文集 第 19 章 第 1/3 段

The heretics take marriage away; the Psychics heap it on. The former do not marry even once; the latter marry more than once. What are you about, O law of the Creator? Between alien eunuchs and your own charioteers you complain as much of domestic subservience as of outside disdain; accordingly they wound you who abuse marriage no less than those who do not use it. But neither is continence of this sort to be praised, because it is heretical, nor is license to be defended, because it is psychic; the one blasphemes, the other runs riot; the one destroys the God of marriage, the other confounds Him. With us, however — whom the recognition of spiritual gifts rightly makes to be called Spiritual — continence is religious, with a license that is modest; both stand with the Creator: continence honors the law of marriage, license tempers it;

the one is not constrained, the other is governed; the one has free choice, this one a limit. We know one marriage, even as one God. The law of marriage bears the greater honor where it has also modesty. But to the Psychics, who do not receive the Spirit, the things that are of the Spirit are not pleasing. Thus, while the things of the Spirit do not please, the things of the flesh will please, as being contrary to the Spirit. 'The flesh,' he says, 'lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.' And what will the flesh lust for, save the things that are more of the flesh? For which cause, even in the beginning, the flesh was made a stranger to the Spirit: 'My Spirit,' He says, 'shall not abide in these men for ever, because they are flesh.'

And so they reproach the discipline of monogamy as heresy, and for no cause more are they compelled to deny the Paraclete than when they reckon Him the founder of a new discipline — and indeed a most harsh one to them — so that on this first of all we must take our stand, in a general re-examination: whether it can be that the Paraclete taught anything of the sort which could be counted either new, against catholic tradition, or burdensome, against the light burden. Concerning both, however, the Lord Himself has pronounced; for He said: 'I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now';

'when the Holy Spirit is come, He shall lead you into all truth' — He surely intimates well enough that that One would teach things which both could be thought new, as never before published, and somewhat burdensome, as for that reason not published. 'Therefore,' you say, 'by this line of argument anything whatever, new and burdensome, could be ascribed to the Paraclete, even if it came from an adversary spirit.' Not at all; for an adversary spirit would appear from the diversity of its preaching, first adulterating the rule of faith, and so adulterating the order of discipline — because that which is prior in rank, its corruption comes first, that is, the corruption of faith, which is prior to discipline: first must a man be a heretic as toward God, and then as toward the ordinance.

But the Paraclete, having many things to teach which the Lord deferred to Him, will, according to the fore-appointment, first bear witness to Christ Himself — such as we believe Him, with the whole order of God the Creator — and will glorify Him and make mention of Him; and thus, from that principal rule, He will reveal those many things which pertain to disciplines, the integrity of the preaching speaking their faith for them, though they be new, because they are now revealed, though burdensome, because not even now are they endured — yet of no other Christ than He who said that He had also many other things which would be taught by the Paraclete, no less burdensome than those things by which men at that time could not yet be borne. But whether monogamy is burdensome, let the still shameless weakness of the flesh look to that;

but whether it is new, let this meanwhile be established. For we say this further: even if the Paraclete had today defined total and entire virginity or continence, so as not to permit the fervor of the flesh to be foamed off even in a single marriage, not even so would He seem to introduce anything new, since the Lord Himself opens the kingdom of heaven to eunuchs, being Himself indeed a eunuch; looking to whom the Apostle also, being for that reason himself made a eunuch, prefers continence. 'But,' you say, 'with the right of marrying kept safe.' Kept safe, plainly — and we shall see to what extent — yet none the less broken down on that side whereon he prefers continence. 'It is good,' he says, 'for a man not to touch a woman'; therefore it is evil to touch;

for nothing is contrary to a good except an evil — and that therefore it remains that even those who have wives should be as though not having them, so much the more that those who have none ought not to have. He gives also the reasons why he so counsels: that the unmarried think about God, but the married, how each may please his own spouse in marriage. And I can maintain that what is permitted is not purely good; for what is purely good is not permitted, but is lawful of itself; a permission has its cause sometimes even in necessity. In short, in this case it is not the will of the one permitting that men marry; for he wills something else: 'I wish,' he says, 'you all to be as I also am.' And when he shows that it is better, what indeed does he confirm that he wills, save what he has already set forth as better?

