On Modesty 1–7

Modesty, the flower of morals, the honor of bodies, the grace of the sexes, the integrity of the blood, the guarantee of the race, the foundation of holiness, the first sign of a good mind in all, though rare and not easily perfected and hardly lasting, will nevertheless remain to some extent in the world, if nature has laid its foundation, if discipline has persuaded it, if censure has restrained it; for every good of the mind is either born, or trained, or compelled. But as evils prevail more, which is the character of the last times, good things can no longer be born, so corrupt are the seeds; nor trained, so neglected are studies; nor compelled, so disarmed are the laws. In short, the virtue with which we begin has now so far fallen out of use that modesty is thought to be not the renouncing but the moderating of lusts, and he is held chaste enough who has been less unchaste. But let the world's modesty look to itself, together with the world: with its own nature, if it was born; with its own study, if it was trained; with its own servitude, if it was compelled; except that it would be even more unhappy, had it stood, as being fruitless, since it would not have acted before God. I would rather have no good than an empty one. What profit is there in being what does not profit? The state of our own goods is now sinking; the system of Christian modesty is being shaken, which draws everything from heaven: its nature through the washing of regeneration, its discipline through the instrument of preaching, its censure through judgments drawn from both testaments, enforced more steadily by fear of eternal fire and desire of the eternal kingdom. Could I not have kept silent against this? I hear that an edict has even been posted, and a peremptory one at that. The supreme pontiff, that is, the bishop of bishops, decrees: “I remit the sins both of adultery and of sexual immorality to those who have done penance.” O edict, on which cannot be written “Well done!” And where will this generosity be posted? There, I suppose, at the very doors of lust, beneath the very signboards of lust. There such repentance must be promulgated, where the offense itself will dwell. There the pardon must be read, where men will enter in hope of it. But this is read in the church, and pronounced in the church, and she is a virgin! Far, far from the bride of Christ be such a proclamation! She who is true, who is modest, who is holy, will be free even of a stain on her ears. She has none to whom she might promise this; and if she had, she does not promise it, since even the earthly temple of God could sooner be called by the Lord “a den of robbers” than of adulterers and fornicators. This work, then, will also be against the psychics; against my own former fellowship in their opinion too, so that they may reproach me all the more with it as a mark of fickleness. Repudiating a fellowship is never a prejudgment of guilt. As if it were not easier to err with the many, when the truth is loved with the few! But a useful fickleness will not disgrace me more than a harmful one would have adorned me. I am not ashamed of an error I have left behind, because I delight to have left it, because I recognize myself as better and more modest. No one who makes progress blushes. Knowledge in Christ too has its ages, through which even the apostle passed. “When I was a child,” he says, “I spoke as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I did away with the things that were a child's.” So he turned from his former opinions, and did not sin thereby, because he became a zealot not for the traditions of his fathers but for Christian ones, even wishing that those who urged keeping circumcision would cut themselves off. And would that these too were cut off, who mutilate the pure and true integrity of the flesh, amputating not the outermost surface but the innermost image of modesty itself, when they promise pardon to adulterers and fornicators against the principal discipline of the Christian name, to which even the world bears witness so strongly that, when it wishes to punish it in our women, it strives to do so rather by defilements of the flesh than by torments, wishing to snatch away what they put before life. But now this glory is being extinguished, and that by those who ought all the more steadily to have signed no pardon for stains of this kind, inasmuch as they marry as often as they wish precisely so as not to be forced to fall into adultery and sexual immorality, since “it is better to marry than to burn.” No doubt, for the sake of continence, incontinence is necessary; the blaze will be put out by fires! Why, then, do they afterward also forgive, under the name of repentance, the crimes for which they provide remedies by the right of many marriages? For the remedies will be pointless when the crimes are forgiven, and the crimes will remain if the remedies are pointless. So on both sides they make game of care and carelessness, taking precautions most vainly against what they spare, and sparing most foolishly what they take precautions against, since either there should be no precaution where there is sparing, or no sparing where there is precaution. For they take precautions as though they did not want such a thing committed, but they forgive as though they wanted it committed; whereas if they do not want it committed, they ought not to forgive, and if they want to forgive, they ought not to take precautions. For adultery and sexual immorality will not be counted among the moderate and middling sins, so that both would fit: the care that takes precautions and the ease that forgives. But since they are those that hold the summit of crimes, it does not fit that they be forgiven as moderate and guarded against as greatest. By us, however, the greatest or highest sins are guarded against in this way too: that it is not permitted even to know a second marriage after the faith, differing, perhaps, from the work of adultery and sexual immorality only by the marriage and dowry tablets; and therefore, though they defame us most harshly for the excess of the Paraclete's discipline, we set digamists outside. We fix the same boundary of the threshold for adulterers and fornicators also, who will pour out tears fasting from peace and will bring back from the church nothing more than the publication of their disgrace.

