Letters 49.14–49.21

You are indignant with me for having defeated Jovinian rather than taught him. Or rather, those are indignant who grieve that he has been anathematized, and who, while they praise what they are, accuse what they pretend to be. As if he ought to have been begged to give way to me, and not led unwilling and resisting into the chains of truth! I would say this if, from eagerness to win, I had said anything against the rule of the Scriptures, and, as brave men usually do in controversies, were redeeming the fault by the prize. But as it is, since I was an interpreter of the apostle rather than a dogmatist and have performed the office of a commentator, whatever seems harsh should be charged to him whom we expounded rather than to us who expounded him; unless perhaps he said something else and we twisted the simplicity of his words by a malicious interpretation. Whoever alleges this, let him prove it from the writings themselves. We said: 'If it is good not to touch a woman, then it is bad to touch one; for nothing is opposed to good except bad. But if it is bad and is pardoned, it is conceded for this reason, lest something worse than the bad should happen,' and so on up to the beginning of the next section. We added this because the apostle had said: 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of sexual immorality let each man have his own wife and each woman have her own husband.' In what do my words differ from the apostle's sense? Unless perhaps in this, that he declares while I doubt; he defines while I inquire; he says openly, 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman,' while I ask timidly, 'if it is good not to touch a woman.' 'If' belongs to one who doubts, not to one who affirms. He says, 'It is good not to touch'; I add what can be the opposite of good. And at once in what follows: 'Note the apostle's prudence. He did not say, "It is good not to have a wife," but "It is good not to touch a woman," as if there were danger even in touching, as if one who touched her would not escape.' You see, then, that we are not expounding about spouses but simply discussing intercourse: that in comparison with chastity and virginity and likeness to the angels it is good for a man not to touch a woman. 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,' said Ecclesiastes. If all creatures are good, as made by a good Creator, how is everything vanity? If the earth is vanity, are the heavens too, and the angels, and the thrones, dominions, powers, and the other virtues? But things good in themselves, as made by a good Creator, are called vanity in comparison with greater things. For example, a lamp is nothing compared with a torch; a torch does not shine compared with a star; compare a star with the moon and it is blind; set the moon beside the sun and it does not glow; compare the sun with Christ and it is darkness. 'I am,' he says, 'who am.' So if you compare every creature with God, it does not subsist. 'Do not give your inheritance,' says Esther, 'to those who are not,' namely to idols or demons; and certainly the idols and demons existed to whom she prayed that they not be handed over. In Job too we read the words of Bildad about the wicked: 'Let his confidence be torn from his tent, and let destruction trample on him like a king. Let the companions of him who is not dwell in his tent'; no doubt of the devil, who, though he has companions (and he would not have them if he did not exist), is nevertheless said not to be because he has perished to God. So in this sense of comparison we said that it is bad to touch a woman (though no mention was made of a wife), because it is good not to touch one. And we added, calling virginity wheat, marriage barley, and sexual immorality cow dung: certainly both wheat and barley are God's creation. But in the Gospel the larger crowd is fed with barley loaves, the smaller with wheat. 'Men and beasts,' it says, 'you will save, O Lord.' We said the same thing in other words when we called virginity gold and marriage silver, and spoke of the hundred and forty-four thousand sealed virgins who have not been defiled with women; by which we meant to show that all who have not remained virgins are defiled in comparison with the purest and angelic chastity, and with our Lord Jesus Christ himself. But if anyone thinks it harsh and blameworthy that we set as great a distance between virginity and marriage as between wheat and barley, let him read the holy Ambrose's book On Widows, and he will find that among the other things he argued about virginity and marriage he also said this: 'The apostle did not so prefer marriage as to extinguish the pursuit of integrity; but beginning from the counsel of continence he came down to the remedies for incontinence; and though he showed the brave the prize of the upward call, he let no one faint on the way, so applauding the first as not to despise those who follow. For he had himself learned that the Lord Jesus gave barley bread to some, lest they faint on the way, and offered his body to others, that they might strive for the kingdom.' And further on: 'The marriage bond, then, is not to be avoided as a fault, but declined as a burden of necessity. For the law bound the wife to bear children in labor and sorrow, and to turn to her husband, because he rules over her. So it is the married woman, not the widow, who is given over to labor and pains in bearing children, and only the wife, not the virgin, is subject to the rule of a husband.' And in another place: 'You were bought with a price,' he says; 'do not become slaves of men. See how plain is the definition of marital slavery.' And a little after: 'If then a good marriage is slavery, what is a bad one, when they cannot sanctify but destroy one another?' Everything that we poured out at length about virginity and marriage he compressed into a short summary, comprehending much in a few words. Virginity is proclaimed by him as the counsel of continence, marriage as the remedy for incontinence. And there is a significant descent from greater things to lesser: to virgins he shows the prize of the upward call; the married he consoles, lest they faint on the way; the one he praises, the other he does not despise; he compares marriage to barley and virginity to the body of Christ. And I think the distance between wheat and barley is much smaller than that between barley and the body of Christ. Then he calls marriage both a burden of necessity to be declined and the definition of the plainest slavery, and much else that he has pursued at great length in his three little books On Virgins.

