'because of fornications,' and 'lest Satan tempt you because of your incontinence,' he gives the reason why he said, 'if they do not contain themselves, let them marry': 'for it is better to marry than to burn.' Therefore it is better to marry, because it is worse to burn. Take away the ardour of lust, and he will not say, 'it is better to marry.' 'Better' always regards the comparison of something worse, not the simple quality of a good incomparable in itself — as if he should say: it is better to have one eye than none. And a little after, when I had made an apostrophe to the Apostle, I inferred: if marriage is good in itself, do not compare it to a burning, but say simply, 'it is good to marry.'
The goodness of that thing is suspect to me, which the magnitude of another evil compels to be an inferior evil. But I want, not a lighter evil, but something simply good in itself. The Apostle wills the unmarried and widows to remain without intercourse, and provokes them to his own example, and calls them happy if they so remain. But if they cannot contain themselves, and wish to quench the ardour of lust not so much by continence as by fornication, it is better for them 'to marry than to burn.' To which we inferred: therefore it is better to marry, because it is worse to burn — not bringing forward our own opinion, but interpreting the Apostle's: it is better to marry than to burn, that is, it is better to take a husband than to fornicate.
If you were to teach that to burn or to fornicate is good, then a better would be preferred to a good; but if to burn is evil — that which is preferred to it — it is not of genuine and pure integrity, nor of that blessedness which is likened to the angels. If I say, 'It is better to be a virgin than married,' I have preferred a better to a good; but if I make another grade — 'it is better to marry than to fornicate' — there I have preferred not a better to a good, but a good to an evil; and there is much difference between that 'better' which is set before marriage, and that which is set before fornication. I beseech you, what have I sinned in this discussion? My purpose was not to drag the Scriptures to my own will, but to say that which I understood the Scriptures to will.
It is the office of a commentator to set forth, not what he himself wills, but what he whom he interprets means; otherwise, if he says contrary things, he will be not so much an interpreter as an adversary of the one whom he strives to explain. Certainly, wherever I do not interpret the Scriptures but speak freely from my own sense, let anyone convict me of having said anything harsh against marriage. But if he does not find it, whatever seems either austere or harsh, let him impute it not to the authority of the writer, but to the office of the interpreter. But that reproach — who could bear it? — which is cast at me: that, expounding the chapter of the Apostle in which he wrote of the married, 'such shall have tribulation of the flesh,' I said:
'We, ignorant of things, used to think that marriage had at least the gladness of the flesh. But if for those who marry there is tribulation even in the flesh — in which alone they seemed to have delights — what will be left for the sake of which they should marry, when there is tribulation in the spirit and in the soul and in the very flesh?' What condemnation of matrimony is this, if we have called the wailing of infants, the deaths of children, the miscarriages of wives, the losses of the household, and other things of this kind, the tribulation of marriage? While Damasus of holy memory was still living, I wrote a book against Helvidius on the perpetual virginity of blessed Mary, in which it was necessary for me, in order to proclaim the blessedness of virginity, to say many things about the troubles of marriage.
Did that excellent man, learned in the Scriptures, and a virgin doctor of the Church which is a virgin, reprove anything in that discourse? In my book also to Eustochium I said far harsher things about marriage, and no one was hurt over this matter; for a lover of chastity was catching the praise of purity with attentive ear. Read Tertullian, read Cyprian, read Ambrose, and either accuse me or acquit me along with them. There have been found men of the Plautine household and mere smatterers, apt only to disparage, who wish to display themselves as learned in this — if they tear to pieces the sayings of all, and in one and the same cause reprove both me and my adversary, that is, both parties, so that, since of two one must needs conquer, they may contend that both have been vanquished.