And so, if he permits something other than what he willed, permitting not from will but from necessity, he shows that not to be purely good which he indulged unwillingly. In short, when he says, 'It is better to marry than to burn,' what kind of good is that to be understood, which is better even than a punishment — which cannot seem better save when compared with the worst? A good is that which of itself holds this name, without comparison — I do not say with an evil, but even with another good — so that, even if it be overshadowed when compared with another good, it none the less remains in the name of good. But if it is forced to be called good only by comparison with an evil, it is not so much a good as a kind of lesser evil, which, being darkened by a higher evil, is driven to the name of good. Take away, in short, the condition, so that you say:

'It is better to marry than to burn' — and I ask whether you would dare to say, 'It is better to marry,' without adding wherein it is better. Therefore it is now not better, and since it is not better, neither is it good, the condition being removed which, while it makes that thing better than another, thereby forces it to be held good. It is better to lose one eye than two; yet if you depart from the comparison of the two, it will not be better to have one eye, because neither is it good. What now, if he adapts the whole indulgence of marrying from his own, that is, from human, judgment, out of that necessity of which we spoke, namely, that it is better to marry than to burn? In short, turning to the other case, by saying:

'But to the married I give charge, not I, but the Lord,' he shows that those things which he had said above were not of the Lord's authority, but of human estimation. But where he turns men's minds back to continence — 'But I wish you all to be so' — 'yet I think,' he says, 'that I too have the Spirit of God,' so that, if he had indulged anything out of necessity, he might revoke it by the authority of the Holy Spirit. And John too, warning that we ought so to walk even as the Lord did, surely admonished us to walk also according to the holiness of the flesh. So, more plainly: 'And everyone,' he says, 'who has this hope in Him purifies himself, even as He also is pure.' For elsewhere too: 'Be holy, even as He was holy' — namely, in the flesh;

for of the spirit he would not have said it, since the spirit is of itself acknowledged as holy and does not await an admonition to holiness, which is its own proper nature; but the flesh is taught holiness — the flesh which in Christ too was holy. Therefore, if all these things blot out the license of marrying, both when the condition of the license is examined and when the preference of continence is laid upon it, why could not the same Spirit, coming after the apostles to lead the discipline into all truth by degrees of the seasons — according to that of Ecclesiastes, 'There is a time for everything' — now impose the final clasp upon the flesh, now calling men away from marriage not obliquely but openly, since the time has now been made more concentrated, some hundred and sixty years being drawn out from that time onward?

Would you not yourself reconsider within yourself that this discipline is old, foreshown even then in the flesh and in the will of the Lord, and thereafter in the counsels no less than the examples of His apostles? 'Long ago we were destined to this holiness; the Paraclete introduces nothing new; what He forewarned, He defines; what He sustained, He demands.' And now, reconsidering these things, you will easily persuade yourself that it much more befitted the Paraclete to preach single marriages, He who could have preached none at all; and that it is the more to be believed that He tempered what it would have become Him even to have taken away. If you understand what Christ wills, in this too you ought to recognize the Paraclete as an advocate, in that He excuses your weakness from total continence. Let the mention of the Paraclete now withdraw, as of some author of our own;

Let us unroll the common records of the ancient Scriptures. By these very texts it is shown by us that the discipline of monogamy is neither new nor foreign, but rather ancient and proper to Christians, so that you may regard the Paraclete as the restorer of it rather than its founder. As concerns its antiquity, what more ancient form can be brought forward than the very origin of the human race? God fashioned one woman for the man, one rib of his being plucked out, and that surely from among several. Moreover, in the very preface of that work He says: 'It is not good for man to be alone; let us make him a helper.' For He would have said 'helpers' if He had destined him for several wives. He also added a law concerning the future, since it was said by way of prophecy:

'And the two shall be in one flesh'—not three nor more; moreover, they are no longer two, if they are more. The law stood firm; and so the union of marriage persisted in the ancestors of the race down to the very end—not because there were no other women, but because for this reason there were none, lest the first-fruits of the race should be defiled by a double marriage. Otherwise, had God so willed, it could even have been possible; certainly He would have taken from the multitude of his daughters, having Eve no less from his own bones and flesh, if this could be done piously. But when the first crime, homicide, was inaugurated in fratricide, no crime was so worthy of second place as a double wedding; for it makes no difference whether one man has had two wives one at a time, or two women have each together taken two husbands: the number of the joined and of the separated is the same.