From all this it is clear that I said nothing new about virgins and married women, but followed in everything the opinion of those before me, both of this man and of the others who have discussed the doctrines of the church; and I would rather imitate their negligence than the obscure diligence of others. Husbands are swollen with anger against me because I said: 'I ask you, what kind of good is that which prevents one from praying, which does not allow one to receive the body of Christ? When I fulfil the office of a husband, I do not fulfil that of the continent. The same apostle in another place commands us to pray always. If we must pray always, then we must never serve marriage, since whenever I render my wife her due I cannot pray.' Why I said this is clear: I was interpreting the apostle's saying, 'Do not defraud one another, except perhaps by agreement for a time, so that you may be free for prayer.' The apostle Paul says that when we have intercourse with our wives we cannot pray; Peter urges continence, 'so that your prayers may not be hindered.' What, I ask, is my sin here? What have I deserved? What wrong have I done? If the waters flow muddy and cloudy, the fault is not the channel's but the spring's. Or am I blamed for having dared to add something of my own: 'What kind of good is that which does not allow one to receive the body of Christ?' To this I will answer briefly: which is greater, to pray or to receive the body of Christ? Surely the body of Christ. If intercourse hinders the lesser, much more does it hinder the greater. We said in the same volume that David and his companions could not eat the loaves of the presence under the law unless they answered that they had been clean of women for three days: not, of course, of harlots, which the law condemned, but of wives, with whom they were lawfully united. We said too that the people, when about to receive the law on Mount Sinai, were commanded to abstain from their wives for three days. I know that at Rome it is the custom for the faithful always to receive the body of Christ. I neither blame nor approve this, for 'let each be fully convinced in his own mind'; but I appeal to the conscience of those who communicate on the same day after intercourse and, as Persius says, 'wash off the night in the river': why do they not dare to go to the martyrs' shrines, why do they not enter the churches? Is Christ one thing in public and another at home? What is not lawful in church is not lawful at home either. Nothing is closed to God, and even darkness shines before him. Let each examine himself and so approach the body of Christ: not that one or two days of delayed communion make a Christian holier, so that what I did not merit today I merit tomorrow or the day after; but that, while I grieve at not having communicated in the body of Christ, I may abstain for a little from my wife's embrace, so as to prefer the love of Christ to the love of a wife. 'This is hard, not to be borne; which of the people of the world can endure it?' Let him who can endure it endure it; he who cannot must see to it himself. Our concern is to say not what each can or wishes to do, but what the Scriptures command.

In my little commentaries on the same apostle this passage is also criticized, where I said: 'But lest anyone think from what follows, "so that you may be free for prayer, and come together again," that the apostle wants this and does not concede it to avoid a greater fall, he at once adds: "lest Satan tempt you because of your incontinence." A fine indulgence indeed: "and come together again"! What he blushes to call by its own name, what he prefers to the temptation of Satan, what has incontinence as its cause, do we labor to explain as though it were obscure, when the writer has explained himself: "This I say," he says, "by way of indulgence, not of command"? And do we still mutter that marriage is to be called not an indulgence but a precept, as if second and third marriages were not conceded in the same way?' and so on. What did I say here that the apostle did not say? Perhaps this: 'what he blushes to call by its own name'? I think that when he says 'come together again' and passes over the thing itself in silence, he does not name intercourse openly but indicates it modestly. Or perhaps this, which follows: 'what he prefers to the temptation of Satan, what has incontinence as its cause'? Is it not the same thing in a different word order: 'lest Satan tempt you because of your incontinence'? Or because I said, 'And do we still mutter that marriage is to be called not an indulgence but a precept'? If that is harsh, let it be charged to the apostle, who says, 'This I say by way of indulgence, not of command,' and not to me, who, apart from a reversal of order, changed neither the sense nor the words.

