On Modesty 19–22

But how long on Paul, when even John seems to applaud the other side somewhat? As though in the Apocalypse he had plainly granted the help of repentance to sexual immorality, where the Spirit sends word to the angel of the Thyatirans that he has this against him, that he tolerated the woman Jezebel, “who calls herself a prophetess and teaches and seduces my servants to commit sexual immorality and to eat things sacrificed to idols. And I gave her a space of time to enter on repentance, and she does not want to enter on it on the score of sexual immorality. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and her adulterers with her into very great distress, unless they repent of her works.” It is well, however, that the apostles agree in the rules both of faith and of discipline. “For whether it is I,” he says, “or they, so we preach.” It concerns the whole sacrament, then, to believe that nothing was granted by John that was denied by Paul. Whoever observes this equality of the Holy Spirit will be led by him into his meanings. For she was a heretical woman, who had undertaken to teach what she had learned from the Nicolaitans, and was bringing it secretly into the church, and he rightly urged her to repentance. For who doubts that a heretic deceived by instruction, having afterward recognized his fall and expiated it by repentance, both obtains pardon and is brought back into the church? Hence among us too, the heretic, as equal to a heathen, or rather worse than a heathen, is admitted after being cleansed on both counts by the baptism of truth. Or, if you are certain that that woman, after living in faith, afterward expired into heresy, so that you claim pardon from repentance for her not as a heretic but as a believing sinner, let her indeed do penance, but to put an end to adultery, not, however, to obtain restoration too. For this will be the repentance which we too acknowledge to be owed, and much more so, but the pardon we reserve to God. Then that Apocalypse, in its later parts, decreed the shameless and the fornicators, like the cowardly and unbelieving and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters, who have been such in the faith, to the lake of fire, without any conditional condemnation. For it will not be thought to refer to the heathen, since it spoke of believers: “Those who conquer will have this inheritance, and I will be their God, and they will be my sons”; and so it added: “But for the cowardly and unbelieving and shameless and fornicators and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters, their portion is in the lake of fire and sulphur, which is the second death.” So too again: “Blessed are those who act by the commandments, that they may have power over the tree of life and over the gates to enter into the holy city. Dogs, sorcerers, the fornicator, the murderer are outside”: those, surely, who do not act by the commandments. For it belongs to those to be put outside who were inside. Besides, “What have I to do with judging those who are outside?” had come before. From the letter of John too they pluck something at once. It is said: “The blood of his Son cleanses us from every sin.” Then we shall sin always and in every way, if he always cleanses us from every sin; or if not always, then not after faith either; and if not from every sin, then not from sexual immorality either. But where did he begin? He had first said that God is light and that there is no darkness in him, and that we lie if we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness. “But if,” he says, “we walk in the light, we shall have fellowship with him, and the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord cleanses us from every sin.” So do we sin while walking in the light, and shall we be cleansed while sinning in the light? By no means. For he who sins is not in the light but in darkness. Hence he also shows how we shall be cleansed from sin while walking in the light, in which sin cannot be committed. He says we are cleansed by God in this way, not as though we sin, but because we do not sin. For walking in the light and having no communion with darkness, we shall act as cleansed, sin not being laid aside but not being committed. For this is the power of the Lord's blood: that those whom it has already cleansed from sin and thereafter set in the light, it keeps clean thereafter, if they persevere in walking in the light. “But he adds,” you say, “‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive them to us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’” Does he mean from impurity? But if so, then from idolatry too. But the sense is different. For look, again he says: “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. All the more, little children, I have written these things to you so that you may not sin; and if you sin, we have an advocate with God the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins.” “According to these texts,” you say, “it will be clear both that we sin and that we have pardon.” What, then, will happen when, going on, I find something else? For he denies that we sin at all, and deals at length with this, so as to grant nothing of the kind, setting forth that sins were once blotted out by Christ and will not afterward have pardon, a meaning by which he commits us to the admonition of chastity. “Everyone,” he says, “who has this hope makes himself chaste, because he too is chaste. Everyone who commits sin also commits iniquity, and sin is iniquity. And you know that he was manifested to take away sins,” namely those committed up to then. For he adds: “Everyone who abides in him will not sin. Everyone who sins has neither seen him nor known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does righteousness is righteous, as he too is righteous. He who commits sin is of the devil, because the devil sins from the beginning. For to this end the Son of God was manifested, to undo the works of the devil.” For he did undo them, freeing man through the washing, the bond of death having been forgiven him. “And therefore everyone who is born of God does not commit sin, because the seed of God abides in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest.” In what, except that the former by not sinning, from the time they were born of God, and the latter by sinning, because they are of the devil, just as if they had never been born of God? And if he says, “He who is not righteous is not of God,” how will he who is not modest become of God again, when he has already ceased to be so? It is nearly come, then, to our saying that John forgot himself: in the earlier part of the letter denying that we are without sin, but now prescribing that we do not sin at all; and there flattering us somewhat about pardon, but here strictly denying that any who have sinned are children of God. But far from it. For neither have we ourselves forgotten the distinction of sins from which we started. For here too John