A hydra of shapes made by its own hands, it always advances impudently, because it knows not how to blush under alien colors—not known to its household, not to its kin, not to its husbands, not to itself, because what is not constant can never be known nor true. Moreover, it never loves God, whom it knows to be contrary to its own works. It is assuredly the bondservant of the devil, for it possesses his kingdom; for it itself begot the gods, it itself brought them into the world, through whom or in whom the devil is worshipped, in whose deeds their origin is shown. It itself rendered Jove greatest by innumerable, varied, and great crimes. It itself, worse than a stepmother, shamefully conquered Hercules in the lust of Omphale—him whom a terrible throng of monsters could not overcome.
It itself, after many adulteries, prostituted to the spectacle of the whole world Venus, stripped bare in all her limbs and trying to cover herself with curved hands—nay rather demonstrating the vice of her soul and body. There is no need to go through them one by one; although even these things have not been worthy to be told, yet for expressing the force of unchastity they have seemed necessary, that everyone may know that luxury pertains to idolatry. It itself, I say, turned the sepulchers of the dead into temples, the tombs into altars, the corpses into images, the funeral rites into sacrifices, the customs into sacred rites. Thus, thus did it snatch the human race from the worship of God, while with a winsome festivity it persuades them that the wicked deeds of wicked men are to be cultivated and imitated.
Indeed, to men, against the law of God and the justice of God, it disastrously inspires—as it were a free license—of wandering outside the lawful bed into strange lust, and thus it tears their women also away from modesty, who, deserted, compelled by ardor or by grief, if they do such things, think that they are either imitating or avenging themselves. On account of which the Lord says in His precepts: 'Whoever shall dismiss his wife, save for the cause of adultery, makes her to commit adultery.' What the slippery husbands can here reply, I do not see; they who, deceived by the unjust impunity of human laws, not knowing true justice even from their own will, willingly do what they are unwilling to suffer:
who, dragged apart by the detestable theft of profane lust, no longer content with shameful hiding-places, sometimes (O wickedness!) sweat in their frenzied coupling under the very gazes of matrons, not perceiving, wretched men, that in such a business, with God as judge, what is not lawful for wives is not lawful for husbands either; just as Paul the Apostle, prescribing to such men, says: 'The woman has not power over her own body, but the husband: likewise also the husband has not power over his own body, but the wife' (1 Cor. 7:4).
Thus therefore, since they are one flesh, one sacrament of the divine work, since the woman was made from her own man, and the one is held bound to the other, and through this, by the law's right too, they are touched by a single line, there is no doubt that the one of the two who has transgressed will be consumed by the everlasting torments of dreadful punishment. But neither does it pass unpunished for those who, without wives, the more freely out of love of sinning, purchase for themselves uncertain and dishonourable wares of their lusts, not perceiving that whatever is lawful outside of wedlock is wretched and unchaste; for to a Christian, brothers, I do not think anything more is permitted than that he be either continent or a husband. V. I come now to examples, which are above all most necessary for the matter;
because what is done is more than what is said, so that both the evil of unchastity and the good of chastity may most easily be recognized from one and the same instance. Joseph the Hebrew, a young man (Gen. 39), distinguished in lineage, more distinguished in beauty, and most distinguished of all in the uprightness of his character, was among the sons of Jacob the younger in age, but the greater in spirit. He, by the impulse of an envious brotherhood, was carried down into Egypt and sold away by his brothers — he whom his master's wife had begun to love for the worse, whom his brothers hated:
for when the woman blazed to her very marrow with the fire of an insane passion, strongly armed with arguments for a sacrilegious persuasion, she seizes solitude, seizes a secret and a place such as in which even an unprovoked youth has often been wont to be violent toward unwilling women. But when, bursting forth upon her design, she finds that neither her caresses nor her promises avail her, joining hand to hand, with the turn reversed, she set about to divert the youth's fire, with all her strength, onto her own tinder. But he, in resisting, leaving behind the garment violently wrenched from him, fled away naked from the pit of unchastity; yet, clothed with the splendour of chastity, after a slanderous condemnation he was both set free by God and honoured.
In short, he was rightly made second in the kingdom, who was already before a distinguished king of modesty. VI. Susanna too, the pillar of matronhood, by her unaffected form the fairer ornament of her own beauty, a remarkable testimony of chastity — two of the elders, but inflamed with one monstrous passion, otherwise than was fitting, had begun to perish with longing for her; and when they noticed her hedged round, in the solitude of a garden, by the wall of chastity, which is surely the true and eternal comeliness — there where they remembered that Eve had been deceived by the author of her own ruin — having from this very circumstance got their counsel, they set about to take her by guile, and unless she yielded to the sin, they threaten her with great destruction, as an adulteress caught in the act.