Let us pass on to the rest, for my speech hurries with the brevity of a letter. 'I say,' says the apostle, 'to the unmarried and widows: it is good for them if they remain as I am. But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.' We interpreted this section as follows: 'After granting the married the use of marriage and showing what he wished and what he conceded, he passes to unmarried women and widows, puts forward his own example, and calls them happy if they remain so; "but if they do not contain themselves, let them marry." This is the same as above, "but because of sexual immorality" and "lest Satan tempt you because of your incontinence"; and he gives the reason why he said, "If they do not contain themselves, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn." It is better to marry precisely because it is worse to burn. Take away the heat of lust, and he will not say, "it is better to marry." "Better" always looks to comparison with something worse, not to a simple good that is beyond comparison in itself; as if he were to say, "It is better to have one eye than none."' And a little later, addressing the apostle directly, I added: 'If marriage is good in itself, do not compare it to a fire, but say simply, "It is good to marry." I am suspicious of the goodness of a thing which the greatness of another evil forces to be a lesser evil. I want not a lighter evil but a simple good in itself.' The apostle wants unmarried women and widows to remain without intercourse, calls them to follow his example, and calls them happy if they remain so. But if they cannot contain themselves, and wish to quench the heat of lust not by continence but by sexual immorality, it is better for them to marry than to burn. To which we added: 'It is better to marry precisely because it is worse to burn,' putting forward not our own opinion but interpreting the apostle's: 'It is better to marry than to burn,' that is, it is better to take a husband than to commit sexual immorality. If you teach that to burn or to commit sexual immorality is good, then something better will be preferred to something good; but if to burn is bad, what is preferred to the bad does not belong to genuine and pure integrity, nor to that blessedness which is compared to the angels. If I say, 'It is better to be a virgin than married,' I have preferred the better to the good; but if I take a further step, 'It is better to marry than to commit sexual immorality,' there I have preferred not the better to the good but the good to the bad; and there is much difference between the 'better' that is set above marriage and that which is set above sexual immorality. I ask you, what did I do wrong in this discussion? My aim was not to drag the Scriptures to my will, but to say what I understood the Scriptures to intend. The commentator's duty is to set out not what he himself wishes but what the one he interprets means; otherwise, if he says the opposite, he will be not so much the interpreter as the adversary of the one he tries to explain. Certainly, wherever I am not interpreting the Scriptures and speak freely from my own mind, let anyone who likes convict me of having said something harsh against marriage. If he does not find it, let him attribute whatever seems severe or harsh not to the authority of the writer but to the duty of the interpreter.

But who could bear the criticism made of me because, in expounding the apostle's section in which he wrote of spouses, 'Such will have tribulation of the flesh,' I said: 'We in our ignorance thought that marriage at least had the joy of the flesh. But if the married have tribulation even in the flesh, in which alone they seemed to have delights, what reason is left for marrying, when there is tribulation in the spirit, in the soul, and in the flesh itself?' What condemnation of marriage is there here, if we called the wailing of infants, the deaths of children, the miscarriages of wives, the losses of the household, and the like, the tribulation of marriage? While Damasus of holy memory was still alive, we wrote a book against Helvidius on the perpetual virginity of the blessed Mary, in which, to proclaim the blessedness of virginity, we had to say much about the troubles of marriage. Did that excellent man, learned in the Scriptures, a virgin teacher of the virgin church, find anything to blame in that treatise? In the book to Eustochium too we said much harsher things about marriage, and no one was offended on that account; a lover of chastity, indeed, listened attentively to the praise of purity. Read Tertullian, read Cyprian, read Ambrose, and either accuse me or acquit me together with them. There have been found people of the Plautine family, clever only at disparaging, who want to show themselves learned by tearing apart what everyone says, and in one and the same case blame both me and my adversary, that is, both of us, so that, when one of the two must win, they claim that both have lost. Further, where in discussing the twice and thrice married we said, 'It is better, even if a second or third, to know one man than many; that is, it is more tolerable for a woman to have prostituted herself to one man than to many,' did we not immediately add why I said this: 'since even the Samaritan woman in the Gospel, who said she had a sixth husband, is rebuked by the Lord because he is not her husband'? I still proclaim openly that digamy is not condemned in the church, nor even trigamy, and that it is lawful to marry a fifth and sixth husband and more, just as a second; but as these marriages are not condemned, neither are they praised. They are a consolation in misery, not a praise of continence. Hence I said in another place too: 'Where one husband is exceeded, it makes no difference whether it is the second or the third, because she ceases to be monogamous. All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient. I do not condemn the twice married, nor even the thrice married, nor, if the word can be used, the eight-times married: let a woman have an eighth husband, if she likes, and deny that she is prostituted to one man.'

