Tractates 1.4.1–1.5.9

He who cultivates chastity easily recognises how noble it is: for it is of such virtue that it is honoured even by its enemies. It strengthens the foundations of the whole human race; it gives to all affections the proper meaning of their names; it guards the sacred rights of parents, spouses and children; conspicuous in both sexes, admirable at every age, not doubtful in any condition, devoted to itself alone, always of good conscience, subject to nothing at all, fearing only one thing, that it may no longer be what it is called. In solitude, which the fearful call an opportunity, it fears itself as a witness; and it reveres every secret place more than a public one. It hates the pestilent flatteries of the hostile flesh; and whatever the world offers of pleasure or of gifts, it spits out entirely, presuming that it has everything if it is pure. It desires no one shamefully, and likewise makes itself desirable to no one. It remains in its state in every place and at every time, considering honour more than advantage. Do you want to know how happy it is? If it loves you, both he who has it and he who does not have it love it. If then its glory often exults among the Gentiles (although there it cannot be fruitful or true, because it lives under a shameless robber), how much more glorious ought it to be in the Christian people, which serves God, its inviolable sanctifier? For if the church is the bride of Christ because she is chaste, and honoured with the yoke of the heavenly bridal chamber because even after the wedding she remains a perpetual virgin, we who are born of so great a marriage must strive in every way to prove the nobility of our lineage not only by descent but also by the faithfulness of likeness. Yet I rejoice, dearest brothers, that this claim shines out in you, and not doubtfully: for you show that you both have and possess God as Father, since you do not only love chastity, in which God dwells, but adorn it with shining conduct. It is great glory, then, to adorn that by which you are adorned, to keep that by which you yourself are kept. In the end your praise equals the praise of chastity: for it gives you holiness, you give it love. Through it you reach Christ; rather, through you it embraces Christ with you. Through it you obtain from God the Father what you ask; rather, through you it obtains, for which you labour anxiously, lest it blush while it asks for something. Blessed is it when it plays among children; more blessed when it happily fears falls among adolescents; most blessed when it labours to put out carnal fires in the young. In the old, as it is to be honoured, so it is not to be wondered at: because, although it is victorious, it shares the palm of its triumph with the stiffness of old age: for the fight of lust ceases where, as diseases grow frequent, by necessity even the members of the unchaste become chaste.

Come now, let us briefly expose the madness of its rival too, even by a comparison of names, so that what is to be sought and what is to be fled may very easily be recognised. Under the veil of the name of Christ, brothers, Antichrist tries to present himself; in the same way unchastity tries to present itself as chaste, in order to deceive; it trails the sound of the name of chastity behind it, but its author shows what fruits it has. It runs madly about among the peoples, and with the burning goads of lusts it hurls the slippery minds of men into stench, sparing neither sex, nor age, nor family devotion, nor itself, because he who seeks another's modesty first loses his own. For it night and day do not even follow each other in purity, for it is always drowned in the storm of its own muddy flood, while the shamefulness of lust, ever seething, is carried out in reality or in imagination. It gives or receives rewards; it corrupts or is corrupted; it casts in love, soon to make hatred out of love. It sows unlawful heirs, and knowing the crime, excuses it with the names of family affection. It either kills its own or strips them of affection. It thinks nothing at all shameful to suffer or to do, so long as its attempts succeed. Yet even in its very fruit, in which it is accustomed to rejoice from the stain of another's violated modesty, it is always unhappy. In the end, after the business is done, it hates both itself and the one it has conquered. It has often declared war on peaceful nations; it has sometimes overturned strong kingdoms; it has triumphed over other men's bridal chambers, subjugated either by shameful or by cruel deeds; it has taught men, maddened with lust, to fight against their own nature, by an unheard-of wage paid to women; it has placed the price of lust above all in the deaths of parents, children, husbands and wives; it has sometimes destroyed the names of family devotion by monstrous intercourse, persecuting the chaste, but killing only the unchaste in its embraces; it, I say, at every moment both bears every evil and has borne every worse one; for among the idols it is a goddess, among their worshippers a servant. It contrives to be revered in the temples, merry in the theatres, importunate in public places, opportune in any secret place. Wanton, sparing neither tongues, nor eyes, nor ears, it jests, hopes, canvasses, complies, is jealous, rages, arms itself with prayers, arms itself with anger, and likewise sometimes extorts by force what it could not obtain by flatteries. It always rejoices in varied change of lusts; and it repents, never reaching satiety in its slippery profit. It desires to do what it fears to have made public; it tries everything so as to claim everything for itself. It is a new kind of monster. It hates chastity, and yet it wants to seem what chastity is.