commended it: that there are some sins of daily occurrence, to which we are all exposed. For to whom will it not happen either to be angry unjustly and beyond sunset, or even to lay hands on someone, or easily to speak ill, or rashly to swear, or to break the faith of an agreement, or to lie out of shame or necessity? In business, in duties, in trade, in food, in sight, in hearing, how much are we tempted! So that if there were no pardon for these, salvation would belong to no one. For these, then, there will be pardon through Christ, who entreats the Father. But there are also sins contrary to these, as graver and deadly, which do not admit pardon: murder, idolatry, fraud, denial, blasphemy, and surely adultery and sexual immorality too, and any other violation of the temple of God. For these Christ will no longer be the one who entreats; these he who has been born of God will not commit at all, since he will not be a child of God if he commits them. So John's reason for the difference will stand, as he sets out the distinction of sins, when he now allows and now denies that the children of God sin. For he was looking ahead to the close of his letter, and was laying the foundation for it, about to say more plainly at the end: “If anyone knows that his brother is sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and the Lord will give life to him who does not sin unto death. For there is a sin unto death; I do not say that anyone should ask concerning it.” He too remembered that Jeremiah was forbidden by God to pray for a people committing deadly sins. “All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin unto death. But we know that everyone who is born of God does not sin,” namely the sin that is unto death. So nothing now remains but that you either deny that adultery and sexual immorality are deadly sins, or confess them irremissible, sins for which it is not even permitted to pray.

The discipline of the apostles, then, properly instructs and chiefly determines the overseer of all holiness toward the temple of God, rooting out everywhere from the church every sacrilege of immodesty, without any mention of restoration. Yet I wish, by way of surplus, to bring in besides the testimony of one of the apostles' companions, fit to confirm the discipline of the masters by a right close to theirs. For there is also extant a writing of Barnabas to the Hebrews, a man sufficiently accredited by God, as one whom Paul placed beside himself in the course of abstinence: “Or is it only I and Barnabas who have not the right to refrain from working?” And surely the letter of Barnabas is more widely received among the churches than that apocryphal Shepherd of adulterers. Warning his disciples, then, to leave all beginnings behind and press on rather to perfection, and not to lay again the foundations of repentance from dead works, he says: “For it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the Holy Spirit and have tasted the sweet word of God, when they have fallen away as the age is now setting, to be called back again to repentance, crucifying again on their own account the Son of God and dishonoring him. For the earth which drinks the moisture that often comes down on it, and bears plants fit for those for whose sake it is also tilled, obtains God's blessing; but that which brings forth thorns is rejected and near to a curse, whose end is burning.” He who learned this from the apostles and taught it with the apostles never knew of a second repentance promised by the apostles to the adulterer and fornicator. For he interpreted the law excellently and kept its figures now in the truth itself. For this kind of discipline, in short, provision was made concerning the leper: “But if the variegation has blossomed out in the skin and has covered all the skin from head to feet in all its appearance, and the priest sees it, he shall pronounce him clean, since it has turned white; he is clean. But on the day on which living color is seen in him, he is unclean.” For he wanted it to be understood that the man turned from the former state of the flesh to the whiteness of faith, which is reckoned a fault and a stain in the world, and wholly renewed, is clean, being no longer variegated, no longer spotted with the old and the new. But if, after the abolition, anything of the old comes to life again, what was held dead to sin in his flesh is again judged unclean and is no longer expiated by the priest. So adultery, relapsing from the former state and staining the unity of the new color, from which it had been excluded, is a fault that cannot be cleansed. Likewise concerning the house: if any spots and hollows in the walls were reported to the priest, before he entered to inspect it he orders everything to be taken out of the house, so that the things belonging to the house would not be unclean. Then, if the priest on entering had found greenish or reddish hollows, and their appearance lower than the surface of the wall, he was to go out to the door and shut up that house for seven days. Then, returning on the seventh day, if he had observed that the plague had spread in the walls, he was to order those stones in which the plague of leprosy had been to be removed and thrown outside the city into an unclean place, and other stones, polished and solid, to be taken and put in the place of the former ones, and the house to be plastered with other dust. For when one comes to the high priest of the Father, Christ, all hindrances must first be taken out of the house of our man, in the time of the week, so that the house which remains, flesh and soul, may be clean; and when the Word of God has entered it and found spots of red and green, the deadly and bloody thoughts must at once be pulled out and thrown outside (for the Apocalypse too set death on a pale green horse and the warrior on a red one), and in their place polished stones, fitted for joining and firm, such as are made into sons of Abraham, must be laid, so that man may thus be fit for God. But if after the recovery and re-forming the priest observes again in the same house something of the former hollows and spots, he pronounced it unclean, and ordered the timbers and stones and its whole structure to be taken down and thrown into an unclean place. This will be the man, flesh and soul, who, re-formed after baptism and the entry of the priests, takes up again the scabs and spots of the flesh, and is thrown outside the city into an unclean place, handed over, that is, to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, and is no longer rebuilt in the church after his ruin. So also concerning intercourse with a slave woman who was reserved for a man, not yet redeemed, not yet freed: “There shall be an inquiry,” he says, “and she shall not die, because she has not been set free,” she for whom she was being kept. For flesh not yet set free by Christ, for whom it was being kept, was defiled with impunity; so, now that it has been set free, it has no pardon.

