Exhortation to Chastity (complete)

I do not doubt, brother, that since your wife has been sent ahead in peace, you have turned to composing your mind, are thinking about how your single state is to end, and certainly need counsel. Although in matters of this kind each one ought to confer with his own faith and consult its strength, yet because in this sort of case the necessity of the flesh stirs up the thought, a necessity that generally resists faith within the conscience itself, faith needs counsel from outside, as an advocate against the necessities of the flesh. That necessity can very easily be curbed if the will of God, rather than his indulgence, is considered. No one earns merit by making use of an indulgence, but by obeying the will. The will of God is our sanctification. For he wills that we, his image, should become also his likeness, that we may be holy as he himself is holy. That good (sanctification, I mean) I divide into several kinds, so that we may be found in one of them. The first kind is virginity from birth; the second, virginity from the second birth, that is, from the washing, which either keeps a marriage pure by mutual agreement or perseveres in widowhood by choice; a third degree remains, monogamy, when after one marriage has been cut off a person thereafter renounces sex. The first virginity belongs to happiness: not to know at all what you will afterwards wish to be freed from. The second belongs to virtue: to despise what you know very well the power of. The remaining kind, of marrying no further after a marriage has been severed by death, has, besides the praise of virtue, that of modesty as well. For modesty is not to long for what has been taken away, and taken away by the Lord God, without whose will neither does a leaf slip from a tree nor does a sparrow worth one as fall to the ground.

How modest, then, is that saying: “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; as it seemed good to the Lord, so it has been done.” And therefore if we restore a marriage that has been taken away, we are without doubt striving against the will of God, wishing to have again what he willed us not to have. For if he had willed it, he would not have taken it away. Unless we interpret this too as the will of God, as though he willed us to have again what he has just willed us not to have! It is not the mark of a good and solid faith to refer everything to the will of God in this way, and for each person so to flatter himself by saying that nothing happens without his nod, as not to understand that there is something in ourselves. Otherwise every sin will be excused if we contend that nothing is done by us without the will of God, and that definition will lead to the destruction of the whole discipline, even of God himself, if either he brings about by his own will what he does not will, or there is nothing that God does not will. But just as he forbids certain things, for which he even threatens eternal punishment (for certainly what he forbids he does not will, and by these he is offended), so conversely what he wills he commands, accepts, and repays with the reward of eternity. So, since we have learned both from his commands, what he does not will and what he wills, we nevertheless have the will and the choice to elect one or the other, as it is written: “Behold, I have set before you good and evil”; for you have tasted of the tree of knowledge. And therefore we ought not to refer to the Lord's will what has been placed in our own choice, as though he himself willed it, or as though he who does not will evil did not will what is good. So the will is ours when we will evil against the will of God, who wills the good. Further, if you ask where this will comes from by which we will something against the will of God, I will say: from ourselves. And not rashly. For you must answer to your seed, since Adam, the founder both of the race and of sin, willed that by which he sinned. The devil did not impose on him the will to sin, but supplied material to his will. God's will, moreover, had come to him in the form of obedience. Accordingly you too, if you do not obey God, who established you with free power by setting a command before you, will through the freedom of your will turn aside willingly into what God does not will, and then you think you have been overthrown by the devil. Even if he wills you to will something God does not will, he still does not make you will it, since not even then did he force those first-formed ones into the will to sin; indeed, they were neither unwilling nor ignorant of what God did not will. For certainly he did not will it to be done, since he appointed death for the transgression. So the devil's one work is to tempt whether you will what lies in you to will. But once you have willed it, it follows that he subdues you to himself, not having worked the will in you, but having found an opportunity in your will. Since, then, willing alone is in us, and in this our mind toward God is tested, whether we will the things that accord with his will, I say that the will of God must be pondered deeply and earnestly, even what he wills in secret.