Further, where, discussing those twice- and thrice-married, we said: 'It is better, though it be a second and a third, to know one husband than many' — that is, 'it is more tolerable to have prostituted oneself to one man than to many' — did we not immediately, as to why I said this, subjoin: 'seeing that even the Samaritan woman in the Gospel, saying that she had a sixth husband, is rebuked by the Lord that he was not her husband'? I even now proclaim with free voice that digamy is not condemned in the Church, nay nor even trigamy, and that it is thus permitted to marry a fifth and a sixth and beyond, just as a second husband; but as these marriages are not condemned, so neither are they proclaimed. They are the solace of misery, not the praise of continence. Whence in another place I said:
where one husband is exceeded, it matters not whether it be a second or a third, because she ceases to be a monogamist. 'All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient.' I do not condemn those twice-married, nay nor thrice-married, and, if it can be said, even eight-times-married: let any woman have an eighth husband, provided she deny that she has prostituted herself to one. I will come also to that passage in which I am charged for having said that, according to the Hebrew verity alone, in the second day there is not added, as in the first and third and the rest, 'God saw that it was good,' and then immediately subjoined: 'He has left to us to understand that the double number is not good, which divides from unity and prefigures the covenants of marriage.' Whence also in the ark of Noah all the animals that enter two by two are unclean;
the odd number is clean. In this I do not know what, for the present, is being reproved concerning the second day: whether, because it is written and we said it is not written? Or, because — even though it is not written — we understood it otherwise than the simplicity of the Scriptures allows? That it is not written in the second day, 'God saw that it was good' — let them accept as testimony not mine, but that of all the Hebrews and of the other translators, namely of Aquila and Symmachus and Theodotion. But if it is not written, whereas in the other days it is written, either let them render some more probable reason why it is not written, or, if they do not find one, they shall, whether they like it or not, accept what has been said by us.
Further, if in the ark of Noah all the animals which enter two by two are unclean, the odd number is clean; and no one doubts that this is written — let them explain why it is written. But if they do not explain it, then, will they or nill they, they shall accept what has been expounded by me. Either bring forth better fare and use me as your guest, or be content with our humble little supper, such as it is. Am I now, forsooth, to enumerate those churchmen who have discoursed on the odd number: Clement, Hippolytus, Origen, Dionysius, Eusebius, Didymus — and among our own too Tertullian, Cyprian, Victorinus, Lactantius, Hilary? Of whom Cyprian, discoursing on the number seven — that is, the odd — what and how great things he said 'To Fortunatus,' that book of his bears witness.
Or shall I perhaps bring forward Pythagoras, and Archytas of Tarentum, and Publius Scipio in the sixth book of the 'Republic,' disputing about the odd number? But if my detractors are unwilling to hear these, I will make the schools of the grammarians ring aloud to them: 'God delights in the odd number.' A grievous sacrilege, forsooth! The churches are overthrown, the world cannot bear to hear, if we have said that virginity is cleaner than marriage, if we have subordinated the even number to the odd, and shown that the types of the Old Testament have profited unto the truth of the Gospel! The other things which have been reproved in my book I think either too trivial, or pertaining to the same sense;
Hence I was unwilling to reply to these matters, lest I both exceed the compass of a small book and seem to distrust your genius, whom I had as patron of my cause before ever I asked it of you. Therefore with my last breath I protest this: that I have neither condemned marriage nor do I condemn it; that I answered an adversary, not that I dreaded the plots of my own people. But virginity I extol to heaven, not because I possess it, but because I marvel at what I do not possess. It is a frank and modest confession to proclaim in others that which you yourself lack. Surely, because I cling to earth with a heavy body, do I not therefore marvel at the flight of birds, nor praise the dove because it skims the liquid path swift and stirs not its wings? Let no man deceive himself; let no one be hurled down by a flattering fawner.
The first virginity is from birth, the second virginity is from the second birth. This saying is not mine; it is an ancient sentence: No one can serve two masters, the flesh and the spirit. The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh; these are mutually opposed to each other, so that we do not do the very things we will. When anything seems harsh to you in our little work, look not to my words, but to the Scripture whence my words are drawn. Christ a virgin; the mother of our Virgin ever a virgin, both mother and virgin. For Jesus entered through closed doors; in His tomb, which was new and cut out of hardest rock, no one was laid either before or after;
a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed, from which fountain flows that river spoken of by Amos, which waters the torrent of ropes or of thorns: the ropes of sins, by which we were formerly bound; the thorns which choked the seed of the householder. This is the eastern gate in Ezekiel, ever closed and luminous, containing within itself, or bringing forth from itself, the Holy of Holies, through which the Sun of Justice and our High Priest after the order of Melchizedek enters and goes forth. Let them answer me, how Jesus entered through closed doors, when He showed His hands to be handled and His side to be examined, and His bones and flesh, lest the reality of His body should be thought a phantasm; and I will answer, how holy Mary is both mother and virgin:
a virgin after childbirth, a mother before she was wedded. Therefore, as we had begun to say, Christ a virgin and Mary a virgin consecrated to both sexes the beginnings of virginity; the apostles were either virgins or continent after marriage; bishops, presbyters, deacons are chosen either as virgins or as widowers, or at least are forever chaste after their ordination. Why do we mock and vex ourselves, if the rewards of chastity are ever denied to those in heat for coupling? We wish to eat sumptuously, to cling to the embraces of wives, and to reign with Christ in the number of virgins and widows: shall then hunger and gluttony, filth and cleanness, sackcloth and silk have the same reward?
