Homilies (complete)

From the Gospel according to Matthew, on “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for any cause?” A fine pair, for Christians and the industrious, are these two days, the Sabbath and the Lord's day, I mean, which time brings round in its cycle every week. For as mothers or nurses of the church they both gather the people and set the priests as instructors in the chair, and … both disciples and teachers to the care of souls. In my ears, then, yesterday's discourse still echoes, and what was laboured over sits in my memory. I see the cross fixed in place through the prophecy of Isaiah, and the garments of the Lord dyed with blood like those of one who treads the winepress, and the Saviour bearing his reward ready in his right hand. And I behold Solomon making exact for us the scales and the weights, as far as may be. And I pity the debtor in the Gospel, who did not share with his fellow servant the kindness that he had received from the Master, but out of thoughtlessness and … For on these heads we laboured on the past [day], as all of you know who [listened] not carelessly … But today again the Spirit has set before us many things, and all good, on the table that is seen. I turned my mind to the garrulous and tempting Pharisees, and I pitied them greatly for the wickedness of their ways, in which by their questions they even attempted [to test] the very spring of wisdom … from their own designs. Yet thanks to them, [since through them] the women's side may be taught what concerns it and the men's side may profit by what is special to it. … I see the aim of the question. For since … the sequence of cohabitation inescapable, which one ought to honour as a law of God. “Those joined to each other are no longer two but one flesh; so that what God has yoked together, let man not separate.” … pleasure, so it is also with those united by law and ordinance; but entirely the opposite, O man: a single union of both body and soul takes place, so that character is blended with character and flesh in a way bound to flesh. How, then, do you cut it apart unfeelingly? How do you go off easily and without pain, when you took a partner of life, not a servant for a few days, your sister and wife? Sister by the account of the forming and the creation (for you came into being from one cause, the earth, and the same matter); wife, through the union of the yoke, through the law of marriage. What sort of bond will you break, being bound both by law and by nature? And how will you set aside the agreements that you made at the marriage? And which do you think I mean? Those of the dowry written up here, when with your own hand you signed the document, sealing what was done? Those too are strong and offer sufficient security; but I refer myself to the voice of Adam: “This is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones; she shall be called my wife.” This voice is not preserved in writing in vain, but is a common acknowledgment of men, set out through one person, the first, to the common multitude of women who are joined by law to husbands. And do not be surprised that one is held to account for what another said. For all that happened to the first-formed in the beginning became the nature of the race that followed.

If, then, the wife sent away for nothing should take the book of the Creation and drag you before the judge (the same one is judge and witness), what will you say, tell me? How will you erase your own voice, which you uttered before God, of which the servant of God became [the recorder]? God gave the woman to Adam without father or mother; and for this reason, as guardian, he secured the orphan; and now daughters use their mother's rights strongly against ungrateful and faithless husbands; so that contempt for your wife is impossible for you on every side, bound as you are both by ancient divine laws and by new human ones. Let the usefulness of the wife for life also shame you. She is a member, she is a helper; a co-worker in the conduct of life and in the begetting of children; an aid in sickness, a consolation in afflictions, a guardian of the hearth, a treasury of possessions; grieving at the same things, rejoicing at the same things; sharing wealth in common, if it is there; managing wretched poverty, resisting its pains resourcefully and patiently, enduring the toil of rearing children because of her life with you. And if a reversal of affairs overtakes you somewhere, [wealth] sinks and vanishes; those thought to be friends, measuring friendship by the season of prosperity, withdraw in troubles; slaves run away from their master and his misfortunes alike. There remains the wife, … and of caring for her husband: wiping away his tears, tending the wound if he is scourged, following him when he is led to prison; and if anyone lets her go in with him, she gladly shares his confinement; and if she is prevented even from this, she stays at the doors of the prison, like a little dog accustomed to its master. I knew a woman who cut off her hair and put on a man's clothing, and that a coloured one, so as not to be separated from her husband when he was fleeing and in hiding. Seeming to be a slave, she was in truth the slave of love; and she continued this life for many years, exchanging place for place and wilderness for wilderness. Such too we find the wife of the most patient Job. For everyone abandoned him as well: the flatterers flowed away with his wealth, and the friends measured friendship by the season of prosperity. And if they did come at all, their presence was a reproach and not a visit, an addition to the calamity and not a consolation. That is why all those “comforters of evils” railed against him; but she alone, once illustrious, sat with her husband on the dunghill, scraping away the discharge and drawing the worms from his wounds. So she was a partner of his life, not a companion of his prosperity; an inseparable friend, not a flatterer of pleasures; the only good remnant of all his good fortune and of all his dearest and kin. Therefore, from the utmost and surpassing love of her husband, she even fell into the sin of blasphemy, counselling him to say some blasphemous word against God and so to meet a quick end, so that her husband would not be punished further and she would not see him in unceasing pains. For she did not reckon her own misfortune, widowhood; she cared for one thing only, that her husband might escape a life not worth living. Such things, together with fresh experience, the memory of the ancients too teaches the one who outrages marriage.