If the apostles knew these things better, they surely cared for them more. But I will now run down to this point too, distinguishing between the teaching of the apostles and their power. Discipline governs a man; power sets a seal on him. But again, what is power? The Spirit; and the Spirit is God. And what did he teach? That one must have no communion with the works of darkness. Observe what he commands. But who could forgive sins? This is his alone. For “who forgives sins but God alone?” And surely mortal sins, those committed against himself and against his temple? For as to you, what involves guilt against you, you are commanded, in the person of Peter, to forgive even seventy times seven times. So if it were established that the blessed apostles themselves had forgiven any such thing, whose pardon belonged to God, not to man, they would have done it not from discipline but from power. For they also raised the dead, which God alone does, and restored the disabled, which none but Christ does; indeed, they also inflicted blows, which Christ did not wish to do. For it did not befit him to be severe who had come to suffer. Ananias was struck, and Elymas: Ananias with death, Elymas with blindness, so that by this very fact it might be proved that Christ could have done these things too. So too the prophets had forgiven murder, and with it adultery, to the penitent, because they also gave proofs of severity. Show me now, then, apostolic man, prophetic examples, so that I may recognize the divinity, and claim for yourself the power of remitting sins of this kind. But if you have been allotted the duties of discipline alone, to preside not by command but by ministry, who or how great are you to forgive, you who, showing yourself neither a prophet nor an apostle, lack that power to which forgiving belongs? “But,” you say, “the church has the power of forgiving sins.” This I acknowledge and arrange all the more, I who have the Paraclete himself saying in the new prophets: “The church can forgive sin, but I will not do it, lest they commit other sins too.” What if a false-prophetic spirit pronounced this? But it would rather have been the part of a subverter both to commend himself by clemency and to tempt the rest to sin. Or if he was eager to affect this too in accordance with the Spirit of truth, then the Spirit of truth can indeed grant pardon to fornicators, but does not will to do so, since it would be to the harm of many. I now ask about your opinion: from where do you usurp this right for the church? If, because the Lord said to Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my church; to you I have given the keys of the heavenly kingdom,” or, “Whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven,” you therefore presume that the power of loosing and binding has come down to you too, that is, to every church akin to Peter: what sort of man are you, overturning and changing the plain intention of the Lord, who conferred this personally on Peter? “Upon you,” he says, “I will build my church”; and, “I will give the keys to you,” not to the church; and, “Whatever you loose or bind,” not what they loose or bind. For so the outcome also teaches. In him the church was built, that is, through him; he himself first used the key; see which: “Men of Israel, give ear to what I say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man appointed for you by God,” and the rest. In short, he himself was the first, in the baptism of Christ, to unlock the entrance to the heavenly kingdom, in which the sins formerly bound are loosed and those that have not been loosed are bound, according to true salvation; and he bound Ananias with the bond of death and loosed the man lame in his feet from his bodily defect. And in that debate about whether or not to keep the law, Peter, first of all, moved by the Spirit and having spoken first of the calling of the nations, said: “And now why have you tempted the Lord by imposing on the brothers a yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of Jesus we shall be saved, just as they will.” This sentence both loosed the parts of the law that were abandoned and bound those that were kept. So the power of loosing and binding handed over to Peter had nothing to do with the capital sins of believers. And if the Lord had commanded him to forgive a brother sinning against him even seventy times seven times, surely he would not have ordered him to bind, that is, to retain, anything afterward, except perhaps sins someone had committed against the Lord, not against a brother. For it is prejudged that sins against God are not to be forgiven, when those committed against man are pardoned. What, now, has this to do with the church, and indeed with yours, psychic? For according to the person of Peter this power will belong to spiritual men, either to an apostle or to a prophet. For the church itself, properly and principally, is the Spirit himself, in whom is the Trinity of the one Divinity, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. He gathers that church which the Lord placed in three. And so from then on every number of those who have agreed together in this faith is reckoned a church by its author and consecrator. And therefore the church will indeed forgive sins; but the church of the Spirit, through a spiritual man, not the church as a number of bishops. For the right and the decision belong to the Lord, not to the servant; to God himself, not to the priest.

