On Modesty

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.

But the same outcome deceives most interpreters of parables as very often happens in cloth to be matched with purple. When you think you have correctly harmonized the blends of the colors, and believe you have skillfully united their comparisons with one another, soon, when both pieces are brought out into the light, the difference exposed will spew out the whole error. With the same dimness, then, about the parable of the two sons too, some, because the figures match in color for the moment, swerve from the true light of the comparison which the matter of the parable put forward. For they place two peoples in the two sons, the Jewish in the elder, the Christian in the younger. For they cannot then set in the younger son a Christian sinner who will obtain pardon unless they have portrayed the Jew in the elder. Now if I show that the Jew does not fit the comparison with the elder son, it follows surely that the Christian will not be admitted to the likeness of the younger son either. For though the Jew too is called a son, and the elder, because he was first in adoption; though he also envies the Christian his reconciliation with God the Father, which the other side seizes on most of all; yet it will not be the Jew's saying to the father, “Look, for so many years I have served you and never transgressed your command.” For when was the Jew not a transgressor of the law, hearing with the ear and not hearing, hating him who reproves in the gates and holding the holy word in contempt? So neither will the father's voice to the Jew be, “You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” For the Jews are pronounced apostate sons, begotten indeed and raised on high, but who have not regarded God and have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger. We shall say, plainly, that all things were granted to the Jew, from whom even every more pleasing condition of food was snatched away, not to speak of the very land of the fatherly promise! And so, no less than the younger son, the Jew today, having squandered God's substance, begs in a foreign country, serving until now its princes, that is, of this world. Let the Christians, then, look for another brother of theirs; for the parable does not admit the Jew. It would have been much more fitting to match the Christian with the elder and the Jew with the younger son, according to the comparison of faith, if the order of the two peoples marked out from Rebecca's womb allowed the exchange. Except that the ending too would resist it. For it will befit the Christian to rejoice at the restoration of the Jew, not to grieve, since our whole hope is joined with the remaining expectation of Israel. So even if some points will fit, the equivalence of the examples is destroyed by others that point the opposite way. And yet, even if everything could answer as in a mirror, there is one and principal danger of interpretations: that the ease of comparisons be adjusted in another direction than the matter of each parable required. For we remember that actors too, when they fit allegorical gestures to songs, express things far from the present story, stage, and character, and yet most fittingly. But let extraordinary ingenuity look to itself: that has nothing to do with Andromache. So too the heretics apply these same parables where they wish, and exclude them, most neatly, from where they ought to go. Why most neatly? Because from the beginning they fashioned the matter of their doctrines to suit the occasions of the parables. For they, freed from the rule of truth, of course had leisure to seek out and put together things of which the parables seem to speak.