What would the one liable to this accusation say to these things? What plausible defence of his readiness [to divorce] would he put forward? “My wife's character,” he says, “is bad and deserving of hatred; her tongue is reckless, her ways are not homekeeping, and her management [is poor].” Let it be so; let it be granted. I am persuaded for the moment and accept it, like those who are carried along without testing what they hear very exactly. But tell me: when you took her in the beginning, did you not know that you were being joined to a human being? And does anyone who hears “human being” not at once see sin following? For blamelessness belongs to God alone. And do you yourself not sin? Do you not cause griefs …? Oh, how many of your drunken outrages perhaps your wife has borne! How many ready insults and indecent words she has endured! How many of your failings are kept silent because your wife did not make them public! She bore with you when you were angry without cause and boiling over with rage; and she, a free woman of equal honour, was silent like a slave bought from the auction block. And when you did not supply the necessities for the conduct of life, through poverty or stinginess, she did not reproach you in her grief; nor, when you came back from a banquet drunk and out of your senses, did she cast you off in hatred of the drunkenness; but she received you with human forgiveness, led you by the hand as you staggered, and tended your head, spinning with the fumes of wine; she guided you to the marriage bed, she alone sympathizing, while the servants laughed and jeered at the [effects] of drunkenness. [And do you call to account] the ways of your wife? Are you innocent of every fault? … exaggerating your wife's [faults] with petty causes, so that you may prepare pardon for yourself for a hasty separation. Hard is the mind of such men, beastly and implacable, born, as the saying goes, of oak or rock. For, erasing the memory of everything at once, they cut themselves off unfeelingly. Who cuts off a sick limb instead of treating it, and that when no dangerous disease has struck, but one with much and easy hope of healing? A blister has appeared on the hand: let us treat it carefully. Inflammation troubles the foot: [let us summon] the physicians' visit … let us busy ourselves with the knife and the iron; and at each of the things that trouble us, not lasting even a short time of life, let us mutilate ourselves in all our limbs! But not so, you men; let there be some remembrance of the limbs too; let the care your wives have given shame you. However much you are provoked, set against your reproaches the labour of a single childbirth, and you will find the trouble of what grieves you overcome. Let reflection bring into the midst also the goods of a good marriage: the treatment of illnesses, the sharing of misfortunes, the tears that some have offered for a husband; leaving parents and the paternal hearth and following a stranger; selling something of her own to buy off a husband's insult and trouble. Let all these train you toward affection, and let them become a bond of love, as if holding a house together. Let mercy prevail; and let long habit and living together for a long time not be trampled, which also …

