Latin original · 39 verses · some words can be tapped for a gloss · long chapter, split into parts; this part covers 1:2599–1:2637 (3306 verses in all)
And the meaning is this: they would not be converted to me to do penance, but in the hardness of their heart they turned their backs to my injury. Wherefore the Lord also speaks to Jeremiah: Have you seen what the habitation of Israel has done to me? They went up upon every high mountain and under every leafy tree, and there they committed fornication. And I said, after she had committed all these fornications, 'Return to me,' and she did not return. O the clemency of God, O our hardness! While even after such great crimes He calls us to salvation, and not even so are we willing to be converted to better things: If, He says, a wife leave her husband and marry another and afterward wish to return to him, will he receive her, and not abhor her?
In place of which it is written, according to the Hebrew truth, what is not found in the Greek and Latin manuscripts: And you have forsaken me; yet return, and I will receive you, says the Lord. Isaiah too speaks in almost the same words to the same effect: Turn yourselves, you who devise a deep and wicked counsel, O children of Israel. Return to me, and I will redeem you. I am God, and there is none other besides me; a just one and a saviour, there is none apart from me. Turn to me and you shall be saved, you who are in the ends of the earth. Remember these things and groan, and do penance, you who err. Be converted in heart, and remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is none other besides me. Joel too writes:
Turn to me with all your heart, in fasting and tears and mourning; rend your hearts and not your garments. For the Lord is merciful and compassionate, and repents of the evils. But how great is his mercy, and how great — so to speak — his exceeding and ineffable clemency, let the prophet Hosea teach us, through whom God speaks: What shall I do to you, Ephraim? How shall I protect you, O Israel? What, I say, shall I do to you? Shall I set you as Admah and as Zeboim? My heart is turned within me, my repentance is troubled. By no means will I act according to the wrath of my fury. Whence David too speaks in the psalm: There is none in death who is mindful of you; and in hell who shall confess to you?
And in another place: I have made known my sin, and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, 'I will pronounce against myself my iniquity to the Lord,' and you have forgiven the impiety of my heart. For this shall every saint pray to you in a seasonable time; nevertheless in a flood of many waters they shall not come near to him. See how great is the magnitude of weeping, that it is compared to a flood of waters. And whoever shall have this, and shall say with Jeremiah: Let not the pupil of my eye be silent, straightway in him shall be fulfilled: Mercy and truth have met each other; justice and peace have kissed — so that, if justice and truth have terrified you, mercy and peace may provoke you to salvation.
The whole penance of the sinner the fiftieth psalm sets forth, when David went in to Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and, rebuked by Nathan prophesying, answered saying: I have sinned; and straightway he deserves to hear: And the Lord has taken away your sin from you. For he had joined homicide to adultery, and yet, turning to tears, he says: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy, and according to the multitude of your compassions blot out my iniquity. For a great sin needed great mercy. Whence he joins and says: Wash me yet more from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin, for I acknowledge my iniquity, and my sin is ever before me.
Against you only have I sinned — for a king feared no other — and done evil before you, that you may be justified in your words and may overcome when you are judged. For God has shut up all things under sin, that he may have mercy on all. And he profited so greatly that, once a sinner and a penitent, he passed over into a master and says: I will teach the wicked your ways, and the impious shall be converted to you. For confession and beauty are before me — so that he who has confessed his sins, and has said: My scars are corrupted and putrefied because of my foolishness, may exchange the foulness of his wounds for the beauty of health. For he who hides his iniquity shall not prosper.
Ahab, a most impious king, possessed the vineyard of Naboth by bloodshed, and, together with Jezebel — joined to him not so much by wedlock as by cruelty — he is corrected by the rebuke of Elijah: Thus says the Lord: You have slain and you have possessed. And again: In the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, there shall they lick your blood too; and: The dogs shall eat Jezebel before the walls of Jezreel. When Ahab had heard this, he rent his garments and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and slept in sackcloth. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying: Since Ahab has reverenced my face, I will not bring the evil in his days.