Lazarus received his evil things in his life, and that rich man clothed in purple, gross and glossy, enjoyed the good things of the flesh while he lived, but after death they hold different places — miseries are exchanged for delights and delights for miseries —: it lies in our choice whether to follow Lazarus or the rich man. LETTER TO DOMNIO. Your letter sounds forth at once both love and complaint: your love, whereby, diligently admonishing, you dread even those things in us that are safe; the complaint of those who love not, and who, seeking occasion, prattle against their brother amid his sins and set a stumbling-block against the son of their own mother.
You write that they — nay, I know not what fellow from the crossway, from the byways, from the streets, a peddling monk, a rumor-monger, a wrangler, cunning only at disparaging, who tries to pluck the mote out of another's eye through the beam in his own — harangue against me and gnaw with a dog's tooth, tear, and rend the books which I wrote against Jovinian; that this man, the pillar of your city's dialectic and of the Plautine breed, has not indeed read the Categories of Aristotle, nor the On Interpretation, nor the Analytics, nor even Cicero's Topics, but through the circles of the ignorant and of little women weaves extempore, unsyllogistic syllogisms, and undoes our arguments as though by his own crafty reasoning.
A fool am I, who supposed I could not know these things without philosophers; who read the better part of my pen — that which erased rather than that which wrote. In vain then did I turn over the commentaries of Alexander; to no purpose did the learned master lead me through Porphyry's Introduction to logic; and, to despise human things, without cause did I have Gregory Nazianzen and Didymus as my catechists in the Holy Scriptures; the erudition of the Hebrews profited me nothing, and my daily meditation from youth up to this age in the law, prophets, gospels, and apostles [was for naught]. A man has been found perfect without a teacher, self-taught,
a self-taught wise man, who surpasses in eloquence Cicero, in arguments Aristotle, in prudence Plato, in erudition Aristarchus, in the multitude of his books Didymus (that most prolific writer), and in knowledge of the Scriptures all the commentators of his own time. Indeed, he is said to demand a subject and, like a very Carneades, to argue on either side — that is, both for justice and against justice. The world has been delivered from peril, and inheritance suits and cases before the hundred-men have been rescued from the abyss, because this man, neglecting the forum, has betaken himself to the church. Who, if he were unwilling, would have been guiltless? Whom, however criminal, would his oratory not have saved, once he began to parcel out the case on his fingers and to stretch the nets of his syllogisms?
For if he had stamped his foot, fixed his eyes, wrinkled his brow, flung out his hand, rounded off his words, he would at once have poured darkness before the eyes of the judges. Nor is it any wonder if a most Latin and most eloquent man should surpass me — absent and now long unpractised in the Latin tongue and half-barbarous — since he crushed Jovinian himself, present before him, by the mere mass of his eloquence — good Jesus, what a man and how great, whose writings no one could understand, who sang only to himself and to the Muses!
I beg you therefore, dearest father, to admonish him not to speak against his own profession, not by his words to destroy the chastity he promises by his habit, not — being a virgin or a continent man (for he himself will see what he boasts to be) — to compare husbands with virgins, and thus to have fought in vain so long against a most eloquent man. I hear moreover that he gladly makes the rounds of the cells of virgins and widows, and with lifted eyebrow philosophizes among them about the sacred writings. What does he teach the little women in secret, in the bedchamber? That virgins are the same as married women, that they should not neglect the flower of their age, that they should eat and drink, frequent the baths, court elegance, and not spurn perfumes?
Or rather chastity and fasting and the squalor of the body? Surely those precepts he gives are full of virtue: let him then confess publicly what he speaks at home; or, if at home he also teaches the same things he teaches publicly, he ought to be separated from the company of maidens. Is a young man and a monk — and, as he seems to himself, eloquent, from whose mouth flow the charms of Venus, who is of such elegance in his talk that he is sprinkled with comic salt and wit — not ashamed to prowl the houses of the nobility, to hang about the salutations of matrons, to make a battle of our religion, to twist the faith of Christ by wrangling of words, and amid all this to disparage his own brother!
