On Modesty 8–13

But the same outcome deceives most interpreters of parables as very often happens in cloth to be matched with purple. When you think you have correctly harmonized the blends of the colors, and believe you have skillfully united their comparisons with one another, soon, when both pieces are brought out into the light, the difference exposed will spew out the whole error. With the same dimness, then, about the parable of the two sons too, some, because the figures match in color for the moment, swerve from the true light of the comparison which the matter of the parable put forward. For they place two peoples in the two sons, the Jewish in the elder, the Christian in the younger. For they cannot then set in the younger son a Christian sinner who will obtain pardon unless they have portrayed the Jew in the elder. Now if I show that the Jew does not fit the comparison with the elder son, it follows surely that the Christian will not be admitted to the likeness of the younger son either. For though the Jew too is called a son, and the elder, because he was first in adoption; though he also envies the Christian his reconciliation with God the Father, which the other side seizes on most of all; yet it will not be the Jew's saying to the father, “Look, for so many years I have served you and never transgressed your command.” For when was the Jew not a transgressor of the law, hearing with the ear and not hearing, hating him who reproves in the gates and holding the holy word in contempt? So neither will the father's voice to the Jew be, “You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” For the Jews are pronounced apostate sons, begotten indeed and raised on high, but who have not regarded God and have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger. We shall say, plainly, that all things were granted to the Jew, from whom even every more pleasing condition of food was snatched away, not to speak of the very land of the fatherly promise! And so, no less than the younger son, the Jew today, having squandered God's substance, begs in a foreign country, serving until now its princes, that is, of this world. Let the Christians, then, look for another brother of theirs; for the parable does not admit the Jew. It would have been much more fitting to match the Christian with the elder and the Jew with the younger son, according to the comparison of faith, if the order of the two peoples marked out from Rebecca's womb allowed the exchange. Except that the ending too would resist it. For it will befit the Christian to rejoice at the restoration of the Jew, not to grieve, since our whole hope is joined with the remaining expectation of Israel. So even if some points will fit, the equivalence of the examples is destroyed by others that point the opposite way. And yet, even if everything could answer as in a mirror, there is one and principal danger of interpretations: that the ease of comparisons be adjusted in another direction than the matter of each parable required. For we remember that actors too, when they fit allegorical gestures to songs, express things far from the present story, stage, and character, and yet most fittingly. But let extraordinary ingenuity look to itself: that has nothing to do with Andromache. So too the heretics apply these same parables where they wish, and exclude them, most neatly, from where they ought to go. Why most neatly? Because from the beginning they fashioned the matter of their doctrines to suit the occasions of the parables. For they, freed from the rule of truth, of course had leisure to seek out and put together things of which the parables seem to speak.

We, however, because we do not devise matter from parables but interpret parables from their matter, do not labor greatly to twist everything in exposition, so long as we avoid contradictions. Why a hundred sheep? And why ten drachmas, of all things? And what is that broom? It was necessary that he who wished to express how very pleasing to God is the salvation of one sinner should name some quantity of a number, from which he could describe one as lost; it was necessary that the manner of the woman seeking the drachma in the house should be fitted out with the help both of a broom and of a lamp. For curiosities of this kind both make some things suspect and, by the subtlety of forced expositions, mostly lead away from the truth. There are also things set down simply to build and arrange and clothe the parable, so that they may be carried through to that for which the example is provided. And surely the two sons will look to the same point as the drachma and the sheep. For the things to which they are attached have the same cause, and surely the same muttering of the Pharisees about the Lord's dealings with the heathen. Or if anyone doubts that tax collectors were heathen in Judea, which had long since been seized by the hand of Pompey and Lucullus, let him read Deuteronomy: “There shall be no one paying tribute from the sons of Israel.” Nor would the name of tax collectors have been so detestable to the Lord, unless it were foreign, the name of men who sell the passage of heaven and earth and sea itself. And when he joins sinners to tax collectors, he does not at once show them to be Jews, though some could have been. But by putting them together he distinguished one class of heathen into those who were