Homilies 1 part 4/11

I see the cross being set up through the prophecy of Isaiah, and the garments of the Lord, like those of one who treads the winepress, stained with blood, and the Savior bearing his reward ready in his right hand.

And I behold Solomon, to the best of his ability, making precise for us the scales and the weights.

And I pity the debtor of the Gospel, who did not share with his fellow-servant the mercy which he himself had received from his master, but instead, through his own ill counsel and hard-heartedness, renewed his own calamity.

For it was with these topics that we labored on the previous occasion, as you all know, all of you who did not treat the hearing of it as a mere side matter.

But today again there are for us many good things, all that the Spirit has laid out upon this visible table.

I have turned my mind to the talkative and tempting Pharisees together, and I pitied them greatly for the wickedness of their ways, in that with their own questions they attempted to outwit the very fountain of wisdom;

and they failed in their attempt, since the divinity of the Only-Begotten always turned their questions back upon them, to the opposite of what they intended.

Concerning them, it seems to me, Isaiah too spoke in prophecy, saying:

"Turning the wise back, and making their counsel foolish, and confirming the words of his servant;

with their tongues they have practiced deceit;

let them fall by their own counsels."

Nevertheless, thanks be to them, enemies though they are, because they stirred up Wisdom to make reply, so that he might leave behind for us his servants a written record of profitable teaching.

For behold, marriage is regulated — a matter that is the very sum of human life — and precise boundaries are legislated for both its formation and its dissolution.

Let both companies hear these things with great earnestness, so that the women's quarters may be instructed in what belongs to them, and the men's quarters may profit from what is especially theirs.

"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?"

This, then, is the problem posed by the Hebrews.

As for me, beyond the rest, I look to the true purpose of the question.

For since the female sex is more easily persuaded, and was more inclined both toward the greatness of his wondrous works and toward assent to, and faith in, the divinity of Christ ... so too, in the end, when the murderers were in their intent dragging the Lord toward the cross, the multitude of the women lamented both him and his suffering, and, following the Savior, wept for him piteously — so that, through this treacherous question, they might contrive some offense and ill-will against him among the company of women, they themselves fixing, as they supposed, snares and the nets of their words.

But the Lord, seeing by the power of his divinity the malice of what was being contrived, and at the same time laying down for human life what is humane, and rendering their ambush vain, puts forward an answer that pleads the women's cause.

dispatching the Pharisees like empty-jawed wolves, who had gaped wide in vain over their question.

"Creation itself," he says, "displays a purpose of union and not of dissolution;"

for those who were to come into being afterward, establishing the inescapable consequence of cohabitation — which it was fitting to honor as a law of God.

"Those joined to one another are no longer two, but one flesh;"

"so that what God has joined together, let man not separate."

This indeed was said to the Pharisees at that time;

but hear it now, you hucksters of these things, who change your wives as easily as garments;

you who often and readily pitch your bridal chambers like booths for a festival market;

you who marry wealth and traffic in wives;

you who are provoked over a trifle and at once write the bill of divorce;

you who leave behind many women as widows while they yet live.

Be persuaded that marriage is severed by death alone, and by adultery.

For it is not the case that, as with courtesans a few days' span tests the cohabitation and hunts only pleasure, so it is also with unions solemnized by law and ordinance;

but quite the opposite, O man: a certain union comes about of both body and soul, so that character is mingled with character, and flesh is in some manner bound to flesh.

How then do you sunder it without feeling? How do you depart so easily and without pain, having taken as the partner of your life — not the servant of a few days, but your sister and wife? Your sister, indeed, according to the account of her formation and creation, for from one cause, the earth, and from the same matter, you both came to be;

and your wife, on account of the union of conjugal bond, on account of the law of marriage.

What bond, then, will you tear apart, bound as you are both by law and by nature? How will you set aside the pledges you laid down at your marriage? And what do you suppose I mean? Is it the dowry-contract drawn up here, when with your own hand you set your mark, sealing the document upon the things solemnized? .. That, indeed, is strong and possesses sufficient security;

but I refer myself to the voice of Adam;

"This is flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bones;"

This utterance is preserved in writing not in vain, but is the common confession of humankind, set forth through the person of this first man for the common multitude of women who are joined by law to men.

And do not be surprised if, from what one person said, another is held to account.

For all that happened concerning the first-formed at the beginning became the nature of the generation that followed.

