Therefore, if those whom God has joined man shall not separate by divorce, is it at all consistent that those whom He has separated by death man should join by a new marriage—thus about to work, against the will of God, a joining as if he had separated a union? This much as regards the will of God, not to be destroyed, and the form of the beginning, to be rebuilt. Moreover, yet another reasoning conspires—nay, not another, but that very one which imposed the form of the beginning and moved the will of God to the prohibition of divorce: that whoever shall put away his wife, save for the cause of adultery, makes her to commit adultery, and whoever shall take her who is put away by her husband, commits adultery too.
'Cannot the divorced woman also marry lawfully, and if she has committed anything of the kind without the name of marriage, does it not incur the reproach of adultery, since adultery is a crime within marriage?' God has judged otherwise than men, so that wholly, whether through wedlock or promiscuously, the admission of another man is pronounced adultery—nay, indeed. Therefore let us see what marriage is in God's sight, and thus we shall know what likewise is adultery. Marriage is when God joins two into one flesh, or, finding them joined in the same flesh, has set His seal upon the joining; adultery is when, the two being in any way disjoined, another flesh—nay, an alien flesh—is mingled in, concerning which it cannot be said, 'This is flesh of my flesh and this bone of my bones.'
For once this has been both done and pronounced, as from the beginning so also now, it cannot suit with another flesh. And so you will say without cause that God does not wish the divorced woman, while her husband lives, to be joined to another man, as though He would wish it once he were dead; since, if she is not bound to a dead husband, then likewise not to a living one; she will as little be held to him in a divorce that dissolves the marriage as she will by death, seeing that that by which she was held has been snatched away from him. To whom, then, she will be held, it makes no difference at all whether she marries away from a living or a dead husband; for she does not offend against him, but against her own self: 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits adultery sins against his own body.'
And he commits adultery, as we have established before, who mingles to himself another flesh over that former one which God either joined into the two or found already joined. And therefore He took away divorce, which from the beginning was not, in order to fortify that which from the beginning was—the perseverance of the two in one flesh—lest the necessity or occasion of a third incarnation should break in, permitting divorce to that cause alone, if perchance it should occur, for which precaution is taken. Indeed, divorce so did not exist from the beginning that among the Romans that kind of hardness is noted as first committed after the six-hundredth year from the founding of the city. But they, even without divorcing, mingle adulteries; for us, even if we should divorce, it will not even be lawful to marry.
For the more easily perceiving his meaning, this must be the more insistently trodden in beforehand: that a woman is more bound to a deceased husband, so as the less to admit another man. For let us consider that divorce either arises from discord or produces discord, but that death comes about by law, not from any human offense, and is the debt of all, even of those who are not husbands. Therefore, if a divorced woman—who, through discord and wrath and hatred and their causes, injury or insult or any complaint whatever, has been separated both in soul and in body—is bound to an enemy, not to say a husband, how much more is she bound who, separated by no fault of her own or of her husband but by the event of the Lord's law, has not been separated from the marriage but left in it, and will belong even to the deceased, to whom, even deceased, she owes concord?
From him she has heard no divorce, she has not departed; to him she has written no bill of divorce, she is with him; him whom she was unwilling to lose, she retains; she has with her the liberty of the soul, which represents to a person, by an imaginary enjoyment, all the things it does not possess. In fine, I put the question to the woman herself: 'Tell me, sister, did you send your husband on before you in peace?' What will she answer? Was it in discord? Then she is the more bound to him, with whom she has a cause before God; she has not departed, being still held. But in peace? Then it is necessary that she persevere in that peace with him whom she can now no longer divorce—nor even so about to marry, if she could have divorced him.
Indeed, she both prays for his soul and, in the meanwhile, asks for him refreshment, and, in the first resurrection, fellowship, and she makes offering on the yearly days of his falling asleep. For unless she does these things, she has, so far as in her lies, truly divorced him—and that the more iniquitously, the more it would have been fair to do so; and this the more shamefully, if it be because she could not—the more, indeed, worthily so, if it be because she did not deserve to. Or shall we perhaps be nothing after death, according to some Epicurus, and not according to Christ? But if we have believed in the resurrection of the dead, we shall surely be bound to those with whom we are to rise again, being about to render an account of one another.
But if in that age they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be equal to the angels, shall we not on that account be bound to our deceased spouses, because there will be no restitution of marriage? Nay, we shall be the more bound, because we are destined for a better state, being to rise again into spiritual fellowship, about to recognize both our own selves and our own people. Otherwise, how shall we sing thanks to God for eternity, if there shall not remain in us the sense and the memory of this debt? We shall be reformed in substance, not in consciousness?