sinners by occupation, that is tax collectors, and those who were so by nature, that is not tax collectors. Besides, he would not have been censured for sharing food with Jews, but with heathen, whose table the Jewish discipline shuns. Now about the prodigal son, what is more useful must be considered first. For a matching of examples will not be admitted, however perfectly it fits on the page, if it is most harmful to salvation. But we see the whole state of salvation, which is set in the continuance of discipline, overturned by the interpretation which the other side affects. For if it is a Christian who, having received from God the Father a substance, namely that of baptism, of the Holy Spirit, and thence of eternal hope, has wandered far from the Father and squandered it living like a heathen; if, stripped of the goods of the mind, he has handed over his service even to the prince of the world (to whom else than the devil?), and, set by him to feed pigs, that is, to tend unclean spirits, has come to his senses to return to the Father: then not adulterers and fornicators only, but idolaters and blasphemers and deniers and every kind of apostate will make satisfaction to the Father by this parable; and in this way of imaging, most truly, the whole substance of the sacrament has been crushed. For who will fear to squander what he will be able to recover afterward? Who will take care to keep forever what he will not be able to lose forever? Security about sin is also a lust for it. So the apostate too will recover his former robe, the garment of the Holy Spirit, and the ring again, the seal of the washing, and Christ will be sacrificed for him once more, and he will recline on that couch from which those unworthily clothed are usually taken by the torturers and thrown into the darkness, not to speak of those stripped. It is more, then, if it is not even expedient that the pattern of the prodigal son should fit the Christian. But if the image of the son does not fit the Jew wholly either, the interpretation will be guided simply by the Lord's purpose. The Lord had come, surely, to save what was lost, a physician needed more by the sick than by the healthy. This he both pictured in parables and preached in sayings. Who among men is lost, who is failing in health, except the one who does not know God? Who is safe and sound, except the one who knows God? These two kinds, brothers by descent, this parable too will signify. See whether the heathen does not have a substance in God the Father: of endowment, of wisdom, of natural knowledge of God, through which the apostle also notes that in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, which surely it had received from God. This, then, he squandered, cast far from the Lord in his conduct, among the errors and allurements and lusts of the world, where, driven by hunger for the truth, he handed himself over to the prince of this age. He set him over pigs (to feed that flock familiar to demons), where he would not have access to the food of life and at the same time would see others in God's work abounding with heavenly bread. He remembers God the Father; having made satisfaction he returns, receives his former robe, that is, the state which Adam lost by transgressing. He receives the ring too, then for the first time, with which, when questioned, he seals the covenant of faith; and so from then on he feeds on the richness of the Lord's body, that is, the Eucharist. This will be the prodigal son, who was never thrifty before, who was prodigal from the first because he was not a Christian from the first. It is he whom the Pharisees too were grieving over, returning from the world to the Father's embrace in the tax collectors and sinners. And therefore the elder brother's envy is fitted to this point alone: not because the Jews were innocent and obedient to God, but because they begrudged the nations salvation, plainly those who ought always to have been with the Father. And surely the Jew groans at the Christian's first calling at once, not at his second restoration. For the former shines out even to the heathen, but the latter, which is carried out in the churches, is not known even to the Jews. I think I have given interpretations better fitted to the matter of the parables, to the correspondence of things, and to the protection of disciplines. But if the other side is eager to picture the sheep and the drachma and the son's riotous living as a Christian sinner in order to grant adultery and sexual immorality by penance, then either the other capital sins too will have to be granted alike, or adultery and sexual immorality, their equals, will have to be kept unpardonable like them. But it is more that it is not permitted to argue anything beyond what was being dealt with. In short, if it were permitted to carry the parables over elsewhere, we would rather direct their hope to martyrdom, which alone will be able to restore the son when all his substance has been squandered, and will proclaim with joy the drachma found among everything, even in dung, and will bring back to the flock, on the Lord's own shoulders, the sheep that fled through every rough and steep place. But we prefer to understand less in the Scriptures, if it so happens, rather than against them. So we must keep the Lord's sense and precept. Transgression in interpretation is no lighter than in conduct.