If, then, the woman who has been groundlessly put away should take the book of the world's creation and drag you before the judge — the same one who is both judge and witness — what will you say, tell me? How will you erase your own utterance, which you made before God, whose scribe, instead of some cheap notary, was Moses, the servant of God? .. God gave the woman, fatherless and motherless, in marriage to Adam, and therefore, like a good guardian, secured the orphan;

and now daughters strongly avail themselves of their mother's claims against ungrateful and faithless husbands, so that for you the contempt of your wedded wife is on every side impossible, bound as you are both by the ancient divine laws and by the new human ones.

Let the usefulness of a wife to life also abash you.

She is a member, she is a helper;

a co-worker for the conduct of life, for the begetting of children;

a support in sickness, a consolation in afflictions, guardian of the hearth, treasurer of possessions;

grieving the same things, rejoicing in the same things;

holding wealth in common, if it should be present;

managing wretched poverty when it comes, resourcefully and steadfastly withstanding its painful effects, enduring the toil of child-rearing for the sake of her life together with you.

And if some crisis of affairs should overtake a man, once he is submerged, he vanishes from view;

and those reputed friends, who measure friendship by the season of prosperity, withdraw in times of trouble;

and the slaves flee both the master and his misfortunes together.

There remains, then, the wife — the member belonging to the ailing part, both slave to his misfortunes and to the care of her husband — wiping away his tear;

tending the wound, if he has been scourged;

following him as he is led away to prison;

and if even this is prevented, she remains at the doors of the prison, like a little dog accustomed to its master.

I have known a woman who both cut off her hair and put on a man's garment — and a bright-colored one at that — so that she might not be parted from her husband while he was a fugitive and in hiding.

Though she seemed to be a slave, she truly was enslaved to her longing;

and she continued this life for many years, exchanging place for place and wilderness for wilderness.

We find such a woman also in the wife of the most steadfast Job.

For all abandoned him as well, and the flatterers flowed away together with his wealth, and his friends measured their friendship by the season of prosperity.

And if at some point they did appear, their presence was a reproach and not a visitation of comfort;

an addition to his misfortune, not a consolation.

Therefore indeed all his comforters in misfortune raised bitter complaint against him.

But she alone, once renowned, sat with her husband upon the dunghill, scraping off the discharge and drawing out the worms from his wounds.

Thus a partner of his life, not merely a cohabitant of his prosperity;

an inseparable friend, not a flatterer of pleasures;

the sole good remnant of all his good fortune, and of all his dearest ones and kinsmen.

For this very reason, out of extreme and excessive love for her husband, she even fell into the sin of blasphemy, so that her husband might not be tormented for long, nor she see him in unceasing pains — counseling him to speak some blasphemous word against God, and thereby undergo a swift death.

For she no longer took into account her own misfortune of widowhood;

but her one and only concern was that her husband might escape his unlivable life.

These things, together with the recent experience, the memory of the ancient examples also teaches to the one who does outrage to marriage.

But what might the man liable to this accusation say in reply? What plausible defense might he offer for his own fickleness? "The character of the woman," he says, "is base and worthy of hatred; her tongue is rash, her manner is not home-keeping, and her management of the household is disorderly."

For the moment I am persuaded and I accept this, like judges who are not very exacting in their hearing, but are easily swept along by the invectives of accusers.

When you first took her, did you not know that you were joining yourself to a human being? And on hearing the word "human being," does one not immediately see that at least some small sin follows along with it? For blamelessness belongs to God alone.

But do you yourself not sin? Do you not cause your wife grief by your own manner? Are you innocent of every fault, and do you keep the ordinance of your cohabitation undefiled? .. Oh, how many drunken outrages of yours has your wife perhaps borne!

And how many ready insults and indecent words has she endured!

And how many of your faults are kept silent, because your wife has not made them public!

She has endured you even when you were angry for no reason and boiling over with rage;

and she who is free and of equal honor to you has kept silent like a slave bought from the market.

And when, through poverty or through stinginess, you did not supply the necessities for the conduct of life, she, though grieved, did not reproach you;

nor indeed, when you once came from a banquet drunk and out of your senses, did she, hating your drunkenness, cast you off; but she received you with humane forgiveness, and led by the hand you who mistreated her, and tended your head, reeling with the fumes of wine;

and she alone, sympathizing with you, led you to the marriage bed, while the household servants laughed and mocked at the derangement caused by your drunkenness.

But you go wandering about the streets, making a tragic spectacle of your wife over frivolous pretexts, so that you may procure for yourself an excuse for your rash divorce.

Hard is the disposition of such men, savage and implacable, having its birth — as the saying goes — from oak or from rock.

For, having wiped out the memory of everything all at once, they cut it apart without any feeling.