We, however, because we do not devise matter from parables but interpret parables from their matter, do not labor greatly to twist everything in exposition, so long as we avoid contradictions. Why a hundred sheep? And why ten drachmas, of all things? And what is that broom? It was necessary that he who wished to express how very pleasing to God is the salvation of one sinner should name some quantity of a number, from which he could describe one as lost; it was necessary that the manner of the woman seeking the drachma in the house should be fitted out with the help both of a broom and of a lamp. For curiosities of this kind both make some things suspect and, by the subtlety of forced expositions, mostly lead away from the truth. There are also things set down simply to build and arrange and clothe the parable, so that they may be carried through to that for which the example is provided. And surely the two sons will look to the same point as the drachma and the sheep. For the things to which they are attached have the same cause, and surely the same muttering of the Pharisees about the Lord's dealings with the heathen. Or if anyone doubts that tax collectors were heathen in Judea, which had long since been seized by the hand of Pompey and Lucullus, let him read Deuteronomy: “There shall be no one paying tribute from the sons of Israel.” Nor would the name of tax collectors have been so detestable to the Lord, unless it were foreign, the name of men who sell the passage of heaven and earth and sea itself. And when he joins sinners to tax collectors, he does not at once show them to be Jews, though some could have been. But by putting them together he distinguished one class of heathen into those who were sinners by occupation, that is tax collectors, and those who were so by nature, that is not tax collectors. Besides, he would not have been censured for sharing food with Jews, but with heathen, whose table the Jewish discipline shuns. Now about the prodigal son, what is more useful must be considered first. For a matching of examples will not be admitted, however perfectly it fits on the page, if it is most harmful to salvation. But we see the whole state of salvation, which is set in the continuance of discipline, overturned by the interpretation which the other side affects. For if it is a Christian who, having received from God the Father a substance, namely that of baptism, of the Holy Spirit, and thence of eternal hope, has wandered far from the Father and squandered it living like a heathen; if, stripped of the goods of the mind, he has handed over his service even to the prince of the world (to whom else than the devil?), and, set by him to feed pigs, that is, to tend unclean spirits, has come to his senses to return to the Father: then not adulterers and fornicators only, but idolaters and blasphemers and deniers and every kind of apostate will make satisfaction to the Father by this parable; and in this way of imaging, most truly, the whole substance of the sacrament has been crushed. For who will fear to squander what he will be able to recover afterward? Who will take care to keep forever what he will not be able to lose forever? Security about sin is also a lust for it. So the apostate too will recover his former robe, the garment of the Holy Spirit, and the ring again, the seal of the washing, and Christ will be sacrificed for him once more, and he will recline on that couch from which those unworthily clothed are usually taken by the torturers and thrown into the darkness, not to speak of those stripped. It is more, then, if it is not even expedient that the pattern of the prodigal son should fit the Christian. But if the image of the son does not fit the Jew wholly either, the interpretation will be guided simply by the Lord's purpose. The Lord had come, surely, to save what was lost, a physician needed more by the sick than by the healthy. This he both pictured in parables and preached in sayings. Who among men is lost, who is failing in health, except the one who does not know God? Who is safe and sound, except the one who knows God? These two kinds, brothers by descent, this parable too will signify. See whether the heathen does not have a substance in God the Father: of endowment, of wisdom, of natural knowledge of God, through which the apostle also notes that in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, which surely it had received from God. This, then, he squandered, cast far from the Lord in his conduct, among the errors and allurements and lusts of the world, where, driven by hunger for the truth, he handed himself over to the prince of this age. He set him over pigs (to feed that flock familiar to demons), where he would not have access to the food of life and at the same time would see others in God's work abounding with heavenly bread. He remembers God the Father; having made satisfaction he returns, receives his former robe, that is, the state which Adam lost by transgressing. He receives the ring too, then for the first time, with which, when questioned, he seals the covenant of faith; and so from then on he feeds on the richness of the Lord's body, that is, the Eucharist. This will be the prodigal son, who was never thrifty before, who was prodigal from the first because he was not a Christian from the first. It is he whom the Pharisees too were grieving over, returning from the world to the Father's embrace in the tax collectors and sinners. And therefore the elder brother's envy is fitted to this point alone: not because the Jews were innocent and obedient to God, but because they begrudged the nations salvation, plainly those who ought always to have been with the Father. And surely the Jew groans at the Christian's first calling at once, not at his second restoration. For the former shines out even to the heathen, but the latter, which is carried out in the churches, is not known even to the Jews. I think I have given interpretations better fitted to the matter of the parables, to the correspondence of things, and to the protection of disciplines. But if the other side is eager to picture the sheep and the drachma and the son's riotous living as a Christian sinner in order to grant adultery and sexual immorality by penance, then either the other capital sins too will have to be granted alike, or adultery and sexual immorality, their equals, will have to be kept unpardonable like them. But it is more that it is not permitted to argue anything beyond what was being dealt with. In short, if it were permitted to carry the parables over elsewhere, we would rather direct their hope to martyrdom, which alone will be able to restore the son when all his substance has been squandered, and will proclaim with joy the drachma found among everything, even in dung, and will bring back to the flock, on the Lord's own shoulders, the sheep that fled through every rough and steep place. But we prefer to understand less in the Scriptures, if it so happens, rather than against them. So we must keep the Lord's sense and precept. Transgression in interpretation is no lighter than in conduct.