Having shaken off, then, the yoke of explaining these parables of the heathen, and having once seen through, or else accepted, the necessity of interpreting them in no other way than the matter of the subject requires, they now contend that the proclamation of repentance does not even fit the heathen, since their sins are not liable to it, being of course to be charged to ignorance, which nature alone makes guilty before God. Further, they say, remedies mean nothing to those to whom the dangers themselves mean nothing; the reason of repentance holds where sin is committed with knowledge and will, where both guilt and grace are understood; he mourns, he rolls on the ground, who knows both what he has lost and what he will recover if he sacrifices repentance to God, who surely offers it to sons rather than to strangers. Did Jonah, then, think repentance unnecessary for the heathen Ninevites for this reason, when he quibbled over the duty of preaching? Or did he rather fear, foreseeing God's mercy poured out even on strangers, that it would, as it were, destroy his proclamation? And so, for the sake of a profane city, not yet possessed of God, still sinning in ignorance, did the prophet nearly perish? Except that he underwent an example of the Lord's passion, which was to redeem the heathen too when they repented. It is well that John too, laying down the ways of the Lord, was a herald of repentance no less to soldiers and tax collectors than to the sons of Abraham. The Lord himself presumed repentance in the Sidonians and Tyrians, if they had seen the proofs of his mighty works. Yet I will contend that it fits sinners by nature more than sinners by will. For he will deserve its fruit more who has not yet used it than he who has already misused it; and remedies will mean more when first used than when worn out. No doubt the Lord is more kind to the ungrateful than to the ignorant, and more quickly merciful to the rejected than to those not yet tested, so that he is not more angered by insults to his clemency than he fawns on them, and does not more gladly impart it to strangers than he has lost it in his sons, having adopted the nations in this way while the Jews make game of his patience! But this is what the psychics want: that God, the just judge, should prefer the repentance of that sinner rather than the death of one who preferred death to repentance. If that is so, we earn merit by sinning. Come now, you tightrope walker of modesty and chastity and all holiness in regard to sex, who tread the finest thread of such discipline, with your foot hanging over the pathless ways of truth, balancing the flesh with the spirit, moderating the soul by faith, restraining the eye by fear: why are you so wholly intent on your step? Go on, by all means, if you can, if you will, as long as you are so secure and as if on solid ground. For if some wavering of the flesh, some distraction of the mind, some straying of the eye shakes you from your course, God is good. He holds out his bosom to his own, not to the heathen; a second repentance will receive you; you will be a Christian again after being an adulterer. This is what you tell me, most kindly interpreter of God! But I would yield to you if the writing of the Shepherd, which alone loves adulterers, had deserved to be included in the divine instrument; if it were not judged among the apocryphal and false writings by every council of the churches, even of yours; itself adulterous, and hence the patron of its companions, from which you are initiated in other ways too; to which, perhaps, that shepherd will be patron whom you paint on your cup, himself a prostitutor of the Christian sacrament, rightly both the idol of drunkenness and the refuge of the adultery that will follow the cup, from which you would drink nothing more gladly than the sheep of a second repentance. But I drink the Scripture of that Shepherd who cannot be broken. John offers it to me at once, with the washing and duty of repentance, saying: “Bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not say, ‘We have Abraham as our father’” (lest, that is, they should again take up the flatteries of sinning from the favor of the fathers), “for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” So he follows us too: those who have sinned up to now, bearing the fruit worthy of repentance. For what ripens from repentance but the effect of amendment? But even if pardon is rather the fruit of repentance, this too cannot stand without the ceasing of sin. So the ceasing of sin is the root of pardon, so that pardon may be the fruit of repentance.

From there, as regards the gospel, the question of the parables has now been discussed. But if the Lord also by deeds granted something of this kind to sinners, as when he allowed the sinful woman even the touch of his body, as she washed his feet with tears and wiped them with her hair and anointed him beforehand for his burial with ointment; as when to the Samaritan woman, in her sixth marriage now, not an adulteress but a prostitute, he showed who he was, which he did not readily do for anyone; nothing from this is brought to our adversaries, even if he had granted pardon of sins to people who were already Christians. For we say now: this is permitted to the Lord alone; may the power of his indulgence work today. Yet as regards those times in which he acted on earth, we lay down this: that it prejudges nothing against us if pardon was given to sinners, even Jewish ones. For Christian discipline is reckoned from the renewal of the testament and, as we said before, from the redemption of the flesh, that is, the Lord's passion. No one was perfect before the order of faith was found, no one a Christian before Christ was taken back into heaven, no one holy before the Holy Spirit was presented from heaven, the one who fixes that very discipline.

