Having therefore driven out and banished those women who wish not to be virgins but only to seem so, now to you is my whole discourse directed. And inasmuch as you have begun to be the first noble virgin of the city of Rome, so much the more must you labour, lest you lose both present goods and future. Indeed, you have learned the troubles of marriage and the uncertainties of wedlock from a domestic example, when your sister Blesilla, older in age but younger in resolve, was widowed in the seventh month after receiving a husband. O unhappy human condition, and ignorant of the future! She lost both the crown of virginity and the pleasure of marriage.
And although she holds the second rank of chastity, yet how many crosses do you suppose she endures moment by moment, seeing daily in her sister what she herself has lost; and since, having tried it, she is deprived of a pleasure with greater difficulty, she has the smaller reward of continence? Yet let her too be secure, let her rejoice: both the hundredfold and the sixtyfold fruit spring from the one seed of chastity. I would not have you keep company with married ladies, I would not have you approach the houses of the nobility, I would not have you frequently see what, in scorning it, you chose to be a virgin. If little women are wont to applaud themselves over husbands who are judges and set in some dignity, if the ambition of those who pay court runs to the emperor's wife, why should you do injury to your Husband? Why do you, the bride of God, hasten to the wife of a man?
In this matter learn a holy pride; know that you are better than they. Nor indeed do I merely desire you to shun the company of those women who are puffed up with the honours of their husbands, whom troops of eunuchs surround, and in whose garments metal is woven, drawn out fine into a thread; but flee also those whom necessity has made widows—not that they ought to have wished the death of their husbands, but that they should gladly seize the occasion given for chastity. But now they change only their dress, while their old ambition is not changed. There precedes a train of eunuch-borne litters, and their skin, stuffed out with reddening cheeks, is stretched taut, so that you would think they had not lost husbands but were seeking them. Their house is full of flatterers, full of banqueters.
The clergy themselves, who ought to have been objects both of instruction and of reverence, kiss the heads of their patronesses and, stretching out the hand—so that you would think they wished to bless, if you did not know—they receive a fee for their greeting. Meanwhile these women, seeing that the priests need their protection, are lifted up into pride, and, because having experienced the domination of husbands they prefer the freedom of widowhood, they are called chaste and 'nonnae,' and after a doubtful dinner they dream of apostles. Let those be your companions whom you see thin from fasting, whose faces are pale, whom both age and life have approved, who daily sing in their hearts: 'Where do you feed your flock? Where do you lie down at noon?'—who out of affection say, 'I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ.' Be subject to your parents; imitate your Bridegroom.
Let your going out into public be rare; let your martyrs be sought within your own chamber. There will never be lacking a reason for going out, if you are always to go out whenever it is necessary—and whenever it is not. Let your food be moderate and your belly never filled. For there are very many who, though sober with respect to wine, are drunk with the abundance of food. When you rise at night for prayer, let it be emptiness, not indigestion, that makes you belch. Read often and learn as much as you can. Let sleep steal upon you as you hold the book, and let the sacred page receive your drooping face. Let your fasts be daily and your refreshment such as flees satiety. It profits nothing to carry an empty belly for two or three days if the fast is at once buried and compensated by fullness.
The mind at once grows sluggish when it is filled, and the well-watered soil sprouts the thorns of lusts. If ever you perceive the outer man sighing for the flower of youth, and, after taking food, when you are laid down in your little bed the sweet parade of lusts shakes you, seize the shield of faith, in which the fiery arrows of the devil are quenched. 'They are all adulterers, their hearts like an oven.' But do you, accompanying the footsteps of Christ and intent upon his words, say: 'Did not our heart burn within us on the way, while Jesus opened to us the Scriptures?' and this: 'Your word is fiery, and your servant has loved it.' It is difficult for the human soul not to love, and it is necessary that our mind be drawn to some affections or other; the love of the flesh is overcome by the love of the spirit;
desire is extinguished by desire. Whatever is diminished on the one side grows on the other. Nay rather, repeat always: 'Upon my bed in the night I sought him whom my soul loves.' 'Mortify,' says the Apostle, 'your members that are upon the earth.' Hence he himself confidently said, 'I live, yet now not I, but Christ lives in me.' He who has mortified his members and walked in an image does not fear to say: 'I have become like a wineskin in the frost'; for whatever moisture was in me has been dried up; and: 'My knees are made weak through fasting'; and: 'I forgot to eat my bread'; 'from the voice of my groaning my bone has cleaved to my flesh.' Be a cicada of the nights; wash your bed each night, water your couch with tears.
