And that I may not weave together many things in a long discourse—which you can take, for your edification, from the first book against Jovinian—I will repeat only one thing that was done in your own country, that you may know that chastity is venerable even to barbarous, wild, and bloodthirsty nations. The nation of the Teutones, setting out from the farthest shores of the ocean and of Germany, flooded all the Gauls, and, after the Roman armies had often been cut down, was overcome at Aquae Sextiae when Marius attacked. Three hundred of their matrons, when they had learned that they were to be handed over with the other captives into servitude, first entreated the consul that they might be given over to the service of the temple of Ceres and Venus.
And when they did not obtain this, the lictor removing them, having slain their little children they were found dead in the morning, their throats strangled with a noose and holding one another in mutual embraces. That, then, which captivity could not inflict upon barbarian chastity—shall a noble matron do this, and try a second husband, she who has either lost a good first one or has known a bad one, so as to strive again to act against the judgment of God? What? If she at once lose the second, will she draw a third by lot? And if he too fall asleep, will she proceed to a fourth and a fifth, so that in what may she differ from harlots? By every means it must be provided for the widow that she overstep not the first bounds of chastity.
But if she oversteps them and breaks matronly modesty, she will run riot into every kind of luxury, so that she deserves to hear the prophet saying: 'You have gotten a harlot's face; you are past shame.' What then? Do we condemn second marriages? By no means; but we praise the first. Do we cast the twice-married out of the Church? Far be it; but we summon the once-married to continence. In the ark of Noah there were not only clean but also unclean animals; it had both men and serpents. In a great house also the vessels are diverse, some for honor, some for dishonor. There is both a bowl for drinking and a chamber-pot for the more private needs of nature.
For since, in the sowing of good soil, the Gospels teach a hundredfold and sixtyfold and thirtyfold fruit, and the hundredfold holds the first rank as the crown of virginity, the sixtyfold is in the second number for the labor of widows, and the thirtyfold attests the compacts of marriage by the very joining of the fingers—in what number will digamy be? Nay, outside of number. Certainly it does not spring up in good soil, but among brambles and in the thorn-thickets of foxes, which are compared to the most impious Herod—so that in it a woman may reckon herself praiseworthy if she is better than harlots, if she surpasses the victims of public lusts, if she has been prostituted to one, not to many. About to say a thing incredible, I will prove it by the testimony of many.
Many years ago, when I was assisting Damasus, bishop of the city of Rome, in ecclesiastical documents, and was answering the synodical consultations of both East and West, I saw two of the vilest people among the common folk matched against each other as a pair: one who had buried twenty wives, and a woman who had had a twenty-second husband, joined to each other in what they themselves supposed was their last marriage. There was the utmost expectation of all, men and women alike: 'After so many trials, which of them will first carry out the other?' The husband won, and, crowned amid the concourse of the whole city's people and holding the palm and doing homage, he walked before the bier of his many-times-married wife amid the crowd shouting 'the six hundred!' one by one. What do we say to such a woman? Surely that which the Lord said to the Samaritan woman:
'You have had twenty-two husbands, and this one, by whom you are now being buried, is not yours.' And so I beseech you, religious daughter in Christ, that you may not know those testimonies by which the incontinent and the wretched are aided, but rather that you read those by which chastity is crowned. It is enough for you that you have lost the first degree of virginity, and through the third have come to the second, that is, through the conjugal office to the continence of widowhood. Think not on the last, nay rather the abject things, nor seek out foreign and far-fetched examples. You have a grandmother, a mother, an aunt, whose imitation and teaching is abundant for you, and whose precepts are the rule of a virtuous life. For if many, while their husbands are yet living in wedlock, understand that word of the apostle:
'All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient,' and castrate themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven—either from a second birth after the laver by consent, or after marriage from the ardor of faith—why should not a widow, who by the judgment of the Lord has ceased to have a husband, rejoicingly repeat that word: 'the Lord gave, the Lord has taken away,' and seize the occasion of liberty offered her, that she may have power over her own body, lest she become again the handmaid of a man? And certainly it is far more laborious not to enjoy what you have than to desire what you have lost.
Whence virginity is the happier in this, that it knows not the incitements of the flesh, and widowhood the more anxious in this, that it recalls in the mind past pleasures—especially if she reckons that she has lost her husband, not sent him on ahead; of which the one belongs to grief, the other to joy. Let the first creation of man teach us to reject a plurality of marriages. One Adam and one Eve—nay rather, one from his rib—is separated into woman, and again what had been divided is joined by marriage, the Scripture saying: 'they shall be two in one flesh'—not into two nor into three—'for which cause a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife,' certainly not to wives.