Therefore, we who shall be with God shall be together, since all are one before God—though the reward be varied, though there be many mansions with the same Father—having labored for the one penny of the same reward, that is, of eternal life, in which God will the more not separate those whom He joined, seeing that in this lesser life He forbids them to be separated. Since these things are so, how shall she be free for another man, who is occupied with her own even for the future?—but we speak to both sexes, even if the discourse is addressed to one, since one discipline presides over all—shall she have one thing in the spirit and another in the flesh too? This will be adultery: the consciousness of one woman toward two men.
If the one is disjoined from the flesh, yet remains in the heart—there, where, even gathered without any congress of the flesh, adultery is beforehand accomplished out of concupiscence, and marriage out of the will—he is still a husband up to now, possessing that very thing through which he was also made a husband, that is, the mind, in which, if another too shall dwell, this will be a crime. Otherwise he is not excluded, if he has departed from the baser commerce of the flesh: he is a more honored husband, in proportion as he has been made purer.
Therefore, that you may 'marry in the Lord,' according to the Apostle also—if indeed you care even for this—what sort of person are you, demanding that marriage which is not lawful for those to have from whom you demand it: from a monogamous bishop, from presbyters and deacons of the same sacrament, from widows, whose sect you have refused in yourself? And they, forsooth, will give husbands and wives just like morsels of bread—for this is how it is among them: 'To everyone that asks of you, you shall give'—and they will join you in the Church, the Virgin, the one and only bride of the one Christ, and you shall pray for your husbands, the new and the old? Choose to which you would present yourself an adulteress; to both, I suppose. But if you were wise, you would keep silence to the dead: let your silence be a divorce to him, now that you are enrolled in another's marriage settlements.
In this way you will win a new husband, if you forget the old one: you ought the more to please him, on whose account you have not preferred to please God. These things the psychici claim that the Apostle approved, or else did not reconsider at all, when he wrote: 'The woman is bound as long as her husband lives; but if he is dead, she is free: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord.' For from this little chapter they defend the license of a second marriage—nay, even of very many, if of a second; for what has once ceased to be single is liable to every number. But in what sense the Apostle wrote will thus shine forth, if first it be established that he did not write it in that sense which the psychici employ;
and it will be established, if anyone recalls those things which are contrary to this little chapter, both in doctrine and in intention and in Paul's own proper discipline. For if he remits second marriages, which from the beginning were not, how does he affirm that all things are gathered back to the beginning in Christ? If he wishes us to repeat our marriages, how does he defend that our seed in Isaac was with but one married author? How does he arrange the whole order of the Church out of monogamists, if this discipline does not first prevail among the laity, from whom the order of the Church advances? How does he call those still placed in marriage away from the fruit of marriage, saying that the time is contracted, if he recalls again into marriage those who have slipped out of marriage by death?
If these things are contrary to that little chapter of which we are treating, it will be established, as we have said, that he did not write it in that sense which the psychici employ; for it is easier that that one little chapter should admit of some reasoning which is in accord with the rest, than that the Apostle should seem to have taught things at variance with each other. That reasoning we shall be able to recognize in the very subject matter. What was this subject matter for the Apostle in writing such things? The infancy of a new Church, and one just then most vigorously arising, which he was nourishing, namely, with milk, not yet with the solid food of a stronger doctrine; so that, on account of that infancy of faith, they were as yet ignorant what they ought to do concerning the necessity of the flesh and of sex. Its very kinds too we understand from his rescripts, when he says:
But concerning the things about which you write: 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman; yet on account of fornications let each man have his own wife' -- by this he shows that there were persons who, being already in marriage, were overtaken by the faith and feared lest it might not thereafter be lawful for them to make use of their own marriage, because they had come to believe in the holy flesh of Christ. And yet he grants this by way of indulgence, not by way of command; that is, permitting it, not enjoining that it be done so. For the rest, he would have preferred all to be what he himself also was. Accordingly, writing back also concerning divorce, he shows that some had been thinking about that matter too, and this especially because in heathen marriages they did not think that one ought to persevere after the faith. They were seeking counsel also concerning virgins -- for there was no commandment of the Lord on the point --:
that it is good for a man, if he so remain, namely just as he was found at the time of the faith: 'Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek release; are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you have taken a wife, you have not sinned' -- because a second wife who is first after the faith will not be reckoned to him who was loosed from a wife before the faith; for from the faith our very life itself is reckoned. But here he says that he is sparing them, for otherwise, amid the straitness of the times, a pressure of the flesh would follow upon those refusing the encumbrances of marriage; nay rather, that solicitude ought to be had by pleasing the Lord than the husband. And so he revokes what he had permitted.