… You know it yourselves too; for [you are] not from oak, in the poet's phrase, or from rock. … For I have seen an ox lowing with feeling, since … in a glen, and running across the mountains until it rejoins the herd from which it was separated while grazing. A goat too, suffering the same thing, even if it runs across and overtakes many herds of goats, does not stop until it finds its familiar one and its own goatherd. Let us not, rational beings as we are, be found more unfeeling toward friendship than the irrational; nor judge the wife less worthy of honour than some fellow traveller, or one who became a friend for a short time on a small pretext. Do you see how men who have met each other on the highway, and have gone under the same roof of an inn, or under a spreading tree at midday in summer, make the meeting the occasion of a genuine affection; and when they come to the road that divides them, they do not part from each other unfeelingly, but stand and weep a little, looking intently at each other, and each gives the other tokens of remembrance to carry; and having gone on a little, they turn round again and call back; and one wishes the other good fortune; and a short time blends friendship so keenly that the parting becomes hard and forced for them? But you are so contemptuous toward the partner of your life, as toward a vessel that has fallen, or a cheap garment on a journey …? And where is the affection formed in the beginning? Where is the rest in the one bed, the confinement of the law, the power of much and long habit, which can be turned even into nature, as reason holds and experience has shown? You have cut through everything more easily than Samson [cut] the [bonds] of the foreigners. And yet the chaste man, the guardian of affection, does not easily forget his wife even when she has departed this life; but he cherishes the children as a common deposit of their mother and of nature, and seems to see the departed in them. For one of the children preserves the likeness of the mother's voice, another draws much of her features, another has been shaped after the one who bore him in the cast of his character; and so the father, having many living and vivid images of his wife, figures to himself an undying life together with her; and for this reason he thinks of nothing pleasure-loving: he does not heap up the tomb today and prepare a bridal chamber a little later; nor does he hasten, after the tears and groans, to the wedding dance again; nor bring the second wife into the black clothing and the bed of the departed; nor give the children a stepmother, that burdensome name. He imitates the natural, unreasoning modesty of the turtle-doves. For [they say] that bird keeps widowhood, and is the opposite of the pigeon in its readiness for many marriages. Up to this point …

… let the husband be pelted with accusations, and let the charges of ingratitude wound him more thickly than snowflakes. But if somewhere he puts forward the charge of adultery and offers such a defence for the separation, at once I will shift my advocacy to the wronged party, and, preparing my speech against the adulteress, I will stand by the husband as a good ally instead of an enemy, praising the one who fled the plotter, who cut the bond by which [he was joined] to the asp or the viper … the Maker of all at first, as one who rightly grieves and fittingly drives the disease out of his house and hearth. For marriage is constituted for the sake of these two things, affection and the begetting of children, neither of which is preserved with adultery. For there is no affection when goodwill has turned aside to another; and the good of begetting children is destroyed when the children are confused. But what bears on this sin has been said in due measure in another discourse. Let both parties practise chastity, the unbreakable bond of marriage. For where this is honoured, there must be both peace and longing, no common and bastard desire whetting the soul, but [chastity] instilling the lawful and just affection. This law of chastity has been laid down by God not for wives only, but also for husbands. But those who heed the lawgivers of this life leave to men an unaccountable licence for sexual immorality; they are severe judges and teachers of women's decency, while they themselves rage shamelessly upon many bodies, physicians of others, as the proverb has it, teeming with countless sores. And if anyone reproaches them for these faults, they put forward a false and jesting defence. For men, they say, even if they go to very many women, do no harm to the hearth; but women, by their sins, bring strange heirs into the houses and families. Let the sophists and inventors of this deranged opinion hear that they too [are wronging] other hearths, and that [these women] are certainly someone's daughters or wives; and in every way it will be found either that a marriage is plotted against, or that a parent is wronged who begot and reared [her] and [hoped] to have a virgin for the bridal chamber … If the terrible thing happens, … the woman … from the hands of the wronged man; but he, having the laws to help him, … escapes the penalty of the laws, but is kept for the [judgment] from above and of God … from the robbers of chastity. If the licentious man is a father, let him recognize a father's suffering when his hopes fail. For in general it is good that each should judge the affairs of others as he would wish another to judge his own. And if some, heeding the laws of the Romans, think sexual immorality unaccountable, they wander in a terrible error, not knowing that God legislates one way and men decree another. [Hear] Moses, proclaiming the will of God and pronouncing bitter sentences against the sexually immoral.

Hear Paul saying: “God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.” And the others will not suffice for your salvation at the time of recompense; … and Plato, the sophist of the laws, will be seen by you as unlearned, and humbled that weighty tone [of his], with its power raised above all lawgivers, when they see the lovers of bodies being dragged off, to whom they themselves wrongly gave licence. Certainly those who did not prevent others first turned the sin upon themselves, and will be found liable to a double accusation: for what they did themselves, and for allowing others to be licentious. Those, then, who wish to live as far as possible with one wife each should themselves make their own way of life the teacher of their spouses, so that they may have from the hearth a good zeal.