So let these men, who have received another Paraclete in the apostles and through the apostles, whom, not recognizing him now in his own prophets, they no longer possess even in the apostles; come now, let them teach even from the apostolic instrument that stains of the flesh splashed on it after baptism can be washed away by penance. Did not the pattern of the old law remain in force in the apostles too, in showing how great adultery is, lest perhaps it be thought lighter in the newness of disciplines than in their antiquity? When the gospel first thundered and shook the old order, so that there was debate about the necessity of keeping the law, the apostles, by the authority of the Holy Spirit, send out this first rule to those who were already beginning to be gathered from the nations: “It has seemed good,” they say, “to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no further weight than those things from which it is necessary to abstain: from sacrifices and from acts of sexual immorality and from blood. By keeping yourselves from these you will do rightly, the Holy Spirit forbidding them.” It is enough that here too the place of honor of adultery and sexual immorality is kept, between idolatry and homicide. For we shall understand the prohibition of blood to be much more of human blood. Further, what kind of crimes do the apostles want those to seem which alone they pick out of the former law to be observed, which alone they prescribe as necessarily to be abstained from? Not that they allow others, but that they put these alone first, surely as not remissible, who for the heathen's sake made the other burdens of the law remissible. Why, then, do they free our neck from so great a yoke, except to place these summaries of discipline on it forever? Why do they indulge the appetite wholly, except to bind us forever to the more necessary things? They released us from the many, so that we might be bound to observe the more harmful. The matter was done by compensation. We gained much so that we might render some things. But a compensation is not revocable, unless indeed it will be revoked by a repetition of adultery, and surely of blood and idolatry too. For the whole law will be resumed if the condition of pardon is dissolved. But the Holy Spirit did not make a light compact with us, a compact made even of his own accord, so that he is to be honored all the more. No one will dissolve his pledge except an ungrateful man. He will neither take back now what he released, nor release what he retained. The state of the newest testament is always unchangeable, and surely the reading of that decree and that counsel will cease only with the world. He sufficiently refused pardon for those whose observance he chose; he will punish what he did not likewise grant. Hence it is that peace is restored by the churches neither to idolatry nor to blood. That the apostles fell away from this definition of theirs it is not permitted, I think, to believe; or if some can believe it, they will have to prove it.

We plainly know their suspicions here too. For in fact they suspect that the apostle Paul in Second Corinthians gave pardon to the same fornicator whom in the First he pronounced must be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, the impious heir of his father's marriage; as though he himself afterward reversed his pen, writing: “But if anyone has caused grief, he has not grieved me, but in part, not to burden you all. Sufficient is such a rebuke, which is given by many; so that on the contrary you should rather forgive and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up by excessive grief. Therefore I beg you to confirm love toward him. For to this end I also wrote, that I might know your proof, that you obey me in all things. And to whom you forgive anything, I do also. For if I have forgiven anything, I have forgiven it in the person of Christ, so that we may not be defrauded by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his devices.” What is understood here about a fornicator, about the defiler of his father's bed, about a Christian who went beyond the shamelessness of the heathen, when surely he would have released with a special pardon the man he had condemned with special wrath? He is more obscure in pity than in indignation. He is more open in severity than in leniency. And yet anger is more easily oblique than indulgence. Sadder things hesitate more than happier ones. Evidently a slight indulgence was in question; which, if it were perhaps being weighed now, when even the greatest things are not usually forgiven without public proclamation, is far from being given without any indication. And you indeed, leading the penance of an adulterer into the church to beg the brotherhood, clad in haircloth and covered with ashes, a composite of disgrace and horror, prostrate him in the middle before the widows, before the presbyters, grasping the hems of all, licking the footprints of all, clasping the knees of all; and toward this plight of the man do you, good shepherd and blessed father, harangue with all the