing. And so, since the things of the Spirit do not please, the things of the flesh will please, as being contrary to the Spirit. “The flesh,” it says, “lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” And what will the flesh desire but the things that are more of the flesh? That is why in the beginning, too, it became estranged from the Spirit: “My Spirit,” he says, “shall not remain in these men forever, because they are flesh.”

So they reproach the discipline of monogamy as heresy, and for no reason are they more driven to deny the Paraclete than because they think him the founder of a new discipline, and one very hard for them. So we must first settle this in a general discussion: whether it is conceivable that the Paraclete taught anything of this kind that could be counted either new, against catholic tradition, or burdensome, against the light burden of the Lord. On both points the Lord himself has pronounced. For in saying, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot yet bear them; when the Holy Spirit comes, he will lead you into all truth,” he certainly indicated clearly enough that the Spirit would do things that could be considered both new, since never published before, and at times burdensome, since that was why they were not published. “Then,” you say, “by this argument anything new and burdensome could be ascribed to the Paraclete, even if it came from the adversary spirit.” Certainly not. For the adversary spirit would show itself by the difference of its preaching, first adulterating the rule of faith and so adulterating the order of discipline; since the corruption of whatever stands first in rank comes first, that is, of faith, which is prior to discipline. A person must be a heretic about God before being one about practice. But the Paraclete, having many things to teach which the Lord deferred to him, according to the prior appointment, will first bear witness to Christ himself as we believe him, together with the whole order of God the Creator; he will glorify him and bring him to remembrance; and thus, recognized by the principal rule, he will reveal those many things that concern disciplines. The integrity of his preaching vouches for them: new though they are, because they are only now revealed; burdensome though they are, because even now they are not borne; yet they belong to no other Christ than the one who said that he also had many other things which the Paraclete would teach, things no less burdensome to these people than to those by whom they could not yet be borne then.

Whether monogamy is burdensome, let the still shameless weakness of the flesh see to that; but whether it is new, let us settle that meanwhile. For we say this further: even if the Paraclete had today prescribed total and complete virginity or continence, so as not to permit the heat of the flesh to be foamed off even in a single marriage, even so he would not seem to introduce anything new, since the Lord himself opens the kingdoms of heaven to eunuchs, being himself a eunuch; and looking to him the apostle too, having made himself a eunuch for that reason, prefers continence. “But,” you say, “with the right to marry preserved.” Preserved indeed, and we shall see how far; yet already destroyed in the respect in which he prefers continence. “It is good,” he says, “for a man not to touch a woman.” Then it is evil to touch one. For nothing is contrary to good except evil. And therefore it remains that even those who have wives should be as though they had none, so much the more should those who have none not have them. He also gives reasons why he so advises: that the unmarried think about God, but the married about how each may please his spouse in marriage. And I can contend that what is permitted is not purely good. For what is purely good is not permitted, but is lawful of itself. Permission sometimes has necessity as its cause. Finally, in this case the will of the one who permits is not that people should marry. For he wills something else: “I would,” he says, “that all of you were as I am.” And when he shows that this is better, what does he confirm that he wills, if not what he has first said is better? And so, if he permits something other than what he willed, permitting it not by will but by necessity, he shows that what he granted unwillingly is not purely good. Finally, when he says, “It is better to marry than to burn,” what sort of good is to be understood that is better than a punishment, that cannot seem better except when compared with the worst? That is good which holds this name by itself, without comparison, I do not say with an evil, but even with another good, so that even if it is compared with another good and overshadowed by it, it still remains in the name of good. But if it is forced to be called good by being set against an evil, it is not so much good as a kind of lesser evil, which, obscured by a greater evil, is pushed into the name of good. Take away the condition, then, so that you do not say, “It is better to marry than to burn,” and I ask whether you dare say, “It is better to marry,” without adding what it is better than. So it is no longer better; and while it is not better, it is not good either, once the condition is removed which, while it makes it better than something else, thereby forces it to be counted good. It is better to lose one eye than two. Yet if you leave aside the comparison of the two evils, it will not be better to have one eye, because it is not good either. What now, if he adapts every indulgence to marry from his own, that is, from human judgment, out of the necessity we mentioned, because it is better to marry than to burn? In fact, turning to the other class by saying, “But to the married I give charge, not I, but the Lord,” he shows that what he had said above was not of the Lord's authority but of human judgment. But when he turns minds back to continence (“But I would that you all were so”), “And I think,” he says, “that I too have the Spirit of God,” so that whatever he had allowed out of necessity he might revoke by the authority of the Holy Spirit. John too, warning that we ought to walk as the Lord walked, certainly admonished us to walk also according to holiness of the flesh. Even more plainly: “And everyone,” he says, “who has this hope in him makes himself chaste, as he too is chaste.” And elsewhere: “Be holy, as he too was holy”: in the flesh, that is. For he would not have said this of the spirit, since the spirit is acknowledged to be holy of itself and does not wait for an admonition to holiness, which is its own nature. But the flesh is taught holiness, the flesh which in Christ too was holy. So if all these things blot out the license to marry, both when the terms of the license are examined and when continence is set above it, why could not the same Spirit, coming after the apostles to lead the discipline into all truth by the stages of the times (as Ecclesiastes says, “A time for everything”), now put a final clasp on the flesh, no longer calling away from marriage indirectly but openly, since the time has now become still more “drawn in,” some 160 years having passed since then? Would you not reflect within yourself: This is an old discipline, shown beforehand even then in the Lord's flesh and will, and then in the counsels as well as the examples of his apostles? We were destined for this holiness long ago. The Paraclete introduces nothing new. What he forewarned, he defines; what he bore with, he demands. And now, as you reflect on these things, you will easily persuade yourself that it was much more fitting for the Paraclete to preach a single marriage, when he could have preached none, and that one should rather believe he moderated what it would have been fitting even to take away, if you understand what Christ wills. In this too you should recognize the Paraclete as an advocate: that he excuses your weakness from total continence.