One and the same crime belonged to Ahab and Jezebel, and yet, Ahab having turned to penance, the punishment is deferred to his posterity, while Jezebel, persevering in crime, is condemned by present judgment. The Lord also speaks in the Gospel: The men of Nineveh shall rise up in judgment with this generation and shall condemn it, because they did penance at the preaching of Jonah. For I came not to call the righteous but sinners to penance. The drachma is lost, and yet is found in the dung; ninety-nine sheep are left in the wilderness, and the one sheep that had strayed is carried back on the shepherd's shoulders. Whence also there is joy among the angels over one sinner doing penance. How great the felicity, that the heavenly ones exult over our salvation! Of whom it is said:
Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. There is no space between them; death and life are contrary to each other, and yet by penance they are joined together. The prodigal son had wasted all his substance, and far from his father scarcely sustained his hunger with the food of swine. He returns to his parent; the fatted calf is sacrificed for him; he receives the robe and the ring, that he may receive the garment of Christ which he had lately defiled, and may be counted worthy to hear: Let your garments be always white; and, having received back the seal of God, may cry out to the Lord: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; and, reconciled by a kiss, may say to him: The light of your countenance is sealed upon us, O Lord.
The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in whatever day he shall have sinned, and the iniquity of the wicked shall not harm him in whatever day he shall have been converted. He judges each one as he finds him, and considers not the past but the present, provided nevertheless that the old crimes be changed by a new conversion. Seven times shall the righteous fall and rise again. If he falls, how is he righteous? If righteous, how does he fall? But he does not lose the name of righteous who through penance always rises again. And not only to him who offends seven times, but seventy times seven, if he be converted to penance, are the sins forgiven. To whom more is forgiven, he loves more. The harlot washes the Saviour's feet with tears and wipes them with her hair, and, as a type of the Church gathered from the Gentiles, deserves to hear:
Your sins are forgiven you. The righteousness of the Pharisee perishes through pride, and the humility of the publican is saved by confession. Through Jeremiah God testifies: I will speak in sum against a nation and a kingdom, to root it out and destroy and scatter it. If that nation do penance for its evil, which I have spoken against it, I too will repent of the evil which I purposed to do to it. And I will speak in sum concerning a nation and a kingdom, to build it up and to plant it. If it do evil in my sight, so as not to hear my voice, I will repent of the good which I have spoken to do to it. And straightway he adds: Behold, I frame evil against you and devise a device against you.
Let each one return from his evil way, and set right your ways and your endeavours. They who said: We are in despair; for we will go after our own thoughts, and each one will do the wickedness of his evil heart. Simeon the just speaks in the Gospel: Behold, this one is set for the fall and for the rising again of many — for the fall, that is, of sinners, and for the rising again of those who do penance. The apostle writes to the Corinthians: There is heard among you fornication, and such fornication as is not even among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife. And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he might be taken away from among you who has done this deed.
And in the second epistle to the same, lest he who is such should perish through overmuch sorrow, he calls him back and beseeches them that they confirm their love toward him, and that he who had perished by incest might be preserved by penance. For no one is clean from sin, not even if his life be but of one day, and the years of his life are numbered. The very stars are not clean in his sight, and against his own angels he has devised something perverse. If there is sin in heaven, how much more on earth! If there is fault in those who lack bodily temptation, how much more in us, who are surrounded by frail flesh and say with the apostle: Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
For there dwells no good thing in our flesh, nor do we do what we will, but what we hate — so that the soul desires one thing and the flesh is compelled to do another. But if certain persons are called righteous in the Scriptures, and not only righteous but righteous in the sight of God, they are called righteous according to that righteousness of which it was said above: Seven times shall the righteous fall and rise again, and according to that: The iniquity of the wicked shall not harm him in whatever day he shall have been converted. In short, even Zechariah, the father of John, who is written to be righteous, sinned in this, that he did not believe, and is straightway condemned to silence; and Job, who at the beginning of his volume is written to be righteous and blameless and without complaint, is afterward, both by the word of God and by his own confession, proven a sinner.
If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the prophets and apostles too, were by no means free from sin; if the purest wheat had chaff mixed in it, what can be said of us, of whom that is written: What is the chaff to the wheat, says the Lord? And yet the chaff is reserved for the future burning, and the tares at this time are mixed with the crops of grain, until He come who has the winnowing-fan in his hand, and shall cleanse the threshing-floor, that he may gather the wheat into the barns and burn up the refuse with the fire of Gehenna.
