On Modesty 14–18

With these points that came in between discussed, then, I return to Second Corinthians, to prove that this saying of the apostle too, “Sufficient for such a man is this rebuke which is given by many,” does not fit the person of the fornicator. For if he had pronounced that he must be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, he had surely condemned him rather than rebuked him. So it was another to whom he wished the rebuke to be sufficient; since the fornicator had received from his sentence not a rebuke but condemnation. For I offer you this very point too to consider: whether there were not others as well, in the first letter, who grieved the apostle by acting in a disorderly way and were grieved by him in receiving a rebuke, according to the sense of the second letter, of whom some one could have obtained pardon in it. Let us observe, moreover, that the whole first letter is written, so to speak, not in ink but in gall: swelling, indignant, disdainful, threatening, reproachful, and shaped, case by case, against certain persons as if they were the ringleaders of those cases. For schisms and rivalries and dissensions and presumptions and conceits and quarrels required it, so that they should be weighed down with reproach, beaten back with correction, filed down in their pride, and deterred by severity. And what kind of reproach is the goad of humility? “I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I baptized in my name.” “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” And, “I think God has chosen us apostles last, like beast-fighters, since we have been made a spectacle to this world, both to angels and to men”; and “we have been made the refuse of this world, the scum of all”; and, “Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Christ Jesus our Lord?” Against what haughtiness, on the other hand, was he compelled to pronounce: “But to me it is a very small thing to be examined by you or by any human day; for I am not conscious of anything against myself”; and, “No one shall make my glory empty.” “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” Again, how open is the freedom of his reproof, how bare the edge of the spiritual sword: “Already you have been enriched, already you are sated, already you reign”; and, “If anyone thinks he knows, he does not yet know as he ought to know!” Is he not then striking at someone to his face: “For who distinguishes you? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” Does he not strike those too in the face: “But some, with conscience, until now eat as though it were something sacrificed to idols. And sinning thus, by striking the weak consciences of the brothers, they will sin against Christ.” And now even by name: “Or have we not the right to eat and drink and to take women about with us, as also the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” and, “If others share in your right, do not we still more?” Likewise he pierces those too with a special pen: “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall”; and, “If anyone seems contentious, we have no such custom, nor the church of the Lord.” With such a closing curse woven in, “If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus, let him be anathema, maranatha,” he surely struck someone. But I will rather stand at the place where the apostle is more fervent, where the fornicator himself caused trouble for others too. “Some have become puffed up, as though I were not coming to you. But I will come soon, if the Lord permits, and I will learn not the talk of those who are puffed up but their power. For the kingdom of God is not in talk but in power. And what do you want? Shall I come to you with a rod, or in a spirit of gentleness?” For what lay beneath? “It is heard that there is sexual immorality among you altogether, and such sexual immorality as is not even among the nations, that someone has his father's wife. And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done such a deed might be removed from your midst?” For whom were they to mourn? For a dead man, surely. To whom were they to mourn? To the Lord, surely, that in some way he might be removed from their midst; not, surely, that he be put outside the church. For this would not be asked of God, which was part of the duty of the one presiding; but that by death, this common death too, the flesh's own, which was already a corruptible corpse, rotting with irrecoverable impurity, he might be removed from the church more fully. And therefore, in whatever way he could be removed meanwhile, he judged that such a man must be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. For it followed that it should be cursed, being cast to the devil, so that it should be discharged from the sacrament of blessing, never to return to the camp of the church. So we see in this place the apostle's severity divided between a certain puffed-up man and a certain incestuous man, armed with a rod against the one and with a sentence against the other: a rod, which he threatened; a sentence, which he carried out; the one still flashing, the other at once striking like lightning, the one by which he rebuked, the other by which he condemned. And it is certain that from then on the one rebuked trembled under the threat of the rod, while the one condemned perished under the infliction of the punishment. At once the one, fearing the blow, …; the other went away, paying the penalty. When the same apostle's letter to the Corinthians is repeated, pardon is plainly given, but it is uncertain to whom, because neither person nor case is posted. I will compare the matter with the sense. If the incestuous man is set against it, the puffed-up man will be there too. The reason of the matter is certainly held sufficiently when the puffed-up man was rebuked and the incestuous man condemned. The puffed-up man is forgiven, but as one rebuked; the incestuous man does not seem to have been forgiven, as one condemned. If it was the one whose being swallowed up by excessive grief was feared who was forgiven, it was the one rebuked who