What is in the open we all know, and we must look closely at how these very things stand in the open. For even if some things seem to savor of God's will because he allows them, not everything that is permitted proceeds at once from the pure and whole will of the one who permits it. Whatever is permitted comes from indulgence. And though indulgence is not without will, yet because it has some cause in the one who is indulged, it comes as though from an unwilling will, one that has undergone a cause of itself which constrains the will. See what sort of will it is that has another as its cause. Next, a second kind must be considered, that of pure will. God wills us to do certain things pleasing to him, in which indulgence does not plead but discipline rules. If, however, he has set other things above these, namely those he wills more, is there any doubt that we must pursue the things he prefers, since the things he wills less, because he wills others more, are to be treated as if he did not will them? For in showing what he wills more, he has blotted out the lesser will with the greater. And the more clearly he has set both before your knowledge, the more he has determined that you should pursue what he has declared he wills more. So if he declared it in order that you should pursue what he wills more, then without doubt, unless you do so, you are minded against his will, by being minded against his preferable will, and you offend more than you merit, doing what he does indeed will and rejecting what he prefers. In part you sin; in part, if you do not sin, still you do not earn merit. And is not unwillingness to earn merit itself a sin? Second marriage, then, if it comes from that will of God which is called indulgence, we shall deny to be his pure will, since indulgence is its cause; if it comes from that will above which another, preferable one is set, namely continence, which is more to be sought, we shall have learned that the less preferable is cancelled by the preferable. These points I have touched on briefly so that I may now run through the words of the apostle. First of all, I shall not seem irreverent if I note what he himself professes: that he introduced that whole indulgence of marriage from his own, that is, from human judgment, not from divine prescription. For when he laid down concerning widows and the unmarried that they should marry if they cannot contain themselves, because “it is better to marry than to burn,” turning to the other class he says, “But to the married I give charge, not I, but the Lord.” So by transferring from his own person to the Lord he shows that what he had said above he had pronounced not in the Lord's person but in his own: “It is better to marry than to burn.” And although this saying applies to those whom the faith finds unmarried or widowed, yet since everyone embraces it as a license to marry, I would like to examine what sort of good it points to that is only better than a punishment, which cannot seem good except when compared with what is worst, so that marrying is good only because burning is worse. A thing is good in the true sense if it keeps that name without comparison, I do not say with an evil, but even with another good, so that even if it is compared with another good and overshadowed by it, it still remains in the name of good. But if it is forced to be called good by setting it against an evil, it is not so much good as a kind of lesser evil, which, being obscured by a greater evil, is pushed into the name of good. Take away the comparison, then, so that you do not say, “It is better to marry than to burn,” and I ask whether you dare say, “It is better to marry,” without adding what it is better than. So what is not better is certainly not good either, since you have taken away and removed the comparison, which, while it makes the thing “better,” thereby forces it to be counted good. “It is better to marry than to burn” is to be understood as it is better to lack one eye than two: yet if you leave the comparison aside, it will not be better to have one eye, because it is not good either. Let no one, then, snatch a defense from this passage, which properly concerns the unmarried and the widowed, who have as yet no union counted against them; though I have shown that even for them the condition attached to the permission must be understood.