But who cuts off a limb that has fallen sick, instead of treating it — and this when no dangerous affliction has struck, but one that has much hope of an easy cure? A blister has appeared on the hand: let us treat it carefully;

But if, setting aside the physicians' careful judgment concerning incision and the knife, we should busy ourselves with cutting away each of the things that pain us, we should not pass even a little space of life before we had mutilated ourselves in all our limbs.

But it is not so, O men;

let there be some regard also for the limbs;

let the attentive services of your wives move you to reverence.

However much you may be provoked, if you set the birth-pang of a single childbearing against your complaints, you will find the trouble of the things that grieve you overcome.

Let your reckoning bring into the midst also the good things of her goodwill;

the care of your illnesses, the sharing of misfortunes, the tears some have shed on behalf of a husband, the leaving of parents and the ancestral hearth to follow the stranger, the selling of some of her own possessions, that she might buy off her husband's insult and harassment.

Let all these things educate you toward affection and become a bond of tender love, rousing and holding together the soul prone to slip, as one might a house grown unsound.

Let mercy prevail, and let habit and the companionship of long time not be trampled underfoot — that same thing which even makes the irrational animals inseparable from one another.

For I myself have seen, with feeling, an ox bellowing because, having strayed from its fellow grazers, it was left alone; and a sheep bleating in a wooded glen and running over the mountains, until it should rejoin the flock from which it had become separated while grazing.

And a goat, suffering this same thing, even if in its running it comes upon many flocks of goats, does not stop before it finds the flock it is accustomed to and its own goatherd.

Let us, then, who are rational, not be found more insensible to affection than the irrational animals, nor let us judge our wife less worthy of honor than some fellow-traveler, or than one who, for some slight occasion, has briefly become dear to us.

You see how, even on the highway, people who have met one another and have come under the same roof of an inn, or under a spreading tree that has shaded them at noon in summer, make of this chance encounter an occasion for genuine affection;

and if they come to the parting of the ways, they do not separate from one another without feeling, but they stand and shed a few tears, gazing steadily at one another, and each gives the other tokens of remembrance to carry;

and having gone forward a little, they turn back again and call to one another, and each one prays the other well;

and does so short a space of time blend their friendship so keenly that parting becomes hard for them to bear and their departure a kind of forced thing? ... But you regard the partner of your life with such contempt, as though she were a vessel that had fallen and broken, or a cheap cloak forgotten on a journey, or a little Melitaean lapdog that has strayed from the house. And where now is the affection you feigned at the beginning? Where is the repose upon the one marriage-bed, the union joined by law, the power of that long and abundant habit which, both reason holds and experience has shown, is transformed even into nature? All this you have severed more easily than Samson severed the cords of the Philistines.

And yet the prudent man, the guardian of true affection, does not readily forget his wife even when she has departed from life, but cherishes the children as a common trust left by the mother and by nature, and in them he seems to behold the one who has departed;

for one of the children preserves the likeness of the mother's voice, another draws much of her features, another has been formed in disposition of character after the one who bore him;

and thus the father, having many living and vivid images of his wife, forms for himself an undying picture of his life together with her, and therefore entertains no thought of pleasure-seeking;

he does not, having today heaped the earth over her grave, prepare a bridal chamber after only a little time;

nor does he, after the tears and the groans, hasten again to the wedding dance;

nor does he exchange the black and mourning garment for a bridal robe;

nor, while the bed of the departed is still warm, does he bring in a second wife;

nor does he give the children a stepmother — that burdensome name.

He imitates instead the irrational yet natural dignity of the turtledoves,

and to be the opposite of the dove in its readiness for taking many mates.

Up to this point let the husband be pelted with frequent accusations, and let the charges of ingratitude wound him thicker than snowflakes.

But if he should somewhere allege the charge of adultery, and offer this as his defense for the separation, I will at once transfer my advocacy to the one wronged, and having prepared my argument against the adulteress, I will stand beside the husband as a good shield-companion rather than as an enemy, praising the one who has fled the treacherous woman, who has cut the bond by which he was bound to the asp or the viper.

For to this man the Maker of the universe himself first grants pardon, as one who both justly grieves and rightly drives the sickness out from his house and hearth.

For marriage is established for the sake of these two things: affection and the begetting of children, and neither of these is preserved together with adultery.

For affection does not exist once goodwill has inclined toward another;

and the good of child-bearing is destroyed once the children's lineage is confounded.

But the matters bearing upon this sin have been discussed adequately in another discourse.

But you, both parties, practice for me self-control — the unbreakable bond of marriage.

For where this is honored, peace and mutual longing must necessarily be present, since no promiscuous and illegitimate desire whets the soul, nor drives out lawful and righteous affection.