Assuredly, if he judged that I had erred — for in many things we all offend, and if any man offend not in word, he is a perfect man — he ought either to have refuted or questioned me by letter, as the learned and noble Pammachius did, to whom I replied as best I could, and in a longer letter set forth in what sense I said each thing. He would at least have imitated your modesty, you who excerpted from the volume in order those passages which seemed to give scandal to some, asking me either to amend or to explain them, and would not have thought me of such great madness as to write both for marriage and against marriage in one and the same book! Let him spare himself, spare me, spare the Christian name;
let him know that he is a monk not by talking and running about, but by keeping silence and sitting still; let him read Jeremiah, who says: It is good for a man when he has borne the yoke from his youth. He shall sit alone and keep silence, because he has taken the yoke upon himself. But if indeed he has taken up a censor's rod against all writers, and thinks himself learned for this reason, that he alone understands Jovinian — for there is a proverb, that a stammerer better understands a stammerer's words — I appeal from such a judge, unlettered and unskilled. And Jovinian himself, unlettered and untrained in art, will most justly proclaim: 'That the bishops condemn me is no reason, but a conspiracy. I do not want this or that man to answer me, whose authority can crush me. Teach me it cannot.'
Let a man write against me whose very tongue I understand; and when I have conquered him, I shall have conquered all men at once. I know him well — believe one who has proved it, how mightily he rises up behind his shield, with what a whirlwind he hurls his spear —: he is strong in disputation too. Knotty and tenacious, one who fights with slanting and pointed head. Often from night till evening we have shouted against us in the streets; he has flanks and the strength of athletes and is handsomely corpulent. He seems to me to be secretly a follower of my own doctrine. Moreover he never blushes, nor considers what he says, but only how much; and he has come into such a repute for eloquence that his sayings are wont to be the dictation-copy of curly-haired schoolboys.
How often has that fellow made me chafe in the crowds and driven me to bile; how often has he spat, and gone off spat upon in his turn! But these are vulgar things, and can be done by any of my followers: I appeal to books, to a memory to be handed down to posterity. Let us speak in writings, that the silent reader may judge of us — that, as I lead a flock of disciples, so from his name his own may be called Gnathonics or Phormionics. It is no great thing, my Domnio, to prattle through the corners and the doctors' shops and to pass sentence upon the world: 'This man spoke well, that one ill; this one knows the Scriptures, that one raves; this one is talkative, that one utterly infantile.' By what judgment did he earn the right to judge of all?
To brawl at random against anyone in the crossways and to heap up curses, not charges, belongs to buffoons and to men ever ready for quarrels. Let him move his hand, fix his pen, bestir himself, and whatever he can, let him show it in writings. Let him give us occasion to answer his eloquence. I can bite back, if I choose; I can, when wounded, sink in my tooth; we too have learned our little letters. We too have often drawn back our hand from the ferule; of us too it can be said: He has hay on his horn, flee far off. But rather do we wish to be disciples of Him who says:
I set my back to the scourges, and turned not my face from the shame of spittle — He who, when He was reviled, reviled not again, and after the blows, the cross, the scourges, the blasphemies, at the last prayed for those who crucified Him, saying: Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And I too forgive my brother's error; I understand that he has been deceived by the devil's art. Among the little women he seemed to himself learned and eloquent; but after my little works reached Rome, he shuddered at me as a rival and hunted for glory even at my expense, that there might be no one on earth who did not displease his eloquence — except those whose power he does not spare but yields to, nay, whom he does not honor but fears.
The most consummate fellow wished, forsooth, like a veteran soldier, with one whirl of his sword to strike both at once, and to show the peoples that whatever he himself wished, this the Scripture felt. Let him then deign to send us his discourse, and, not by reproving but by teaching, correct our garrulity. Then he will understand that the force of the forum is one thing, that of the dining-couch another; that it is not equally fitting to dispute among the distaffs and workbaskets of girls and among learned men about the doctrines of the divine law. Now freely and shamelessly he flings it to the crowd and blusters: 'He has condemned marriage!' — and amid swelling wombs, the wailings of infants, and the beds of husbands, what the Apostle said he keeps silent, that he may drag me alone into odium;
but when he comes to the books and sets foot to foot, and either proposes something from the Scriptures or hears another proposing, then he will sweat, then he will stick fast. Far off be Epicurus, far off Aristippus; the swineherds will not be present, the pregnant sow will not grunt. And we too, father, scatter darts and no feeble iron from our right hand, and from our wound too the blood follows. Furthermore, if he will not write and thinks the matter must be handled only by curses, let him hear — though so many lands, waves, and peoples lie between — at least the echo of my cry: 'I do not condemn marriage, I do not condemn wedlock.' And that he may hold my opinion more surely, I wish all who, because perchance of nocturnal fears, cannot lie alone, to take wives.