This testimony Paul, expounding it, refers to Christ and to the Church, so that the first Adam in the flesh and the second in the spirit may be monogamous. One Eve is the mother of all living, and one Church is the parent of all Christians. As the accursed Lamech divided that one into two wives, so heretics tear this one into many churches, which, according to the Apocalypse of John, are rather to be called synagogues of the devil than assemblies of Christ. We read in the Song of Songs: 'there are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and young women without number. One is my dove, my perfect one, one is she to her mother, the chosen of her that bore her.' To whom the same John writes an epistle: 'the elder to the elect lady and to her children.'
But also into the ark, which the apostle Peter interprets as a type of the Church, Noah with his three sons brought in wives singly, not two apiece. Even of the unclean animals two are taken, male and female, so that not even in beasts, serpents, crocodiles, and lizards may digamy have a place. But if of the clean seven are set down, that is, an odd number, in this too the palm of virginity and chastity is shown. For Noah, on going out of the ark, offered victims to God—not, assuredly, of an even, but of an odd number, because the one was prepared for offspring and wedlock, the other for sacrifice.
But the patriarchs did not have single wives; nay, they had very many concubines too, and, that this be not too little, David had many and Solomon had innumerable. Judah goes in to Tamar as to a harlot, and, according to the killing letter, the prophet Hosea is joined not only to a harlot but even to an adulteress. But if this too is by right conceded to us, let us neigh after all women, and after the example of Sodom and Gomorrah let us be caught, on the last day, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage—so that then be the end of wedlock, when there is the term of life. But if both after the flood and before the flood that sentence prevailed, 'increase and multiply and fill the earth,' what is it to us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come, to whom it is said:
'the time is short,' and: 'now also the axe is laid to the roots of the trees,' which is to cut down with evangelical chastity the forest of the law and of marriages? There is a time to embrace and a time to be far from embraces. Jeremiah, with captivity at hand, is forbidden to take a wife. Ezekiel in Babylon says: 'my wife died, and my mouth was opened.' Neither he who is about to take a wife, nor he who had taken one, can prophesy freely in the conjugal work. Once it was a glory to hear that little verse: 'your sons are like young olive plants round about your table,' and: 'may you see your children's children'; now of the continent it is said: 'he who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit,' and: 'my soul has cleaved after you; your right hand has upheld me.'
Then it was an eye for an eye; now to him who strikes we offer the other cheek as well. In that time it was said to warriors: 'gird your sword upon your thigh, O most mighty'; now Peter hears: 'put up your sword into its sheath; for whoever strikes with the sword shall perish by the sword.' These things we say, not separating the law and the Gospel, as Marcion slanderously alleges, but receiving one and the same God, who, according to the variety of times and causes, sows at the beginning and at the end that he may reap, plants that he may have what to cut down, casts the foundation that, the building being completed, he may set on the roof.
Otherwise, if we come to the sacraments and the types of things to come, not by our own judgment but by the apostle's exposition, Hagar and Sarah, the mountains Sinai and Zion, signify two covenants. Leah with bleary eyes, and Rachel whom Jacob loves most, attest the synagogue and the Church. Whence also Hannah, at first barren, is more fruitful than the fecundity of Peninnah—although monogamy has also gone before us in Isaac and Rebecca, of whose sole childbearing there is a revelation of the Lord; nor did any other of the women consult God through herself.
What shall I say of Tamar, who poured forth the twin infants Zerah and Perez—in whose birth the divided wall parted two peoples, and the hand bound with scarlet stained even then the conscience of the Jews with the passion of Christ—and of the prophetic harlot, whose likeness signifies either the Church gathered from the Gentiles, or (what better suits the passage itself) the synagogue, first taken up from idolaters through Abraham and Moses, then, after her adultery and the denial of the Savior, sitting a very long time without altar, priests, and prophets, awaiting the fellowship of her former husband, so that, after the fullness of the Gentiles has entered in, then all Israel may be saved?
As though on a small tablet I have wished to display the widest tracts of lands, that I may pass on to other little questions, of which the first concerns the counsel of Anna: 'Will you alone waste your youth in perpetual mourning, and know neither sweet children nor the rewards of Venus? Do you believe that ashes or the buried shades care for this?' To whom let her herself, who suffered it, briefly reply: 'You, overcome by my tears, you first, my sister, burden the frenzied woman with these evils and cast her before the foe. It was not permitted me to pass a life apart from the marriage-chamber, without reproach, after the manner of a wild thing, nor to touch such cares. The faith promised to the ashes of Sychaeus was not kept.' You propose to me the joys of marriage; I will set against you the pyre, the sword, the flame.