was still in danger of being swallowed up, failing because of the threat and grieving because of the rebuke; whereas the condemned man was already reckoned swallowed up, both by guilt and by sentence, one who had not to grieve but to suffer what he could have grieved over before suffering. If he was forgiven so that we should not be defrauded by Satan, surely the loss guarded against concerned what had not yet perished. Nothing is guarded against concerning what is over, but concerning what is still safe. But the condemned man, handed over into the possession of Satan, had perished to the church even then when he committed such a deed, not to speak of when he was also cast out by it. How would he fear to suffer a fraud regarding a man whom he had already lost, snatched away, and could not keep once condemned? Lastly, what will it befit a judge to forgive: what he has decided by a verdict, or what he has left pending by an interlocutory decision? And surely that judge who does not usually rebuild what he has destroyed, lest he be held a transgressor? Come now: if the first letter had not grieved so many persons, if it had rebuked no one, frightened no one, if it had struck only the incestuous man, if it had driven no one into fear on his account, had it not dismayed the puffed-up man, would you not better suspect and more faithfully argue that some quite different person was then among the Corinthians in the same case, so that, rebuked and frightened and wounded by grief, the measure of his sin allowing it, he afterward received pardon, rather than interpret it of the incestuous fornicator? For you ought to have read this, if not in the letter, then in the very way of life of the apostle, stamped more clearly by his modesty than by his pen: namely, that you should not taint Paul, the apostle of Christ, the teacher of the nations in faith and truth, the vessel of election, the founder of churches, the censor of disciplines, with such fickleness as either to have condemned rashly one whom he would soon acquit, or to have acquitted rashly one whom he had not rashly condemned, even if only for simple sexual immorality, still less for incestuous marriage and impious luxury and parricidal lust, which he had not even compared with the nations, lest it be attributed to custom; which he had judged though absent, lest the guilty man gain time; which he had condemned calling on the power of the Lord too, lest it seem a human sentence. He trifled, then, both with his own spirit and with the angel of the church and with the power of the Lord, if he rescinded what he had pronounced with their counsel.

If you extend the following parts of that letter too to the apostle's purpose, they will not fit the blotting out of the incest either, lest here too the apostle be put to shame by the inconsistency of his later meanings. For what sort of thing is it that, at the very moment he granted the incestuous fornicator the return of church peace, he at once pressed on them about turning from impurities, cutting away stains, exhorting to holiness, as though he had decreed nothing contrary a little before? Compare, then, whether it is his to say, “Therefore, having this ministry, according as we have obtained mercy, we do not lose heart, but we renounce the hidden things of shame,” who would have released from condemnation the open deed not only of shame but of crime; whether it is the same man's to excuse any immodesty, who among the titles of his labors, after distresses and pressures, after fasts and vigils, proclaimed purity too; whether it is the same man's to receive into communion any reprobates, who writes: “For what fellowship has righteousness with iniquity? What communion has light with darkness? What harmony has Christ with Belial? Or what share has a believer with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols?” Will he not have to hear, and rightly: “And how do you separate what you joined above by restoring the incestuous man?” For when he is incorporated again into the church, righteousness is joined with iniquity, and darkness has communion with light, and Belial is in harmony with Christ, and the unbeliever shares the sacraments with the believer. And let the idols look to themselves: the very defiler of the temple of God comes together into the temple of God. For here too he says: “For you are the temple of the living God. For he says, ‘I will dwell in you and walk among you, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’ Therefore come out from their midst, be separate, and do not touch what is unclean.” Do you unroll this too, O apostle, at the very moment when you yourself give your hand to so great a whirlpool of impurities, and indeed … still add: “Having, then, this promise, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting purity in the fear of God”? I ask you, had he who fixes such things in our minds called any fornicator back into the church? Or does he write this so that he may not now seem to you to have called him back? These things must both lay down a rule for what went before and prejudge what follows. For at the end of the letter, saying, “Lest, when I come again, God humble me, and I mourn many of those who sinned before and did not repent of the impurity which they committed, sexual immorality and vileness,” he did not, surely, decide that those whom he was to find in the church were to be received if they had entered upon penance, but that they were to be mourned and without doubt cast out, so that they would lose their penance. And besides, it does not fit that he should have shown anything here about communion, who had denied it above to light and darkness, to righteousness and iniquity. But all these men do not know the apostle, who understand something contrary to the nature and purpose of the man himself, contrary to the form and rule of his teachings, so as to presume that he, the master of all holiness even by his own example, the execrator and expiator of all impurity, and everywhere such, gave back the church to an incestuous man sooner than to some more ordinary offender.