LETTER OF EPIPHANIUS OF CYPRUS SENT TO JOHN THE BISHOP, TRANSLATED BY SAINT JEROME. To the most beloved lord and brother John the bishop, Epiphanius. It behooved us, most beloved, not to abuse the honor of the clerical office into pride, but by the keeping of God's commandments and most diligent observance to be that which we are called. For if Holy Scripture says: Their clerical office shall not profit them, what shall the arrogance of the clericate be able to profit us, who sin not only in thought and sense but also in speech — for I have heard that you swell against us, and are angry, and threaten to write to the uttermost ends of the earth, that I may not name particular places and provinces —, and where is the fear of God, which ought to shake us with that trembling which is spoken by the Lord:
Whosoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be guilty in the judgment? Not that I greatly care if you write whatever pleases you — for letters of papyrus, according to Isaiah, used to be written and sent upon the waters, which quickly pass away together with the age —: we have done you no harm, we have done you no injury, nor have we violently extorted anything from you.
In the monastery of the brethren — and of pilgrim brethren, who owed nothing to your province, and who, on account of our lowliness and the letters which we frequently sent to them, had even begun to be in discord with your communion —, lest they should seem, out of a certain harshness and a conscience of the ancient faith, to be separated from the Church, we ordained a deacon, and, after he had ministered, again a presbyter; over which you ought to have rejoiced, understanding that we were compelled to do this out of the fear of God, especially since there is no difference in the priesthood of God, and where the benefit of the Church is provided for.
For although the individual bishops of the churches have under them churches over which they seem to bestow care, and no one is stretched beyond his own measure, yet the charity of Christ, in which there is no dissimulation, is to be preferred to all things; nor is it to be considered what was done, but at what time and in what manner and in whom and for what reason it was done.
For when I had seen that a multitude of holy brethren dwelt in the monastery, and that the holy presbyters Jerome and Vincentius, out of modesty and humility, were unwilling to perform the sacrifices due to their office and to labor in this part on behalf of the monastery — which is the chief salvation of Christians —, and that you could not find and lay hold of a servant of God who, because he was unwilling to take upon himself the heavy burden of the priesthood, often fled from you, and whom no other of the bishops could easily find — whence I greatly marveled how, by God's dispensation, he came to us with the deacons of the monastery and the other brethren to give me satisfaction, because I harbored some sadness against them —: when therefore an assembly was being celebrated in the church of the village which is near our monastery, I ordered him, unsuspecting and having no suspicion at all, to be seized by many deacons and his mouth to be held, lest perchance, longing to free himself, he should adjure us by the name of Christ; and first we ordained him deacon, setting before him the fear of God and compelling him to minister;
and he strongly resisted, protesting that he was unworthy. Scarcely then did we compel him, and were able to persuade him by the testimonies of the Scriptures and the setting forth of God's commandments. And when he had ministered in the holy sacrifices, again with immense difficulty, his mouth being held, we ordained him presbyter, and by the same words with which we had before persuaded him, we impelled him to sit in the order of the presbyterate. After this we wrote to the holy presbyters of the monastery and to the other brethren, and rebuked them, why they had not written concerning him, since a year before we had heard that many of them complained,
[complaining] why they had none to confect for them the Lord's sacraments, and all sought him by their own testimony and attested his great usefulness for the common good of the monastery: why then, when the opportunity had been found, had they not written to us nor asked anything concerning his ordination? These things were done, as I have said, in the charity of Christ, which I believed you had toward our littleness — although I ordained in the monastery and not in a parish subject to you. O truly blessed gentleness and goodness of the bishops of Cyprus, and our rusticity worthy, in your judgment and estimation, of the mercy of God!
For many bishops of our communion have ordained presbyters even in our own province, whom we had not been able to lay hold of, and have sent to us both deacons and subdeacons, whom we received with grace. And I myself exhorted Philo of blessed memory, the bishop, and holy Theoprepus, that for the churches of Cyprus which were near them — but which seemed to pertain to the church of my parish, because the province was great and widely extended — they should ordain presbyters and provide for the Church of Christ. But I myself never ordained deaconesses, nor sent them into foreign provinces, nor did anything to rend the Church.