As for second marriage, we know that the apostle plainly declared: “Are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you will not sin.” Yet he introduced the train of this saying too from his own counsel, not from divine command. And there is a great difference between a command of God and the counsel of a man. “I have no command of the Lord,” he says, “but I give counsel, as one who has obtained mercy from the Lord to be faithful.” Moreover, neither in the Gospel nor in the letters of Paul himself will you find repetition of marriage permitted by God's command. Hence it is confirmed that one marriage is to be kept, because what is not found permitted by the Lord is recognized as forbidden. Add that this very interjection of human counsel, as if already having second thoughts about its excess, at once reins itself in and calls itself back, when he adds, “Nevertheless such will have affliction of the flesh”; when he says that he is sparing them; when he adds that the time is drawn in, so that even those who have marriages ought to act as though they had none; when he compares the anxiety of the married and of the unmarried. For by these things, teaching why it is not expedient to marry, he dissuades from what he had allowed above. And this concerns a first marriage; how much more a second? When, moreover, he urges us to follow his own example, certainly showing what he wishes us to be, that is, continent, he equally declares what he does not wish us to be, that is, incontinent. So he too, when he wills one thing, permits what he does not will, neither freely nor sincerely. For if he had willed it, he would not have permitted it; rather, he would have commanded it. But look, again he says that a woman whose husband has died may marry whom she will, only in the Lord. “But she will be happier,” he says, “if she remains so, according to my counsel. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.” We see two counsels: one by which above he grants leave to marry, and one by which afterwards he teaches continence from marriage. To which, then, you ask, shall we assent? Look and read. When he grants leave, he cites the counsel of a prudent man; when he enjoins continence, he affirms the counsel of the Holy Spirit. Follow the admonition that has divinity for its patron. Believers too have the Spirit of God, but not all believers are apostles. So when he who had called himself faithful afterwards added that he had the Spirit of God, which no one would doubt even of a believer, he said it in order to restore to himself the high rank of an apostle. For apostles properly have the Holy Spirit, since they have him fully, in works of prophecy, in effective miracles, and in the evidences of tongues, not in part, as the rest do. So he made the authority of the Holy Spirit attach to the kind of counsel he wished us rather to obey, and it has now become not a counsel of the divine Spirit but, in keeping with his majesty, a command.

In support of the law of marrying once, the very origin of the human race pleads, testifying what God established in the beginning as a pattern for posterity to follow. For when he had formed man and foresaw that he needed a partner like him, he borrowed one of his ribs and fashioned one woman for him, though certainly neither craftsman nor material was lacking. There were more ribs in Adam, and untiring hands in God, but not more wives with God. And therefore Adam, the man of God, and Eve, the woman of God, living in a single marriage with each other, established a pattern for mankind on the authority of the origin and the first will of God. Finally, “they shall be,” he says, “two in one flesh”: not three, nor four. Otherwise it is no longer one flesh, nor two into one flesh. They will be so if the joining and growing together into unity happens once. But if it happens again, or more often, it has ceased to be one, and they will be not two into one flesh but plainly one rib into many. And since the apostle interprets “They shall be two into one flesh” of the church and Christ, according to the spiritual marriage of the church and Christ (for there is one Christ and one church of his), we must recognize that the law of one marriage is doubled and heightened for us, both according to the foundation of the race and according to the sacrament of Christ. From one marriage we are reckoned in both respects: carnally in Adam and spiritually in Christ. Of the two births there is one rule of monogamy. In each, whoever swerves from monogamy falls away from his origin. The multiplying of marriage began with an accursed man: Lamech was the first, married to two wives, to make three into one flesh.

“But the blessed patriarchs too,” you say, “joined themselves in marriage not only to several wives but even to concubines.” Will we too, on that account, be allowed to marry without number? Certainly it will be allowed, if there still remain types, sacraments of something to come, for your marriages to prefigure; or if there is still room even now for that saying, “Increase and multiply”; that is, if another saying has not yet come after it: “The time is now drawn in; it remains that those who have wives should act as though they had none.” For by enjoining continence and restraining intercourse, the seedbed of the race, he certainly abolished that “Increase and multiply.” But, as I think, both utterances and both arrangements belong to one and the same God, who then, in the beginning, sent forth the seed of the race, slackening the reins of marriage until the world should be filled, until the material for a new discipline should grow; but now, at the last ends of the times, he has checked what he had sent forth and recalled what he had allowed, not without reason both for the extension at the beginning and the cutting back at the end. Beginnings are always given free rein. That is why a person plants a wood and lets it grow: so that in its time he may cut it down. The wood was the old dispensation, which is pruned by the new Gospel, in which the axe too has been laid to the roots. So too “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” has grown old ever since “Let no one repay evil for evil” grew young. And I think that even in human constitutions and decrees the later prevail over the earlier.