“But God,” they say, “is good and very good, and merciful and compassionate and abounding in mercy, which he puts before every sacrifice, not valuing the death of a sinner so much as his repentance, the Savior of all men and especially of believers. So the sons of God too will have to be merciful and peacemakers, forgiving one another as Christ also forgave us, not judging, lest we be judged. For to his own lord one stands or falls: who are you to judge another's servant? Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Such and so many are the trifles of those by which they both flatter God and pander to themselves, enervating discipline rather than invigorating it. With how many contrary ones can we not strike back, which both threaten God's severity and summon our own constancy? For though God is good by nature, he is also just. For, as the case requires, just as he knows how to heal, so also to strike, making peace but also creating evils, preferring repentance but also commanding Jeremiah not to pray for the sinful people: “For even if they fast,” he says, “I will not hear their supplication.” And again: “And you, do not intercede for the people, and do not ask for them in petition and prayer, for I will not hear in the time when they call upon me, in the time of their affliction.” And still earlier, the same who prefers mercy to sacrifice: “And you, do not intercede for this people, and do not ask that they obtain mercy, and do not approach me for them, for I will not hear”: not hear those who ask for mercy, surely, those who weep and fast out of repentance and offer their affliction to God. For God is jealous, and one who is not mocked with a sneer, that is, by those who flatter his goodness; and though patient, he threatens through Isaiah an end to his patience: “I have been silent; shall I always be silent and endure? I have been quiet like a woman in labor; I will rise and make them wither.” For “a fire will go before his face and burn up his enemies,” killing not only the body but also souls in Gehenna. But how the Lord threatens those who judge, he himself shows: “For with the judgment with which you judge, you will be judged.” So he did not forbid judging, but taught how to judge. Hence the apostle too judges, and that in a case of sexual immorality, that such a man must be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, rebuking them also because brothers were not being judged before the saints. For he adds, saying: “What have I to do with judging those outside?” But you forgive, so that you may be forgiven by God. The sins that are cleansed are those one commits against a brother, not against God. In short, in the prayer we profess that we will forgive our debtors. But it is not fitting to go on stretching such a contentious rope from the authority of the Scriptures in opposite directions by pulling in turn, so that the one text seems to tighten the reins of discipline and the other to loosen them, as though they were uncertain, and the one overthrows the aid of repentance through leniency, the other denies it through austerity. Further, both the authority of Scripture will stand within its own limits without either side being set against the other, and the aid of repentance is fixed by its own conditions without indiscriminate concession, and its causes themselves are first distinguished without confused statement. We declare that the causes of repentance are sins. These we divide into two outcomes. Some will be remissible, others irremissible; accordingly no one doubts that some deserve chastisement, others condemnation. Every sin is discharged either by pardon or by punishment: pardon as the result of chastisement, punishment as the result of condemnation. On this difference we have already set out some conflicting passages of Scripture, on the one side retaining, on the other remitting sins. But John too will teach: “If anyone knows that his brother is sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and life will be given to him”: because he sins not unto death, this will be remissible. “There is a sin unto death; I do not say that anyone should ask for that”: this will be irremissible. So where there is reason for asking, there is also reason for remission; where there is none for asking, there is likewise none for remission. According to this difference of sins, the condition of repentance too is distinguished. One kind will be able to obtain pardon, namely in a remissible sin; the other will in no way be able to obtain it, namely in an irremissible sin. And it remains to examine specifically the status of adultery and sexual immorality: to which class of sins they must be assigned.

