On Monogamy 1–9

Heretics abolish marriage; the psychics heap it up. The former do not marry even once; the latter, not only once. What are you to do, law of the Creator? Between strangers who make themselves eunuchs and your own people who drive on like charioteers, you have as much to complain of in the service of your own household as in the disdain of outsiders. Those who abuse you hurt you just as those who do not use you. But neither is continence of that kind to be praised, because it is heretical, nor is license to be defended, because it is psychic. The one blasphemes, the other runs riot; the one destroys the God of marriage, the other puts him to shame. With us, however, whom the recognition of spiritual gifts rightly causes to be called spiritual, continence is as religious as license is modest, since both are with the Creator. Continence honors the law of marriage, license tempers it; the one is not compelled, the other is ruled; the one has free choice, the other a limit. We know one marriage, as we know one God. The law of marriage brings greater honor where it also has modesty. But to the psychics, who do not receive the Spirit, the things that are of the Spirit are not pleasing. And so, since the things of the Spirit do not please, the things of the flesh will please, as being contrary to the Spirit. “The flesh,” it says, “lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” And what will the flesh desire but the things that are more of the flesh? That is why in the beginning, too, it became estranged from the Spirit: “My Spirit,” he says, “shall not remain in these men forever, because they are flesh.”

So they reproach the discipline of monogamy as heresy, and for no reason are they more driven to deny the Paraclete than because they think him the founder of a new discipline, and one very hard for them. So we must first settle this in a general discussion: whether it is conceivable that the Paraclete taught anything of this kind that could be counted either new, against catholic tradition, or burdensome, against the light burden of the Lord. On both points the Lord himself has pronounced. For in saying, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot yet bear them; when the Holy Spirit comes, he will lead you into all truth,” he certainly indicated clearly enough that the Spirit would do things that could be considered both new, since never published before, and at times burdensome, since that was why they were not published. “Then,” you say, “by this argument anything new and burdensome could be ascribed to the Paraclete, even if it came from the adversary spirit.” Certainly not. For the adversary spirit would show itself by the difference of its preaching, first adulterating the rule of faith and so adulterating the order of discipline; since the corruption of whatever stands first in rank comes first, that is, of faith, which is prior to discipline. A person must be a heretic about God before being one about practice. But the Paraclete, having many things to teach which the Lord deferred to him, according to the prior appointment, will first bear witness to Christ himself as we believe him, together with the whole order of God the Creator; he will glorify him and bring him to remembrance; and thus, recognized by the principal rule, he will reveal those many things that concern disciplines. The integrity of his preaching vouches for them: new though they are, because they are only now revealed; burdensome though they are, because even now they are not borne; yet they belong to no other Christ than the one who said that he also had many other things which the Paraclete would teach, things no less burdensome to these people than to those by whom they could not yet be borne then.