Yet God's institution, once suffering violence through Lamech, thereafter stood firm to the very end of that race; there arose no second Lamech as husband of two women: Scripture denies what it does not note. Other iniquities provoked the Flood—iniquities but once indulged, such as they were, yet not seventy times seven, as two marriages deserved. Moreover, the reformation of the second human race is reckoned by a monogamous mother: again two undertake to grow and multiply into one flesh—Noah and his wife and their sons in single marriages. Even among the animals themselves monogamy is recognized, lest even the beasts should be born of adultery: 'Of all beasts,' He says, 'of all flesh, two shalt thou bring into the ark, that they may live with thee; they shall be male and female';

'of the flying creatures according to their kind, and of all the serpents of the earth according to their kind, two of every sort shall come in to thee, male and female.' In the same fashion He commands that even the sevens be chosen from pairs, from one male and one female. What more shall I say? Even the unclean birds were not permitted to enter with two females apiece. This much, then, as regards the testimony of our beginnings, the patronage of our origin, and the prior judgement of the divine institution.

This surely is a law, not a mere memorial, since, if it was so done from the beginning, we find ourselves directed to the beginning by Christ, who—when in the question of divorce He says that this was permitted by Moses because of their hardness of heart, but that from the beginning it was not so—without doubt recalls the indissolubility of marriage to its beginning; and therefore those whom God from the beginning joined into one flesh, the two, today man shall not separate. The Apostle also says, writing to the Ephesians, that God purposed in Himself, for the dispensation of the fullness of the times, to gather back all things again unto the Head, that is, unto the beginning, in Christ, both the things which are above the heavens and those upon the earth, in Him.

So too the Lord took upon Himself the two letters of Greece, the first and the last, as the figures of the beginning and the end meeting together in Himself, in order that, just as Alpha rolls onward to Omega and again Omega is folded back to Alpha, so He might show that in Himself is both the running of the beginning down to the end and the return of the end back to the beginning, so that every dispensation, terminating in Him through whom it was begun—namely through the Word of God, who was made flesh—might accordingly end just as it also began.

And to such a degree are all things in Christ recalled to the beginning, that even faith has returned from circumcision to the wholeness of that flesh, as it was from the beginning; and freedom of foods with abstinence from blood alone, as it was from the beginning; and the indissolubility of marriage, as it was from the beginning; and the restraining of divorce, which from the beginning was not; and finally, the whole man is recalled into paradise, where he was from the beginning. Why then should Adam not also refer back to us at least as a monogamist—Adam, who can be as whole as he was when he was sent forth from there? As concerns, therefore, the restoration of the beginning, the reasoning both of your ordering and of your hope demands of you that which was from the beginning;

according to the beginning, which is both reckoned to you in Adam and re-reckoned in Noah, choose in which of the two you would count your beginning: in both the discipline of monogamy defends you for itself. But even if the beginning transmits to the end as Alpha to Omega, so that the end likewise remits to the beginning as Omega to Alpha, and thus our reckoning is transferred into Christ, from the animal into the spiritual—for not first is that which is spiritual, but that which is animal, and afterward that which is spiritual—let us accordingly see whether you owe this very same thing to this second reckoning also, whether it befits that the last Adam too should conform you to the same form as the first, since the last Adam, that is Christ, was wholly unmarried, as also was the first Adam before his exile.

But, having given by the example of His own flesh a concession to your weakness, the more perfect Adam—that is, Christ—more perfect also in this respect, that He was more entire, meets you, if you are willing, as a eunuch in the flesh; but if you are not equal to this, He comes to you as a monogamist in the spirit, having one Church as His bride according to the figure which the Apostle interprets as that great sacrament, concerning Christ and the Church—the two corresponding to carnal monogamy through the spiritual. You see, therefore, how, even in Christ, when you are being reckoned anew, you cannot enroll Him without the profession of monogamy, unless you are in the flesh what He is in the spirit—although you ought equally to be also in the flesh what He was. But let us still seek out for ourselves certain founders of our origin.

For to certain people the monogamous parents Adam and Noah are not pleasing; perhaps not even Christ. So at last they appeal to Abraham, though they are forbidden to acknowledge any father besides God. Well, let Abraham now be our father: let Paul be so also, for he says, 'In the Gospel I begot you.' Show yourself Abraham's son as well; for the reckoning is not indiscriminate in his case: there is a definite time in which he is your father. For if we are counted sons of Abraham by faith, as the Apostle teaches, saying to the Galatians, 'You surely know that they who are of faith, these are the sons of Abraham,' when did Abraham believe God and it was reckoned to him for righteousness? While still, I suppose, in monogamy, for he was not yet in circumcision.