But why should we not rather recognize, among the old examples, those which share a discipline with the later ones and hand on the pattern of antiquity to the new? For see: in the old law I observe that the license of marrying more often was cut off. It is laid down in Leviticus: “My priests shall not marry more.” I can say that even what is not once is “more.” What is not one is number. In short, number begins after one. And everything that is once is one. But for Christ, in this as in other things, the fullness of the law was reserved. Hence among us it is prescribed more fully and more carefully that those chosen into the priestly order must be men of one marriage; so much so that I remember some twice-married men being removed from their place. But you will say: “Then the others, whom it excepts, are allowed.” We shall be foolish if we think that what is not allowed to priests is allowed to laypeople. Are not we laypeople priests too? It is written: “He has made us also a kingdom and priests to his God and Father.” It is the authority of the church that has established the difference between the order and the people, and the honor made holy by the assembled bench of the order. So where there is no bench of the church's order, you both offer and baptize and are a priest for yourself alone. But where three are, there is a church, even if they are laypeople. For each lives by his own faith, and there is no respect of persons with God, since it is not the hearers of the law who are justified by the Lord but the doers, as the apostle also says. Therefore, if you have the right of a priest in yourself where there is necessity, you must also have the discipline of a priest wherever it may be necessary to have the right of a priest. Do you, twice married, baptize? Do you, twice married, offer? How much more is it a capital offense for a twice-married layman to act as a priest, when a priest himself who has become twice married is deprived of acting as a priest? “But allowance is made for necessity,” you say. No necessity is excused that need not exist. In short, do not be found twice married, and you will not fall into the necessity of administering what is not lawful for a twice-married man. God wills all of us to be so disposed that we are fit everywhere to perform his sacraments. One God, one faith, and one discipline too. So true is this that, unless laypeople also observe the rules by which presbyters are chosen, how will there be presbyters, who are chosen from the laity? Therefore we must contend that the layman is commanded first to abstain from a second marriage, since no one can be a presbyter except a layman who has been married once.

Suppose now that it is lawful to marry again, if everything lawful is good. The same apostle exclaims: “All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.” What is not profitable, I ask you, can it be called good? If things are lawful that do not serve salvation, then things that are not good are also lawful. Which ought you to prefer: what is good because it is lawful, or what is good because it is profitable? I think there is a great difference between license and salvation. Of the good one does not say “It is lawful,” because the good does not wait to be permitted but to be taken up. What is permitted is something whose goodness is in doubt, something that might also not be permitted if it did not have some prior cause for itself, as marrying a second time is permitted because of the danger of incontinence. For unless license were attached to something not good, there would be nothing in which to test who obeys the divine will and who his own power, which of us pursues what is truly profitable and which seizes on the opportunity license offers. License is very often the testing of discipline, since discipline is proved by temptation and temptation works through license. So it comes about that all things are lawful but not all are expedient: the one to whom something is permitted is being tested, and while he is tested in the permission he is judged. The apostles too were allowed to marry and to take wives about with them. They were allowed also to live by the Gospel. But he who did not use this right as an opportunity calls us to his own example, teaching that the testing lies where license has set up a trial of abstinence.

If we interpret his meaning thoroughly, second marriage will have to be called nothing other than a kind of sexual immorality. For he says that married people are anxious about this: how to please one another. He certainly does not mean their characters (for he would not disparage a good anxiety); he wants them to be understood as anxious about dress and adornment and every effort at beauty in order to contrive allurements. Now, to please by beauty and dress is the nature of carnal desire, which is also the cause of sexual immorality. Does not second marriage, then, seem to you akin to sexual immorality, since the things found in it are those that belong to sexual immorality? The Lord himself says: “Whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already violated her in his heart.” But he who has looked at her in order to marry her: has he done less, or more? What if he has actually married her? He would not have done so unless he had both desired her in order to marry her and looked at her in order to desire her; unless, of course, a wife can be married whom you have neither seen nor desired. It makes a great difference, certainly, whether a husband or an unmarried man desires another woman. Every woman is “another” even to an unmarried man as long as she is not his own; and yet she becomes a wife by no other means than that by which she also becomes an adulteress. The laws seem to make the difference between marriage and sexual immorality by the difference of what is unlawful, not by the nature of the thing itself. Otherwise, what is present for all men and women in both marriage and sexual immorality? The mingling of flesh, obviously, the desire for which the Lord equated with sexual immorality. “So,” someone says, “you are now destroying even first marriages, that is, single ones?” And not without reason, since they too consist of that which is sexual immorality. Therefore “it is best for a man not to touch a woman,” and therefore the holiness of the virgin is foremost, because it is free of any kinship with sexual immorality. And since these things can be urged in the cause of continence even against first and single marriages, how much more will they weigh in refusing a second marriage? Be grateful if God has allowed you to marry once. And you will be grateful if you do not know that he allowed you to a second time. Otherwise you abuse the indulgence when you use it without moderation. Moderation (modestia) is understood from measure (modus). Is it not enough for you to have fallen, by marrying, from that highest degree of unstained virginity to the second? You roll down further to the third, and the fourth, and perhaps more, once you were not continent at the second station; for he who discussed inviting second marriages did not wish to forbid more marriages either. Let us marry every day, then, and let the last day catch us marrying, like Sodom and Gomorrah, on the day when that “Woe” will be fulfilled upon those who are pregnant and nursing, that is, upon the married and the incontinent; for from marriages come wombs and breasts and infants. And when will there be an end of marrying? After the end of living, I suppose.