Whether monogamy is burdensome, let the still shameless weakness of the flesh see to that; but whether it is new, let us settle that meanwhile. For we say this further: even if the Paraclete had today prescribed total and complete virginity or continence, so as not to permit the heat of the flesh to be foamed off even in a single marriage, even so he would not seem to introduce anything new, since the Lord himself opens the kingdoms of heaven to eunuchs, being himself a eunuch; and looking to him the apostle too, having made himself a eunuch for that reason, prefers continence. “But,” you say, “with the right to marry preserved.” Preserved indeed, and we shall see how far; yet already destroyed in the respect in which he prefers continence. “It is good,” he says, “for a man not to touch a woman.” Then it is evil to touch one. For nothing is contrary to good except evil. And therefore it remains that even those who have wives should be as though they had none, so much the more should those who have none not have them. He also gives reasons why he so advises: that the unmarried think about God, but the married about how each may please his spouse in marriage. And I can contend that what is permitted is not purely good. For what is purely good is not permitted, but is lawful of itself. Permission sometimes has necessity as its cause. Finally, in this case the will of the one who permits is not that people should marry. For he wills something else: “I would,” he says, “that all of you were as I am.” And when he shows that this is better, what does he confirm that he wills, if not what he has first said is better? And so, if he permits something other than what he willed, permitting it not by will but by necessity, he shows that what he granted unwillingly is not purely good. Finally, when he says, “It is better to marry than to burn,” what sort of good is to be understood that is better than a punishment, that cannot seem better except when compared with the worst? That is good which holds this name by itself, 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 being set against an evil, it is not so much good as a kind of lesser evil, which, obscured by a greater evil, is pushed into the name of good. Take away the condition, 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 it is no longer better; and while it is not better, it is not good either, once the condition is removed which, while it makes it better than something else, thereby forces it to be counted good. It is better to lose one eye than two. Yet if you leave aside the comparison of the two evils, it will not be better to have one eye, because it is not good either. What now, if he adapts every indulgence to marry from his own, that is, from human judgment, out of the necessity we mentioned, because it is better to marry than to burn? In fact, turning to the other class by saying, “But to the married I give charge, not I, but the Lord,” he shows that what he had said above was not of the Lord's authority but of human judgment. But when he turns minds back to continence (“But I would that you all were so”), “And I think,” he says, “that I too have the Spirit of God,” so that whatever he had allowed out of necessity he might revoke by the authority of the Holy Spirit. John too, warning that we ought to walk as the Lord walked, certainly admonished us to walk also according to holiness of the flesh. Even more plainly: “And everyone,” he says, “who has this hope in him makes himself chaste, as he too is chaste.” And elsewhere: “Be holy, as he too was holy”: in the flesh, that is. For he would not have said this of the spirit, since the spirit is acknowledged to be holy of itself and does not wait for an admonition to holiness, which is its own nature. But the flesh is taught holiness, the flesh which in Christ too was holy. So if all these things blot out the license to marry, both when the terms of the license are examined and when continence is set above it, why could not the same Spirit, coming after the apostles to lead the discipline into all truth by the stages of the times (as Ecclesiastes says, “A time for everything”), now put a final clasp on the flesh, no longer calling away from marriage indirectly but openly, since the time has now become still more “drawn in,” some 160 years having passed since then? Would you not reflect within yourself: This is an old discipline, shown beforehand even then in the Lord's flesh and will, and then in the counsels as well as the examples of his apostles? We were destined for this holiness long ago. The Paraclete introduces nothing new. What he forewarned, he defines; what he bore with, he demands. And now, as you reflect on these things, you will easily persuade yourself that it was much more fitting for the Paraclete to preach a single marriage, when he could have preached none, and that one should rather believe he moderated what it would have been fitting even to take away, if you understand what Christ wills. In this too you should recognize the Paraclete as an advocate: that he excuses your weakness from total continence.

Let mention of the Paraclete now withdraw, as if he were an authority peculiar to us. Let us unroll the documents of the ancient Scriptures that we share. We are showing this very thing: that the discipline of monogamy is neither new nor foreign, but rather both ancient and proper to Christians, so that you may perceive the Paraclete as its restorer rather than its founder. As regards antiquity, what more ancient pattern can be brought forward than the very enrollment of the human race? God fashioned one woman for the male, taking one rib of his, and certainly out of several. And in the preface to that very work he says: “It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make a helper for him.” For he would have said “helpers” if he had destined him for several wives. He added also a law for the future, since it was said prophetically: “And the two shall be into one flesh”: not three, nor more; otherwise no longer two, if more. The law stood. In fact, the unity of marriage continued in the founders of the race to the very end, not because there were no other women, but because there were none for this reason: that the firstfruits of the race might not be defiled by a double marriage. Otherwise, if God had willed it, there could have been; he could certainly have taken from the multitude of his daughters, having Eve no less from his own bones and flesh, if this could have been done piously. But when the first crime, murder, had been inaugurated in a brother's killing, no crime was so fit for second place as two marriages. For it makes no difference whether a man has had two wives one at a time, or two women at once have made two. The number of those joined and of those separated is the same. Yet God's institution, having once suffered violence through Lamech, stood firm afterwards to the very end of that people. No second Lamech appeared, as one married to two wives. What Scripture does not record, it denies. Other iniquities provoked the flood, avenged once, whatever they were, but not seventy-seven times, which two marriages deserved. And the renewal of the second human race too is reckoned from monogamy as its mother. Again two into one flesh undertake to grow and abound: Noah and his wife and their sons, in single marriages. Even in the animals monogamy is recognized, so that not even the beasts should be born of adultery. “Of all beasts,” he says, “of all flesh, you shall bring two into the ark, that they may live with you, male and female; they shall be of the flying creatures according to their kind, and of all the creeping things of the earth according to their kind; two of all shall go in to you, male and female.” In the same pattern he commands sevens also to be chosen by pairs, of male and female, one male and one female. What more shall I say? Not even unclean birds were allowed to go in with two females.