But first I will settle an answer that comes in from the other side against that kind of repentance which we are at this very point defining as lacking pardon. “If,” they say, “some repentance lacks pardon, then you should not practice it at all. For nothing should be done in vain. Now repentance will be done in vain if it lacks pardon. But all repentance must be done. Therefore let all obtain pardon, so that it is not done in vain, since it will not be done if it is done in vain. And it is done in vain if it lacks pardon.” They are right, then, to raise the objection, since they have usurped the fruit of this repentance too, that is, pardon, into their own power. As far as they are concerned, from whom it obtains human peace, it is done in vain. But as far as we are concerned, who remember that the Lord alone grants sins, and surely mortal ones, it will not be done in vain. For, remitted to the Lord and from then on prostrate before him, it will all the more earn pardon by this very fact: that it begs it from God alone, that it does not believe human peace sufficient for its sin, that it prefers to blush before the church rather than to have communion with it. For it stands before her doors and by the example of its own disgrace warns the rest, and calls the tears of the brothers to its aid too, and returns having gained more, surely: compassion rather than communion. And if it does not reap peace here, it sows it with the Lord. It does not lose the fruit but prepares it. It will not be without reward if it has not been without duty. So neither is repentance of this kind vain, nor is discipline of this kind harsh. Both honor God. The one, by flattering itself in nothing, will more easily obtain; the other, by claiming nothing for itself, will help more fully.

Having set out the distinction of repentance, then, we can now return to the assessment of the sins themselves: whether they are such as can obtain pardon from men. First, usage demands that we name them moechia and fornicatio. Faith too has a familiarity with certain words. So in the whole little work we keep to this usage. Otherwise, if I say adulterium and stuprum, there will be one charge of defiled flesh. For it makes no difference whether a man attacks another's wife or a widow, provided she is not his own woman; just as it makes no difference to places whether modesty is slaughtered in bedrooms or in towers. Every homicide, even outside a forest, is banditry. So too, wherever and in whatever woman, the man who uses anything other than marriage commits adultery and sexual immorality against himself. Therefore among us secret unions too, that is, those not first professed before the church, are in danger of being judged next to adultery and sexual immorality; nor, if joined in marriage afterward, may they evade the charge under the pretext of matrimony. But the other frenzies of lusts, impious both against bodies and against the sexes beyond the laws of nature, we banish not only from the threshold but from every roof of the church, because they are not sins but monstrosities.