But she — no Eve — shut in indeed by the contemplation of the doubtful bounds, where either her modesty or her soul must be slain, calling God alone to witness as the witness of her conscience, chose rather an honourable death than a shameful life, deeming it better to offer herself guilty before men than before God. Meanwhile those men press on, made accusers out of lovers, and while they artfully exaggerate their own crime, shifted onto the innocence of the woman they had ensnared, they thereby already condemn themselves as the first offenders. But — oh, the abomination! — credence is given to age, credence to authority: the adulterers exult, integrity is condemned. And now Susanna, undeserving, was being dragged to punishment; now the whole people swelled up for her blood;
now even her own household, struck by the atrocity of the strange affair, groaning pitiably, with bowed heads had cast aside all zeal for her defence. Now even she herself, for the sake of her modesty's gain, hated the delays of death, displeasing to all, but pleasing to her conscience alone. When suddenly God — who is never deceived by any cunning — at once is present in the boy Daniel. He suddenly tore apart the whole stage-play of malice; the crime is swiftly laid open at its source; the wickedness he returns upon its authors; and modesty is cleansed through innocence. And thus victorious chastity carried back Susanna — whom, with unchastity lying about her, they had dragged into public — proven and vindicated, to her husband's bridal chamber with a mighty triumph. VII.
But O how greatly to be admired you are, chastity, you who will be praised in no other way than by being guarded, content with the single ornament of a good conscience! You are happy in virgins, strong in widows, faithful in marriages, pure in priests, glorious in martyrs, bright in Angels, and indeed in all things a queen. You are never subject to the flesh, never to any law. You are born of the will, but you, born of the good, give birth to the will itself: by which is will. Yet your delight comes afterward, when through you you gather daily thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and hundredfold fruits. You are rich among the poor, richer among the rich, and in all things you are perfected as their equal. You are the honour of bodies. You are the treasure of souls.
You are the foundation, the summit, and the fruit of all your peers. You are the eternal, insoluble knot of your own purpose. Through you are lawful fasts celebrated. Through you are prayers, before they are poured out, accepted as already pleaded. You are a sacrifice dear to God; you are the lawful temple of God, the shrine of modesty. Into you corruption knows not how to enter. Through you the world is conquered, all concupiscence is crushed, the devil is subjugated, the Antichrist is not feared, the Holy Spirit is brought in, Christ is glorified, God the Father almighty is made propitious. Finally, he shall reign happy in time to come, who shall have arrived there together with you. TRACTATE V. On Continence. I.
If perhaps to anyone it seems harsh and hard that we speak confidently, brothers, of a thing almost against nature, let him at once cease to be disturbed, understanding that this is the greatest glory of Christian virtue: to trample nature itself underfoot. But because virtue always overshadows pleasures, and nothing is right to anyone except what he has loved — especially that which all peoples cultivate with one desire — there is no doubt that whoever should dissuade from marriage is judged either a public enemy or certainly a madman. But I will not greatly dread the envy that common talk may fable about me; for I do not condemn marriage, but I set better things before marriage; and this indeed with the Apostle Paul also exhorting thus:
'But I say to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they so remain, even as I. But if they are not continent, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.' And in another place he says: 'This I say by way of concession, not by command; but I wish you all to be as I myself am' (1 Cor. 7:6-9): and thus marriage is the better precisely because to burn is the worse. 'All things indeed are lawful, but not all things are expedient.' Now here, Christian, recognize, choose what you will: the remedy or health. II. Finally, if it seems good, let us compare what the distinction is between a virgin and a married woman. The married woman thinks how she may please her husband; the virgin, how she may please God. The former is adorned with outward ornaments;
the latter is far more adorned, for the very reason that she knows not how to be adorned from any other source. The former is fragrant with various ointments and perfumes; the latter, more delightful in any meadow than her own single flower, breathes up into heaven itself with a chosen honour. The former rejoices in children; but the latter does not fear childlessness of children. The former is fed by their blooming endearments and is delighted daily by their growing increments; but the latter, sick with no weariness, does not carry the burden of nine months: under an uncertain birth she does not groan over the safety of her who bears and of him who is born, nor at every moment is she tortured by the care of manifold anxiety. III. But someone will say: Mary too, a virgin, both married and gave birth. Let there be some such woman, and I yield. Yet she was a virgin after wedlock, a virgin after conception, a virgin after a son.