There is not so much of good in marriage, which we hope for, as there is of evil, which can befall and is to be feared. Lust, once transacted, always leaves behind repentance of itself, and is never satisfied, and, once extinguished, is rekindled. It grows with use and fails, nor does it obey reason, which is led by impulse. But you say: 'ample wealth and the management of the household need the authority of a husband.' As though the households of the unmarried have perished, and, unless you yourself serve along with your little slaves, you cannot rule your family! Are not your grandmother, mother, and aunt of former authority and greater honor, while both the whole province and the leaders of the churches receive them?
Do soldiers, then, and travelers, without wives, not govern their little lodgings, and neither invite to banquets nor are invited? As though you cannot have servants or freedmen of approved age, in whose hands you were nurtured, who may preside over the house, who may answer in public, pay the taxes, who may look up to you as their patroness, love you as their foster-child, venerate you as holy. 'Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you.' If you think about clothing, the lilies will be set before you from the Gospel; if about food, you will be referred to the birds, which neither sow nor reap, and your heavenly Father feeds them. How many virgins and widows, without any stain of scandal, have managed their little substance?
Beware lest you be joined to young men, lest you cleave to those on whose account the apostle concedes second marriages, and suffer shipwreck in the midst of calm. If it is said to Timothy, 'avoid younger widows,' and again, 'aged women as mothers, young women as sisters, with all chastity,' why do you not hearken to me admonishing you? Flee persons in whom there can be a suspicion of evil conversation, nor have ready at hand that saying of the crossroads: 'my conscience suffices me; I care not what men say.' And certainly the apostle provided things good not only before God but also before men, lest through him the name of God be blasphemed among the Gentiles.
He had, to be sure, the power of leading about sister women, but he was unwilling to be judged by an unbelieving conscience; and, though he could live by the Gospel, he labored day and night with his own hands, that he might not burden any of the believers. 'If food scandalizes my brother,' he says, 'I will not eat flesh forever.' Let us too say: if that sister or brother scandalizes not one and another but the whole Church, I will see neither sister nor brother. It is better that the family estate be diminished than that the soul's salvation perish; better that that perish which—will we, nill we—is one day to perish, than to lose that for which all things are to be given up. Which of us can add—I will not say a cubit, which is enormous, but the tenth part of a single little inch—to his stature?
'And we are anxious about what we shall eat or what we shall drink?' Let us therefore not be anxious about the morrow: sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Jacob, fleeing from his brother, left behind the great riches in his father's house and went off naked into Mesopotamia; and, to offer us an example of his fortitude, he set a stone beneath his head and saw a ladder raised up all the way to heaven, with the Lord leaning upon it; up and down it the angels ascended and descended, so that neither should the sinner despair of salvation nor the righteous be complacent in his own virtue.
And—to pass over much, for there is no time to expound everything with cited proofs—after twenty years the lord and father who was once richer, who long before had crossed the Jordan with only a staff, returns to his homeland with three companies of flocks. The apostles, pilgrims throughout the whole world, had no coin in their belt, no staff in their hand, no sandals on their feet, and yet they could say: 'having nothing, yet possessing all things,' and: 'Silver and gold have we none, but what we have: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, rise and walk.' For they were not weighed down by the burden of riches, and therefore, standing with Elijah in the cleft of the rock, they could pass through the narrow eye of the needle and behold the back parts of the Lord.
But we burn with avarice, and while disputing against money we spread open our lap for gold, and nothing is enough for us; and that saying about the Megarians can rightly be fitted to us wretches: 'they build as though about to live forever, they live as though about to die the next day.' And we do this because we do not believe the Lord's words, because the length of life that all desire promises us not the nearness of death—which is owed to mortals by the law of nature—but, on the empty hope of years, ever wider spans of time. For no one is of such broken strength or of such decrepit old age that he does not suppose he will live yet another year. Hence there creeps over him forgetfulness of his condition, so that this earthly creature, ready at any moment to be dissolved, is lifted up in pride and holds heaven in his mind. But what am I doing?