Let mention of the Paraclete now withdraw, as if he were an authority peculiar to us. Let us unroll the documents of the ancient Scriptures that we share. We are showing this very thing: that the discipline of monogamy is neither new nor foreign, but rather both ancient and proper to Christians, so that you may perceive the Paraclete as its restorer rather than its founder. As regards antiquity, what more ancient pattern can be brought forward than the very enrollment of the human race? God fashioned one woman for the male, taking one rib of his, and certainly out of several. And in the preface to that very work he says: “It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make a helper for him.” For he would have said “helpers” if he had destined him for several wives. He added also a law for the future, since it was said prophetically: “And the two shall be into one flesh”: not three, nor more; otherwise no longer two, if more. The law stood. In fact, the unity of marriage continued in the founders of the race to the very end, not because there were no other women, but because there were none for this reason: that the firstfruits of the race might not be defiled by a double marriage. Otherwise, if God had willed it, there could have been; he could certainly have taken from the multitude of his daughters, having Eve no less from his own bones and flesh, if this could have been done piously. But when the first crime, murder, had been inaugurated in a brother's killing, no crime was so fit for second place as two marriages. For it makes no difference whether a man has had two wives one at a time, or two women at once have made two. The number of those joined and of those separated is the same. Yet God's institution, having once suffered violence through Lamech, stood firm afterwards to the very end of that people. No second Lamech appeared, as one married to two wives. What Scripture does not record, it denies. Other iniquities provoked the flood, avenged once, whatever they were, but not seventy-seven times, which two marriages deserved. And the renewal of the second human race too is reckoned from monogamy as its mother. Again two into one flesh undertake to grow and abound: Noah and his wife and their sons, in single marriages. Even in the animals monogamy is recognized, so that not even the beasts should be born of adultery. “Of all beasts,” he says, “of all flesh, you shall bring two into the ark, that they may live with you, male and female; they shall be of the flying creatures according to their kind, and of all the creeping things of the earth according to their kind; two of all shall go in to you, male and female.” In the same pattern he commands sevens also to be chosen by pairs, of male and female, one male and one female. What more shall I say? Not even unclean birds were allowed to go in with two females.

