Let even this suffice as counsel toward widowhood, especially among us: the burdensomeness of children, to the rearing of whom men are compelled by the laws, since every wise man would never have willingly desired children. What then will you do, if you have filled a new wife by your own contrivance? Will you dissolve the conception by drugs? I think it is even less lawful for us to harm one being born than one already born. But perhaps at that time, when your wife is pregnant, you will dare to ask of God a remedy for so great an anxiety — a remedy which, when it lay within your own power, you refused? Some barren woman, I suppose, will be provided for, one now even of a colder age. Prudently enough, and above all faithfully. For we have believed that none, if God will it, is barren or too old to bring forth.
This may indeed the more come to pass, if anyone by presumption of this providence of his provoke God's rivalry. In short, we know a certain one of the brethren who, when on account of his daughter he had sought a wife in a second marriage as being barren, was made a father again just as he was made a husband again. XIII. To this my exhortation, most beloved brother, there are added also secular examples, which have often been set before us even for a testimony, since whatever is good and pleasing to God is recognized even by outsiders and honored with their testimony. In short, monogamy is held in such high honor among the heathen that even for virgins lawfully marrying a bridesmatron married but once is employed; and if this be for the sake of an omen, it is assuredly the omen of a good thing;
likewise, so that in certain solemnities and offices the place of one married but once takes precedence. Certainly the Flaminica is none but a woman married once; and this is also the law of the Flamen. For as to the fact that even to the Pontifex Maximus himself it is not lawful to repeat marriage, that assuredly is the glory of monogamy. But since Satan affects the sacraments of God, it is our own challenge — nay, our own confusion — if we are sluggish to render to God that continence which certain persons render to the devil, now by virginity, now by perpetual widowhood. We know the virgins of Vesta, and of Juno at a town of Achaia, and of Apollo at Delphi, and of Minerva and Diana in certain places. We know also continent men, and indeed the priests of that Egyptian bull;
and, as for women, those of the African Ceres, to whom they even grow old in a marriage of their own accord renounced, thenceforth shunning contact with males, even to the kisses of their sons. The devil has indeed found, after luxury, even a chastity that destroys, so that the Christian may be the more guilty who has refused a chastity that preserves. There will be for us, as a testimony, certain secular women too who have won fame for their obstinacy in being married but once: a certain Dido, who, a fugitive on foreign soil, where she ought rather of her own accord to have desired marriage with the king, chose on the contrary to burn rather than to marry, that she might not experience a second marriage; or that Lucretia, who, though she once suffered another man by force and against her will, washed away with her own blood her defiled flesh, that she might no longer live as one no longer married to but a single husband.
You may find, if you search more carefully, more examples of our own, and indeed ones superior to those others, inasmuch as it is a greater thing to live in chastity than to die for it. You may more easily lay down your life because you have lost a good, than by living preserve that for which you would rather die. How many men, then, and how many women in the ecclesiastical orders are enrolled for their continence, who have preferred to be wedded to God, who have restored the honor of their flesh, and who have already dedicated themselves as sons of that age to come — slaying in themselves the concupiscence of lust, and all that which could not be admitted within paradise! Whence it is to be presumed that these who wish at last to be received within paradise ought to cease from that thing from which paradise remained untouched. Text edited by Claudio Moreschini, SC319, Paris: Cerf, 1985.