So much for the testimony of the beginnings, the advocacy of our origin, and the precedent of divine institution. This is certainly a law, not a mere record; for if it was so done from the beginning, we find that we are directed back to the beginning by Christ. In the question of divorce, when he said that it was permitted by Moses because of their hardness of heart, but from the beginning it was not so, he without doubt called back the indivisibility of marriage to the beginning. And therefore those two whom God joined from the beginning into one flesh, man shall not separate today. The apostle too, writing to the Ephesians, says that God purposed in himself, for the dispensation of the fulfillment of the times, to bring back all things in Christ to the head, that is, to the beginning, things above the heavens and on the earth, in him. So too the Lord put on himself two letters of the Greeks, the first and the last, figures of the beginning and the end meeting in himself; so that, just as Alpha rolls on to Omega and Omega is folded back again to Alpha, he might show that in him is both the course of the beginning to the end and the return of the end to the beginning; so that every dispensation, ending in him through whom it began (through the Word of God, namely, who became flesh), may end just as it began. And so fully are all things in Christ called back to the beginning that faith has turned back from circumcision to the wholeness of the flesh, as it was from the beginning; and so has freedom of foods, with abstinence from blood alone, as it was from the beginning; and the indivisibility of marriage, as it was from the beginning; and the restraint of divorce, which was not from the beginning; and finally the whole man is called back into paradise, where he was from the beginning. Why then should Christ not bring Adam back at least monogamous, when he cannot present him as whole as he was when sent out from there? So as regards the restoration of the beginning, the logic both of the dispensation and of your hope demands of you what was from the beginning, according to the beginning, which is reckoned to you in Adam and reckoned again in Noah. Choose in which of them you count your beginning. In both, the rule of monogamy claims you for itself. But if the beginning passes on to the end, as Alpha to Omega, just as the end refers back to the beginning, as Omega to Alpha, and so our enrollment is transferred into Christ, the natural into the spiritual (since what is spiritual is not first, but what is natural, and then what is spiritual), let us see likewise whether you owe the same thing to this second enrollment too, whether the last Adam also meets you in the same form as the first. For the last Adam, that is Christ, was wholly unmarried, as the first Adam also was before his exile. But, granting your weakness the example of his own flesh, the more perfect Adam, that is Christ, more perfect also by being more whole, meets you, if you are willing, as a eunuch in the flesh. If you are not equal to that, he meets you as monogamous in the spirit, having one church as his bride, according to the figure of Adam and Eve, which the apostle interprets of that great mystery, of Christ and the church, as fitting carnal monogamy through the spiritual. You see, then, how, even in renewing your enrollment in Christ, you cannot bring it forward without the profession of monogamy, unless you are in the flesh what he is in the spirit; although you ought equally to have been what he was in the flesh.

But let us look further for some founders of our origin. For to some people the monogamous parents Adam and Noah are not pleasing, and perhaps not even Christ. So they appeal to Abraham, though they are forbidden to acknowledge any father but God. Very well, let Abraham be our father; let Paul be so too: “In the Gospel,” he says, “I have begotten you.” Show yourself a son of Abraham as well. For your descent from him is not from just any point; there is a fixed time at which he is your father. For if we are counted sons of Abraham by faith, as the apostle teaches when he says to the Galatians, “You know, surely, that those who are of faith are the sons of Abraham,” when did Abraham believe God, and it was counted to him as righteousness? Still in monogamy, I think, since not yet in circumcision. But if afterwards he changed in both respects, into digamy through concubinage with a slave woman, and into circumcision through the seal of the covenant, you cannot acknowledge him as father except at the time when he believed God, since you are his son according to faith, not according to the flesh. Or, if you follow the later Abraham as father, that is, the twice-married one, accept the circumcised one too. If you reject the circumcised one, you will therefore refuse the twice-married one as well. You cannot mix his two dispensations, which differ from each other in two ways. He began to be twice-married along with circumcision, and was monogamous along with uncircumcision. If you accept digamy, admit circumcision too. If you defend uncircumcision, you are bound to monogamy as well. Indeed, you are the son of a monogamous Abraham just as of an uncircumcised one, so that if you are circumcised you are no longer his son, because you will not be of faith, but of the seal of the faith that was justified in uncircumcision. You have the apostle: learn with the Galatians. So even if you bring digamy upon yourself, you are not the son of that Abraham whose faith came first, in monogamy. For even if he was afterwards named the father of many nations, it was of those who were to be counted sons of Abraham from the faith that preceded his digamy. What came afterwards is another matter. Figures are one thing, patterns another; images one thing, definitions another. Images pass away once fulfilled; definitions remain to be fulfilled. Images prophesy; definitions govern. What that digamy of Abraham portends, the same apostle teaches, the interpreter of both testaments, just as he also determines that our seed is called in Isaac. If you are of the free woman, belonging to Isaac, he certainly kept to one marriage. These, then, as I think, are the ones in whom I am enrolled; the others I do not know. If I look around at their examples (a certain David, heaping marriages on himself even through bloodshed; a certain Solomon, rich even in wives), I am told to follow the better: you have Joseph too, husband of one wife, and on that account, I dare say, better than his father; you have Moses, God's intimate intermediary; you have Aaron, the chief priest. The second Moses too, of the second people, who led our image into the promise of God, in whom the name of the Lord was first consecrated, was not twice married.

