Miscellanies 3.15.96–4.3.12

Again, when he says, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of sexual immorality let each have his own wife,” he says again as if explaining: “so that Satan may not tempt you.” For he says “because of your lack of self-control” not to those who use marriage with self-control for the begetting of children alone, but to those who desire to go beyond the begetting of children, so that the adversary may not blow hard and swell their appetite toward other pleasures. And perhaps, since the adversary opposes those who live justly out of jealousy and contends against them, wishing to bring them under his own rank, he wishes to give them occasions through laborious self-control.

Fittingly, then, he says, “It is better to marry than to burn,” so that the husband may render to the wife what is due and the wife to the husband, and they may not deprive each other of the help given for birth by the divine arrangement. “And whoever does not hate,” they say, “father or mother or wife or children cannot be my disciple.” He does not command hatred of one's family; for he says, “Honor father and mother, that it may be well with you.” But he says: do not be led away by irrational impulses, and do not attach yourself to civic customs; for a house consists of family, and cities of houses, as Paul too said that those occupied with marriage please the world. Again the Lord says: “Let the one who has married not put away, and let the one who has not married not marry”; the one who has professed, by a purpose of celibacy, not to marry, let him remain unmarried.

To both, at any rate, the same Lord gives suitable promises through the prophet Isaiah, speaking thus: “Let not the eunuch say, ‘I am a dry tree.’ Thus says the Lord to the eunuchs: If you keep my Sabbaths and do all that I command, I will give you a place better than sons and daughters.” For celibacy alone does not justify, nor indeed the eunuch's Sabbath, unless he does the commandments. And to the married he adds, saying: “My chosen ones will not toil in vain, nor bear children for a curse, because they are a seed blessed by the Lord.” For there is a reward laid up for the one who has begotten children according to reason, reared them, and educated them in the Lord, as for the one who has begotten through true instruction, as also for the chosen seed. But others take the begetting of children as a curse and do not understand that Scripture speaks against those very people. For those truly chosen by the Lord neither teach nor beget things that lead to a curse, as the heresies do.

The eunuch, then, is said to be not the one whose parts have been forcibly treated, nor indeed the unmarried man, but the one who does not beget truth. This man was formerly a dry tree; but having obeyed the Word, and kept the Sabbaths by abstaining from sins, and done the commandments, he will be more honored than those educated by word alone without right conduct. “Little children,” says the Teacher, “yet a little while I am with you.” That is why Paul too, writing to the Galatians, says: “My little children, for whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you.” And again, writing to the Corinthians, he says: “For though you have ten thousand tutors in Christ, you do not have many fathers; for in Christ I begot you through the gospel.” That is why “a eunuch will not enter the assembly of God,” the one who is barren and fruitless both in conduct and in word; but those who have made themselves eunuchs from all sin for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, these are blessed, who fast from the world.

“Cursed be the day on which I was born, and let it not be desired,” says Jeremiah, not calling birth simply cursed, but despairing at the sins and disobedience of the people. He adds, at any rate: “For why was I born to see toils and troubles, and my days were spent in shame?” Indeed all who preached the truth were persecuted and in danger because of the disobedience of their hearers. “For why did my mother's womb not become my tomb, so that I might not see the toil of Jacob and the labor of the race of Israel?” says Ezra the prophet. “No one is clean from filth,” says Job, “not even if his life is one day.” Let them tell us where the newborn child committed sexual immorality, or how the one who has done nothing has fallen under the curse of Adam. It remains for them, it seems, to say consistently that birth is evil, not only that of the body, but also that of the soul, for the sake of which the body exists. And when David says, “In sins I was conceived, and in lawless deeds my mother bore me,” he speaks prophetically of Eve as mother; but Eve became “the mother of the living”; and if he was conceived in sin, yet he himself was not in sin, nor was he himself sin.

And that everyone who turns from sin to faith turns to life from the sinful habit as from a mother, one of the twelve prophets will bear me witness, saying: “Shall I give my firstborn for ungodliness, the fruit of my womb for the sin of my soul?” He does not accuse the one who said, “Increase and multiply,” but calls the first impulses from birth, by which we do not know God, ungodliness. And if someone calls birth evil on this account, let him call it good on the other, in that in it we come to know the truth. “Awake to righteousness and do not sin; for some have no knowledge of God,” clearly those who sin. Since “our wrestling is not against blood and flesh but against spiritual things,” and “the world rulers of darkness” are able to tempt, therefore pardons are given. That is why Paul too says, “I pummel my body and lead it into slavery,” because “everyone who competes exercises self-control in all things” (meaning he exercises self-control with regard to all things, not abstaining from all, but using self-controlledly those he has judged fit); “they to receive a perishable crown, but we an imperishable,” victorious in the wrestling, not crowned without a struggle. Some already prefer the widow to the virgin in regard to self-control, since she has scorned a pleasure she has experienced.