It is necessary, then, that the apostle be shown to them at length, whom I will defend in Second Corinthians too as being such as I have known him in all his letters. In the First he was the first of all to dedicate the temple of God: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Lord dwells in you?” He also wrote, for consecrating and purifying the temple, a sacristan's law: “If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him; for the temple of God is holy, which you are.” Come now, who has at all restored one destroyed by God, that is, handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, when for this reason he added below, “Let no one deceive himself,” that is, let no one presume that one destroyed by God can be restored again? So again, among other things, or rather before other things, when he stated that adulterers and fornicators and the effeminate and those who lie with males will not attain the kingdom of God, he said first, “Do not be deceived”: namely, if you think they will attain it. But those from whom the kingdom is taken away are surely not allowed the life that is in the kingdom either. And when he adds, “But such you were; but you were washed, but you were sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God,” as much as he makes these sins received before the washing, so much does he make them irremissible after the washing, since it is not permitted to be washed again. Recognize in what follows too Paul, the immovable pillar of disciplines: “Food for the belly and the belly for food; God will do away with both the one and the other; but the body is not for sexual immorality, but for God.” For “let us make man,” God says, “in our image and likeness”; and God made man, in the image and likeness of God he made him. “The Lord for the body”: for the Word too became flesh. “And God both raised the Lord and will raise us by his power,” because, of course, of the bond of the body with him. And therefore: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” because Christ too is the temple of God: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.” “Shall I take away the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Do you not know that he who is glued to a harlot becomes one body? For the two shall be one flesh. But he who is glued to the Lord is one spirit. Flee sexual immorality.” If it is revocable by pardon, how shall I flee it, since I will be an adulterer again? I shall gain nothing if I flee it; I shall be one body with the one to whom I shall be glued by communion. “Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.” And lest you should seize on this saying as license for sexual immorality, as though you would be sinning against your own property and not the Lord's, he takes you away from yourself and assigns you to Christ, as he had arranged, immediately setting against it: “And you are not your own, for you were bought at a price,” namely the blood of the Lord; “glorify and carry the Lord in your body.” See whether he who commands this has forgiven one who has dishonored God and cast him out of his body, and that by incest. If you want to drink in the whole knowledge of the apostle, so as to understand with how great an axe of censure he cuts down and uproots and grubs out the whole forest of lusts, so as to let nothing sprout again from the stump, look at him desiring souls to fast from the lawful fruit of nature, I mean the fruit of marriage. “Now concerning the things of which you wrote: it is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of sexual immorality let each man have his own wife; let the husband pay his debt to the wife, and the wife to the husband.” Who does not know that he loosened the clasp of this good unwillingly, in order to block sexual immorality? If he has forgiven or forgives this to anyone, he has surely broken the plan of his own remedy, and will now be held bound to rein in marriages of continence, if sexual immorality, on account of which they are permitted, will not be feared. For what will be forgiven will not be feared. And yet he declares that he has allowed the use of marriage, not commanded it. For he wishes all to be like himself. But when lawful things are only allowed, who hopes for unlawful ones? To the unmarried and widows too he says it is good to persevere after his example, but if they fail, to marry, “because it is better to marry than to burn.” With what fires, I ask, is it worse to burn: of desire, or of punishment? And yet if sexual immorality has pardon, one does not burn with desire for it. But it is more the apostle's part to provide against the fires of punishment. But if it is punishment that burns, then sexual immorality, which punishment awaits, has no pardon. Meanwhile, forbidding divorce too, he provides in its place either perseverance in widowhood or the reconciliation of peace, by the Lord's precept against adultery, because “he who dismisses his wife except for the cause of adultery makes her commit adultery, and he who marries a woman dismissed by her husband commits adultery.” How great are the remedies the Holy Spirit sets up, so that, of course, what he does not want forgiven again may not be committed again! Now, if he says that it is altogether best for a man to be thus, “Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek release,” so that you give no place to adultery; “Are you released from a wife? Do not seek a wife,” so that you keep your opportunity for yourself; yet “if you marry a wife, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin; yet such will have trouble of the flesh”: here too he permits by sparing. Besides, he declares that “the time is gathered in, so that those who have wives should be as though they had none. For the fashion of this world is passing away,” a world, that is, no longer desiring, “Increase and multiply.” So he wants us to live free from anxiety, because the unmarried care for the things of the Lord, how to please God, but the married think about the things of the world, how to please their marriage partner. So he pronounces that he who keeps his virgin does better than he who gives her away. So too he judges her more blessed who, having lost her husband after entering the faith, has welcomed the opportunity of widowhood. So he commends all these counsels of continence as divine: “I think,” he says, “that I too have the Spirit of God.” Who is this most audacious champion of all immodesty, this plainly most faithful advocate of adulterers and fornicators and the incestuous, who has taken up this case against the Holy Spirit to honor them, so as to read out false testimony about his apostle? Paul granted nothing of the kind, who tries to blot out every necessity of the flesh even from honorable titles. He grants, indeed, not adulteries but marriages. He spares matrimonies, not acts of sexual immorality. He tries not to forgive even nature, lest he flatter guilt? He is eager to restrain the intercourse of blessing, lest that of the curse be excused. This remained for him: to purge the flesh at least of filth, for from stains it cannot be purged. But this is the custom of perverse and ignorant heretics, and now of all the psychics too: to arm themselves, on the occasion of some ambiguous passage, against an army of statements from the whole instrument.