Having shaken off, then, the yoke of explaining these parables of the heathen, and having once seen through, or else accepted, the necessity of interpreting them in no other way than the matter of the subject requires, they now contend that the proclamation of repentance does not even fit the heathen, since their sins are not liable to it, being of course to be charged to ignorance, which nature alone makes guilty before God. Further, they say, remedies mean nothing to those to whom the dangers themselves mean nothing; the reason of repentance holds where sin is committed with knowledge and will, where both guilt and grace are understood; he mourns, he rolls on the ground, who knows both what he has lost and what he will recover if he sacrifices repentance to God, who surely offers it to sons rather than to strangers. Did Jonah, then, think repentance unnecessary for the heathen Ninevites for this reason, when he quibbled over the duty of preaching? Or did he rather fear, foreseeing God's mercy poured out even on strangers, that it would, as it were, destroy his proclamation? And so, for the sake of a profane city, not yet possessed of God, still sinning in ignorance, did the prophet nearly perish? Except that he underwent an example of the Lord's passion, which was to redeem the heathen too when they repented. It is well that John too, laying down the ways of the Lord, was a herald of repentance no less to soldiers and tax collectors than to the sons of Abraham. The Lord himself presumed repentance in the Sidonians and Tyrians, if they had seen the proofs of his mighty works. Yet I will contend that it fits sinners by nature more than sinners by will. For he will deserve its fruit more who has not yet used it than he who has already misused it; and remedies will mean more when first used than when worn out. No doubt the Lord is more kind to the ungrateful than to the ignorant, and more quickly merciful to the rejected than to those not yet tested, so that he is not more angered by insults to his clemency than he fawns on them, and does not more gladly impart it to strangers than he has lost it in his sons, having adopted the nations in this way while the Jews make game of his patience! But this is what the psychics want: that God, the just judge, should prefer the repentance of that sinner rather than the death of one who preferred death to repentance. If that is so, we earn merit by sinning. Come now, you tightrope walker of modesty and chastity and all holiness in regard to sex, who tread the finest thread of such discipline, with your foot hanging over the pathless ways of truth, balancing the flesh with the spirit, moderating the soul by faith, restraining the eye by fear: why are you so wholly intent on your step? Go on, by all means, if you can, if you will, as long as you are so secure and as if on solid ground. For if some wavering of the flesh, some distraction of the mind, some straying of the eye shakes you from your course, God is good. He holds out his bosom to his own, not to the heathen; a second repentance will receive you; you will be a Christian again after being an adulterer. This is what you tell me, most kindly interpreter of God! But I would yield to you if the writing of the Shepherd, which alone loves adulterers, had deserved to be included in the divine instrument; if it were not judged among the apocryphal and false writings by every council of the churches, even of yours; itself adulterous, and hence the patron of its companions, from which you are initiated in other ways too; to which, perhaps, that shepherd will be patron whom you paint on your cup, himself a prostitutor of the Christian sacrament, rightly both the idol of drunkenness and the refuge of the adultery that will follow the cup, from which you would drink nothing more gladly than the sheep of a second repentance. But I drink the Scripture of that Shepherd who cannot be broken. John offers it to me at once, with the washing and duty of repentance, saying: “Bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not say, ‘We have Abraham as our father’” (lest, that is, they should again take up the flatteries of sinning from the favor of the fathers), “for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” So he follows us too: those who have sinned up to now, bearing the fruit worthy of repentance. For what ripens from repentance but the effect of amendment? But even if pardon is rather the fruit of repentance, this too cannot stand without the ceasing of sin. So the ceasing of sin is the root of pardon, so that pardon may be the fruit of repentance.

From there, as regards the gospel, the question of the parables has now been discussed. But if the Lord also by deeds granted something of this kind to sinners, as when he allowed the sinful woman even the touch of his body, as she washed his feet with tears and wiped them with her hair and anointed him beforehand for his burial with ointment; as when to the Samaritan woman, in her sixth marriage now, not an adulteress but a prostitute, he showed who he was, which he did not readily do for anyone; nothing from this is brought to our adversaries, even if he had granted pardon of sins to people who were already Christians. For we say now: this is permitted to the Lord alone; may the power of his indulgence work today. Yet as regards those times in which he acted on earth, we lay down this: that it prejudges nothing against us if pardon was given to sinners, even Jewish ones. For Christian discipline is reckoned from the renewal of the testament and, as we said before, from the redemption of the flesh, that is, the Lord's passion. No one was perfect before the order of faith was found, no one a Christian before Christ was taken back into heaven, no one holy before the Holy Spirit was presented from heaven, the one who fixes that very discipline.