All these things, running as it were through the most beautiful meadows of the Scriptures, I have wished to gather into one place, and to weave for you from the most lovely flowers a crown of penance, which you may place upon your head, and may take the wings of a dove and fly and be at rest, and be reconciled to your most merciful Father. Your wife of former days, now your sister and fellow-servant, related to me that, according to the precept of the apostle, by mutual consent you had abstained from the work of marriage, that you might have leisure for prayer; but that your steps in turn, as though set upon the deep sea, had wavered — nay, to speak more plainly, had slipped and fallen — while she had heard from the Lord, as Moses did: But do you stand here with me, and said concerning the Lord:
He set my feet upon a rock — but that your house, which had no solid foundation of faith, afterward fell in the whirlwind of the devil; whereas hers stands firm in the Lord, and does not deny you her lodging, so that you, to whom you were formerly joined in body, may now be coupled in spirit — for he who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit. And when the fury of the barbarians and imminent captivity had separated you, that you had promised, under the attestation of an oath, that you would follow her as she passed to the holy places, either at once or afterward, and would save your soul, which you had seemed to lose through negligence. Render then what you have vowed in the Lord's presence. Uncertain is the life of mortals; lest you be snatched away before you fulfil your promise, imitate her whom you ought to have taught.
O for shame! The frailer sex overcomes the world, and the stronger is overcome by the world. A woman is the leader of so great a deed, and will you not follow her, in whose salvation you are enrolled a candidate of the faith? But if the remnants of your household property hold you back — so that forsooth you may see the deaths of friends and citizens, and the ruins of cities and country houses — at least, amid the evils of captivity and the fierce faces of the enemy and the endless shipwrecks of your province, hold fast the plank of penance, and remember your fellow-servant, who daily sighs for your salvation and does not despair of it. You wander in your homeland — nay, not your homeland, since you have lost your homeland;
she, on your behalf, in the venerable places of the resurrection and the cross and the cradle of the Lord and Saviour, in which as a little child he wailed, remembers your name and draws you to herself by her prayers, that, if not by your own merit, at least by her faith you may be saved. A paralytic once lay upon his little bed, and was so loosened in all his limbs that he could neither move his feet to walk nor his hands to pray; and yet he is brought by others and restored to his former health, so that he who was lately carried by the bed might carry the bed. And so your fellow-servant offers you also to the Lord and Saviour — absent in body, present in faith — and says with the Canaanite woman: My daughter is grievously vexed by a demon.
For rightly shall I call your soul the daughter of her soul, which knows no difference of sex; because she invites you, as though a little one and still nursing and not yet able to take solid food, to the milk of infancy, and shows you the nourishment of a nurse, that you may be able to say with the prophet: 'I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commandments.' Letter 123. To Geruchia, on Monogamy. Upon an old road we seek a new path, and in ancient and well-worn material we devise an untried elegance of art, so that the things be not the same and yet be the same. There is one way of reaching where you desire, but many shortcuts.
Often have we written to widows, and in exhorting them, repeating many examples from the holy Scriptures, we have woven the varied flowers of testimonies into a single crown of chastity. Now our discourse is addressed to Geruchia, who by a kind of prophecy of things to come and by the help of God's foreseeing providence received her name, and about whom stands a noble throng of grandmother, mother, and aunt, women approved in Christ:
Of these, her grandmother Metronia, persevering as a widow for forty years, has reproduced for us Anna the daughter of Phanuel from the Gospel; her mother Benigna, completing the fourteenth year of her widowhood, is girded with a company of a hundred virgins; Celerina, the sister of Celerinus the father of Geruchia, who nursed the little infant and received her, newborn, into her own bosom, for twenty years bereft of a husband's comfort has instructed her niece in what she herself learned from her mother.
These things I have touched on briefly, to show that my young lady is not conferring a favor of monogamy upon her family, but rendering what is owed; and that she is not so much to be praised if she grants it, as to be abhorred by all if she should attempt to refuse it—especially since her posthumous son Simplicius bears his father's name, and there is no excuse of a deserted and heirless house, under whose patronage lust sometimes flatters itself, so that what they do out of their own incontinence they may seem to do from a longing for children.