Watch and be like a sparrow alone upon the housetop. Sing with the spirit, sing also with the mind: 'Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who is merciful to all your iniquities, who heals all your infirmities and redeems your life from corruption.' Which of us can say from the heart: 'For I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping'? Ought I not to weep, ought I not to groan, when the serpent again invites me to unlawful foods, when he wishes to clothe me, cast out from the paradise of virginity, with garments of skins, which Elijah, returning to paradise, threw down upon the earth? What have I to do with pleasure, which perishes in a moment? What have I to do with this sweet and death-dealing song of the sirens?
I would not be subject to that sentence which was passed upon a condemned human being: 'In pain and anguish you shall bring forth, woman'—this law is not mine—'and your turning shall be toward your husband.' Let her turning be toward her husband, who has not Christ for her husband; and at the last 'you shall die the death' is the end of that wedlock: my resolve is without sex. Let marriage have its own time and title: for me virginity is dedicated in Mary and in Christ. Let someone say: 'And do you dare to disparage marriage, which was blessed by the Lord?' It is no disparagement of marriage when virginity is preferred to it. No one compares a bad thing with a good. Let married women too glory, since they are second to virgins. 'Increase,' he says, 'and multiply, and fill the earth.'
Let him increase and multiply who is to fill the earth: your company is in the heavens. 'Increase and multiply': this edict is fulfilled after paradise, and nakedness, and the fig-leaves that presaged the itching of marriage. Let him marry and be given in marriage who eats his bread in the sweat of his face, for whom the earth brings forth thistles and thorns, whose grass is choked by briars: my seed is fruitful with a hundredfold produce. 'Not all receive the word of God, but those to whom it is given.' Let necessity make another a eunuch; for me, let it be the will. 'A time for embracing, and a time to keep the hands from an embrace; a time for casting stones, and a time for gathering them.' After sons of Abraham were begotten from the hardness of the nations, the holy stones began to roll upon the earth.
For they pass through the whirlwinds of this world, and are rolled along in the chariot of God with the swiftness of wheels. Let them stitch together tunics who have lost the seamless tunic from above, whom the wailing of infants delights, at the very dawn of light lamenting with weeping that they were born. Eve was a virgin in paradise; after the garments of skins came the beginning of marriage. Your region is paradise. Keep what you were born, and say: 'Return, O my soul, to your rest.' And that you may know that virginity belongs to nature, but marriage came after transgression: the flesh born of marriage is virgin, rendering back in its fruit what it had lost in its root. 'A rod shall come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up from the root.'
The rod is the mother of the Lord—simple, pure, sincere, with no external germ cleaving to it, and after the likeness of God fruitful in her singleness. The flower of the rod is Christ, who says: 'I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys.' He is also proclaimed in another place a stone cut without hands from the mountain, the prophecy signifying that a virgin was to be born from a virgin. For hands are taken to mean the work of marriage, as in that passage: 'His left hand is under my head, and his right hand shall embrace me.' To the meaning of this sense agrees also that fact: that the animals which are led two by two into the ark by Noah are unclean—for an uneven number is clean.
so too Moses and Joshua son of Nun are commanded to walk with bare feet upon the holy ground, and the disciples are sent to preach the Gospel without the burden of shoes and the bonds of skins; the soldiers, having divided the garments of Jesus by lot, had no sandals to take away. For the Lord could not have what he had forbidden in his servants. I praise marriage, I praise wedlock, but because they beget virgins for me: I gather roses from thorns, gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell. 'Shall he who ploughs, plough all day long?' Shall he not also rejoice in the fruit of his labour? Marriage is more honoured, since what is born of it is more loved. Why do you envy, mother, your daughter?