In short, if there were anything better than virginity, the Son of God could the rather have bestowed it upon his own mother, to whom he granted that she should be mighty in the honour of divine virginity. Therefore, remaining a virgin in the state in which you were born, glory in it, and, subject to no law, guard the flower of holy modesty, the treasure of God; be holy both in body and in spirit; by the love of Christ extinguish the fire of the flesh — that I may be silent about the glory of the resurrection, which here you already claim for yourself, in which, as the Lord says, 'They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but shall be as the Angels' (Matt. 22:30). You will obtain a great benefit, if you live for God, free, with pure morals, and are not the handmaid of a man. IV.
But you, widow, why do you desire a second marriage, when you see that the Apostle restrains even the first? whose words are these: 'The time is short: it remains, that those who have wives be as though they had none, for the figure of this world passes away' (1 Cor. 7:29, 31). But since this apostolic edict was at work nearly four hundred years ago, or even more — when men were both more long-lived and Christians most rare — why should I, now that the Christian world is nearly entire, and human longevity worn away as the world grows old, blunt the edge of truth with flattering words, and not fully proclaim with what perfection of observance the worship of God ought to be guarded? Since most of all it is written in Solomon:
'And if sons be multiplied, take no delight in them, if the fear of the Lord be not with them; smile not upon their soul: for better is one that feareth God than a thousand ungodly sons' (Sir. 16:1-3). Since these things are so, come, widow, you who like an innocent virgin often hasten to marry, answer the one who asks: did you lose a good husband, or a bad one? If a bad one, and you desire to marry, you deserve that a worse one afflict you. If a good one, keep the seal of fidelity: he does not deserve to suffer injury, to whom you yourself bear witness. Where is that first day of marriage, which, while you longed for one another, seemed slower than all the rest? Where the festal slaying of precious virginity, sweet to you both?
Where is the love which, in an equal and united wedlock, does not die when, of the two, the one survives? Are you not she who washed your husband's body, laid out, with tears, wiped it with kisses, veiled it with the loss of your hair, with cheeks torn, with breasts disfigured by bruises, covered more with foul dust than with garment? Are you not, I say, she who, now bursting heaven itself with wailings, cried that after such a husband you could not live for a single moment of time? Now, with groans shut in by grief, often dead in spirit among your kin, with limbs sinking to the ground, you rendered the funeral rites uncertain: to whom should they rather lend their tears — to the dead man, or to the dying woman? After this, if it pleases you to marry, you have lied in all those things. What is this?
Behold, again you return to the arts of seduction; you borrow from the cosmetic-box the colour you condemned a little before. Behold, indulgently you dress your hair; you exchange the dust of mourning for fragrant powder; you shut up your weeping in eye-paint; you bind with an ornament the neck which you had vowed to the noose; from the mirror you seek oracles, how conveniently you may ensnare a suitor. Whatever you do, you will no longer be a virgin; yet one thing I know, that whoever for another's sake changes both her form and her morals differs in nothing from a monster. V. But you say: The ardour of my tender age compels me. I believe it. Behold, you have married.
That I may say nothing of the frailty of humanity, nor of chances, as of the rest: behold, on the next day some necessity snatches your husband away, which, dragging him far from you, keeps him banished for ten years, or even longer, as is wont to happen. What will you do? Will you wait for his return, or will you seek a remedy for your ardour from elsewhere? If you promise faithful waiting, you doubtless deceive, you whose profession of impatience is already on record. But if you are about to take a remedy, there is no doubt that this is the only one: that you curb your flames by the contemplation of the marital sword. Believe me, concupiscence has no place where patience reigns, where life is lived soberly, where death is feared.
Therefore transfer this faithful watching, this fear — which is truer and more just — to God, and whatever sort that fire may be, it will suddenly be extinguished. VI. But thus I linger over matters almost sound, as though the crimes that are truly to be execrated were already corrected. I am ashamed to say, among a serious people, that old women are often seen as new brides, whose marriages are well-nigh more than their birthdays; who are asked not to marry but to sleep, who are invited, nearer to the tomb than to the bridal-chamber; who themselves, when they perish, by a detestable example compel young girls too to perish. What son would love these women? what husband?
confounding the rights of blood, blotting out the merits of their husbands, fawning on the living, sighing for the dead, now hating their old sons, now their new ones, and their husbands likewise? But, on the contrary, let them themselves reckon what it is that often befalls amid such solemn vows: that they have neither sons nor husbands. Such also is the case of the husbands, to whom to say anything is superfluous, because, if wife and husband are one in the flesh, there is no doubt that what the one hears belongs to both. What I should do, whither I should turn, I know not; for I do not see what I should preach to the Gentiles in exhortations of the divine and true worship. The happiness of virginity? But they have their own virgins; and if not happy, they have them nonetheless.