But if afterward he was changed into both—into digamy through concubinage with the handmaid, and into circumcision through the seal of the covenant—you cannot acknowledge him as father except at that time when he believed God, since it is according to faith that you are his son, not according to the flesh; or if you follow the later Abraham as father, so as to follow him as a digamist too, then receive also the circumcised one. If you reject the circumcised one, then you will refuse also the digamist; you will not be able to mix together his two dispensations, which are diverse from each other in a twofold manner. Digamy began together with circumcision, and monogamy together with uncircumcision: if you receive digamy, admit circumcision also; if you uphold uncircumcision, you are bound also to monogamy.

Nay, you are the son of Abraham's monogamy just as you are of his uncircumcision, so that, if you are now circumcised, you are not his son, because you will not be of faith, but of the seal of the faith that was justified in uncircumcision. Having the Apostle, learn along with the Galatians. Accordingly, even if you have now brought digamy upon yourself, you are not his whose faith preceded in monogamy. For although he is afterward named father of many nations, yet it is of those who, from a faith preceding digamy, may be counted sons of Abraham. From then on, let the matters look to themselves: figures are one thing, forms another, images another, definitions another; images pass away when fulfilled, definitions abide to be fulfilled; images prophesy, definitions govern.

What that digamy of Abraham portended, the same Apostle teaches, interpreting it as pertaining to both testaments, just as he determines that our seed is likewise called in Isaac. If you are of the freewoman, you belong to Isaac; he certainly endured but one marriage. These, then, as I suppose, are they among whom I am reckoned. The others I know not; and if I look around at their examples—of a certain David forcing marriages upon himself even through bloodshed, of a certain Solomon rich even in wives—being bidden to follow the better, you have also Joseph, husband of one wife (and on this account I dare to call him better than his father), you have Moses, God's counselor at close hand, you have Aaron the chief priest.

The second Moses too—that is, of the second people, he who led the image of us into the promise of God, in whom the name of the Lord was first consecrated—was no digamist. After the ancient examples of the original persons, let us pass likewise to the ancient records of the legal Scriptures, that we may treat in order of the whole of our equipment.

And since certain people at times declare that they have nothing to do with the Law—which Christ did not dissolve but fulfilled—while at other times they snatch up such things of the Law as they please, we too plainly say this, that the Law has passed away in such a way that its burdens indeed (which, according to the sentence of the Apostles, not even the fathers had strength to bear) have been remitted, but those things which pertain to righteousness not only remain reserved, but are even enlarged, so that, namely, our righteousness may be able to abound over the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. And if righteousness, then surely chastity as well.

If, then, because it is enjoined in the Law that a man take in marriage his brother's wife when the brother has died childless, in order to raise up seed to his brother, and this can happen rather often to one and the same person—according to that crafty question of the Sadducees—men therefore suppose that on this ground frequency of marriages is elsewhere permitted, they will first have to understand the reasoning of the precept itself, and thus they will know that its reasoning, now ceasing, is among those things which have been done away. It was necessary to succeed to the marriage of a brother who had died childless: first, because that ancient blessing had still to run its course, 'Increase and abound'; next, because the offenses of the fathers were exacted even from the sons; thirdly, because eunuchs and the barren were held in disgrace.

And so, lest those be judged accursed likewise who had departed childless, not through any fault of nature, but through being forestalled by death, therefore for such men a substitute and, as it were, posthumous offspring was provided out of their own stock. But when the end of the times, at the Apostle's leading, abolished the 'Increase and abound'—'It remains,' he says, 'that both they who have wives be as though they had none, because the time is contracted'—and the sour grape eaten by the fathers ceased to set the children's teeth on edge—for each shall die in his own sin—and eunuchs not only were freed from disgrace, but even earned grace, being invited into the kingdom of heaven: the law of succeeding to a brother's marriage having been buried, the contrary of it prevailed, namely, of not succeeding to a brother's marriage.

And thus, as we have said before, that which has ceased to be valid, its reasoning having ceased, cannot lend its argument to something else. Therefore the wife of a deceased husband shall not marry—she who, if she marries, will surely marry a brother; for we are all brethren; and she who is to marry has to marry in the Lord, that is, not a heathen but a brother, since even the old Law removes the marriage of aliens. But since it is provided also in Leviticus, 'Whoever shall take his brother's wife, it is uncleanness, it is a shame; he shall die childless,' without doubt, while he is forbidden to marry anew, she too is forbidden, having no one to marry except a brother. How, then, this will square both with the Apostle and with the Law—which he does not assail in its entirety—will be shown when we come to his epistle itself.