Let us renounce the things of the flesh, so that at last we may bear spiritual fruit. Seize the opportunity, if not a most desired one, yet a timely one, of having no one to whom you must pay the debt and by whom you must be paid. You have ceased to be a debtor. O happy you! You have released your debtor: bear the loss. What if you find that what we have called a loss is a gain? For through continence you will trade for a great substance of holiness; by sparing the flesh you will gain the spirit. Let us reflect on our own conscience: how different a man feels when perhaps he abstains from his wife. His understanding is spiritual. If he prays to the Lord, he is near heaven. If he applies himself to the Scriptures, he is wholly in them. If he sings a psalm, he is content with himself. If he adjures a demon, he is confident. That is why the apostle added a temporary purification for the sake of commending prayers: so that we might know that what is profitable for a time must be practiced by us always, so that it may always profit. Daily, at every moment, prayer is necessary for people; and so, certainly, is continence, since prayer is necessary. Prayer proceeds from the conscience. If the conscience blushes, prayer blushes. The spirit leads prayer to God. If the spirit is conscious within itself of a blushing conscience, how will it dare to lead prayer to the altar, when, as the prayer blushes, the holy minister himself is also flushed with shame? For there is the prophetic word of the Old Testament: “You shall be holy, because God is holy”; and again: “With the holy you will be sanctified, and with the innocent man you will be innocent, and with the elect elect.” For we ought to walk in the discipline of the Lord as is fitting, not according to the filthy desires of the flesh. So too the apostle says that to be minded according to the flesh is death, but to be minded according to the spirit is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Likewise through the holy prophetess Prisca the good news is proclaimed that the holy minister knows how to minister holiness. “For purification brings harmony,” she says, “and they see visions, and, putting their face downward, they also hear clear voices, both saving and hidden.” If this dulling turns away the Holy Spirit even when the business of the flesh is carried on within a single marriage, how much more when it is done in a second marriage?

For the shame is double, because in a second marriage two wives surround the same husband, one in spirit, the other in the flesh. For you will not be able to hate the first, for whom you even keep a more religious affection, as one already received with the Lord, for whose spirit you make petition, for whom you render annual offerings. Will you, then, stand before the Lord with as many wives as you commemorate in prayer, and offer for two, and commend those two through a priest ordained from monogamy, or even consecrated from virginity, surrounded by widows married only once? And will your sacrifice ascend with an unabashed brow, and among the other requests of a good mind will you ask chastity for yourself and your wife?