After the old examples of the persons of our origins, let us pass likewise to the old documents of the Scriptures of the law, so as to go through all our equipment in order. And since some people sometimes say they have nothing to do with the law (which Christ did not dissolve but fulfilled), and sometimes snatch from the law whatever they want, we too say plainly that the law has passed away in this sense: its burdens, which, according to the judgment of the apostles, not even the fathers could bear, have been given up; but what concerns righteousness not only remains reserved but has been enlarged, so that our righteousness may exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. If righteousness, then certainly chastity too. Now the law commands that a man take in marriage the wife of his brother who died without children, to raise up seed for his brother, and this can happen more than once to the same woman, according to that crafty question of the Sadducees. If for that reason they think that frequent marriages are permitted in other cases too, they must first understand the reason for the precept itself, and so they will know that the reason has now ceased and belongs to those parts of the law that have been made void. It was necessary to succeed to the marriage of a brother who had died without children: first, because that old blessing, “Increase and abound,” still had to run its course; next, because the sins of fathers were required even of sons; third, because eunuchs and the barren were held in disgrace. So, lest those who had departed childless, not through a fault of nature but because death came first, be judged accursed on that account, a substitute and, as it were, posthumous offspring was provided for them from their own family. But when the end of the times had made void “Increase and abound,” as the apostle introduced, “It remains that those who have wives should be as though they had none, because the time is drawn in”; and when the sour grape eaten by the fathers ceased to set the sons' teeth on edge, for each will die in his own sin; and when eunuchs not only were free of disgrace but even earned favor, being invited into the kingdoms of heaven; then, with the law of succeeding to a brother's marriage buried, its opposite prevailed: not to succeed to a brother's marriage. And so, as we said before, what has ceased to be valid, now that its reason has ceased, cannot lend an argument to anything else. So a wife whose husband has died will not marry; for she would certainly be marrying a brother if she married, since we are all brothers. And she who is to marry “in the Lord” must marry, that is, not a heathen but a brother, since the old law too takes away marriage with foreigners. But since it is also laid down in Leviticus, “Whoever takes his brother's wife, it is uncleanness, a disgrace; he will die childless,” without doubt, while he is forbidden to marry again, she is forbidden too, having no one to marry but a brother. How the apostle will agree with the law, which he does not wholly attack, will be shown when we come to his letter. Meanwhile, as far as the law is concerned, its arguments suit us better. Indeed, the same law forbids priests to marry again. It also commands that a priest's daughter, widowed or put away, if she has no seed, shall return to her father's house and be fed from his bread. “If she has no seed,” then: not so that, if she has, she may marry again (how much more will she not marry if she has children?), but so that, if she has, she may be fed by her son rather than by her father, so that the son too may carry out God's commandment, “Honor father and mother.” But Jesus, the high and great priest of the Father, clothing us from what is his own (for those who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ), has made us priests to God his Father, according to John. For he also called back that young man who was hurrying to his father's funeral, in order to show that he calls us priests, whom the law forbade to be present at the burial of parents: “The priest,” it says, “shall not go in to any dead soul, and he shall not be defiled for his father or for his mother.” Must we then observe this prohibition too? Certainly not. For our one Father, God, lives, and so does our mother the church; and we are not dead, who live to God, nor do we bury the dead, since they too live in Christ. Certainly we are priests called by Christ, bound to monogamy by the ancient law of God, which then prophesied us in its priests.