But you now pour out this power even on your martyrs. As soon as anyone, by confession, has put on chains, still soft in the new name of custody, at once the adulterers canvass him, at once the fornicators approach him; now prayers resound around him, now the tears of every defiled person pool around him; and none buy entry to the prison more than those who have lost the church. Men and women are violated in the darkness, plainly familiar from the practice of lusts, and they seek peace from those who are in danger about their own. Others flee to the mines and come back from there as dispensers of communion, where another martyrdom is now needed for sins new after martyrdom. For who on earth and in the flesh is without fault? What martyr is an inhabitant of the world, a suppliant for pennies, subject to the physician and the moneylender? Suppose him now under the sword, the head already poised; suppose him on the gibbet, the body already stretched out; suppose him at the stake, already granted to the lion; suppose him on the axle, already built up with fire; in the very security and possession, I say, of martyrdom: who permits a man to forgive what must be reserved to God, by whom these things have been condemned without excuse, which not even the apostles, themselves martyrs too, judged forgivable, as far as I know? Indeed Paul had already fought with beasts at Ephesus when he decreed destruction for the incestuous man. Let it be enough for the martyr to have purged his own sins. It belongs to an ungrateful or proud man to scatter on others as well what he has obtained as a great thing. Who has redeemed another's death by his own, except the Son of God alone? For even in his very passion he freed the thief. For to this end he had come, that he himself, pure from sin and holy in all things, might die for sinners. So you who imitate him in forgiving sins, if you yourself have committed no sin, then by all means suffer for me. But if you are a sinner, how can the oil of your little torch suffice both for you and for me? I have even now a way to prove Christ. If Christ is in the martyr for this purpose, that the martyr may absolve adulterers and fornicators, let him declare the secrets of the heart, so as to grant sins in this way, and he is Christ. For thus the Lord Jesus Christ showed his power: “Why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or, ‘Rise and walk’? So that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, I say to you, paralytic, rise and walk.” If the Lord took such care over the proof of his power, as to expose their thoughts and so to command health, lest he not be believed able to forgive sins, I may not believe the same power to be in anyone without the same proofs. Yet when you demand pardon for adulterers and fornicators from a martyr, you yourself confess that crimes of this kind can be washed away only by one's own martyrdom, you who presume to do it by another's. But if that is so, then martyrdom will now be another baptism. “For I have,” he says, “another baptism too.” Hence also from the wound in the Lord's side flowed water and blood, the provision for both washings. Then I ought to free another by the first washing too, if I can by the second. I must press it home to your bosom: whatever authority, whatever reason restores church peace to the adulterer and fornicator, the same will have to come to the aid of the murderer and the idolater when they repent; certainly of the one who denied, and surely of the one whom cruelty threw down after he had wrestled with tortures in the battle of confession. Besides, it is unworthy of God and of his mercy, who prefers the sinner's repentance to his death, that those who have fallen by rutting should return to the church more easily than those who fell by fighting. Indignation urges us to say: will you call back defiled bodies sooner than bloodied ones? Which repentance is more pitiable, that which lays low a flesh that was tickled, or one that was torn? Which pardon is more just in every case: the one that a voluntary sinner implores, or an unwilling one? No one who is willing is compelled to deny; no one who is unwilling commits sexual immorality. There is no force toward lust except lust itself; it knows no compulsion to what pleases it. But how many devices of the executioner and kinds of punishment compel denial! Who denied more: he who lost Christ under torment, or he who lost him in delight? He who grieved as he lost him, or he who sported as he lost him? And yet those scars carved in the Christian battle, and surely enviable in Christ's eyes because they desired to conquer, and glorious even so because they did not give way by being conquered, at which even the devil himself still sighs, with a misfortune that is yet chaste, with a repentance that mourns but does not blush before the Lord: shall there be no fresh pardon granted to those who denied under such expiation? For them alone is the flesh weak? And yet no flesh is so strong as that which crushes the spirit.