So as to adultery, which is also a matter of sexual immorality, how great a crime it must be judged according to the deed, the first law of God is at hand. For after forbidding the superstition of strange gods and the making of idols themselves, after commending the veneration of the Sabbath, after commanding reverence toward parents, second only to God, he laid down, in securing and fortifying such articles, no other precept than “You shall not commit adultery.” For after spiritual chastity and holiness came bodily integrity. And so he fortified this too, by at once forbidding its enemy, adultery. Understand now what kind of sin it is, whose restraint he ordered right after idolatry. Nothing second is far from the first; nothing is so near the first as the second. What comes from the first is in a way another first. So adultery is akin to idolatry. For idolatry too, often reproached to the people under the name of adultery and sexual immorality, will be joined to it in lot as in sequence, and will cling to it in condemnation as in arrangement. Moreover, putting “You shall not commit adultery” first, he adds “You shall not kill.” So he honored adultery by placing it before homicide, at the very front, surely, of the most holy law, among the first articles of the heavenly edict, marked out in the proscription of the principal sins. From its place you may discern the measure of each, from its order its status, from its neighbors its deserts. Evil too has its rank, placed at the top or in the middle of the worst. I see a kind of procession and dais of adultery: on one side the leadership of idolatry going before, on the other the escort of homicide following. Between the two most eminent peaks of crime it has without doubt sat down as worthy, and filled up the space between them, as though it were vacant, with equal authority of crime. Who will tear it, enclosed by such flanks, propped by such ribs, from the body of those joined to it, from the bond of neighboring crimes, from the embrace of related wickednesses, so as to set it apart alone for the fruit of penance? Will not idolatry on one side and homicide on the other hold it back, and, if they had a voice, cry out: “This is our wedge, our joint! We begin with idolatry; with it dividing us, we are joined; to it, springing out from the middle, we are united. The divine Scripture has made us one body; the very letters are our glue; now it cannot do without us. I, idolatry, very often furnish the occasion for adultery. My groves and my mountains know it, and the living waters, and the very temples in the cities, how much I contrive for the overthrow of modesty. I, homicide, too sometimes work for adultery. To say nothing of tragedies, the poisoners know today, the magicians know, how many concubinages I avenge, how many rivalries I defend, how many guards, how many informers, how many accomplices I remove. The midwives too know how many adulterous conceptions are slaughtered. Even among Christians there is no adultery without us. There are idolatries there, where it is the business of an unclean spirit; there is homicide there too, where a man is killed when he is defiled. So either the aids of penance will befit neither them nor us, or else us too. Either we hold it back, or we follow it.” These things the facts themselves say. If facts lack a voice, there stands the idolater, there stands the murderer, and between them stands the adulterer too. Alike, for the duty of penance, they sit, they shudder in sackcloth and ashes, they groan with the same weeping, they canvass with the same prayers, they entreat on the same knees, they call on the same mother. What are you doing, most soft and most humane discipline? Either you must be this to all of them, for “blessed are the peacemakers,” or, if not to all, be ours. Do you condemn the idolater and the murderer once for all, but take the adulterer out from the middle? The successor of the idolater, the forerunner of the murderer, the colleague of both? This is respect of persons: you have left behind the more pitiable penances.

Plainly, if you show from what support of heavenly examples and precepts you open the door of penance for adultery alone, and within it for sexual immorality too, our encounter will now fight along this line. Yet I must lay down a rule for you, that you not stretch out your hand to the old things, nor look back. For “the old things have passed away,” according to Isaiah, and “a renewal has now been renewed,” according to Jeremiah, and “forgetting what lies behind we stretch forward to what lies ahead,” according to the apostle, and “the law and the prophets were until John,” according to the Lord. For even though we began just now from the law in setting out adultery, we did so rightly, from that state of the law which Christ did not dissolve but fulfilled. For it is the burdens of the law that lasted until John, not its remedies. The yokes of works have been cast off, not those of disciplines. Liberty in Christ has done no wrong to innocence. The whole law of piety, holiness, humanity, truth, chastity, justice, mercy, benevolence, and modesty remains. In this law blessed is the man who will meditate day and night. Of it the same David says again: “The law of the Lord is blameless, converting souls; the statutes of the Lord are right, delighting hearts; the precept of the Lord is far-shining, enlightening the eyes.” So too the apostle: “So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and very good”; surely including “You shall not commit adultery.” And earlier too: “Do we then make void the law through faith? Far from it; rather, we establish the law”: that is, in those things which even now in the New Testament are forbidden, prohibited by an even fuller precept. Instead of “You shall not commit adultery,” “whoever has looked with desire has already committed adultery in his heart”; and instead of “You shall not kill,” “whoever says to his brother Raca will be liable to Gehenna.” Ask whether the law against committing adultery is intact, when that against desiring has been added to it. Besides, if any examples applaud you in your bosom, they will not be set against this discipline that we are defending. For in vain has the law been built up higher, condemning the origins of sins too, that is, desires and wills, no less than deeds, if pardon is granted to adultery today because it was once granted. For what gain is it now restrained by a fuller discipline, unless perhaps so that it may be indulged by your greater pandering? You will give pardon, then, to the idolater too and to every apostate, because we find that the people itself, so often guilty of these things, was so often restored in the past. You will admit the murderer to communion as well, because Ahab too wiped out Naboth's blood by entreaty, and David purged the slaughter of Uriah, together with its cause, adultery, by confession. You will now forgive incests too, because of Lot, and sexual immorality with incest, because of Judah, and shameful marriages from prostitution, because of Hosea, and not only repeated marriages but several at once, because of our fathers. For surely it is right that grace now too should be made equal regarding everything formerly indulged, if pardon for adultery is claimed from some former example. We too, indeed, have examples of the same antiquity for our opinion, of a judgment on sexual immorality not only not pardoned but carried out at once. And surely it suffices [to know] that so great a number, twenty-four thousand of the people committing sexual immorality with the daughters of Midian, fell by one plague. But I prefer to derive discipline from Christ, for the glory of Christ. Let former times have had, if the psychics wish, even license for every immodesty. Let the flesh have played before Christ, or rather, let it have been lost before it was sought by its Lord: it was not yet worthy of the gift of salvation, not yet fit for the duty of holiness. It was still reckoned in Adam with his vice, easily desiring what it had seen to be attractive, looking back to lower things, and keeping the itch from the fig leaves. The poison of lust clung everywhere, and … fit, since not even the waters had yet washed them. But when the Word of God came down into flesh not unsealed even by marriage, and the Word became flesh never to be unsealed even by marriage, flesh which would approach the tree not of incontinence but of endurance, which would taste from it not something sweet but something bitter, which would belong not to the underworld but to heaven, which would be girded not with the leaves of lasciviousness but with the flowers of holiness, which would hand over its cleanness to the waters: from then on any flesh in Christ has dissolved its former remaining filth; it is now another thing; it emerges new, no longer from the slime of seed, not from the dung of desire, but from pure water and a clean Spirit. Why, then, do you excuse it from former times? It was not called the body of Christ, the members of Christ, the temple of God, when it obtained pardon for adultery. So if, from the time when it changed its state and, dipped into Christ, put on Christ, and was redeemed at a great price, the blood of the Lord, you hold any example, or precept, or pattern, or judgment of sexual immorality and adultery pardoned or to be pardoned, you also have from us the fixing of the time from which the age of the question is to be reckoned.

You may begin from the parables, where there is the lost sheep sought by the Lord and carried back on his shoulders. Let the very pictures on your cups come forward, if even in them the interpretation of that animal will shine through: whether it aims at restoration for a Christian sinner or a heathen one. For we lay down as a rule, from the discipline of nature, from the law of ear and tongue, from soundness of mind, that answers are always given to what provokes them, that is, to the things that provoke them. What provoked it, I think, was that the Pharisees were muttering in indignation because the Lord admitted tax collectors and heathen sinners and shared food with them. When, in answer to this, the Lord had pictured the restoration of the lost animal, to whom else is he to be believed to have fitted the picture than to the lost heathen, who was under discussion, and not to a Christian, who as yet was no one? Or what sort of thing would it be for the Lord, like a quibbler, to leave aside the present kind of answer, which he was bound to strike back with, and labor over a future one? “But the sheep is properly the Christian, and the Lord's flock is the people of the church, and the good shepherd is Christ; and therefore by the sheep is to be understood a Christian who has strayed from the church's flock.” So you want the Lord to have answered nothing to the