She was nourished with your milk, brought forth from your own womb, grew up in your bosom; you guarded her with watchful devotion: are you indignant that she chose not to be a soldier's wife, but a king's? She has bestowed a great benefit upon you: you have begun to be the mother-in-law of God. 'Concerning virgins,' says the Apostle, 'I have no commandment of the Lord.' Why? Because that he himself might be a virgin was not a matter of command, but of his own will. Nor indeed are those to be heard who pretend that he had a wife, since, while discoursing on continence and urging perpetual chastity, he added: 'I wish that all were as I myself am,' and further on: 'But I say to the unmarried and to widows: it is good for them if they so remain, even as I,' and in another place:
Have we not the right to lead about wives, as also the rest of the apostles?' Why then has he no commandment of the Lord concerning virginity? Because that is of greater reward which is not compelled but offered; for if virginity had been commanded, marriage would have seemed to be taken away, and it would have been most harsh to compel against nature and to wring the life of angels from human beings, and in a certain manner to condemn what was created. There was a different blessedness under the old law. 'Blessed is he who has seed in Zion and kinsfolk in Jerusalem,' and cursed is the barren woman who did not bear, and: 'Your sons are like young olive plants round about your table,' and the promise of riches, and: 'There shall not be a feeble one among your tribes.' Now it is said: 'Do not think yourself a dry tree;
you have in the heavens an everlasting place, better than that of sons and daughters.' Now the poor are blessed, and Lazarus is preferred to the rich man in his purple; now he who is weak is the stronger. The world was empty, and—to say nothing of the types—the blessing of children was the only one. For this reason Abraham, already old, is joined to Keturah, and Jacob is bought with mandrakes, and beautiful Rachel, a figure of the Church, laments her closed womb. But gradually, as the harvest grew, the reaper was sent in. Elijah was a virgin, Elisha a virgin; many sons of the prophets were virgins. To Jeremiah it is said, 'And you shall not take a wife.' Sanctified in the womb, with captivity drawing near, he is forbidden to take a wife. In other words the Apostle says the same thing:
'I think therefore that this is good because of the present necessity: that it is good for a man so to be.' What is this necessity that takes away the joys of marriage? 'The time is shortened; it remains that even those who have wives should be as though they had none.' Nebuchadnezzar is at hand: 'the lion has come up from his lair.' To what end would I have wedlock serving a most proud king? To what end little ones, whom the prophet bewails, saying: 'The tongue of the suckling has cleaved to its palate for thirst; the little ones have asked for bread, and there was none to break it for them?' There was found, therefore, as we have said, this good of continence in men only, while Eve continually brought forth in pains.
But after a virgin conceived in her womb and bore for us a child, whose government is upon his shoulder, God mighty, Father of the age to come, the curse was loosed. Death through Eve, life through Mary. And therefore the gift of virginity flowed more richly into women, because it began from a woman. As soon as the Son of God set foot upon the earth, he established for himself a new household, so that he who was adored by angels in heaven might have angels also on earth. Then Judith, being continent, cut off the head of Holofernes; then Haman, which is interpreted 'iniquity,' was burned in his own fire; then James and John, leaving their father, net, and boat, followed the Saviour, forsaking alike the affection of blood, the bonds of the world, and the care of the household;
then for the first time was heard: 'He who wishes to come after me, let him deny his very self and take up his cross and follow me.' For no soldier goes to battle with a wife. A disciple who wished to go to bury his father is not permitted. 'The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head': lest perhaps you be saddened if you dwell in a narrow place. 'He who is without a wife is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please God; but he who is with a wife is anxious about the things of this world, how he may please his wife. The woman and the virgin are divided: she who is not married thinks upon the things of the Lord, that she may be holy in body and spirit; but she who is married thinks upon the things of the world, how she may please her husband.'
How many troubles marriage has, and by how many anxieties it is bound, I think I have briefly set forth in that book which we published against Helvidius concerning the perpetual virginity of blessed Mary. To repeat the same things now would be too long, and, if it pleases anyone, he can draw from that little spring. But, lest I seem to have omitted it entirely, I will now say this: that since the Apostle bids us pray without ceasing, and he who pays the marriage debt in wedlock cannot pray, either we pray always and are virgins, or we cease to pray that we may serve wedlock. 'And if a virgin marry,' he says, 'she has not sinned; yet such shall have tribulation of the flesh.'
And at the beginning of the little book I stated by way of preface that I would say either nothing at all or very little concerning the straits of marriage, and now I give the same warning. But if it pleases you to know by how many troubles the virgin is free and by how many the wife is bound, read Tertullian's work to a philosopher friend, and his other little books on virginity, and the excellent volume of blessed Cyprian, and the works composed in verse and prose upon this subject by Pope Damasus, and the little works which our own Ambrose recently wrote to his sister. In these he poured himself out in such eloquence that whatever pertains to the praise of virgins he sought out, arranged, and expressed. But we proceed by a different path: we do not extol virginity, but preserve it.
Nor does it suffice to know what is good, unless what has been chosen is guarded more attentively; for the one is a matter of judgment, the other of labour; and the one is shared with many, the other with few. 'He who perseveres to the end,' he says, 'shall be saved,' and: 'Many are called, but few are chosen.' Therefore I adjure you before God and Christ Jesus and his elect angels, that you do not lightly bring out into public the vessels of the temple, which it was granted only to the priests to see, lest any profane person look upon the sanctuary of God. Uzzah, touching the ark which was not lawful for him to touch, was struck down by sudden death. Nor indeed was a vessel of gold and silver so dear to God as the temple of a virginal body. The shadow went before; now is the truth.