So then, in that very same chapter in which he laid down that each one ought to persevere in that calling in which he shall be called, adding: 'A woman is bound so long as her husband lives; but if he shall have fallen asleep, she is free: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord' -- he shows that this woman too is to be understood as one who herself likewise was found loosed from a husband, just as the man was loosed from a wife, the loosing being brought about by death, of course, not by divorce; for he would not permit those who have been divorced to marry, against the former precept. And so a woman also, if she marries, does not sin, because here too the second husband will not be counted, who after the faith is the first; and it is so much the case, that on this account he added:
'Only in the Lord,' because the matter concerned a woman who had had a heathen husband and, having lost him, had come to believe -- lest, namely, even after the faith she should presume that she could marry a heathen, although the merely natural men do not even care about this. Let us plainly recognize that it does not stand thus in the authentic Greek, in the way it has passed into common use through the corruption -- whether crafty or artless -- of two syllables: 'But if her husband shall have fallen asleep,' as though it sounded of the future and thereby seemed to pertain to her who has already lost her husband while in the faith. Now if this were so, then, license being sent forth to infinity, it would give a husband as often as one was lost, without any modesty of marrying, even heathens being suitable. But if it were as though of the future:
'if anyone's husband shall have died,' just as much would the future also pertain to her whose husband dies before the faith. Take it as you will, so long as you do not overturn the rest. For since these sentences also precede: 'Have you been called as a slave? Do not be concerned; have you been called in uncircumcision? Do not be circumcised; have you been called circumcised? Do not draw over the foreskin' -- with which this agrees: 'Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek release; are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife' -- it is quite manifest that these things pertain to those who, being established in a new and recent calling, were consulting about the matters in which they had been overtaken by the faith.
This will be the interpretation of that chapter, to be tested by this criterion: whether it accords with the occasion and the cause, and with both the examples and arguments that precede as well as the statements and senses that follow, and above all whether it accords with the Apostle's own counsel and settled purpose; for nothing is so much to be guarded against as that he be found at variance with himself. XII. Hear now another most subtle argument from the contrary side. 'So far,' they say, 'did the Apostle permit the repetition of marriage, that he bound to the yoke of monogamy only those who are in the clergy; for what he prescribes to certain persons, this he does not prescribe to all.' Does he then not prescribe to bishops alone even what he enjoins upon all, if what he prescribes to bishops he does not also enjoin upon all?
Is it therefore prescribed to all because also to bishops, and to bishops because also to all? For whence come bishops and clergy? Is it not from all? If not all are held to monogamy, whence come monogamists into the clergy? Or ought some separate order of monogamists to be instituted, from which the selection into the clergy may be made? But when we are exalted and puffed up against the clergy, then we are all one, then we are all priests, because 'He has made us priests to God and the Father'; yet when we are challenged to the equalization of priestly discipline, we lay aside the fillets and are no longer equals. The matter concerned ecclesiastical orders, what sort of men ought to be ordained.
It was fitting, therefore, that the whole form of common discipline should be set forth on its own front, being, as it were, an edict destined to make an impression upon all, so that the people might the better know the order to be observed by them which makes the overseers, and lest even the honour itself should flatter itself into something toward license, as though from the privilege of place. The Holy Spirit foresaw that some would say, 'All things are lawful for bishops' -- just as that Utinensian of yours did not even fear the Scantinian law. For how many who preside among you are from a second marriage, insulting the Apostle, surely without blushing, when these things are read under their presidency! Come now, you who suppose that the acceptance of monogamy was made only concerning bishops, withdraw also from the rest of your titles of discipline which, together with monogamy, are ascribed to bishops:
do not be blameless, sober, well-behaved, of good deportment, hospitable, apt to teach; nay rather, be given to wine and [ready of hand to strike and] quarrelsome and a lover of money, and one not ruling his household nor caring for the discipline of his children, and not even seeking a good report from those outside. For if bishops have their own law concerning monogamy, then the other things too, which it will behove to be added to monogamy, will have been written for bishops; but for the laity, whom monogamy does not befit, the rest also are foreign. You have escaped, O natural man, if you will, from the bonds of the whole discipline; prescribe constantly that those things are not enjoined upon all which are commanded to certain persons.
Or if the other things indeed are common, but monogamy alone has been imposed upon bishops only, must those alone be pronounced Christians upon whom the whole discipline has been laid? XIII. 'But writing also to Timothy he wills that the young women marry, bear children, act as mothers of families.' He directs this to such as he indicates above -- young widows who, having been overtaken in widowhood and having for some time followed it, after they have held Christ among their delights, wish to marry, incurring the judgment that they have annulled their first faith, that namely by which they were found and made profession in widowhood, in which they do not persevere.