I know the pretexts with which we give color to the insatiable desire of the flesh. We plead the need for support: a house to manage, a household to govern, purses and keys to guard, wool-work to give out, food to procure, cares to lighten. As if only husbands' houses fare well! The households of the unmarried have perished, the estates of eunuchs, the fortunes of soldiers or of those who travel without wives! Are not we too soldiers, and of a stricter discipline as we serve so great a commander? Are not we too travelers in this world? But why, O Christian, are you so disposed that you cannot do without a wife? “But now a partner in household burdens is necessary.” Then have a spiritual wife. Take one of the widows, beautiful in faith, endowed with poverty, sealed with age. You will have made a good marriage. Such wives it is pleasing to God that one should have even several. “But Christians think about posterity”: Christians, for whom there is no tomorrow! Will the servant of God long for heirs, when he has disinherited himself from the world? And is that a reason for someone to seek marriage again, if he has no children from the former one? Will he then have this as the first benefit, that he will wish to live longer, when the apostle himself was hastening to the Lord? Surely he will be most unencumbered in persecutions, most steadfast in martyrdoms, most ready in sharing his goods, most temperate in acquiring; and at last he will die free of care, leaving behind sons who perhaps will make funeral offerings for him! Are such things, then, done with an eye to the commonwealth, so that cities may not fail if offspring are not raised, so that the rule of law and commerce may not collapse, so that the temples may not be deserted, so that there may not lack people to shout “Christians to the lion”? For this is what those who seek sons long to hear. Let even these things be counsel enough for widowhood, especially among us: the burden of children, whom men are compelled by laws to raise, since no wise man would ever willingly have desired children. What then will you do if you get your new wife with child against your conscience? Dissolve the conception with drugs? I think it is no more lawful for us to harm a child being born than one already born. But perhaps, when your wife is pregnant, you will dare to ask God for relief from so great a care, which you refused when it lay in your own power? Some barren woman, I suppose, will be looked out, or one already of a colder age. Very prudent, and above all very faithful! For of course we have never believed that a barren or old woman gave birth when God willed it! That is all the more likely to happen if someone, presuming on this foresight of his, provokes God's rivalry. Indeed, we know one of the brothers who, having taken a barren wife in a second marriage for his daughter's sake, became a father again as surely as he became a husband again.

To this exhortation of mine, dearest brother, are added also examples from the world, which are often set before us as a testimony, when what is good and pleasing to God is recognized even by outsiders and honored with their testimony. Among the heathen, in fact, monogamy is held in such high honor that even for virgins marrying lawfully a once-married woman is employed as bridal attendant; and if that is done for the sake of the omen, it is certainly a good omen. Likewise, in certain solemn rites and offices the once-married woman takes first place. Certainly the Flaminica must be married only once, and that is also the law of the Flamen. And that the Pontifex Maximus himself is not allowed to marry again is surely to the glory of monogamy. And since Satan apes the sacraments of God, it is a challenge to us, indeed a shame, if we are slow to show to God the continence that some offer to the devil, now by virginity, now by lifelong widowhood. We know the virgins of Vesta, and of Juno at a town of Achaia, and of Apollo at Delphi, and of Minerva and Diana in certain places. We know continent men too, the priests of that Egyptian bull; and women who serve the African Ceres, with whom they even grow old after renouncing marriage of their own accord, shunning from then on the touch of males, even the kisses of their sons. The devil, you see, has found, after self-indulgence, even a chastity that destroys, so that the Christian who refuses the chastity that preserves may be the more guilty. There will be as a testimony to us also certain women of the world who won fame for their resolve to have only one husband: a Dido, who, a fugitive on foreign soil, where she ought to have been eager for marriage with a king, yet, rather than experience a second marriage, chose on the contrary to burn rather than marry; or that Lucretia, who, though she had once suffered another man by force and against her will, washed her defiled flesh with her own blood, so as not to live when she was no longer a woman of one husband. You may find more examples, if you look more carefully, among our own people, and indeed better than those others, since it is greater to live in chastity than to die for it. It is easier to lay down your life because you have lost a good than to keep, by living, the thing for which you would rather die. How many men and women, then, in the orders of the church are distinguished by their continence, who have preferred to be wedded to God, who have restored the honor of their flesh, who have already dedicated themselves as sons of that age, killing in themselves the desire of lust and all that could not be admitted within paradise! Hence it must be presumed that those who wish to be received within paradise ought at last to cease from that from which paradise is untouched.