You indeed speak simply and, being kindly, do not despise even those unknown to you; but unchaste eyes see otherwise. They do not know how to consider the beauty of souls, but of bodies. Hezekiah showed the treasure of God to the Assyrians, but the Assyrians saw what they coveted. And so, when Judaea was shaken by frequent wars, the vessels of the Lord were first captured and carried off, and amid banquets and troops of concubines—because it is a triumph of vices to defile what is honourable—Belshazzar drinks from the bowls. Do not incline your ear to evil words. Often, speaking something unseemly, they test the judgment of the mind. If you listen gladly, O virgin, to what is said, if you are dissolved into any laughter at ridiculous things, whatever you say they praise, whatever you deny they deny.
They call you witty and holy, and one in whom there is no guile, saying, 'Behold a true handmaid of Christ; behold utter simplicity, not like that other woman—rough, ugly, rustic, forbidding, who perhaps for that very reason could not find a husband.' We are drawn by a natural fault: we gladly favour our flatterers, and, although we answer that we are unworthy and a warm blush suffuses the face, yet inwardly the soul rejoices at its own praise. The bride of Christ is the ark of the covenant, overlaid with gold within and without, the keeper of the law of the Lord. Just as in that ark there was nothing but the tablets of the covenant, so in you let there be no thought from outside. Above this mercy-seat, as above the cherubim, the Lord wishes to sit.
He sends his disciples to loose you upon the colt of an ass from worldly cares, that, leaving behind the straw and bricks of Egypt, you may follow Moses into the wilderness and enter the land of promise. Let there be no one to hinder—not mother, not sister, not kinswoman, not brother; the Lord has need of you. But if they should wish to hinder, let them fear the scourges of Pharaoh, who, being unwilling to let go the people of God to worship him, suffered those things which are written. Jesus, entering the temple, cast out all that did not belong to the temple. For God is jealous, and does not wish the house of his Father to become a den of thieves.
Otherwise, where money is counted, where there are cages of doves and simplicity is slain, where in a virginal breast the care of worldly business seethes, straightway the veil of the temple is rent; the Bridegroom rises up angry and says: 'Your house shall be left to you desolate.' Read the Gospel and see how Mary, sitting at the feet of the Lord, is preferred to the busyness of Martha—and certainly Martha, by the diligent office of hospitality, was preparing a feast for the Lord and the disciples: 'Martha, Martha,' he says, 'you are anxious and troubled about many things, but few things are necessary, or one. Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.' Be a Mary yourself; prefer doctrine to food.
Let your sisters run to and fro and seek how they may have Christ as their guest; but do you, having once cast off the burden of the world, sit at the feet of the Lord and say: 'I have found him whom my soul was seeking; I will hold him and not let him go.' And let him answer: 'One is my dove, my perfect one; one is she to her mother, chosen of her that bore her'—namely, the heavenly Jerusalem. Let the secret of your chamber always guard you; let the Bridegroom always sport with you within. You pray: you speak to the Bridegroom; you read: he speaks to you. And when sleep overcomes you, he will come behind the wall and will put his hand through the opening and touch your belly; and trembling you will rise up and say: 'I am wounded with love'; and again you will hear from him:
'A garden enclosed is my sister, my bride; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed.' Beware lest you go out of the house, lest you wish to see the daughters of a strange land, although you have patriarchs for brothers and may rejoice in Israel your parent: Dinah, having gone out, is corrupted. I would not have you seek the Bridegroom through the streets, I would not have you go around the corners of the city. Though you may say, 'I will rise and go about the city, in the market and the streets, and I will seek him whom my soul loves,' and though you ask, 'Have you seen him whom my soul loves?'—no one will deign to answer you. The Bridegroom cannot be found in the streets—narrow and straight is the way that leads to life. And so it follows: 'I sought him and found him not; I called him and he did not answer me.' And would that it were enough not to have found him!