Pharisees' muttering, but to your presumption? And yet you will have to defend it so as to deny that what you think fits a Christian applies to a heathen. Tell me, is not the whole human race one flock of God? Is not the same God Lord and shepherd of all nations? Who is more lost to God than the heathen, as long as he strays? Who is more sought by God than the heathen, when he is called back by Christ? In short, this order comes first in the heathen; for Christians are made from heathen in no other way than by first being lost and sought by God and carried back by Christ. So this order too must be kept, that we interpret such a thing of those in whom it comes first. But you, I suppose, would want him to make the sheep lost not from the flock but from a chest or cupboard! So too, although he calls the remaining number righteous, he does not thereby show that they are Christians, since he was dealing with Jews and was at that very moment rebuking them for being indignant at the hope of the heathen; but to express, against the Pharisees' envy, his grace and goodwill even toward one heathen, he set the salvation of one sinner through repentance above theirs through righteousness. Or were the Jews not righteous, and men who had no need of repentance, having as the rudders of discipline and the instruments of fear the law and the prophets? He put them in the parable, then, if not as they were, yet as they ought to have been, so that they might be the more ashamed, hearing that repentance was needed by others and not by themselves. Likewise we interpret the parable of the drachma, as provoked by the same matter, of a heathen too, even though it was lost in a house, as in the church, even though it was found by the light of a lamp, as by the word of God. And yet this whole world is the one house of all, in which the grace of God shines more on the heathen, who is found in darkness, than on the Christian, who is already in the light of God. Besides, to the sheep and the drachma alike a single straying is ascribed. For if they were being depicted as a Christian sinner after faith was lost, the question would also be of their loss and restoration a second time. I will now step down from this ground a little, so as to commend it the more even by stepping down, since even so I shall have overturned the presumption of the other side. I grant that a Christian who is already a sinner is signified in both parables; yet it does not follow that he must be affirmed to be one who can be restored through penance from the crime of adultery and sexual immorality. For though he is said to have been lost, it will be possible to consider the kind of loss, since the sheep too was lost not by dying but by straying, and the drachma not by perishing but by lying hidden. So what is safe may be said to have been lost. So a believer too is lost who has slipped into the spectacle of the charioteers' frenzy, the gladiators' gore, the stage's filth, the athletes' vanity; into the games, into the banquets of a worldly festival; if he has applied some arts to the service and ministry of another's idolatry, or has stumbled too carelessly into a word of ambiguous denial or of blasphemy. For some such thing he has been put outside the flock, or perhaps he himself has broken away in anger, pride, or jealousy, or, as often happens, in disdain of chastisement. He must be sought and called back. What can be recovered does not perish, unless it persists outside. You will interpret the parable rightly when you call back a sinner who is still alive. But who has not pronounced the adulterer and fornicator dead the moment he committed it? With what face will you restore a dead man to the flock on the authority of a parable that does not call back a dead animal? Then, if you remember the prophets, when the shepherds are rebuked (I think it is the voice of Ezekiel): “Shepherds, see, you devour the milk and clothe yourselves with the wool; what was strong you have killed, what was weak you have not cared for, what was broken you have not bound up, what was driven away you have not brought back, what was lost you have not sought.” Does he reproach them about the dead too, that they did not take care to restore that also to the flock? Plainly he charges them with having caused the sheep to be lost and eaten by the beasts of the field (and they can neither be lost to death nor eaten if they are not abandoned), not that the lost ones be taken back after death and being eaten. By the example of the drachma, too, even within the house of God, the church, there may be some sins, middling according to the measure and weight of the drachma itself, which, lying hidden there, are soon found there and at once dealt with there with the joy of amendment. But adultery and sexual immorality are not a drachma but a talent; to search them out one needs not the point of a lamp but the spear of the whole sun. As soon as it has appeared, the man is at once expelled from the church; he does not stay there, nor bring joy to the church that found him, but grief; nor does he call for the congratulation of the neighboring women, but for the sorrow of the nearest brotherhoods. So, even when this interpretation of ours is set against theirs, the arguments of the sheep and the drachma will look all the more to the heathen, since they cannot apply to a Christian guilty of that sin for whose sake the other side forces them to apply to a Christian.