If birth is evil, let the blasphemers say that the Lord who shared in birth was in evil, and the virgin who bore him in evil. Alas for the evils! They blaspheme the will of God and the mystery of creation by slandering birth. This is the reason for Cassianus' Docetism, and for Marcion's, and indeed for Valentinus's psychic body; because they say: “Man became like the beasts when he came to sexual union.” But it is when, being in heat, a man truly wishes to mount another's bed that such a one really becomes a beast: “They became horses mad for females; each neighed after his neighbor's wife.” And if the serpent, having taken the practice of intercourse from the irrational animals, persuaded Adam to consent to union with Eve, as though the first-formed did not use this by nature, as some think, then creation is blasphemed again, as having made men weaker than the nature of the irrational animals, whom God's first-formed followed.

But if nature led them, as it leads the irrational animals, to the begetting of children, and they were moved sooner than was fitting, being still young and led astray by deceit, then God's judgment was just on those who did not wait for his will; yet birth is holy, through which the world was established, through which substances, natures, angels, powers, souls, commandments, law, gospel, and the knowledge of God exist. “And all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass; the grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains,” which anointed the soul and united it to the Spirit. And how could the arrangement of the church among us have been accomplished without the body? For the head of the church himself came in the flesh, but without comeliness and without form, teaching us to look to the formless and incorporeal nature of the divine cause. “For a tree of life,” says the prophet, “arises in good desire,” teaching that desires in the living Lord are fair and pure.

Now they want the intercourse of husband with wife in marriage, called “knowledge,” to be a sin; for they say it is indicated by the eating of the tree of good and evil, the word “knew” signifying the transgression of the commandment. But if so, the knowledge of the truth is also the eating of the tree of life. Self-restrained marriage, then, may share in that tree too. We have said before that marriage can be used well and badly; and this is the tree of knowledge, if we do not transgress in marriage. What then? Did not the Savior heal the body of its passions as well as the soul? He would not, if the flesh were hostile to the soul, have fortified the enemy against it by restoring it to health. “This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption”; for sin, being corruption, cannot have fellowship with incorruption, which is righteousness. “Are you so foolish?” he says. “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”

Some, then, have strained the justice and harmony of salvation, which is dignified and firm, taking self-control blasphemously, as we have shown, with all godlessness, when it is possible to choose celibacy according to the sound rule with godliness, giving thanks for the grace given, not hating creation or despising the married. For the world is created, and celibacy is created; and let both give thanks in the state in which they have been placed, if they also know for what they have been placed. Others, throwing off the reins, have run riot, truly becoming horses mad for females and neighing after their neighbors' wives, pouring themselves out without restraint and persuading their neighbors to love pleasure, wretchedly following those Scriptures: “Cast your lot among us; let us all get one purse, and let there be one money bag for us.”

Because of these the same prophet counsels us: “Do not walk in the way with them; turn your foot from their paths; for not unjustly are nets spread for birds; for they, sharing in blood, store up evils for themselves”; that is, claiming uncleanness for themselves and teaching their neighbors the same, “warriors, striking with their tails,” according to the prophet, which the Greeks call “kerkoi.” Those the prophecy hints at would be the sensual, the intemperate, those who are warriors with their tails, children of darkness and wrath, murderous, killers both of themselves and of their neighbors. “Clean out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump,” the apostle cries to us. And again, grieved at certain such people, he orders us not to associate with anyone “named a brother, if he is sexually immoral, or greedy, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a robber; not even to eat with such a one.” “For through the law I died to the law,” he says, “that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live,” as I lived according to the desires, “but Christ lives in me,” purely and blessedly, through obedience to the commandments; so that then I lived in the flesh fleshly, “but the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God.”

“Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans,” the Lord says, turning us away from the opposite way of life, since “the end of lawless men is evil,” and “these are the ways of all who accomplish lawless things.” “Woe to that man,” says the Lord; “it would have been good for him not to have been born, rather than to cause one of my elect to stumble; it would have been better for him to have a millstone put around him and be drowned in the sea, rather than to pervert one of my elect.” “For the name of God is blasphemed because of them.” That is why the apostle nobly says, “I wrote to you in the letter not to associate with the sexually immoral,” as far as “but the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” And to show that he does not call marriage sexual immorality, he adds: “Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her?” Or will anyone call a virgin a prostitute before she marries? “And do not deprive one another,” he says, “except by agreement for a time,” by the word “deprive” showing the debt of marriage, the begetting of children, which he made clear earlier, saying: “Let the husband render to the wife what is due, and likewise the wife to the husband,”

after which payment she is a helper in the management of the home and in faith in Christ; and still more clearly, saying: “To the married I command, not I but the Lord, that a wife should not be separated from her husband (but if she is separated, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband), and that a husband should not put away his wife. To the rest I say, not the Lord: If any brother,” as far as “but now they are holy.” What do those who run down the law and marriage, as though it were permitted only under the law and not also under the new covenant, say to this? What can those who loathe seed and birth say to these laws? For he also lays down that the bishop who manages his own house well should preside over the church; and the union with one wife establishes a house of the Lord.