enticements of mercy you can, and in the parable of the sheep go looking for your goats? Lest your sheep leap out of the flock again (as though from then on it were permitted, what was not permitted even once), do you fill the rest with fear at the very moment you are most indulgent? But would the apostle have forgiven so recklessly the wicked lust of sexual immorality weighed down with incest that he did not require of him even this lawful garb of penance, which you ought to have learned from him? That he threatened nothing about the future, said nothing about the rest? On the contrary, he even goes on to beg them to confirm love toward him, as one making satisfaction, not as one pardoning. And yet I hear “love,” not “communion.” As also to the Thessalonians: “But if anyone does not obey our word through the letter, mark him and do not associate with him, so that he may be ashamed, not regarding him as an enemy, but rebuking him as a brother.” So he could have said that to the fornicator too only love was granted, not communion as well; but to the incestuous man not even love, since he had ordered him to be removed from their midst, and much more, surely, from their mind. “But he feared that they would be defrauded by Satan in the loss of that person, whom he himself had cast out to Satan; or that he whom he had assigned to the destruction of the flesh would be swallowed up by excessive grief.” Here they now interpret the destruction of the flesh as the duty of penance, because it is thought to make satisfaction to God by wasting the flesh with fasts and squalor and every neglect and deliberate ill-treatment; so that from this they argue that the fornicator, or rather that incestuous man, was handed over by the apostle to Satan not for perdition but for amendment, as though he would afterward obtain pardon on account of the destruction, that is, the affliction, of the flesh, and therefore did obtain it. Plainly the same apostle handed Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan, that they might be corrected not to blaspheme, as he writes to his Timothy. But he himself also says that a stake was given him, an angel of Satan, by whom he was buffeted, lest he exalt himself. If they touch on this too, so that we should understand those handed over to Satan by him as handed over for amendment, not for perdition, what is there alike between blasphemy and incest and a soul untouched by these, indeed elated from no other source than the highest holiness and all innocence, which in the apostle was restrained by buffetings, perhaps by pain, as they say, of the ear or of the head? But incest and blasphemy deserved to hand over whole men into the possession of Satan himself, not of his angel. For on this point there is a difference, indeed it matters very much, that we read that those men were handed over by the apostle to Satan, but that to the apostle an angel of Satan was given. Finally, when Paul entreats the Lord, what does he hear? “Let my grace be enough for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Those who are handed over to Satan cannot hear this. And if the crime of Hymenaeus and Alexander, namely blasphemy, is irremissible both in this age and in the one to come, surely the apostle would not, against the Lord's decree, have handed over to Satan in hope of pardon men already sunk from faith into blasphemy. Hence he also pronounced them shipwrecked in regard to faith, no longer having the comfort of the ship of the church. For pardon is denied to those who have struck from faith into blasphemy. Heathen and heretics, on the other hand, emerge daily from blasphemy. And even if he said, “I have handed them over to Satan, that they may receive the discipline not to blaspheme,” he said it of the rest, who, those men having been handed to Satan, that is, cast outside the church, would learn that one must not blaspheme. So, then, he handed the incestuous fornicator too over to Satan not for amendment but for perdition, to whom he had already passed over by sinning beyond the heathen, so that they might learn that one must not commit sexual immorality. In short, he says “for the destruction of the flesh,” not its torment, condemning the very substance through which he had fallen, which had from then on already perished, baptism having been lost; “that the spirit,” he says, “may be saved in the day of the Lord.” For let this too be asked: whether the spirit of the man himself will be saved. Will the spirit, then, polluted by so great a crime, be saved because the flesh has been lost for this reason? Saved in punishment? Will the contrary interpretation, then, count punishment as without flesh? In that way we lose the resurrection of the flesh. It remains, then, that he meant that spirit which is reckoned in the church, which must be presented saved, that is, intact, on the day of the Lord, from the contagion of impurities, the incestuous fornicator having been cast out. For he adds: “Do you not know that a little leaven spoils the whole lump?” And yet incestuous sexual immorality was not a little leaven, but a great one.