So much for the testimony of the beginnings, the advocacy of our origin, and the precedent of divine institution. This is certainly a law, not a mere record; for if it was so done from the beginning, we find that we are directed back to the beginning by Christ. In the question of divorce, when he said that it was permitted by Moses because of their hardness of heart, but from the beginning it was not so, he without doubt called back the indivisibility of marriage to the beginning. And therefore those two whom God joined from the beginning into one flesh, man shall not separate today. The apostle too, writing to the Ephesians, says that God purposed in himself, for the dispensation of the fulfillment of the times, to bring back all things in Christ to the head, that is, to the beginning, things above the heavens and on the earth, in him. So too the Lord put on himself two letters of the Greeks, the first and the last, figures of the beginning and the end meeting in himself; so that, just as Alpha rolls on to Omega and Omega is folded back again to Alpha, he might show that in him is both the course of the beginning to the end and the return of the end to the beginning; so that every dispensation, ending in him through whom it began (through the Word of God, namely, who became flesh), may end just as it began. And so fully are all things in Christ called back to the beginning that faith has turned back from circumcision to the wholeness of the flesh, as it was from the beginning; and so has freedom of foods, with abstinence from blood alone, as it was from the beginning; and the indivisibility of marriage, as it was from the beginning; and the restraint of divorce, which was not from the beginning; and finally the whole man is called back into paradise, where he was from the beginning. Why then should Christ not bring Adam back at least monogamous, when he cannot present him as whole as he was when sent out from there? So as regards the restoration of the beginning, the logic both of the dispensation and of your hope demands of you what was from the beginning, according to the beginning, which is reckoned to you in Adam and reckoned again in Noah. Choose in which of them you count your beginning. In both, the rule of monogamy claims you for itself. But if the beginning passes on to the end, as Alpha to Omega, just as the end refers back to the beginning, as Omega to Alpha, and so our enrollment is transferred into Christ, the natural into the spiritual (since what is spiritual is not first, but what is natural, and then what is spiritual), let us see likewise whether you owe the same thing to this second enrollment too, whether the last Adam also meets you in the same form as the first. For the last Adam, that is Christ, was wholly unmarried, as the first Adam also was before his exile. But, granting your weakness the example of his own flesh, the more perfect Adam, that is Christ, more perfect also by being more whole, meets you, if you are willing, as a eunuch in the flesh. If you are not equal to that, he meets you as monogamous in the spirit, having one church as his bride, according to the figure of Adam and Eve, which the apostle interprets of that great mystery, of Christ and the church, as fitting carnal monogamy through the spiritual. You see, then, how, even in renewing your enrollment in Christ, you cannot bring it forward without the profession of monogamy, unless you are in the flesh what he is in the spirit; although you ought equally to have been what he was in the flesh.

But let us look further for some founders of our origin. For to some people the monogamous parents Adam and Noah are not pleasing, and perhaps not even Christ. So they appeal to Abraham, though they are forbidden to acknowledge any father but God. Very well, let Abraham be our father; let Paul be so too: “In the Gospel,” he says, “I have begotten you.” Show yourself a son of Abraham as well. For your descent from him is not from just any point; there is a fixed time at which he is your father. For if we are counted sons of Abraham by faith, as the apostle teaches when he says to the Galatians, “You know, surely, that those who are of faith are the sons of Abraham,” when did Abraham believe God, and it was counted to him as righteousness? Still in monogamy, I think, since not yet in circumcision. But if afterwards he changed in both respects, into digamy through concubinage with a slave woman, and into circumcision through the seal of the covenant, you cannot acknowledge him as father except at the time when he believed God, since you are his son according to faith, not according to the flesh. Or, if you follow the later Abraham as father, that is, the twice-married one, accept the circumcised one too. If you reject the circumcised one, you will therefore refuse the twice-married one as well. You cannot mix his two dispensations, which differ from each other in two ways. He began to be twice-married along with circumcision, and was monogamous along with uncircumcision. If you accept digamy, admit circumcision too. If you defend uncircumcision, you are bound to monogamy as well. Indeed, you are the son of a monogamous Abraham just as of an uncircumcised one, so that if you are circumcised you are no longer his son, because you will not be of faith, but of the seal of the faith that was justified in uncircumcision. You have the apostle: learn with the Galatians. So even if you bring digamy upon yourself, you are not the son of that Abraham whose faith came first, in monogamy. For even if he was afterwards named the father of many nations, it was of those who were to be counted sons of Abraham from the faith that preceded his digamy. What came afterwards is another matter. Figures are one thing, patterns another; images one thing, definitions another. Images pass away once fulfilled; definitions remain to be fulfilled. Images prophesy; definitions govern. What that digamy of Abraham portends, the same apostle teaches, the interpreter of both testaments, just as he also determines that our seed is called in Isaac. If you are of the free woman, belonging to Isaac, he certainly kept to one marriage. These, then, as I think, are the ones in whom I am enrolled; the others I do not know. If I look around at their examples (a certain David, heaping marriages on himself even through bloodshed; a certain Solomon, rich even in wives), I am told to follow the better: you have Joseph too, husband of one wife, and on that account, I dare say, better than his father; you have Moses, God's intimate intermediary; you have Aaron, the chief priest. The second Moses too, of the second people, who led our image into the promise of God, in whom the name of the Lord was first consecrated, was not twice married.