So let these men, who have received another Paraclete in the apostles and through the apostles, whom, not recognizing him now in his own prophets, they no longer possess even in the apostles; come now, let them teach even from the apostolic instrument that stains of the flesh splashed on it after baptism can be washed away by penance. Did not the pattern of the old law remain in force in the apostles too, in showing how great adultery is, lest perhaps it be thought lighter in the newness of disciplines than in their antiquity? When the gospel first thundered and shook the old order, so that there was debate about the necessity of keeping the law, the apostles, by the authority of the Holy Spirit, send out this first rule to those who were already beginning to be gathered from the nations: “It has seemed good,” they say, “to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no further weight than those things from which it is necessary to abstain: from sacrifices and from acts of sexual immorality and from blood. By keeping yourselves from these you will do rightly, the Holy Spirit forbidding them.” It is enough that here too the place of honor of adultery and sexual immorality is kept, between idolatry and homicide. For we shall understand the prohibition of blood to be much more of human blood. Further, what kind of crimes do the apostles want those to seem which alone they pick out of the former law to be observed, which alone they prescribe as necessarily to be abstained from? Not that they allow others, but that they put these alone first, surely as not remissible, who for the heathen's sake made the other burdens of the law remissible. Why, then, do they free our neck from so great a yoke, except to place these summaries of discipline on it forever? Why do they indulge the appetite wholly, except to bind us forever to the more necessary things? They released us from the many, so that we might be bound to observe the more harmful. The matter was done by compensation. We gained much so that we might render some things. But a compensation is not revocable, unless indeed it will be revoked by a repetition of adultery, and surely of blood and idolatry too. For the whole law will be resumed if the condition of pardon is dissolved. But the Holy Spirit did not make a light compact with us, a compact made even of his own accord, so that he is to be honored all the more. No one will dissolve his pledge except an ungrateful man. He will neither take back now what he released, nor release what he retained. The state of the newest testament is always unchangeable, and surely the reading of that decree and that counsel will cease only with the world. He sufficiently refused pardon for those whose observance he chose; he will punish what he did not likewise grant. Hence it is that peace is restored by the churches neither to idolatry nor to blood. That the apostles fell away from this definition of theirs it is not permitted, I think, to believe; or if some can believe it, they will have to prove it.