Of Asterius, bishop of Amasea, a discourse on the prophet Daniel and on Susanna. The grace of the Spirit, always having the wealth of its gift overflowing, does not leave its own [gifts] idle, whenever and to whomever it wishes to show them. For, like a river full of the waters that spring up to life, in contrast to these that are seen on earth, it has the outpourings of its working supplied. Its stream does not fail it, as sometimes happens with them; nor does it admit rises and falls, as they do; nor does it [flood] this part and that, as they do; but it is always in flood and suffices for all; and flowing down to those who share in its fullness, it remains no less full; and having its grace so abundantly, it does not know how to be distributed and divided by age. For it does not know how to measure the immeasurable by the bulk of bodies, but how to come together and appear with nobility and purity of soul. That is why now it accompanies Samuel, newly weaned, now it takes up David from the very flocks of sheep and perfects him above his brothers, by whom he seemed overlooked because of the immaturity of his age; and after them it appoints the one now set before us as our subject, the blessed and truly wise Daniel, still tender and quite young, as at once judge of elders and prophet. Although he had become the spoil of that heavy captivity, and had Babylon [as the land] that carried him off, and seemed to be among the inglorious because of the immaturity of his years, and without freedom of speech because he was caught up in so many evils, yet because he bore virtue with him, was grounded in philosophy in his first growth, and was firm and weighty in judgment in the very flower of his age, he was shown to be the refuter and judge of those old and established men. But let us bring the discourse back a little to the beginning, if you please, and see how lofty and blessed it is to be a friend of God.

When the city of Jerusalem had been utterly taken in war by the Assyrians, the peoples of the Hebrews were carried off to Babylon. The crowd of captive youths included the blessed Daniel too, and he was carried into the enemy's land, a child, an easy prey, having neither among his own people any occasion of being noticed, nor regarded among the enemies as a gain of the war worth mentioning: obscure, inglorious because of his age and his misfortune, seen only by the one who sees well. For God alone saw the young man's pure soul, like a pearl enclosed in sea shells, or gold hidden in the folds of a chamber. But when the right time came, and the hidden one had to appear, the obscure to become known, the despised conspicuous, the one hidden in the darkness of misfortune to shine, a small visitation of the Spirit came, and the humble was higher than all: wise, one who does not open his mouth; refuter of hidden things; judge of the judges, the untrained one; seated on a lofty throne, one who had never yet been even an attendant of the courts; the young man avenging slandered chastity, turning back a people led astray, recalling the verdict of a whole city wrongly given. For you heard just now … in the soul. And I, leaving aside the contents of the other books, all that the psalms sang to us profitably and with delight, all that the Apostle counselled, all that the Lord legislated with authority in the Gospels, have inclined to this story. For I see two youths of good repute, one in judging, the other in being judged: Daniel applauded for his verdicts, Susanna crowned for her victory of chastity. Come, then, if you please, lovers of the good and of virtue, let us renew the old judgment in memory; by the ancient chastity let us cut away the licentiousness that flourishes at present, pillorying an old age behaving like boys, and youth … and rulers of the people, needing countless tutors for your correction, quick inventors of slander against marriages yoked by law! You were the ones who judged sexual immorality with your lips and punished adultery; physicians of others, yet full of the disease; whitewashed tombs, filled within with uncleanness and adorning the outward appearance. Lofty men, presiding on the thrones of judgment, when you chose to be licentious, [you hid] in the thickets of the plants and the bushes … The introducer of transgressions and counsellor of evils laughed as he saw you, how those at the summit of the people, the elect and chosen, were dragged along the ground like housebreakers or robbers, to see an unlawful sight … foxes, which from dense and shaded places lie in wait for the domestic birds; and [of] the wickedness that the destroyer of human souls practises from beginning to end! In a garden was the first fall of man, the lofty one; in a garden now too the elders, worked upon by the serpent, fall from the glory of their office and become, instead of judges, condemned, strangers to life and workers of sin. But there he conquered men, and was defeated by the woman, and did not find the first woman's lightness in the Babylonian young woman. And one might well say that Babylon is not “confusion” because of Susanna, but the keeping of God's commandments, the guarding of chastity, the city of a manly woman. Her I bring, setting aside the intervening times, by the likeness of virtue, to the adornment of Joseph: I set the decorous woman beside the chaste man, the friend of God beside the son of Israel. One and the same crown for chastity I place on both; and I throw the defeated under the feet of the victors: under Joseph's, the licentious Egyptian woman, the mistress of the free slave; … these as tutors of chastity, her of women's, him of the youth of men; lamps of the world, flowers of the resurrection, judges of adulterers, guardians of lawful marriages. For now let us occupy the discourse with the holy woman alone; for Joseph, the chaste man, is an episode here and an addition on chastity.