This law of chastity has been ordained by God not for women alone, but for men as well.

But those who attend to the lawgivers of this present life leave the license of fornication unaccountable to men; they are severe judges and teachers of women's chastity, while they themselves rage licentiously among many bodies, being — as the proverb says — physicians of others while teeming with countless sores of their own.

And if anyone censures them for these transgressions, they put forward a witty and jesting defense.

For men, they say, even if they consort with very many women, in no way harm their own household;

but women, by the sins they commit, bring alien heirs into households and families.

But let the sophists and inventors of this reckless opinion hear that they themselves also overturn other households and hearths.

For the women with whom they consort are certainly, in every case, either someone's daughters or someone's wives;

and in every way it will be found either a marriage plotted against, or a parent wronged — one who begot and reared a daughter and hoped to bring her a virgin to the bridal chamber and the marriage-bed, but has been robbed of every good expectation by these robbers of chastity.

If the licentious man is himself a father, let him recognize the suffering of a father thus disappointed;

if he is a husband, let him picture himself as the one wronged.

For indeed it is, in general, altogether right that each person should judge the affairs of others as he would wish another to judge concerning himself.

But if certain persons, attending to the laws of the Romans, suppose that fornication is unaccountable, they wander in a terrible error, not knowing that God legislates in one way and men decree in another.

Hear Moses proclaiming the will of God and pronouncing bitter sentences against fornicators.

"But fornicators and adulterers God will judge."

But the others will not suffice for your salvation in the time of retribution; rather, trembling and sweating, they will melt away.

Plato, that sophist of laws, will appear to you unwise and untaught, and that weighty solemnity of his will seem lowly, and his authority over all lawgivers will be shown destroyed, when they see the lovers of the body being torn apart — the very men to whom they themselves had wrongly granted license.

And assuredly those who did not restrain others have first turned the sin back upon themselves, and will be found liable to a double accusation: both for what they themselves did, and for having allowed others to be licentious.

Those, then, who wish to live with wives as chaste as possible, let them make their own conduct a teacher to those who dwell with them, so that they may have a good example of zeal from their own household.

A discourse of Asterius, bishop of Amasea, on the prophet Daniel and on Susanna. ... The grace of the Spirit, having the wealth of its gift ever overflowing, is never idle in displaying its own gifts, whenever and to whomever it wills.

For, like a river filled with waters that leap unto life — unlike those visible rivers here on earth — it has the outpourings of its activity continually supplied,

for its stream does not fail as those rivers' streams sometimes do, nor does it undergo risings and fallings as they do, nor does it embrace only this region or that as they do, but it is ever sufficient in abundance and for all;

and flowing forth from its fullness to those who partake, it remains no less full; and thus, even while having its grace so abundant, it does not know how to distribute and apportion itself according to age.

For it does not know how to measure the immeasurable by the bulk of bodies, but knows how to unite with and manifest itself according to the nobility and purity of the soul.

And for this reason it now accompanies Samuel while he is still being nursed with milk, now takes up David from among his brothers' flocks of sheep, singling him out from those brothers by whom he seemed to be overlooked on account of his immature age.

Another it perfects with the anointing, calling him from the plow, and after these it now sets before us as our subject the blessed and truly wise Daniel — still tender and altogether young — and establishes him as both judge of elders and prophet at once;

who, even though he had become a product of that heavy captivity, and had Babylon as the land that took him in, and though he seemed among the disreputable on account of the immaturity of his youth, and without freedom of speech because he was hemmed in by so many evils — yet, from bearing virtue within him, and having been grounded in his first growth by true wisdom, and being steadfast and grave of judgment, in the very flower of his youth he was shown to be the reprover and judge of those aged and established elders.

But let us, if it please you, take our discourse back a little to the beginning, and see how lofty and blessed a thing it is to be a friend of God.

When the city of Jerusalem had been utterly captured in war by the Assyrians, the peoples of the Hebrews of that time were carried away to Babylon.

And the multitude of youths taken captive by the spear included also the blessed Daniel, and he lived in the enemy's land as a boy easily despised, a small and one-among-many appendage of an afflicted people, having neither, among his own countrymen, occasion to be noticed, nor being reckoned by the enemy as a gain of war worth mentioning;

unseen, without renown on account of his youth, on account of his misfortune;

seen only by him who sees truly.

For God alone beheld the pure soul of the young man, as it were a pearl enclosed within sea-shells, or gold lying within the bosom of the earth;

as a comely bride veiled behind the curtains of the bridal chamber.