Challenge the apostolic battle line; look at his letters: all hold out their shield for modesty, for chastity, for holiness; all hurl their darts against the business of luxury and lasciviousness and lust. What, in short, does he write to the Thessalonians too? “For our exhortation is not from deceit nor from impurity”; and, “This is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each one know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in the lust of desire, like the nations who do not know God.” What do the Galatians read? “The works of the flesh are plain.” What are they? First he put sexual immorality, impurity, lasciviousness: “of which I forewarn you, as I forewarned you, that those who do such things will not attain the inheritance of the kingdom of God.” And what do the Romans learn more than not to forsake the Lord after faith? “What then shall we say? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? Far from it. We who have died to sin, how shall we still live in it? Or do you not know that we who were dipped into Christ were dipped into his death? So we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that, as Christ rose from the dead, so we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have been buried together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was nailed with him. And if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, raised from the dead, no longer dies; death no longer has dominion over him. For in that he died to sin, he died once. But in that he lives, he lives to God. So you too reckon yourselves dead indeed to sin, but alive to God through Christ Jesus.” So, since Christ died once, no one who has died after Christ can come back to life for sin, and above all for so great a sin. Or if sexual immorality and adultery can be committed again, Christ too will be able to die again. And the apostle presses on, forbidding sin to reign in our mortal body, whose weakness of flesh he knew. “For as you presented your members to serve impurity and iniquity, so now present them as servants of righteousness for sanctification.” For although he denied that good dwelt in his flesh, it was according to the law of the letter, under which he had been; but according to the law of the Spirit, to which he joins us, he sets us free from the weakness of the flesh. “For the law of the Spirit of life,” he says, “has set you free from the law of sin and death.” For though he seems in part to argue from Judaism, yet he directs toward us the integrity and fullness of disciplines, for whose sake, as we labored under the law, God sent his Son through flesh in the likeness of the flesh of sin, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh, “so that the just requirement of the law,” he says, “might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who walk according to the flesh mind the things of the flesh, and those who walk according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.” And he affirmed that the mind of the flesh is death, and then also enmity, and toward God, and that those who are in the flesh, that is, in the mind of the flesh, cannot please God; and, “If you live according to the flesh,” he says, “you will die.” But what do we understand by the mind of the flesh and the life of the flesh except whatever one is ashamed to name? For the apostle would have named the other things of the flesh too. So too to the Ephesians, recalling former things, he warns about the future: “Among whom we too once lived, doing the desires and pleasures of the flesh.” Censuring, then, those who had denied themselves, that is, Christians, because they had given themselves up to the working of all impurity, he says, “But you have not so learned Christ.” And again he says thus: “Let him who stole steal no more.” But also, let him who committed adultery until now commit adultery no more, and let him who committed sexual immorality until now commit it no more. For he would have added these too, if he had been accustomed to hold out pardon to such, or had wished it held out at all, he who, not wanting to be polluted even by a word, says, “Let no foul word come out of your mouth.” Likewise: “But let sexual immorality and all impurity not even be named among you, as befits saints,” so far is it from being excused, “knowing this, that no fornicator or impure person has the kingdom of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words. Because of this the wrath of God comes upon the sons of unbelief.” Who deceives with empty words, except the one who preaches that adultery is remissible? not even seeing that its foundations have been dug out by the apostle, when he restrains drunkenness and revelry, as here too: “And do not be drunk with wine, in which is debauchery.” He shows the Colossians too what members they are to put to death on earth: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, and foul talk. Now yield to so many and such statements that one text which you hold. The few are overshadowed by the many, the doubtful by the certain, the obscure by the plain. Even if the apostle had certainly granted sexual immorality to that Corinthian, it would be a different thing, something he did once, against his own rule, for the reason of the time. He circumcised Timothy alone, and yet he abolished circumcision.