“To the pure, then, all things are pure,” he says, “but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.” And about pleasure contrary to the rule he says: “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor men who lie with men, nor the greedy, nor thieves, not drunkards, not revilers, not robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.” And we who were in these things have been washed; but they, washing into this licentiousness, baptize from self-restraint into sexual immorality, teaching that pleasures and passions should be gratified, teaching people to become intemperate instead of self-restrained, and devoting their hope to the shamelessness of their parts; making their disciples disinherited from the kingdom of God, not enrolled in it; having chosen, under the name of knowledge falsely so called, the journey into the outer darkness. “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is well spoken of, if there is any virtue and if there is any praise, think on these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do; and the God of peace will be with you.”

And Peter in his letter says similar things: “so that your faith and hope may be in God, having purified your souls by obedience to the truth, as children of obedience, not conforming to the desires you formerly had in your ignorance; but as the one who called you is holy, be holy yourselves too in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, because I am holy.’” But the controversy that became necessary against the hypocrites of knowledge falsely so called has led us beyond what was needed and has stretched the discussion to great length. So the third Miscellany of our notes on knowledge according to the true philosophy reaches its end here.

It follows, I think, to treat of martyrdom and of who is perfect, in which will be included the consequences as the discussion requires; and how both slave and free must equally philosophize, whether man or woman by sex. Then, having completed what follows about faith and about seeking, we will set out the symbolic form, so that, having briefly concluded the ethical account, we may present in summary the benefit that was passed on to the Greeks from barbarian philosophy. After this outline, the exposition of the Scriptures in summary, against the Greeks and against the Jews, will be handed down, and whatever we could not include in the previous Miscellanies, though we proposed at the opening of the preface to complete it in one notebook, having been necessarily subject to the multitude of subjects.

After these, later, when the outline of our subjects has been completed as far as possible, we must relate what the Greeks and the other barbarians, as far as their opinions have reached us, taught in natural philosophy about first principles, and take on the chief things devised by the philosophers. Following these it would be fitting, after the survey of theology, to treat what has been handed down about prophecy, so that, showing that the Scriptures we have believed are authoritative through the Almighty's own authority, we may be able to proceed through them in order, and from there show to all the heresies one God and Lord Almighty, genuinely proclaimed through the law and the prophets, and also through the blessed gospel. Many refutations of the heterodox await us, as we try to dissolve in writing what they put forward and to persuade them even against their will, convicting them from the Scriptures themselves.

When, then, our whole purpose has been completed in the notes by which, if the Spirit wills, we serve the pressing need (for great is the necessity of what must be said beforehand about the truth), then indeed we will go on to the truly knowing natural philosophy, having been initiated into the lesser mysteries before the greater, so that nothing may stand in the way of the truly divine revelation of sacred things, what must be related and handed down first having been purified and sketched beforehand. The natural philosophy, then, or rather the highest vision, of the knowing tradition according to the rule of truth depends on the account of the origin of the world, ascending from there to the theological form. Fittingly, then, we will begin the tradition from the creation that was prophesied, setting out in part also the views of the heterodox and trying, as far as we can, to refute them. But this will be written, if God wills and as he inspires; now we must go on to the subject before us and complete the ethical account.

Let our notes, as we have often said, be spread out in varied fashion, as the name itself says, because of those who read them rashly and without experience, passing continually from one thing to another, and indicating one thing by the sequence of the words while showing another. “For those who seek gold,” says Heraclitus, “dig much earth and find little”; but those who are truly of the golden race, mining what is akin, will find much in little. For the writing will find the one who will understand. The Miscellanies of our notes, then, help the one able to seek with reason both to recollect and to see the truth.

We too must work out and find other things in addition to these; since for those traveling a road they do not know it is enough to point out the way that leads there, but from then on they must walk and discover the rest for themselves; as they say the Pythia answered a slave who once consulted her about what he might do to please his master, “You will find it if you seek.” It is truly difficult, it seems, to find a hidden good, since “sweat is set before virtue, and long and steep is the path to it, and rough at first; but when one reaches the top, then it is easy, though it was hard.” For the Lord's way is truly narrow and hard, and the kingdom of God belongs to the violent. That is why it says, “Seek and you will find,” holding to the truly royal road and not running off it.