But if I should challenge them to the glorious sweat and palm of widowhood, perhaps they would mock us, because our holy virgins and widows labour for the great reward of immortality, but theirs labour for nothing. Yet this alone is wherein we conquer: that Christian women, for their own holiness' sake, marry the more. Add what must be said of the Gentiles — what cannot be said without great grief or groaning. VII. For what voice, what rebuke, could worthily convict these women? who, endowing their own disgrace with sacrilege, consign the members of Christ to the slaves of demons; lay open the temple of God to the profane; strip bare the very sanctuaries; confound holy things, rejoicing in darkness with the light lost, having shrines, not homes.
Worthily are they slain, who, ungrateful for Christ's benefits, of their own accord return to the death from which they had escaped. Since therefore the devil ever lies in wait for those who do not seek him, consider what he does when invited; to whom, all the avenues of harm thrown open, they grant a victory without battle, without any toil; for he will not strive to bring under his sway her who has sought to be his handmaid. Finally, the things which are done in the house, and indeed in the very shrines, faithful Christian woman, cannot be done without you, for you are an unhappy wife if you do not know what is done in the house; more unhappy, surely, if you do know. VIII. Let us suppose, then, as often happens, that a day of differing religion falls upon the one and same time, on which the Church must be approached by you, the temples by him.
In what fashion will each of you procure your own sacrifice? at what expense? with what vessels? or with what ministers? But if these things are done separately, it profits nothing; for, by setting out from one home and returning to one home, even if not by confusion, yet by error they become one. What of the fact that his sacrifice is public, yours secret? his may be freely handled by anyone, yours cannot even be looked upon by Christians themselves who are not duly consecrated, without sacrilege. Finally, detestable is the condition of living where it is not permitted to a wife to do what pleases her husband; where you set it before yourself that he allows you to do nothing, except what he has arranged, and himself first completed.
But if it is not done, or if what is done displeases him, then the whole house will bellow with quarrels, God will be blasphemed, and perhaps, snatching up your very sacrifice, he will beat upon your breast, deform your face, sometimes even granting a benefit, when he orders you not to come to church. But it is much worse if you please your husband; for you cannot please a sacrilegious man without sacrilege. To dispatch the matter briefly: at all events, returning from the temple, he will of necessity relate to you, as you inquire, what answers were given to him concerning the welfare of you both, or the concord of the gods.
If they are terrible, you, dismayed with fear, perhaps — even when he ceases — will offer them unlawful vows; which many wives, even under faithful husbands, have done, women worse than Eve, not her disciples but her teachers; for she was deceived, but these of their own accord gave themselves over to the devil. But if they are peaceful and wholesome, surely you will rejoice, and to him, as a compliant wife for so great a tidings, you will, if not impose peace, at least not deny it. IX. What are you doing, wretched woman? why, frantic woman, do you rejoice? That is not peace, but war; not a kiss, but poison. Oh, the abomination! you embrace limbs still smoking from the pyre, and on your own flesh you wipe off the sweat of the vapour of foul altars; you jest, you fawn, you comply;
if perchance some solemn mystery has been received or brought back by the fanatic, you yourself take it up, you yourself lay it away, you yourself guard it. Besides, you take food together; the dregs of the proffered cup you drain by licking with your lips, and you take the future draught as a kind of first-fruits omen; willingly you conceive, through your husband, the whole spirit of iniquity entire: unhappy woman, there is now more in you than remained in the temple. But if you keep and contain yourself, he will reckon that this is contrived, not out of love of divine worship, but out of desire for some other man, to his own insult; the virtue of chastity and observance he will call into accusation. For what evil would he not suspect, not contrive, serving cruel gods, adulterous gods?