We plainly know their suspicions here too. For in fact they suspect that the apostle Paul in Second Corinthians gave pardon to the same fornicator whom in the First he pronounced must be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, the impious heir of his father's marriage; as though he himself afterward reversed his pen, writing: “But if anyone has caused grief, he has not grieved me, but in part, not to burden you all. Sufficient is such a rebuke, which is given by many; so that on the contrary you should rather forgive and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up by excessive grief. Therefore I beg you to confirm love toward him. For to this end I also wrote, that I might know your proof, that you obey me in all things. And to whom you forgive anything, I do also. For if I have forgiven anything, I have forgiven it in the person of Christ, so that we may not be defrauded by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his devices.” What is understood here about a fornicator, about the defiler of his father's bed, about a Christian who went beyond the shamelessness of the heathen, when surely he would have released with a special pardon the man he had condemned with special wrath? He is more obscure in pity than in indignation. He is more open in severity than in leniency. And yet anger is more easily oblique than indulgence. Sadder things hesitate more than happier ones. Evidently a slight indulgence was in question; which, if it were perhaps being weighed now, when even the greatest things are not usually forgiven without public proclamation, is far from being given without any indication. And you indeed, leading the penance of an adulterer into the church to beg the brotherhood, clad in haircloth and covered with ashes, a composite of disgrace and horror, prostrate him in the middle before the widows, before the presbyters, grasping the hems of all, licking the footprints of all, clasping the knees of all; and toward this plight of the man do you, good shepherd and blessed father, harangue with all the enticements of mercy you can, and in the parable of the sheep go looking for your goats? Lest your sheep leap out of the flock again (as though from then on it were permitted, what was not permitted even once), do you fill the rest with fear at the very moment you are most indulgent? But would the apostle have forgiven so recklessly the wicked lust of sexual immorality weighed down with incest that he did not require of him even this lawful garb of penance, which you ought to have learned from him? That he threatened nothing about the future, said nothing about the rest? On the contrary, he even goes on to beg them to confirm love toward him, as one making satisfaction, not as one pardoning. And yet I hear “love,” not “communion.” As also to the Thessalonians: “But if anyone does not obey our word through the letter, mark him and do not associate with him, so that he may be ashamed, not regarding him as an enemy, but rebuking him as a brother.” So he could have said that to the fornicator too only love was granted, not communion as well; but to the incestuous man not even love, since he had ordered him to be removed from their midst, and much more, surely, from their mind. “But he feared that they would be defrauded by Satan in the loss of that person, whom he himself had cast out to Satan; or that he whom he had assigned to the destruction of the flesh would be swallowed up by excessive grief.” Here they now interpret the destruction of the flesh as the duty of penance, because it is thought to make satisfaction to God by wasting the flesh with fasts and squalor and every neglect and deliberate ill-treatment; so that from this they argue that the fornicator, or rather that incestuous man, was handed over by the apostle to Satan not for perdition but for amendment, as though he would afterward obtain pardon on account of the destruction, that is, the affliction, of the flesh, and therefore did obtain it. Plainly the same apostle handed Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan, that they might be corrected not to blaspheme, as he writes to his Timothy. But he himself also says that a stake was given him, an angel of Satan, by whom he was buffeted, lest he exalt himself. If they touch on this too, so that we should understand those handed over to Satan by him as handed over for amendment, not for perdition, what is there alike between blasphemy and incest and a soul untouched by these, indeed elated from no other source than the highest holiness and all innocence, which in the apostle was restrained by buffetings, perhaps by pain, as they say, of the ear or of the head? But incest and blasphemy deserved to hand over whole men into the possession of Satan himself, not of his angel. For on this point there is a difference, indeed it matters very much, that we read that those men were handed over by the apostle to Satan, but that to the apostle an angel of Satan was given. Finally, when Paul entreats the Lord, what does he hear? “Let my grace be enough for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Those who are handed over to Satan cannot hear this. And if the crime of Hymenaeus and Alexander, namely blasphemy, is irremissible both in this age and in the one to come, surely the apostle would not, against the Lord's decree, have handed over to Satan in hope of pardon men already sunk from faith into blasphemy. Hence he also pronounced them shipwrecked in regard to faith, no longer having the comfort of the ship of the church. For pardon is denied to those who have struck from faith into blasphemy. Heathen and heretics, on the other hand, emerge daily from blasphemy. And even if he said, “I have handed them over to Satan, that they may receive the discipline not to blaspheme,” he said it of the rest, who, those men having been handed to Satan, that is, cast outside the church, would learn that one must not blaspheme. So, then, he handed the incestuous fornicator too over to Satan not for amendment but for perdition, to whom he had already passed over by sinning beyond the heathen, so that they might learn that one must not commit sexual immorality. In short, he says “for the destruction of the flesh,” not its torment, condemning the very substance through which he had fallen, which had from then on already perished, baptism having been lost; “that the spirit,” he says, “may be saved in the day of the Lord.” For let this too be asked: whether the spirit of the man himself will be saved. Will the spirit, then, polluted by so great a crime, be saved because the flesh has been lost for this reason? Saved in punishment? Will the contrary interpretation, then, count punishment as without flesh? In that way we lose the resurrection of the flesh. It remains, then, that he meant that spirit which is reckoned in the church, which must be presented saved, that is, intact, on the day of the Lord, from the contagion of impurities, the incestuous fornicator having been cast out. For he adds: “Do you not know that a little leaven spoils the whole lump?” And yet incestuous sexual immorality was not a little leaven, but a great one.

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.

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.