“But these things,” someone says, “will concern the prohibition of all immodesty and the enjoining of all modesty, yet with the place of pardon kept intact, which is not at once denied if sins are condemned, since the time of pardon runs together with the condemnation, which it excludes.” It was to be expected that the psychics would think this too, and so we have kept for this place the things that were guarded against even in ancient times, clearly so that church communion should be denied in cases of this kind. For in the Proverbs of Solomon too, which we call paroimiai, specifically concerning the adulterer, who can never be expiated: “But the adulterer,” he says, “through lack of sense acquires the destruction of his soul; he endures pains and disgraces. And his ignominy will not be blotted out forever. For indignation full of jealousy will not spare the man in the day of judgment.” If you think this was said of a heathen, you have certainly heard concerning believers through Isaiah: “Go out from their midst and be separate, and do not touch what is unclean.” You have at once in the Psalms the blessed man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly nor stood in the way of sinners nor sat in the seat of pestilence. Whose voice is also heard later: “I have not sat with the assembly of vanity, and I will not go in with those who act unjustly; I have hated the church of evildoers, and I will not sit with the ungodly”; and, “I will wash my hands among the innocent, and I will go around your altar, O Lord”; as one alone equal to many, since indeed “with the holy you will be holy, and with the innocent man you will be innocent, and with the elect you will be elect, and with the perverse you will be perverse.” And elsewhere: “But to the sinner the Lord says: Why do you expound my statutes and take up my covenant in your mouth? If you saw a thief, you ran with him, and you put your portion with adulterers.” Instructed from here, then, the apostle too says: “I wrote to you in the letter not to mix with fornicators, not, surely, with the fornicators of this world,” and the rest; “otherwise you would have to go out of the world. But now I write to you: if any brother among you is named a fornicator or an idolater” (for what is so closely joined?) “or an idolater” (for what is so near?) and the rest, “with such not even to eat food,” let alone the Eucharist; since, of course, “a little leaven spoils the whole lump.” Likewise to Timothy: “Lay hands on no one hastily, and do not share in the sins of others.” Likewise to the Ephesians: “Do not, then, be partakers with them; for you were once darkness.” And still more pointedly: “Do not have communion with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather refute them. For the things done by them in secret are shameful even to speak of.” What is more shameful than immodesties? And if he orders the Thessalonians to withdraw even from a brother walking idly, how much more from a fornicator? For these are the counsels of Christ, who loves the church, who gave himself up for it, to sanctify it, cleansing it by the washing of water in the word, and to present to himself a glorious church having no stain or wrinkle, surely after the washing, but that it be holy and without reproach; from then on, that is, without the wrinkle of old age, as a virgin; without the stain of sexual immorality, as a bride; without the reproach of vileness, as one cleansed. What if here too you think of answering that communion is indeed taken away from sinners, especially those polluted in the flesh, but for the present, to be restored, of course, after the round of penance, according to that clemency of God which prefers the sinner's repentance to his death? For this foundation of your opinion must be struck at every point. We say, then: if it had been fitting for the divine clemency to show itself in this way even to those who have fallen after faith, the apostle would have said thus: “Do not have communion with the works of darkness, unless they have done penance”; and, “With such do not even eat food, unless after they have wiped the boots of the brothers by rolling at their feet”; and, “He who defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him, unless he has shaken the ashes of all the hearths in the church from his head.” For he ought to have defined, as regards what he had condemned, how long and under what condition he had condemned it, if he had condemned it with a temporary and conditional severity and not a perpetual one. Now since in all his letters he forbids such a thing to be committed even after faith, and thrusts one who has committed it out of communion, without hope of any condition or time, he rather supports our opinion, showing that the repentance the Lord prefers to the sinner's death is that which comes before faith, before baptism, to be washed away once by the grace of Christ, who once suffered death for our sins. For the apostle laid this down in his own person too. For, affirming that Christ came to save sinners, of whom he himself had been the first, what does he add? “And I obtained mercy, because I acted ignorantly in unbelief.” So that clemency of God, who prefers the sinner's repentance to his death, looks to those still ignorant and still unbelieving, for whose liberation Christ came, not to those who already know God and have learned the sacrament of faith. But if the clemency of God fits those still ignorant and unbelieving, surely repentance too invites clemency to itself, with the exception of that kind of repentance after faith which can obtain pardon from the bishop for lighter sins, or for greater and irremissible ones from God alone.