Therefore henceforth flee, O virgin; flee, O widow; flee such marriages. No excuse at all is available to you. If you cannot be continent, at least do not put your marriages out at interest, lest on that day of resurrection, among very many husbands, you be unable to recognize whose wife you were. Be not sacrilegious; be not a betrayer of the law. Why should you marry a profane man, when you can marry a Christian? TRACTATE VI. On Patience. I. Although the blessed life is sought through diverse virtues — with desire for which burning humanity sighs at every moment — yet all of them, by one and the same consent, are borne, as into a kind of harbour, to patience, without which nothing can be heard, nor conceived, nor learned, nor taught.
For indeed she alone is the one to whom absolutely every matter looks; since there is no doubt that hope, faith, justice, humility, chastity, uprightness, concord, charity — all the arts and all the virtues, and the very elements themselves — cannot stand without her instruction or her restraint. For she is ever mature, humble, cautious, prudent, provident, content with every necessity, tranquil in any tempest of disturbances. She knows not how to ruffle her own serenity with clouds. She knows no penitence; she is ignorant of what strife is; all injuries she either avoids or bears. It is uncertain whether she should be judged incapable of suffering, since, when she has suffered something, she is found as though she had suffered nothing.
Finally, it is impossible, brothers, to estimate the virtue of her whose victory is to be conquered. No force turns her from her place, not toil, not hunger, not nakedness, not persecution, not fear, not danger, not death, not torments heavier than death itself, not power, not ambition, not prosperity. She ever remains unmoved, sturdily poised by a certain lofty and divine temperance, restraining with calm moderation all the agitations of souls; and, that she may conquer all things without great effort, she first conquers herself. II.
Virtues could not be virtues, nor could the perennial states of the elements, nor the seasons in their kindred connection, journey into their accustomed returns, unless patience, like some careful mother, guarded the order and the turning of things. The sun, in short, although with wondrous swiftness it lights up the alternating bounds of the world, yet never anticipates the beloved and modest dawn; the sun which — and this is the greater thing — could not divide itself out evenly into twelve, I will not say spaces, but moments of hours, if impatience urged on its courses. The moon too, which to some seems to wander in its monthly circuit, since it never unseasonably advances the appointed fires of its age, nor withholds them;
what else is given to be understood, than the most skilled discipline of remarkable patience, serving the moderation of its own Maker? But the sea too, provoked by the winds — when it is angered, although in reciprocal alternation, now striking the sky, now seeking the earth, armed on every side with seething glassy mountains, with the violent heaps of raging waves — though it should rave with its whole body, yet from the pale recoil of its outermost rolling masses, as though acknowledging the right of the land and shunning to violate it, with wondrous patience it is broken upon itself, and is reined back by the very waves by which it is driven. This patience grants both prosperity and grace to the sprouting meadows, the golden harvests, the curving vines, the half-pale olives;
since impatience does not suffer the offspring of each several season to plunge, in unripe birth, into the domain of another. What of the comely and ordered interchanges of diverse birds? What of the airy cranes in their lofty flights? What of the innumerable wedges of dissimilar fishes, of graded age, with their own leaders? Do they not, when they obey the invitation of the seasons, and in the splendid coursing of their festal oarage either furrow the waters or mark out the air, both patiently come and patiently depart? III. Man alone, headlong, alone impatient, daily delights in depraved fickleness, is eager for varieties, deems himself wretched if he remains himself, and does not understand that it is a thing akin to madness, that his soul should not remain in its own state.
For what is impatience, but a slippery mind, ever storming itself with frequent and rapid agitations; a faithless soul; toward itself too an act improvident, unstable, blind, incautious, inconstant, driving all things headlong to ruin; a thing without substance, a business without a person? It attempts all things in haste, disturbs all things in a moment, the mother of crimes, the schoolmistress of curiosity, the keen edge of rashness, the author and equally the mistress of detestable evils; for, that death might cut, and may yet cut, the throat of man's salvation from the very cradle of the world, from her it burst forth. In short, when Adam (Gen. 2) was still set in the citadel of paradise, and, most blessed, held the dominion of a blessed world;
so long he lived happy, so long imperishable, as he kept the commands of the royal edict. But when, by an ill-omened consent, he borrowed impatience from the envious serpent's slipperiness, and tasted the evilly sweet apple of the sacred tree, he found tears, sorrows and groans, he procured for himself thorns and thistles, and, troubled at last with sweat, he left to his posterity the inheritance of an undigested death, which soon gave birth to murder. In short, there is no delay. Impatiently envious of his brother's gift, Cain pants for his brother's destruction (Gen. 4); and with God beholding the deed, he is a slayer of his own blood;