With the ship wrecked I dispute about the cargo. He who held it back is taken out of the way, and we do not perceive that Antichrist is drawing near, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth. Woe to those who are with child and to those who give suck in that day—both of which belong to the fruits of marriage. Let me run briefly through a few of the present miseries. That we still remain here, few as we are, is due not to our own merit but to the Lord's mercy. Countless and most ferocious nations have overrun all the Gauls. Whatever lies between the Alps and the Pyrenees, enclosed by the Ocean and the Rhine, the Quadi, the Vandals, the Sarmatians, the Alans, the Gepids, the Heruli, the Saxons, the Burgundians, the Alamanni, and—O commonwealth to be lamented!—the Pannonian foes have laid waste. For 'Assur also came with them.'
Mainz, once a noble city, has been taken and overthrown, and in its church many thousands of men were slaughtered. Worms has been finished off by a long siege; Rheims, that most powerful city, the Ambiani, the Atrebates, the Morini at the ends of the earth, Tournai, Speyer, Strasbourg have been carried off into Germany. Of the provinces of Aquitania and of the Novempopulania, of the Lyonnese and the Narbonnese, all except a few cities have been ravaged—and even those the sword harries from without and famine within. I cannot make mention of Toulouse without tears; that it has not until now collapsed, the merits of its holy bishop Exsuperius have secured.
The Spains themselves, now on the very brink of destruction, tremble daily, recalling the Cimbric invasion; and whatever others have suffered once, these suffer perpetually in fear. The rest I keep silent, lest I seem to despair of God's clemency. Once, from the Pontic Sea all the way to the Julian Alps, what is ours was not ours, and for thirty years, the Danube frontier being broken, battle was waged in the midst of the regions of the Roman empire. Our tears had dried up with age; except for a few old men, all who were born in captivity and siege did not long for a liberty they had never known.
Who would believe this—what histories could set forth in worthy speech—that Rome fights in her own bosom not for glory but for survival; nay, does not even fight, but ransoms her life with gold and all her furnishings? This came about not through the fault of the emperors, who are indeed most religious, but through the crime of a half-barbarian traitor, who armed our enemies against us with our own resources. Once the Roman empire labored under an eternal disgrace, that, when the Gauls laid all waste and the army was routed at the Allia, Brennus had entered Rome; nor could she efface the ancient ignominy until she had subjugated to her rule both Gaul, the native soil of the Gauls, and Gallograecia, in which the conquerors of West and East had settled.
Hannibal, a tempest arisen from the borders of Spain, when he had laid Italy waste, saw the city but did not dare to besiege it. Such reverence for the Roman name held Pyrrhus that, though he had destroyed everything, he withdrew from the nearby place and did not dare, as victor, to look upon the city which he had learned was a city of kings. And yet, for this affront—for I will not call it pride, since it had good outcomes—the one, a fugitive over the whole world, at last found death by poison in Bithynia; the other, having returned to his homeland, fell in his own kingdom; and the peoples of both provinces are tributaries of the Roman people. Now, though everything should turn out to a prosperous end, apart from what was ours which we have lost, we have nothing to take away from the conquered enemy. An ardent poet, describing the power of the city of Rome, says:
'What can suffice, if Rome is too little?'—which we may change into another epitaph: 'What is safe, if Rome perishes?' 'Not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths, a voice of iron, could I recount all the sufferings of the captives or run through all the names of the slain.' And these very things which I have said are perilous both to the one who speaks and to those who hear, so that not even a groan is free to the unwilling; nay, we are not even permitted to weep, nor do we dare to weep, over what we suffer. Answer me, my dearest daughter in Christ, you who are amid these things about to marry: what husband will you take?
I suppose one about to flee or about to fight—you understand what follows from either—and instead of a wedding-song a terrible trumpet will blare at you with hoarse sound, so that perhaps you will have mourning women for your bridesmaids; so that the delights with which you abound, whose income you have lost from your estates, whose little household you behold wasting away from your besieged home through sickness and famine—[what then?] But far be it from me to think such things of you, to suspect anything sinister of one who has consecrated her soul to the Lord.
I have spoken not so much to you as, under your name, to others—those matrons who go about the wine-loving, prying, and gossiping households, whose god is their belly and whose glory is in their shame, who know nothing of the Scriptures except the precepts about second marriage, who console their own desires in another's body, so that they may see others do what they themselves have done and be soothed by the fellowship of the wicked. When you have crushed their shamelessness and their propositions by an interpretation of the apostolic sentences, read, as to how you ought to live in widowhood, the book to Eustochium on preserving virginity, and the others to Furia and to Salvina—of whom the one was once the daughter-in-law of the consul Probus, the other the daughter of Gildo, who held Africa.