For when the elders thought they had the prey within the nets and leapt out of the ambush as if to seize her at once, they did not find the excellent deer timid, but resisting both them and the serpent who was the cause of what happened (the deer is a snake-killing animal, and the discourse has well found the image of the animal). [They] entreated, and were not heeded; and they are held fast by two of the greatest [evils], the failure of their [desire] and … foul heads, and as a release from the evil they plan another, murder. For a sinner, once he falls into the beginnings of offences, draws after him the following iniquities too, as if by a rope [tied] to the beginning. Good things are productive of good things, and bad things of their like. That is why murder, the fruit of adultery, now springs up, and a council sits in haste, as though over a great wrong done by the woman, and a crowd is led on, having the accused as a spectacle. The accusers and the judges are the same; and grey hairs, slandering, condemned [her] by a scheme that prevailed. And the people, stirred up and suffering what a people is accustomed to suffer from a reckless impulse, was indignant, being led astray, and was carried away by the impulse of the elders. The parents of the accused lamented; the husband wailed at the misfortune; the children cried aloud on this side and that, hanging on their mother in her danger; the family was covered with shame. But the fine judges, the allies of chastity, ordered her, decently covered in a garment (for not even in the confusion of evils did she forget herself), [to be stripped] of her covering, so that in the court they might work the [deeds] of adultery, [feeding] on the sight of the accused; and [they laid] their hands on her head (which was the sign of condemnation), the licentious men defiling a pure body by their touch, and harangued the lie against her, these fine champions of the truth. And when the people had been led on, and the vote was brought, and the punishment was near, then the slandered woman looked up to the judge of the judges; she carried the case by appeal from men to God; she invoked the court that cannot be misled; and the truth did not delay. Arise now for me, blessed Daniel, now too in the discourse, as you were roused [then] and [cried out: “I am innocent] of the blood of this woman,” as Pilate later did against the raging Hebrews. Bring the people back to the court; give the trial a beginning …; let the order of those presiding be reversed, and let the woman look upon the elders, as she herself a little before was the spectacle of the city. Judge the citizens, you captive; the natives, you stranger; the old, you young man. Lend a holy mouth to the Spirit; for you do not have unclean lips, as Isaiah says in humbling himself; nor [need you] one of the seraphim and his purifying [coal] … judges, so that they may not leap upon your questions in agreement, as in the garden upon the woman. For of what kind is the beginning of his words: “You who have grown old in evil days, now your sins have come which you committed before, condemning the innocent and releasing the guilty.” O the wonder, and the great freedom of the Spirit! For where the Spirit was, there was freedom. You see how he does not hold back even in his opening; but gazing into the depth of the conscience and seeing the souls of the elders, storehouses of sins, he does not seek witnesses and proofs, but insults them severely, since the prophet has the verdict written on his breast. And as far as it depended on him, he would have said nothing more, but without delay [would have handed them over] to punishment … judges light-minded, who judged by the grey hair of the accusers and not by the truth; and he brings the test of questioning to them separately, and refutes the lie by their discordant answers; and having delivered the judgment, he does not hand the guilty to executioners, but calls punishing angels against them. To such a height did the dignity of the saints grow, that powers … What followed for the foul elders? The judgment was reversed; and they went away paying through death the penalty both for the old iniquities and for the new sin; and all Babylon had the marvel of what happened on its lips and praised God with hymns, who made public the knowledge of hidden dramas. And Hilkiah was renewed on behalf of his child; Joakim celebrated the feast of victory for his wife; and the children, genuine offspring of the chaste woman, leapt around their mother with smiling faces, and … But you, people of Christ, having heard a most pious and soul-profiting story, do not let it run past your hearing indifferently, but make the discourse the training and discipline of your life. Wives, emulate Susanna; keep chastity for your husbands as she did for hers; resolve rather to suffer and be in danger than to provoke God by adultery, shame your husband, [and] houses and hearths …