But why do I speak as though to one who hesitates, when I hear that she avoids the many suitors of the palace by the protection of the Church—suitors whom the devil inflames in rivalry, that he may test the chastity of our widow, whom nobility and beauty and youth and wealth make desirable to all; so that, the more numerous the things assailing her purity, the greater are the rewards of the victress? And because, as we set out from the harbor, a certain rock is set in our way, lest we be able to run down to the safe reaches of the sea, and the authority of the apostle Paul writing to Timothy is brought forward, in which, discoursing about widows, he says: 'But I will that the younger marry, bear children, be mothers of families, give no occasion to the adversary for the sake of reviling';
'for already some have turned aside after Satan'—it is fitting first to treat of the meaning of the precept and to examine the whole context of this passage, and thus, treading close upon the apostolic footsteps, not to swerve even a nail's breadth, as the saying goes, to the other side. Above he had written what sort of widow she ought to be: the wife of one husband, who has brought up children, who has had a good report in good works, who has ministered to the afflicted out of her little substance, whose hope is God, and who continues in supplication and prayers night and day. After this he joins the contrary: 'but she who lives in pleasures is dead while she lives.' And at once he arms his disciple with every skill of doctrine:
'But avoid younger widows, for when they have grown wanton against Christ they wish to marry, having condemnation, because they have made void their first faith.' On account of these, then, who have committed fornication to the injury of their husband Christ—for this is what the Greek word καταστρηνιάσουσιν signifies—the apostle prefers a second marriage, preferring digamy to fornication, yet only by way of indulgence, not by way of command. And at the same time each word of the testimony must be examined. 'I will,' he says, 'that the young widows marry': why, I ask? Because I will not that young women fornicate. 'Bear children': for what cause? Lest, out of fear of childbirth, they be driven to slay children born of adultery. 'Be mothers of families': why, I beseech you?
Because it is far more tolerable to be twice-married than a harlot, to have a second husband than many adulterers. For in the one there is a consolation for miseries, in the other the penalty of sin. There follows: 'give no occasion to the adversary for the sake of reviling.' In this brief and compact precept many admonitions are contained at once: that too studied an adornment defame not the widow's resolve; that she draw not troops of young men after her by the nods of her eyes and the gaiety of her countenance; that she promise not one thing by word and another by dress, and that little verse in common circulation fit her: 'She laughed, and with her arch little eye promised something.' And that he might sum up in a brief phrase all the causes of marrying, he shows why he had given this precept, saying: 'for already some have turned aside after Satan.'
Therefore, for this reason, he opens a second and, if necessary, a third marriage to the incontinent, that he may draw them away from Satan, that he may rather make a woman joined to a husband of whatever sort than to the devil. But also to the Corinthians he speaks something of this kind: 'I say to the unmarried and to widows: it is good for them if they so remain as I. But if they contain not themselves, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.' Why, O apostle? At once you infer: because it is worse to burn. Otherwise it is an absolute good, and without comparison of anything worse, to be what the apostle is, that is, loosed, not bound, not a slave but free, thinking on the things that are God's, not the things that are a wife's. And straightway in what follows: 'a woman,' he says, 'is bound to her husband as long as her husband lives.'
'But if her husband die, she is free: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord. But she will be more blessed if she so remain, according to my counsel; and I think that I also have the Spirit of God.' And here the meaning is the same, because the Spirit is the same; the epistles are diverse, but the author of the epistles is one. While the husband lives the woman is bound, and when he is dead she is loosed. Marriage therefore is a bond, and widowhood a loosing. The wife is bound to the husband and the husband bound to the wife, so far that they have not power over their own bodies, and render the debt each to the other, and cannot have the liberty of chastity, who are enslaved to the dominion of wedlock. And that which he added, 'only in the Lord,' cuts off the marriages of the heathen, of which in another place also he had said:
'Do not bear the yoke together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with iniquity, or what communion has light with darkness? What concord has Christ with Belial, or what part has the faithful with the unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?'—that is, that we plow not with ox and ass together, that the wedding tunic be not woven with a party-colored woof. And at once he takes away what he had granted, and, as though he repented of his opinion, he draws it back: 'she will be more blessed if she so remain,' and he says that this is rather of his own counsel. And lest it be despised as of a man, he confirms it with the authority of the Holy Spirit, that it may be heard, not as a man indulging the frailty of human flesh, but as an apostle commanding by the Holy Spirit.