You will be wounded, you will be stripped bare, and groaning you will tell: 'The watchmen who go about the city found me; they struck me, they wounded me, they took away my veil from me.' But if she who had said, 'I sleep, but my heart wakes,' and, 'A little bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me; he shall abide between my breasts,' suffers this when she goes out, what will become of us, who are still young girls, who, when the Bride enters with the Bridegroom, remain outside? Jesus is jealous; he does not wish your face to be seen by others. Though you may excuse yourself and plead: 'Having drawn my veil, I covered my face; I sought you, I said to you: Tell me, O you whom my soul loves, where you feed your flock;
where you lie down at noon, lest I become as one veiled beside the flocks of your companions,'—he will be indignant, he will swell with anger, and will say: 'If you do not know yourself, O fairest among women, go forth in the footsteps of the flocks and feed your kids beside the tents of the shepherds.' 'You may indeed be fair,' he says, 'and among all women let your beauty be loved by the Bridegroom; yet unless you know yourself and guard your heart with all watchfulness, unless you flee the eyes of young men, you shall go out of my chamber and feed the goats which are to stand on the left hand.' And so, my Eustochium—daughter, lady, fellow-servant, sister (for one name is of age, another of merit; the one of religion, the other of love)—hear Isaiah speaking:
'My people, enter into your chambers, shut your door, hide yourself a little, a very little, until the wrath of the Lord passes over.' Let the foolish virgins wander outside; do you be within with the Bridegroom, for if you shut your door and, according to the precept of the Gospel, pray in secret to your Father, he will come and knock and say: 'Behold, I stand before the door and knock; if anyone opens to me, I will come in and sup with him, and he with me.' And straightway you, full of care, will answer: 'It is the voice of my beloved, knocking: Open to me, my sister, my nearest one, my dove, my perfect one.' Nor is there any reason for you to say: 'I have put off my tunic, how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them?'
Rise up at once and open, lest, while you delay, he pass by and afterward you complain, saying: 'I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had passed by.' For what need is there that the doors of your heart be shut to the Bridegroom? Let them be opened to Christ, let them be shut to the devil, according to that saying: 'If the spirit of one having power ascends over you, do not give place to it.' Daniel in his upper room—for he could not remain in a lowly place—had his windows open toward Jerusalem: do you too keep your windows open, but only such as let in the light, whence you may behold the city of God. Do not open those windows of which it is said: 'Death has entered through your windows.' This too you must avoid more cautiously: that you be not caught by the ardour of vainglory.
'How,' says Jesus, 'can you believe, receiving glory from men?' See what an evil it is, which he who has it cannot believe. But let us say: 'For you are my glorying,' and: 'He who glories, let him glory in the Lord,' and: 'If I still pleased men, I should not be a servant of Christ,' and: 'Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world,' and this: 'In you we shall be praised all the day long,' and: 'In the Lord shall my soul be praised.' When you give alms, let God alone see. When you fast, let your face be cheerful. Let your dress be neither too clean nor squalid, and marked by no peculiarity, lest a crowd of passers-by stop to meet you and you be pointed at with the finger.
A brother has died, the little body of a sister must be borne to burial: beware lest, while you do this too often, you yourself die. Do not wish to seem too religious, nor more humble than is necessary. Do not seek glory by fleeing it. For many, in declining to have witnesses of their poverty, mercy, and fasting, desire in this very thing to please—that they scorn to please; and in a wondrous manner praise, while it is shunned, is sought after. Of the other perturbations in which the mind of man rejoices, sickens, hopes, and fears, I find that many are strangers; from this vice very few indeed are they who have been free, and he is the best who, as in a beautiful body, is besprinkled only with the rare blemish of moles.
Nor indeed do I warn you not to glory in riches, not to boast of the nobility of your family, not to prefer yourself to others: I know your humility, I know that you speak from the heart: 'Lord, my heart is not lifted up, neither are mine eyes lofty.' I know that in you, as in your mother, pride, through which the devil fell, has no place whatsoever. And so I have forborne to write about these things. For it is most foolish to teach what the one you would teach already knows.
But lest this very thing beget in you a boastfulness—that you have despised the world's boastfulness—lest a silent thought creep in, so that, because you have ceased to please in gilded garments, you should try to please in squalor; and lest, when you come into an assembly of brothers or of sisters, you sit upon a lowly stool, plead your own unworthiness, deliberately thin your voice as though worn out by fastings, and, imitating the gait of one fainting, lean upon another's shoulders. For there are indeed certain women who disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to fast; who, the moment they catch sight of anyone, groan aloud, lower their brows, and with veiled face scarcely leave one eye free for seeing.
Their dress is dark, their girdle of sackcloth, hands and feet grimy—only the belly, since it cannot be seen, seethes with food. Of these that psalm is sung daily: 'God hath scattered the bones of them that please themselves.' Other women, changing their dress for a man's attire, blush to be women, as they were born; they cut off their hair and shamelessly raise up faces like eunuchs'. There are those who clothe themselves in haircloth and in cowls cunningly wrought, that they may return to infancy, imitating owls and screech-owls. But lest I seem to argue only about women, flee also the men whom you see loaded with chains, who wear women's hair against the Apostle's rule, goats' beards, a black cloak, and feet bare to endure the cold. All these are the arguments of the devil. Such an one Rome once bewailed in Antimus,