Meanwhile it cultivates itself with wonderful arts, and seeks in itself a face of its own that it does not have. It paints itself over itself, and with the varied rouge of the master cosmetician acting as pander, it clothes its own face with the faces of others, to be not what nature gave, but what a passing whim dictated to it at the mirror's test. Now it corrects, now it erases the looks it had loved, now it substitutes others, now it gives birth to new ones. Made by its own hands a hydra of forms, it always walks boldly, because it does not know how to blush under other people's colours, known neither to the household, nor to relatives, nor to husbands, nor to itself, because what is always uncertain cannot be known or true. Moreover it never loves God, whom it knows to be contrary to its works. It is plainly the slave of the devil, for it possesses his kingdom; for it gave birth to the gods itself, it brought into the world the gods through whom or in whom the devil is worshipped, whose origin is shown in their deeds. It made Jupiter 'greatest' by countless, varied and great crimes. It shamefully conquered Hercules, worse than a stepmother, in his lust for Omphale, whom a terrible crowd of monsters could not overcome. It set Venus too before the gaze of the whole world, after many adulteries, stripped of all clothing on her limbs, trying to cover herself with curved hands, rather displaying the vice of her mind and body. There is no need to go through each one; although these things were not worthy to be said, yet they seemed necessary to express the force of unchastity, so that each may know that luxury belongs to idolatry. It, I say, turned the tombs of the dead into temples, burial mounds into altars, corpses into images, funeral feasts into sacrifices, customs into rites. Thus, thus it snatched the human race away from the worship of God, persuading it by flattering festivity to imitate the criminal deeds of criminals and to worship crimes.

So it unhappily inspires in men, against God's law and God's justice, a seeming free licence to wander outside the lawful bed into foreign luxury, and so it tears their wives too away from modesty; and they, deserted, driven by passion or grief, if they do such things, think they are either imitating or avenging themselves. For this reason the Lord says in his commandments: 'Whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of adultery, makes her commit adultery.' What slippery husbands can answer here I do not see; deceived by the unjust impunity of human laws, not knowing true justice even from their own will, they willingly do what they do not wish to suffer: distracted by the detestable theft of profane lust, no longer content with shameful hiding places, they sometimes (oh, the wickedness!) sweat in mad intercourse under the very eyes of their wives, not noticing, wretched men, that in such a matter, with God as judge, what is not permitted to wives is not permitted to husbands either; as the apostle Paul says, laying down the rule for such men: 'The wife does not have power over her own body, but the husband; likewise the husband does not have power over his own body, but the wife.' Since, then, they are one flesh, one sacrament of a divine work, since the woman was made from her husband, and each is held bound to the other, and so by the right of the law too they are touched by one line, there is no doubt that whichever of the two has transgressed will be consumed by the everlasting torments of a horrible punishment. But neither do those go unpunished who, without wives, so as to sin more freely, buy for themselves uncertain and dishonourable wages of lust, not noticing that whatever is outside lawful marriage is unhappy and unchaste: for I do not think, brothers, that anything more is permitted to a Christian than to be either continent or a husband.

I come now to examples, which are above all necessary to the matter, because what is done counts for more than what is said, so that both the evil of unchastity and the good of chastity may very easily be recognised from one and the same platform. Joseph, a Hebrew youth, famous by birth, more famous for his beauty, and most famous for the uprightness of his conduct, was among the sons of Jacob younger in age but greater in spirit. Driven by the envy of his brothers, he was carried down into Egypt and sold by them; and his master's wife began to love him, in a worse way, whom his brothers hated: for when the woman was burning to the marrow with the fire of mad passion, armed vehemently with arguments for sacrilegious persuasion, she seizes on solitude, she seizes on a secret place, the sort of place in which youth, even unprovoked, has often been accustomed to be violent towards unwilling women. But when, bursting out towards her goal, she realises that neither flatteries nor promises help her, she lays hands on him and, reversing the roles, tries with all her strength to draw the youth's fire into her own tinder. But he, in resisting, left behind the garment violently torn from him and fled naked out of the pit of unchastity; but, clothed in the splendour of chastity, after a slanderous condemnation he was both freed and honoured by God. In the end he who was already before a distinguished king of modesty was made by right the second king of the kingdom.