Fittingly, then, the doctrines contained in this treatise have great fruitfulness in little seed, like “every herb of the field,” says Scripture. In this the Miscellanies of our notes have a fitting title, being culled, quite simply, like that ancient offering of which Sophocles writes: “There was sheep's wool, and from the vines libation and the grape well stored, and in it mixed fruits of every kind with barley grains, and the fat of the olive, and the most intricate wax-molded work of the tawny bee.”

For example, our Miscellanies, like the farmer of Timocles the comic poet, bring in figs, olive oil, dried figs, honey, as if from a field that bears everything. Because of this abundance of fruit he adds: “You speak of a harvest wreath, not of farming”; for the Athenians used to exclaim: “The harvest wreath brings figs and rich loaves, and honey in a cup, and oil to rub oneself with.” One must often, then, as in winnowing baskets, shake and toss the mixture of seeds to pick out the wheat.

Most people have a disposition like the state of winter, unsettled and unreasoning. Unbelief has done many good things, and faith many bad. And Epicharmus says, “Remember to disbelieve; these are the joints of the mind.” For example, to disbelieve the truth brings death, as believing it brings life; conversely, to believe falsehood and disbelieve the truth drags one to destruction. The same account holds for self-control and its lack. To abstain from doing good is the work of vice, but to abstain from injustice is the beginning of salvation. For this reason the Sabbath seems to me to hint at self-control through abstinence from evils, and at what it is in which man differs from beasts. And the angels of God are wiser than man: “You made him a little lower than the angels,” it says; for they understand the Scripture not of the Lord (though he too bore flesh), but of the perfect and knowing man, made lower than the angels by time and by his clothing. So I do not call wisdom something other than knowledge, since life does not differ: for living is common to mortal nature, that is, to man, and to what has been thought worthy of immortality, while they differ in the state of contemplation and self-control.

For this reason, it seems to me, Pythagoras too said that God alone is wise (since the apostle too writes in the letter to the Romans: “made known to all the nations for the obedience of faith, to the only wise God through Jesus Christ”), and called himself a philosopher because of his friendship with God. God spoke with Moses, at any rate, it says, “as a friend with a friend.” The truth, then, is plain to God; for he begets the truth, while the one who knows loves the truth. “Go to the ant, you sluggard, and become the bee's disciple,” says Solomon. For if each thing has one work proper to its nature, of the ox likewise, the horse, and the dog, what would we say is the proper work of man? He is like, I think, a centaur, a Thessalian fiction, composed of rational and irrational, of soul and body. But the body works the earth and hastens to the earth, while the soul is stretched toward God; the soul, at any rate, trained by true philosophy, hastens to its kindred above, turning away from the desires of the body, and besides these from toil and fear; yet we have shown that both endurance and fear are on the side of the good. For if “through the law comes knowledge of sin,” as those who run down the law say, and “until the law sin was in the world,” we answer them in turn, “but apart from the law sin is dead.” For when you take away the cause of fear, sin, you take away fear, and much more still punishment, when what by nature desires is absent; for “the law is not laid down for the righteous,” Scripture says.

Well, then, does Heraclitus say, “They would not have known the name of justice if these things did not exist,” and Socrates, that law would not have come into being for the sake of the good. But the accusers did not know this either, as the apostle says, that “the one who loves his neighbor does no evil. For ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal,’ and any other commandment, is summed up in this one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” In this way, I suppose, “You shall love the Lord your God,” he says, “with all your heart, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If, then, the one who loves his neighbor does no evil, and every commandment is summed up in this, in loving the neighbor, then the commandments that hang fear over us produce love, not hatred.

So the fear that the law produces is not a passion. So “the law is holy” and truly “spiritual,” according to the apostle. We must, it seems, inquire closely into the nature of the body and the substance of the soul, understand the end of each, and not consider death an evil. “For when you were slaves of sin,” says the apostle, “you were free with regard to righteousness. What fruit, then, did you have then? Things of which you are now ashamed; for the end of those things is death. But now, having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you have your fruit for sanctification, and the end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

It has perhaps been shown, then, that death is the fellowship of the soul in the body while it is sinful, and life is separation from sin. Many are the stakes and ditches of desire in our path, and the pits of anger and wrath, which one must leap over, and must avoid the whole construction of plots, if he is to see the knowledge of God no longer through a mirror. “For far-seeing Zeus takes away half a man's virtue, when the day of slavery seizes him.” Scripture knows as slaves those under sin and sold to sins, the lovers of pleasure and of the body, and as beasts rather than men, those who have become like cattle, “horses mad for females, neighing after their neighbors' wives.” The licentious man is an insolent donkey, the greedy a wild wolf, and the deceiver a serpent. The separation of the soul from the body, then, practiced by the philosopher throughout his life, produces a knowing readiness to bear easily the natural death, which is the loosing of the soul's bonds to the body. “For the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world,” he says; and I live now, while in the flesh, as a citizen of heaven.