I come also to that passage for which I am blamed, where I said that, at least according to the Hebrew truth, on the second day it is not added, as on the first, third, and the rest, 'God saw that it was good,' and immediately added: 'He has left us to understand that the double number is not good, since it divides from unity and prefigures the covenant of marriage. Hence too in Noah's ark all the animals that go in by twos are unclean; the odd number is clean.' In this I do not know what is blamed. First, regarding the second day: is it that it is written and we said it is not written? Or that, though it is indeed not written, we understood it otherwise than the simplicity of Scripture allows? That 'God saw that it was good' is not written on the second day, let them accept not my testimony but that of all the Hebrews and of the other translators, namely Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. And if it is not written, although it is written on the other days, let them either give some more probable reason why it is not written, or, if they find none, they will have to accept against their will what we said. Further, if in Noah's ark all the animals that go in by twos are unclean and the odd number is clean, and no one doubts that this is written, let them explain why it is written. But if they do not explain it, they will, willing or not, accept what I have set forth. Either offer a better feast and have me as your guest, or be content with our little supper, such as it is. Must I now list the churchmen who have discussed the odd number: Clement, Hippolytus, Origen, Dionysius, Eusebius, Didymus, and of our own Tertullian, Cyprian, Victorinus, Lactantius, Hilary? What Cyprian said, and of what kind, in discussing the number seven, that is, an odd number, in his book To Fortunatus, his book bears witness. Or perhaps my detractors will not listen to Pythagoras and Archytas of Tarentum and Publius Scipio in the sixth book of the Republic discussing the odd number, if I bring them forward? Then I will make the schools of the grammarians shout at them: 'God delights in an odd number.'

A great sacrilege! The churches are overthrown, the world cannot bear to hear it, if we have said that virginity is purer than marriage, if we have placed the even number below the odd, and shown that the types of the Old Testament led on to the truth of the Gospel! The other things that have been criticized in our book I think either lighter or bearing on the same sense; so I have not wished to answer them, lest I should both exceed the size of a little book and seem to distrust your ability, whom I had as the patron of my case before I asked you. So with my last word I protest that I have not condemned marriage and do not condemn it; that I answered an opponent, and did not fear the ambushes of my own people. But I exalt virginity to heaven, not because I have it, but because I admire what I do not have. It is an honest and modest confession to praise in others what one lacks oneself. Because I cling to the earth with a heavy body, do I not admire the flight of birds, or not praise the dove that 'skims its liquid way and does not move its swift wings'? Let no one deceive himself, let no one be thrown headlong by a flattering adulator. The first virginity is from birth, the second virginity from the second birth. This is not my saying; it is an ancient sentence: 'No one can serve two masters,' the flesh and the spirit. 'The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh; these are opposed to one another, so that we do not do what we wish.' When anything in our little work seems harsh to you, do not look at my words but at the Scripture from which my words are drawn.

Christ is a virgin; the mother of our virgin is a perpetual virgin, mother and virgin. For Jesus entered through closed doors; in his tomb, which was new and hewn in the hardest rock, no one was laid before or after; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed, from which flows that river, according to Amos [Joel], which waters the torrent of ropes or of thorns: of ropes, the sins with which we were once bound; of thorns, which choked the householder's seed. She is the eastern gate in Ezekiel, always shut and full of light, which either encloses within itself or brings forth from itself the Holy of Holies, through which the Sun of righteousness, our high priest after the order of Melchizedek, goes in and goes out. Let them answer me how Jesus entered through closed doors, when he showed his hands to be handled, his side to be examined, and his bones and flesh, so that the reality of his body should not be thought a phantom; and I will answer how holy Mary is both mother and virgin: a virgin after childbirth, a mother before she was married. So, as we had begun to say, Christ a virgin and Mary a virgin consecrated the beginnings of virginity for both sexes. The apostles were either virgins or continent after marriage. Bishops, presbyters, and deacons are chosen either as virgins or as widowers, or at any rate as chaste for ever after receiving the priesthood. Why do we deceive ourselves and grow angry if the rewards of chastity are denied to those who are always in heat for intercourse? We want to eat sumptuously, to cling to the embraces of our wives, and to reign with Christ among the number of virgins and widows. Shall hunger and gluttony, dirt and cleanliness, sackcloth and silk have the same reward? Lazarus received his evil things in his life, and that rich man in purple, fat and sleek, enjoyed the good things of the flesh while he lived; but after death they occupy different places, misery being exchanged for delights and delights for misery. It is in our choice to follow either Lazarus or the rich man.