Susanna too, the pillar of matronhood, whose unaffected beauty was a lovelier ornament than her beauty itself, a distinguished witness of chastity, two of the elders, set on fire by one monstrous passion, began to be madly in love with, otherwise than was fitting. When they noticed that she was enclosed by the wall of chastity, which is surely true and eternal beauty, in the solitude of a paradise, where they remembered Eve had been deceived by the author of her ruin, they took counsel from this very thing and set about catching her by a trick, threatening, unless she gave way to sin, great ruin as though she had been caught in adultery. But she, not an Eve, though shut in by the boundaries of a two-edged choice, in which either her modesty or her life had to be killed, calling God alone to witness as the one who knew her conscience, chose an honourable death rather than a shameful life, thinking it better to present herself as guilty before men than before God. Meanwhile they press on, turned from lovers into accusers, and while they artfully heap up their own crime, transferred onto the simplicity of the woman they had trapped, they already condemn themselves first. But (oh, the wickedness!) age is believed, authority is believed; the adulterers exult; integrity is condemned. Already Susanna was being dragged, undeserving, to punishment; already the whole people was swelling for her blood; already her own household, struck by the atrocity of the new event, groaning pitifully, with heads bowed, had abandoned all effort at defence. Already she herself hated the delay of death, as a short road for modesty, displeasing to all but pleasing to her own conscience alone. When suddenly God, who is never deceived by any cunning, is at once present in the boy Daniel. All at once he tore down the whole stage of malice; the fabricated crime is quickly laid open; the wickedness returns upon its authors; and modesty is cleared by innocence. And so victorious chastity brought Susanna back, proved and vindicated, with great triumph to her husband's bedchamber, whom the lie of unchastity had dragged into public.

But O how wonderful you are, chastity, who wish to be praised in no other way than by being guarded, content with the sole ornament of a good conscience! You are happy in virgins, strong in widows, faithful in marriages, pure in priests, glorious in martyrs, bright in angels, and queen in all. You are never subject to the flesh, never to any law. You are born of the will, but you bear the will itself to good things: for afterwards will becomes your delight, when through it you daily gather fruit thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold. You are rich in the poor, richer in the rich; you are made complete equally in all. You are the honour of bodies. You are the treasure of souls. You are the foundation, summit and fruit of all your peers. You are the eternal, indissoluble knot of your own purpose. Through you lawful fasts are celebrated. Through you prayers that are offered are accepted even before they are poured out. You are a sacrifice dear to God; you are God's lawful temple, the sanctuary of modesty. Corruption does not know how to enter you. Through you the world is conquered, all lust is crushed, the devil is subjugated, Antichrist is not feared, the Holy Spirit is brought in, Christ is glorified, God the almighty Father is made favourable. In the end, happy is he who will reign in the future, having come there with you.

If what we say confidently, brothers, perhaps seems harsh and hard to anyone, a thing almost against nature, let him stop being disturbed at once, understanding that this is the greatest glory of Christian virtue: to trample on nature itself. But since virtue always darkens pleasures, and nothing is right to anyone except what he has loved, especially what all peoples cultivate with one desire, there is no doubt that whoever dissuades from marriage is judged either a public enemy or certainly mad. But I shall not fear what the envy of public talk may gossip about me: for I do not condemn marriage, but I set better things before marriage, and indeed with the apostle Paul urging thus: 'I say to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they remain as I am. But if they are not continent, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.' And in another place he says: 'I say this by way of concession, not of command: I wish all of you to be as I am.' And so marrying is better for this reason, that burning is worse. 'All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient.' Here now, Christian, recognise and choose what you want: the remedy or health.