Now, turning to the law that is properly ours, that is, the Gospel, what examples meet us before we come to its sayings? See, at once, as on the threshold, two high priestesses of Christian holiness meet us, monogamy and continence: the one modest, in Zechariah the priest; the other whole, in John the forerunner; the one appeasing God, the other preaching Christ; the one proclaiming the complete priest, the other presenting more than a prophet, namely one who not only preached Christ or pointed him out face to face, but even baptized him. For who could more worthily initiate the Lord's body than flesh of the same kind as that which conceived it and bore it? And indeed a virgin gave birth to Christ, one who was to marry once after the birth, so that both titles of holiness might be counted in Christ's lineage, through a mother both virgin and married once. And when the infant is presented in the temple, who takes him into his arms? Who first recognizes him in the Spirit? A just and devout man, and certainly not twice married, if only so that Christ should not soon be proclaimed more worthily by a woman, an old widow married only once, who, devoted to the temple, showed well enough in herself what kind of persons ought to cleave to the spiritual temple, that is, the church. Such were the witnesses the Lord had as an infant; he had no others as a grown man. Peter alone I find to have been married, through his mother-in-law; I presume him monogamous through the church, which, built upon him, was going to place monogamous men in every rank of its order. The rest, since I do not find them married, I must understand to have been either eunuchs or continent. For even if among the Greeks women and wives are denoted by a common word, for convenience of usage (though there is a proper word for wives), we shall not on that account interpret Paul as though he showed that the apostles had wives. For if he were discussing marriage, as he does in what follows, where the apostle could better have named some example, he would rightly seem to be saying, “For do we not have the right to take wives about with us, as the other apostles and Cephas?” But when he adds words that show his abstinence regarding provision for food, saying, “For do we not have the right to eat and drink?” he does not show wives taken about by the apostles (those who have no wives still have the right to eat and drink), but simply women who ministered to them in the same way as those who accompanied the Lord. Now, if Christ rebukes the scribes and Pharisees, who sat in Moses' seat and did not do what they taught, how could he himself set on his own seat men mindful to command holiness of the flesh rather than also to practice it, when he had in every way instilled it into them as something both to be taught and to be done? First by his own example, then by other arguments: when he says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; when he makes others, who have become children after marriage, their companions; when he calls us to the simplicity of the dove, a bird not only harmless but chaste, which one male alone knows; when he denies that the Samaritan woman has a husband, to show that a many-times husband is an adulterer; when, in the revelation of his glory, out of so many saints and prophets he prefers to have Moses and Elijah with him, the one monogamous, the other a eunuch. For Elijah was none other than John, who came in the spirit and power of Elijah. And when that “glutton and drinker,” a frequent guest at lunches and dinners with tax collectors and sinners, dines once at a single wedding, though many were certainly marrying, he willed to celebrate weddings as many times as he willed them to take place.

But let these arguments be reckoned as forced out of conjectures, if the sayings did not stand beside them which the Lord uttered in dealing with divorce, which, once permitted, he now forbids: first, because from the beginning it was not so, just like the number of marriages; then, because what God has joined, man shall not separate, that is, so as not to act against the Lord. For he alone will separate who also joined; and he will separate not through the hardness of divorce, which he reproaches and restrains, but through the debt of death, since not one of two sparrows falls to the ground without the Father's will. Therefore, if those whom God has joined man shall not separate by divorce, it is equally consistent that those whom God has separated by death man shall not join by marriage; for he would be joining the separation against God's will just as much as if he had separated the joining. So much as regards not destroying God's will and rebuilding the pattern of the beginning. But another reason also agrees; or rather not another, but the one that imposed the pattern of the beginning and moved God's will to forbid divorce: that whoever dismisses his wife except for the cause of adultery makes her commit adultery, and he who marries a woman dismissed by her husband certainly commits adultery. Can a divorced woman not marry lawfully? And if she commits some such thing without the name of marriage, does she escape the charge of adultery, on the ground that adultery is a crime within marriage? God has judged otherwise than men: that altogether, whether through marriage or promiscuously, the admission of another man is pronounced by him adultery. Let us see what marriage is with God, and so we shall know equally what adultery is. Marriage is when God joins two into one flesh, or, finding them joined in the same flesh, has sealed the joining. Adultery is when, the two having been separated in whatever way, another flesh, or rather a strange flesh, is mingled, of which it cannot be said, “This is flesh from my flesh and bone from my bones.” For this, once done and declared, as from the beginning, so now cannot apply to another flesh. So you will say without reason that God does not will a divorced woman to be joined to another man while her husband is alive, as though he willed it when he is dead; since if she is not bound to him when he is dead, neither is she bound while he lives. If marriage is dissolved by divorce as well as by death, she will not be bound to the one with whom that which bound her has been broken off. To whom, then, will she be bound? It makes no difference to God whether she marries while her husband is alive or dead. For she sins not against him but against herself. “Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits adultery sins against his own body.” And he commits adultery, as we laid down above, who mingles another flesh with himself over and above that former one which God either joined into two or found joined. And therefore he abolished divorce, which was not from the beginning, in order to fortify what was from the beginning, the perseverance of two in one flesh, lest the necessity or occasion of a third union of flesh should break in; he permits divorce for one cause only, if what is being guarded against should happen to come first. So far, indeed, was divorce from existing at the beginning that among the Romans this kind of hardness is recorded to have been committed first after the six hundredth year from the founding of the city. But they commit adulteries even without divorcing; to us, even if we divorce, it will not be permitted even to marry.