After the old examples of the persons of our origins, let us pass likewise to the old documents of the Scriptures of the law, so as to go through all our equipment in order. And since some people sometimes say they have nothing to do with the law (which Christ did not dissolve but fulfilled), and sometimes snatch from the law whatever they want, we too say plainly that the law has passed away in this sense: its burdens, which, according to the judgment of the apostles, not even the fathers could bear, have been given up; but what concerns righteousness not only remains reserved but has been enlarged, so that our righteousness may exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. If righteousness, then certainly chastity too. Now the law commands that a man take in marriage the wife of his brother who died without children, to raise up seed for his brother, and this can happen more than once to the same woman, according to that crafty question of the Sadducees. If for that reason they think that frequent marriages are permitted in other cases too, they must first understand the reason for the precept itself, and so they will know that the reason has now ceased and belongs to those parts of the law that have been made void. It was necessary to succeed to the marriage of a brother who had died without children: first, because that old blessing, “Increase and abound,” still had to run its course; next, because the sins of fathers were required even of sons; third, because eunuchs and the barren were held in disgrace. So, lest those who had departed childless, not through a fault of nature but because death came first, be judged accursed on that account, a substitute and, as it were, posthumous offspring was provided for them from their own family. But when the end of the times had made void “Increase and abound,” as the apostle introduced, “It remains that those who have wives should be as though they had none, because the time is drawn in”; and when the sour grape eaten by the fathers ceased to set the sons' teeth on edge, for each will die in his own sin; and when eunuchs not only were free of disgrace but even earned favor, being invited into the kingdoms of heaven; then, with the law of succeeding to a brother's marriage buried, its opposite prevailed: not to succeed to a brother's marriage. And so, as we said before, what has ceased to be valid, now that its reason has ceased, cannot lend an argument to anything else. So a wife whose husband has died will not marry; for she would certainly be marrying a brother if she married, since we are all brothers. And she who is to marry “in the Lord” must marry, that is, not a heathen but a brother, since the old law too takes away marriage with foreigners. But since it is also laid down in Leviticus, “Whoever takes his brother's wife, it is uncleanness, a disgrace; he will die childless,” without doubt, while he is forbidden to marry again, she is forbidden too, having no one to marry but a brother. How the apostle will agree with the law, which he does not wholly attack, will be shown when we come to his letter. Meanwhile, as far as the law is concerned, its arguments suit us better. Indeed, the same law forbids priests to marry again. It also commands that a priest's daughter, widowed or put away, if she has no seed, shall return to her father's house and be fed from his bread. “If she has no seed,” then: not so that, if she has, she may marry again (how much more will she not marry if she has children?), but so that, if she has, she may be fed by her son rather than by her father, so that the son too may carry out God's commandment, “Honor father and mother.” But Jesus, the high and great priest of the Father, clothing us from what is his own (for those who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ), has made us priests to God his Father, according to John. For he also called back that young man who was hurrying to his father's funeral, in order to show that he calls us priests, whom the law forbade to be present at the burial of parents: “The priest,” it says, “shall not go in to any dead soul, and he shall not be defiled for his father or for his mother.” Must we then observe this prohibition too? Certainly not. For our one Father, God, lives, and so does our mother the church; and we are not dead, who live to God, nor do we bury the dead, since they too live in Christ. Certainly we are priests called by Christ, bound to monogamy by the ancient law of God, which then prophesied us in its priests.