This little book, 'On Monogamy,' will bear its title under your name. CXXIV. TO AVITUS. About ten years ago the holy man Pammachius sent me the sheets of a certain person, which contained the volumes of Origen's 'Peri Archon' translated—or rather corrupted—earnestly requesting this: that a Latin translation should preserve the Greek truth, and that in either direction, whether he who wrote had spoken well or ill, the Roman tongue should learn it without the patronage of a translator.
I did as he wished and sent him the books; when he had read them, he shuddered and shut them away in his chest, lest, brought out into the public, they should wound the minds of many. Being asked by a certain brother (one of those) who 'have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge' to hand them over for reading, as though he would return them at once, he could not, owing to the shortness of the time, suspect any fraud. He who had received them to read, employing scribes, copied out the whole work and returned the volume much sooner than he had promised. And with the same rashness and—to put it mildly—foolishness, what he had wickedly filched, he handed on still worse to others.
And because it is difficult for the abbreviations of shorthand to preserve large books that dispute about mystical matters—especially ones dictated by stealth and in haste—everything in them was so confused that in many places they lack both order and sense. For this reason you ask, dearest Avitus, that I send you the exemplar itself, which was once translated by me and given to no one else, but was perversely published by the aforesaid brother. Receive, then, what you asked, but on this condition: that you know there are very many things in them which you must detest, and that, according to the Lord's word, one must walk among scorpions and serpents. Such is this—and immediately in the first volume: that Christ, the Son of God, was not born but made; that God the Father, invisible by nature, is not seen even by the Son;
that the Son, who is the image of the invisible Father, is not truth when compared to the Father; but that with us, who cannot receive the truth of God almighty, He appears as an imaginary truth, so that the majesty and greatness of the greater is felt as in some way circumscribed in the Son; that God the Father is an incomprehensible light, while Christ, in comparison with the Father, is a very small brightness which to us, because of our weakness, appears great. Of two statues, a larger and a very small one—the one which fills the world and by its greatness is in some way invisible, and the other which falls beneath the eyes—he sets forth an example, comparing the Father to the former, the Son to the latter.
He calls God the Father almighty good and of perfect goodness, but says the Son is not good but a certain breath and image of goodness, so that He is not called absolutely good, but with an addition: 'the good shepherd,' and the rest; and he asserts that the Holy Spirit is third in dignity and honor after the Father and the Son.
Concerning whom, though he says he does not know whether He was made or unmade, in the later parts he expressed what he thought, affirming that nothing except God the Father alone is unmade; that the Son too is lesser than the Father, in that He is second after Him, and the Holy Spirit is inferior to the Son and dwells in each of the saints; and that in this order the might of the Father is greater than that of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and again the might of the Son is greater than that of the Holy Spirit, and consequently the power of the Holy Spirit itself is greater than that of the other things which are called holy. And when he had come to rational creatures and had said that they had slipped down through negligence into earthly bodies, he added this also:
'It is a mark of great negligence and sloth for anyone to flow away and be so emptied out as to come to vices and be able to be bound up in the gross body of irrational beasts of burden.' And in what follows: 'Moved by these disputations,' he says, 'we judge that of their own accord some are in the number of the saints and in the ministry of God, while others, through their own fault falling away from holiness, have collapsed into such great negligence that they are even turned into contrary powers.' And again, that the beginning is born from the end and the end from the beginning, and that all things are so varied that he who is now a man can become a demon in another world, and he who is a demon, if he acts more negligently, may be bound to grosser bodies, that is, become a man.
And thus he mingles all things together, so that from an archangel a devil can be made, and again the devil be turned back into an angel. But those who have wavered and, though their feet slipped, have not utterly fallen, will be subjected to the principalities, powers, thrones, and dominions that dispense, rule, and govern toward better things; and perhaps from these the race of men will be established in some one of the worlds, when, according to Isaiah, a new heaven and a new earth shall be made. But those who have not deserved to return to their pristine state through the race of men will become the devil and his angels and the worst demons, and according to the variety of their merits will obtain diverse offices in the several worlds.
And those very demons and rulers of darkness, in some world or worlds, if they should be willing to turn to better things, may become men and thus return to their ancient beginning—yet only in such a way that through the punishments and torments which they have endured for a longer or shorter time, being instructed in the bodies of men, they may again come to the height of the angels. From which, by consequent reasoning, it is shown that all rational creatures can be made out of all—not once and suddenly, but repeatedly—and that we too shall be both angels and demons, if we act more negligently, and again the demons, if they be willing to receive the virtues, may attain to angelic dignity.