Nor ought the widow to flatter herself in this matter of her girlish years, since he no less enjoins the choosing of a woman of sixty. For he who speaks also of the married does not compel the unmarried or the young to marry: 'the time is short; it remains that even they who have wives be as though they had none'; but he is disputing about those widows who are nourished by the sustenance of their own, who are laid as a burden upon the necks of their sons and grandsons. To these he commands that they learn to care for their own household, and to requite their parents, and to provide sufficiently for them, that the Church be not burdened, and may be able to minister to true widows, of whom it is written:
'Honor widows that are widows indeed'—that is, those who are destitute of all help from their own, who cannot labor with their own hands, whom poverty weakens and age consumes, whose hope is God and whose every work is prayer. From which it is given to be understood that young widows, except those whom infirmity excuses, are to be bound either to their own labor or to the service of their children and kin. And 'honor' in the present is taken either for alms or for a gift, as is that saying: 'let the presbyters who are worthy be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in word and doctrine.' And in the Gospel the Lord expounds the commandment of the law, in which it is said:
'Honor your father and your mother'—not in the sound of words, which can deceive the parents' need with empty flattery, but is to be understood as consisting in the ministering of the necessaries of life. For, God commanding that children should nourish their poor parents and repay to the aged the benefits which they had received as little ones, the scribes and Pharisees on the contrary taught the sons to answer their parents: 'Corban, that is, a gift, which I have promised to the altar and pledged among the offerings of the temple, if you receive food from me, shall be turned to your relief.' And thus it came about that, while father and mother were in need, the sons offered a sacrifice which the priests and scribes consumed.
If, then, the apostle compels poor widows—those, however, who are young and are broken by no infirmity—to labor with their own hands, that the Church be not burdened and may be able to sustain aged widows, what excuse does she use who abounds in the wealth of the world, who can even minister to others and make herself friends of the unrighteous mammon, who may be able to receive her into the eternal tabernacles? And at the same time consider that a widow is not chosen unless she be the wife of one husband. And we used to think that this was only the privilege of priests, that none be admitted to the altar save one who has had one wife.
For the twice-married man is excluded not only from the priestly office, but also from the alms of the Church, being deemed unworthy of a dole who has sunk to a second marriage. Although in the priestly law even the layman is held bound, who ought to show himself such that he may be chosen for the priesthood. For he is not chosen if he has been twice married; and priests are chosen from the laity; therefore the layman also is held by the commandment through which he attains to the priesthood. It is one thing that the apostle wills, another that he is compelled to will. That he should concede second marriages belongs to my incontinence, not to his will. He wills all to be as himself and to think on the things that are God's, and that those who are loosed be by no means bound again.
But if he sees those who are slipping through incontinence coming to the pit of debauchery, he stretches out to them the hand of digamy, that they may wallow with one rather than with many. Let this by no means be heard by the second-married as spoken kindly and against the apostle's rule. For there are two wills of the apostle: one by which he commands, 'I say to the unmarried and to widows: it is good for them if they so remain as I'; the other by which he indulges, 'but if they contain not themselves, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.' First he shows what he wills, then what he is compelled to will. He wills us to remain after marriage as himself, and sets forth the apostle's own example of the blessedness he proposes.
But if he sees us unwilling to do what he himself wills, he grants an indulgence to our incontinence. Which of the two wills do we choose? That which he rather wills and which is good in itself, or that which by comparison with an evil becomes lighter and in a certain manner is not even good, because it is preferred to an evil? Therefore, we who choose what the apostle wills not, but is constrained to will—nay, rather acquiesces in the desires of those who crave worse things—we do not the apostle's will but our own.
We read in the Old Testament that the high priests, married but once, and the daughters of the priests, if they became widows, ought to eat of the priestly food, and that to the dead, as to father and mother, the office of funeral rites was to be rendered; but if they took other husbands, they became strangers both to their father and to the sacrifices, and had to be reckoned among outsiders. This indeed even heathenism observes, to our condemnation, if truth does not display to Christ what falsehood assigns to the devil, who has found chastity even to be a destroyer.
At Athens the hierophant forswears manhood and by a perpetual disability is made chaste; the flamen is admitted to the priesthood as the husband of one wife, and the flaminica too is chosen as the wife of one husband; to the rites of the Egyptian bull one is taken who has been married but once—to say nothing of the virgins of Vesta and of Apollo and of Achaean Juno and of Diana and of Minerva, who wither in the perpetual virginity of their priesthood. I will briefly touch upon the queen of Carthage, who chose rather to burn than to marry king Iarbas, and the wife of Hasdrubal, who, seizing her children with each hand, hurled herself into the fire kindled below, that she might not feel the losses of her chastity, and Lucretia, who, the glory of her chastity being lost, would not survive her defiled conscience.