Now, turning to the law that is properly ours, that is, the Gospel, what examples meet us before we come to its sayings? See, at once, as on the threshold, two high priestesses of Christian holiness meet us, monogamy and continence: the one modest, in Zechariah the priest; the other whole, in John the forerunner; the one appeasing God, the other preaching Christ; the one proclaiming the complete priest, the other presenting more than a prophet, namely one who not only preached Christ or pointed him out face to face, but even baptized him. For who could more worthily initiate the Lord's body than flesh of the same kind as that which conceived it and bore it? And indeed a virgin gave birth to Christ, one who was to marry once after the birth, so that both titles of holiness might be counted in Christ's lineage, through a mother both virgin and married once. And when the infant is presented in the temple, who takes him into his arms? Who first recognizes him in the Spirit? A just and devout man, and certainly not twice married, if only so that Christ should not soon be proclaimed more worthily by a woman, an old widow married only once, who, devoted to the temple, showed well enough in herself what kind of persons ought to cleave to the spiritual temple, that is, the church. Such were the witnesses the Lord had as an infant; he had no others as a grown man. Peter alone I find to have been married, through his mother-in-law; I presume him monogamous through the church, which, built upon him, was going to place monogamous men in every rank of its order. The rest, since I do not find them married, I must understand to have been either eunuchs or continent. For even if among the Greeks women and wives are denoted by a common word, for convenience of usage (though there is a proper word for wives), we shall not on that account interpret Paul as though he showed that the apostles had wives. For if he were discussing marriage, as he does in what follows, where the apostle could better have named some example, he would rightly seem to be saying, “For do we not have the right to take wives about with us, as the other apostles and Cephas?” But when he adds words that show his abstinence regarding provision for food, saying, “For do we not have the right to eat and drink?” he does not show wives taken about by the apostles (those who have no wives still have the right to eat and drink), but simply women who ministered to them in the same way as those who accompanied the Lord. Now, if Christ rebukes the scribes and Pharisees, who sat in Moses' seat and did not do what they taught, how could he himself set on his own seat men mindful to command holiness of the flesh rather than also to practice it, when he had in every way instilled it into them as something both to be taught and to be done? First by his own example, then by other arguments: when he says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; when he makes others, who have become children after marriage, their companions; when he calls us to the simplicity of the dove, a bird not only harmless but chaste, which one male alone knows; when he denies that the Samaritan woman has a husband, to show that a many-times husband is an adulterer; when, in the revelation of his glory, out of so many saints and prophets he prefers to have Moses and Elijah with him, the one monogamous, the other a eunuch. For Elijah was none other than John, who came in the spirit and power of Elijah. And when that “glutton and drinker,” a frequent guest at lunches and dinners with tax collectors and sinners, dines once at a single wedding, though many were certainly marrying, he willed to celebrate weddings as many times as he willed them to take place.

But let these arguments be reckoned as forced out of conjectures, if the sayings did not stand beside them which the Lord uttered in dealing with divorce, which, once permitted, he now forbids: first, because from the beginning it was not so, just like the number of marriages; then, because what God has joined, man shall not separate, that is, so as not to act against the Lord. For he alone will separate who also joined; and he will separate not through the hardness of divorce, which he reproaches and restrains, but through the debt of death, since not one of two sparrows falls to the ground without the Father's will. Therefore, if those whom God has joined man shall not separate by divorce, it is equally consistent that those whom God has separated by death man shall not join by marriage; for he would be joining the separation against God's will just as much as if he had separated the joining. So much as regards not destroying God's will and rebuilding the pattern of the beginning. But another reason also agrees; or rather not another, but the one that imposed the pattern of the beginning and moved God's will to forbid divorce: that whoever dismisses his wife except for the cause of adultery makes her commit adultery, and he who marries a woman dismissed by her husband certainly commits adultery. Can a divorced woman not marry lawfully? And if she commits some such thing without the name of marriage, does she escape the charge of adultery, on the ground that adultery is a crime within marriage? God has judged otherwise than men: that altogether, whether through marriage or promiscuously, the admission of another man is pronounced by him adultery. Let us see what marriage is with God, and so we shall know equally what adultery is. Marriage is when God joins two into one flesh, or, finding them joined in the same flesh, has sealed the joining. Adultery is when, the two having been separated in whatever way, another flesh, or rather a strange flesh, is mingled, of which it cannot be said, “This is flesh from my flesh and bone from my bones.” For this, once done and declared, as from the beginning, so now cannot apply to another flesh. So you will say without reason that God does not will a divorced woman to be joined to another man while her husband is alive, as though he willed it when he is dead; since if she is not bound to him when he is dead, neither is she bound while he lives. If marriage is dissolved by divorce as well as by death, she will not be bound to the one with whom that which bound her has been broken off. To whom, then, will she be bound? It makes no difference to God whether she marries while her husband is alive or dead. For she sins not against him but against herself. “Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits adultery sins against his own body.” And he commits adultery, as we laid down above, who mingles another flesh with himself over and above that former one which God either joined into two or found joined. And therefore he abolished divorce, which was not from the beginning, in order to fortify what was from the beginning, the perseverance of two in one flesh, lest the necessity or occasion of a third union of flesh should break in; he permits divorce for one cause only, if what is being guarded against should happen to come first. So far, indeed, was divorce from existing at the beginning that among the Romans this kind of hardness is recorded to have been committed first after the six hundredth year from the founding of the city. But they commit adulteries even without divorcing; to us, even if we divorce, it will not be permitted even to marry.

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.