But when the appointed time came, and it was necessary for the hidden one to be revealed, for the unseen to become known, for the despised to become conspicuous, for the one hidden in the darkness of misfortune to shine forth — a small visitation of the Spirit, and the lowly one became loftier than all;

wise is he who does not open his mouth wide.

an untrained man, judge of judges;

seated upon a lofty throne, one who had not yet even become an attendant of the courts;

the young man vindicating chastity that was being slandered, turning back a people gone astray, revoking a verdict wrongly rendered by an entire city

For you have just now heard the reading, and surely your souls are wholly held fast by wonder

Whatever things they have chanted melodiously for pleasure's sake, whatever the Apostle counseled, whatever the Lord ordained with masterly authority in the Gospels — to this history I have inclined

Since I see two youths held in high approval, the one in judging, the other in being judged;

and Daniel acclaimed for his verdicts, and Susanna crowned for her victory of chastity

Come then, if it seem good, you lovers of noble things and of virtue, let us renew in memory that ancient judgment;

let us cut off, by that ancient chastity, the licentiousness now springing up afresh in the present, having publicly pilloried a boyish old age and admired a youth grown grey-haired

O polluted elders and rulers of the people, you who need ten thousand tutors for your correction, plotters against marriages joined by law, ambushers of chastity, contrivers of deceits, swift inventors of slander!

You were the very ones who with your lips judged fornication and condemned adultery;

physicians of others, yet yourselves full of the disease;

whitewashed tombs, filled within with uncleanness, yet adorning the outward appearance

You who sit on high, presiding upon the judges' thrones — yet when you chose to run riot, creeping into the leafy plants and the thickets

Then the instigator of transgressions and counselor of evils laughed, watching you, seeing how you, the foremost of the people, the chosen and the elect, dragged yourselves along the ground like housebreakers or robbers, that you might behold a lascivious sight;

and you hid yourselves in the thickets like foxes, which from dense, shady places lie in wait for the domestic birds and pounce upon them unforeseen as they graze

O the like-fashioned wickedness, which the destroyer of human souls has practiced from the beginning to the end!

In a garden was the first fall of that exalted man; in a garden also now the elders, set in motion by the serpent, fall from their original glory, and become — instead of judges — the condemned, strangers to life and workers of sin

But there he prevailed over men, yet here he was overcome by a woman, and in the Babylonian maiden he did not find the fickleness of the first woman

And one might well say that, because of Susanna, Babylon is no longer confusion, but a keeping of God's commandments, a guarding of chastity, a city of a manly woman, a place of a victory festival

Setting aside the intervening years, I bring this woman, by the likeness of her virtue, to Joseph, the world's ornament;

and I set the comely woman beside the chaste man, the one dear to God beside the child of Israel

One and the same crown, the crown for chastity, I set upon them both;

and I cast beneath the feet of the victors those who were defeated;

at Joseph's feet, the licentious Egyptian woman, the mistress of the freeborn slave;

and at Susanna's feet, the dishonored elders

I appoint these two as tutors of chastity;

she, of womanly youth, and he, of the youth of men;

lamps of the inhabited world, flowers of the resurrection, judges of adulterers, guardians of lawful marriages

For now, however, let us occupy our discourse with the holy woman alone;

for at present Joseph is but an episode, and the chaste man a parenthesis within the theme of chastity

For since the elders, as they supposed, had their quarry within the nets, and leapt out from their ambush as though about at once to seize her, they did not find the noblest hind timid, but resisting both them and the dragon who was the instigator of these events — for the hind is a serpent-slaying creature;

and rightly has the discourse found the image of this creature;

they entreated her, they were not heeded;

The ill-fated lovers were thereupon at their wits' end, and were beset by two very great things: failure of their desire and fear of exposure

So the polluted heads stitch together a slander, and for a solution to their evil they devise another evil, and they contrive murder as a cloak for adultery

For a sinner, once he has fallen into the beginnings of offenses, drags along the ensuing iniquities as though by a rope tied to that beginning

And good things prove generative of good things, and base things of their like

Wherefore now also murder springs up as the fruit of adultery, and a council sits in haste as over some great wrongdoing of the woman, and a crowd is stirred up, having the accused woman as their spectacle

The accusers and the judges were the very same men;

and grey hair, when slandering, was deemed trustworthy, while youth, when slandered, was condemned by the prevailing suspicion

And the populace, fanned into flame and suffering what a populace is wont to suffer from a rash impulse, was indignant, being led astray, and was swept along together with the impulse of the elders;

the parents of the accused woman mourned, her husband lamented the calamity, her children wailed, clinging on either side to their endangered mother, and her whole family was covered with shame