On this account he wills that they marry, lest they should afterwards annul the first faith of the widowhood they had undertaken -- not that they should marry as often as, being tempted in widowhood, nay rather having held it among their delights, they refuse to persevere. We read that he also wrote to the Romans: 'The woman who is under a husband is bound to her living husband; but if he has died, she is released from the law of the husband.' Truly then, while her husband lives, she will be reckoned to commit adultery if she is made another man's; but if her husband has died, she is freed from the law, so that she is not an adulteress though made another man's. But recognize also what follows, whereby that sense which flatters you may vanish.
'And so, my brethren,' he says, 'you also are made dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be made another's, namely His who rose from the dead, so that we may bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were through the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death; but now we have been made void of the law, being dead to that in which we were held, so as to serve [God] in newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.'
Therefore, if he bids us be made dead to the law through the body of Christ, which is the Church, which consists in the newness of the spirit, not through the letter of oldness, that is, of the law -- taking you away from the law, which does not bind a wife to a husband once dead, so as to prevent her being made another man's, he reduces you to the contrary condition, that you should not marry when your husband is lost; and just as you would not be reckoned an adulteress for being made another man's after your husband's death, if you still had to act under the law, so much the more, by reason of the diversity of the condition, does the condition of adultery prejudge you as one marrying another after your husband's death: because, having now to be made dead to the law, it cannot be lawful for you, since you have withdrawn from that law under which it was lawful for you. XIV.
Now if the Apostle had also permitted absolutely that one whose marriage had been lost in the faith might marry, he would have done so just as he did the other things which, against the form of his own rule, he did to suit the conditions of the times -- circumcising Timothy on account of false brethren surreptitiously brought in, and bringing certain shaven men into the temple on account of the observance of the Jews, he who chastises the Galatians for wishing to act under the law.
But circumstances so required that he should become all things to all men, that he might gain all, travailing for them until Christ should be formed in them, and warming as a nurse the little ones of the faith, teaching certain things by way of indulgence, not by way of command -- for it is one thing to indulge, another to command -- accordingly permitting a temporary license of marrying again on account of the infirmity of the flesh, just as Moses permitted divorcing on account of the hardness of heart. And here too, therefore, let us render the supplement of that sense.
For if Christ took away what Moses had commanded, because from the beginning it was not so, neither on that account will Christ be reckoned to have come from some other power; why then should not the Paraclete also have taken away what Paul indulged, because a second marriage too was not from the beginning, nor on that account be held suspect as though an alien spirit -- provided only that what is superinduced be worthy of God and of Christ? If it was worthy of God and of Christ to restrain the hardness of heart when the time was fulfilled, why should it not be more worthy of both God and Christ to shake off the infirmity of the flesh in a time now more contracted? If it is now just that a marriage be not dissolved, surely it is also honourable that it be not repeated.
In short, even in the eyes of the world each is reckoned among the goods of discipline, the one under the name of concord, the other of chastity. Hardness of heart reigned until Christ; let the infirmity of the flesh also have reigned until the Paraclete. The new law took away divorce -- it had something to take away -- and the new prophecy takes away a second marriage, which is no less a divorce of the former. But hardness of heart yielded to Christ more easily than the infirmity of the flesh; the latter defends Paul for itself more than the former defended Moses -- if indeed it defends him at all, seeing that it seizes upon him where he indulges but rejects him where he prescribes, eluding his weightier statements and his abiding wishes, which do not allow us to grant to this Apostle what he himself prefers.
And how long will this most shameless infirmity persevere in assailing the better things? Its time was until the Paraclete should work, unto whom were deferred by the Lord those things which they could not then bear; and now it befits no one to be unable to bear them, because He through whom the power to bear is given is not lacking. How long shall we plead the flesh, because the Lord said: 'The flesh is weak'? But He also premised: 'The spirit is willing,' that the spirit may conquer the flesh, that what is weak may yield to what is stronger. For He also says: 'Let him who is able to receive it, receive it' -- that is, let him who is not able depart; that rich man too departed who had not received the precept about distributing his substance to the needy, and he was dismissed to his own opinion by the Lord.
Nor on that account will hardness be imputed to Christ because of the fault of anyone's free will: 'Behold,' He says, 'I have set before you good and evil; choose that which is good.' If you cannot, because you will not -- for He shows that you can if you will, since He set both before your own choice -- it behoves you to depart from Him whose will you do not do. XV. What then is this hardness of ours, if we renounce those who do not do the will of God? What heresy, if we judge second marriages, as unlawful, to be next to adultery? For what is adultery but an unlawful marriage? The Apostle marks out those who altogether forbade marrying, who also interdicted foods which God created.