In short, if it seems good, let us compare the difference between a virgin and a married woman. The married woman thinks how she may please her husband; the virgin, how she may please God. The one is adorned with outward ornaments; the other is far more adorned, because she does not know how to be adorned from outside. The one is fragrant with various ointments and scents; the other, more pleasing than any meadow with her one flower, breathes to heaven itself with joyful honour. The one rejoices in children; but the other does not fear the loss of children. The one is fed on their budding endearments and delights daily in their growing up; but the other, sick with nine months' discomfort, does not carry the weight; in an uncertain childbirth she does not groan for the safety of mother and child, and is tormented at every moment by the care of no shifting anxiety.

But someone will say: 'The virgin Mary too both married and gave birth.' Let some woman be such, and I yield. But she was a virgin after marriage, a virgin after conception, a virgin after her son. In short, if there were anything better than virginity, the Son of God could have granted it rather to his mother, to whom he granted that she should excel in the honour of divine virginity. So, remaining a virgin in the state in which you were born, glory in it; subject to no law, guard the flower of holy modesty, the treasure of faith; be holy both in body and in spirit; extinguish the fire of the flesh by the love of Christ, to say nothing of the glory of the resurrection, which you already claim for yourself here, in which, as the Lord says, 'They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but will be like the angels.' You will gain a great benefit if you live for God, free in pure conduct, and are not the handmaid of a man.

But you, widow, why do you desire a second marriage, when you see the Apostle restraining the first? These are his words: 'The time is short; it remains that those who have wives be as though they had none; for the form of this world is passing away.' And since this apostolic edict was at work almost four hundred years ago or more, when men were longer-lived and Christians very few, why should I, now that the Christian world is almost complete and the vigour of men is worn away as the world grows old, blunt the edge of truth with coaxing words and not fully declare with what perfection of observance the worship of God ought to be kept? Especially since it is written in Solomon: 'Even if your children multiply, do not delight in them if the fear of the Lord is not with them; do not laugh with their souls; for one who fears God is better than a thousand ungodly sons.' Since this is so, come, widow, you who often hurry to marry like an innocent virgin, answer my question: did you lose a good husband or a bad one? If a bad one, and you desire to marry, you deserve to be afflicted by a worse. If a good one, keep the seal of fidelity: he to whom you bear witness does not deserve to suffer an injury. Where is that first day of marriage which, as you longed for each other, seemed slower to come than the others? Where the festal slaying of precious virginity, sweet to both? Where is the love which, in an equal and united marriage, does not die while one of the two survives? Are you not the one who washed your husband's laid-out body with tears, wiped it with kisses, veiled it with the loss of your hair, with torn cheeks and breasts disfigured with bruises, covered more with dirty dust than with clothing? Are you not, I say, the one who, now bursting heaven itself with your wailing, cried that after such a husband you could not live a moment longer? Now, with your groans shut in by grief, often dead in spirit among your relatives, your limbs sinking to the ground, you made the funeral uncertain: to whom should they give their tears, to the dead man or to the dying woman? After this, if you choose to marry, all that was a lie. What is this? See, you return again to the panders' arts; you borrow colour from the box, colour you condemned a little earlier. See, you tend your hair indulgently; you change the dust of mourning for scented powder; you shut your weeping in a little jar; you bind with ornament the neck you had vowed to the noose; you seek oracles from the mirror about how conveniently you can ensnare a suitor. Whatever you do, you will not be a virgin again; but one thing I know, that whoever changes both appearance and conduct for another's sake differs nothing from a monster.

But you say: 'The heat of my tender age drives me.' I believe it. See, you have married. To say nothing of human frailty and other mishaps, see, the day after, some necessity snatches your husband away and keeps him banished far from you for ten years or more, as often happens. What will you do? Will you wait faithfully for his return, or will you seek a remedy for your heat elsewhere? If you promise to wait, you are without doubt deceiving, since your profession of impatience is already on record. But if you are going to take a remedy, there is no doubt that this is the only one: to restrain your flames by thinking of your husband's sword. Believe me, lust has no place where patience rules, where one lives soberly, where death is feared. So transfer this observance, this fear, to God, which is truer and more just, and whatever that fire may be, it will suddenly be extinguished.

But I linger on matters that are almost sound, as if the crimes that are truly detestable were already corrected. I am ashamed to say among a serious people that old women are often seen as new brides, whose marriages are almost more than their birthdays; who are asked not to marry but to sleep, who are invited when nearer the tomb than the bridal chamber; who, as they perish themselves, by their detestable example compel young girls too to perish. What son could love them? What husband? They confuse the rights of blood, blot out the merits of husbands, flatter the living, sigh for the dead, now hating their old children, now their new ones, and likewise their husbands. And let them consider on the other side what it means that in such solemn vows it often happens that they have neither children nor husbands. Such too is the case of husbands, to whom it is superfluous to say anything, because if wife and husband are one in the flesh, there is no doubt that what one hears belongs to both. What am I to do, where to turn, I do not know; for I do not see what I am to preach to the Gentiles in exhortations to divine and true worship. The happiness of virginity? But they have their virgins: even if not happy ones, still they have them. If I call them to the glorious toil and palm of widowhood, they may perhaps mock us, because our sacred virgins and widows labour for the great reward of immortality, but theirs for nothing. But in this alone we surpass them, that Christian women marry more, in the name of their holiness. Add that they marry Gentiles: which cannot be said without great grief or groaning.

For what voice, what rebuke could worthily reprove these women? They endow their disgrace with sacrilege, hand over the members of Christ to the slaves of demons; open the temple of God to the profane; strip bare even the very sanctuaries; confound the sacred things, having lost the joyful light, living in darkness, having shrines, not homes. They are rightly slain who, ungrateful for Christ's benefits, of their own accord return to the death from which they had escaped. Since the devil always lies in wait for those who do not seek him, consider what he does when invited: all the approaches for harm are thrown open to him, and they give him victory without a fight, without any toil: for he will not try to bring under his rule the woman who canvassed to be his handmaid. In short, what is done in the house, and even in the very shrines, cannot happen without you, faithful Christian woman, because you are an unhappy wife if you do not know what goes on in your house; certainly more unhappy if you know.

Let us suppose, then, as often happens, that the feast-days of the different religions fall on one and the same day, when you must go to church and he to the temples. In what manner will each of you provide for your sacrifice? At what expense? With what vessels? Or with what servants? And if these things are done separately, it does no good: for, setting out from one house and returning to one, they become one, if not by confusion, then by mistake. What of the fact that his sacrifice is public, yours secret? His can be handled freely by anyone; yours cannot be seen without sacrilege even by Christians not yet consecrated. Finally, it is a detestable condition of life where a wife may not do what pleases her husband; where you propose to do nothing unless he has arranged it and completed it first. If it is not done, or if what is done displeases him, then the whole house will roar with quarrels, God will be blasphemed, and perhaps, seizing your very sacrifice, he will beat your breast, disfigure your face, granting you even a benefit at times when he orders you not to come to church. But it is much worse if you please your husband: for you cannot please a sacrilegious man without sacrilege. To settle the matter briefly: returning from the temple he will necessarily tell you, when you ask, what replies were given about the safety of both of you or the agreement of the gods. If they are terrible, struck with fear, perhaps when he stops you will offer unlawful vows to them, as many women have done for their husbands even among the faithful, worse than Eve, not her pupils but her teachers; for she was deceived, but these have given themselves to the devil of their own accord. But if they are peaceful and favourable, you will surely rejoice, and an obliging wife, for such news, even if you do not press peace upon him, you will not refuse it.

What are you doing, wretched woman? Why do you rejoice, mad woman? This is not peace but war; not a kiss but poison. Oh, the wickedness! You embrace limbs still smoking from the funeral pyre, and wipe off on your own flesh the sweat of the steam of filthy altars; you jest, flatter, comply; if by chance some solemn mystery is received or brought back by the devotee, you yourself take it, you put it away, you guard it. Besides, you take food together, you drain with your lips the remains of the cup he toasted you with, and you inaugurate, as it were, the first fruits of a future draught; you willingly conceive through your husband the whole spirit of iniquity: unhappy woman, more is now in you than has remained in the temple. But if you keep yourself and hold back, he will think that this is contrived as an insult to him, not from love of divine worship but from desire for someone else; he will turn the virtue of chastity and observance into a crime. For what evil would he not suspect, not do, serving cruel gods, adulterous gods? Therefore from now on flee, virgin, flee, widow, such marriages. No excuse at all applies to you. If you cannot be continent, at least do not lend your marriages out at interest, lest on that day of resurrection you be unable to recognise, among very many husbands, whose wife you were. Do not be sacrilegious, do not be a betrayer of the law. Why marry a pagan, when you can marry a Christian?