But we no more do away with marriage, if we refuse a second one, than we condemn foods if we fast more frequently. It is one thing to do away with, another to be temperate; one thing to lay down a law of not marrying, another to establish a measure of marrying. Plainly, those who reproach us with hardness or heresy in this cause -- if they so cherish the infirmity of my flesh that they think it must be indulged in marrying frequently, why do they in another cause neither indulge it nor cherish it with pardon, when it has been overcome by torments unto denial? For surely she is more capable of being excused who fell in battle than she who fell in the bedchamber, who succumbed on the rack than she who succumbed in the bed, who yielded to cruelty than she who yielded to lust, who was overcome groaning than she who was overcome in heat.
But that woman indeed they drive from communion, because she did not hold out to the end; this one, however, they receive, as though she too had held out to the end. Set forth what each of the two did not hold out to the end, and you will find her cause the more honourable who could not endure savagery rather than her who could not endure chastity. And yet the infirmity of the flesh does not excuse even a bloody defection, much less an unchaste one. XVI. But I laugh when the infirmity of the flesh is alleged, which ought to be called the height of strength. To marry again is a matter of vigour; to rise up unto the works of the flesh out of the leisure of continence is a matter of loins full of substance.
Such 'infirmity' suffices for a third and a fourth and perhaps even a seventh marriage, so that she who is the stronger the oftener she has been weaker will now have as her author not the Apostle but some Hermogenes, who was wont to marry more women than he painted. For matter abounds in that man; wherefore, presuming that the soul too consists of matter, he much the more does not have the Spirit from God, and is now not even a natural man, because he is not a natural man from the breath of God. What if someone should plead poverty, so as to profess openly that his flesh is prostituted, marrying for the sake of maintenance, forgetting that no thought is to be taken about food and clothing? He has God as the feeder even of ravens, the adorner even of flowers. What if he should point to the loneliness of his house?
As though one woman could furnish a man with a crowd, when she is nearest to flight! He has at all events a widow whom it will be permitted to take up: it is conceded to have not one wife of this kind, but now several. What if someone should think about posterity with the same mind wherewith Lot's wife had eyes, so that a man should therefore repeat marriage because he had no children by the former? A Christian, forsooth, will seek heirs -- he who is disinherited from the whole world! He has brethren, he has the Church as mother. It is another matter if they believe that even before Christ things are conducted according to the Julian laws, and think that the celibate and the childless cannot take a full inheritance from the testament of God.
Let such persons, then, marry to the very end, that in that confusion of the flesh they may be overtaken by that last exit of the world, like Sodom and Gomorrah and the days of the flood. Let them add a third saying: 'Let us eat and drink and marry, for tomorrow we shall die,' not considering that that woe upon the pregnant and the nursing will come to pass much more grievously and bitterly in the shaking of the whole world than it came to pass in the devastation of one small portion of Judea. Let them, well suited to the last times, gather the fruits of repeated marriages: flowing breasts and nauseous wombs and whimpering infants; let them make ready for Antichrist, that he may rage the more lustfully among them; he will bring to them executioner-midwives. XVII.
They will plainly have, as a fine privilege which they read to Christ, the everywhere-present weakness of the flesh. But this weakness will now be judged, not by Isaac our monogamous father, nor by any John a eunuch of Christ, nor by Judith the daughter of Merari, nor by so many other examples of the saints: heathen judges are wont to be appointed for it. The queen of Carthage shall arise and decide against Christian women -- she who, a fugitive and on foreign soil, and at that very time the foundress of so great a city, when she ought rather of her own accord to have desired the marriage of a king, yet, lest she should experience a second marriage, chose on the contrary to burn rather than to marry. Beside her too shall sit that Roman matron, who, though through nocturnal violence she had none the less experienced another man, washed away the stain of her flesh with her own blood, that she might vindicate monogamy in her own person.
There have been also those who preferred to die for their husbands rather than to marry after them. To idols too both monogamy and widowhood are apparent: to Womanly Fortune a crown is placed only by women of one husband, as also to Mother Matuta; the chief pontiff and the flamen's wife marry but once; the priestesses of Ceres are widowed even while their husbands live and consent, by a friendly separation. There are also those who may judge us concerning complete continence: the virgins of Vesta and of Achaean Juno and of Scythian Diana and of Pythian Apollo; even the attendants of that Egyptian bull will judge the infirmity of the Christians concerning continence. Blush, O flesh, that hast put on Christ! Let it suffice thee to marry once, unto which thou wast made from the beginning, unto which thou art recalled at the end.