Meanwhile, as concerns the Law, its arguments suit us the better; for the same Law forbids priests to marry anew; it also bids that a priest's daughter, being a widow or cast off, if she has no seed, return to her father's house and be nourished from his bread. Therefore, 'if she has no seed'—not that, if she has, she may marry again (for how much more does she not marry if she has children?)—but that, if she has them, she may rather be nourished by her son than by her father, so that the son too may carry out God's precept, 'Honor father and mother.' But us Jesus, the supreme and great Priest of the Father, clothing us with His own, has made priests to God His Father—according to John—since they who are baptized in Christ have put on Christ.

For He also recalls that young man who was hastening to his father's funeral rites, in order to show that we are called priests by Him, whom the Law forbade to attend the burial of their parents: 'Over no dead soul,' He says, 'shall the priest enter, and over his father and over his mother he shall not be defiled.' Ought we, then, to observe this interdict too? By no means; for our one Father, God, lives, and our Mother, the Church, and we are not dead who live to God, nor do we bury the dead, since they too live in Christ; assuredly we are priests called by Christ, debtors to monogamy by the ancient law of God, which then prophesied of us in His priests.

Now, turning to the law properly our own, that is, the Gospel, by what sort of examples are we received, as we come to its sentences? Behold, at once, as if on the threshold, two presiding patrons of Christian sanctity meet us, monogamy and continence: the one chaste in Zacharias the priest, the other entire in John the forerunner; the one appeasing God, the other proclaiming Christ; the one proclaiming a priest in full, the other showing forth one greater than a prophet—namely, him who not only proclaimed or pointed to Christ before men, but even baptized Christ. For who could more worthily consecrate the Lord's body than such flesh as both conceived it and gave it birth?

And Christ indeed a virgin brought forth, one who was to marry but once after the birth, so that both titles of sanctity might be discharged in Christ's reckoning through a mother both virgin and wife of one man. But when the infant is presented in the Temple, who takes Him into his hands, who first recognizes Him in the spirit? A man just and cautious, and assuredly no digamist—lest Christ should soon be more worthily proclaimed by a woman, an aged widow and wife of one man, who, being also dedicated to the Temple, sufficiently foreshadowed in herself what sort of persons ought to cleave to the spiritual Temple, that is, the Church. Such witnesses the Lord, when an infant, having found, had no others also when grown.

Peter alone I find to have been a husband, by reason of his mother-in-law; a monogamist I presume him to be, by reason of the Church, which upon him was to place every grade of its order composed of monogamists. Since I do not find the rest to have been husbands, I must of necessity understand them either as eunuchs or as continent. For it is not the case that, if among the Greeks women and wives are reckoned by a common term, for the ease of custom—though there is a proper term for 'wives'—we should on that account so interpret Paul as if he showed that the apostles had wives. For if he had been discussing marriages—which he does in what follows, where the Apostle could rather have named some example—he would rightly seem to say: 'For have we not power to lead about wives, as also the rest of the apostles, and Cephas?'

But when he adds those things which, concerning the provision of sustenance, show his abstinence, saying, 'For have we not power to eat and to drink?', he does not point to wives led about by the apostles—which even they who have none nevertheless have power to eat and drink—but simply to the women who, attending upon them by the same practice as they did upon the Lord, ministered to them. But indeed, if Christ reproves the scribes and Pharisees for sitting in the seat of Moses and not doing the things they taught, how is it that He would set upon His own seat those who would remember rather to enjoin the sanctity of the flesh than also to practice it—which He would insinuate to them by every means, as both to be taught and to be done?

First by His own example; then by other arguments—when He says that of children is the kingdom of heaven; when He makes others, after their marriages, companions of these as children; when He calls us to the simplicity of the dove, a bird not only harmless but also chaste, whom one male alone knows; when He denies to the Samaritan woman a husband, so as to show that a multiple husband is an adulterer; when, in the revelation of His glory, out of so many saints and prophets He prefers to have with Him Moses and Elijah, the one a monogamist, the other a eunuch (for Elijah was none other than John, who came in the power and spirit of Elijah); when that man, a glutton and a drinker, a frequenter of luncheons and suppers with publicans and sinners, dines but once at a single wedding, though surely many were marrying;

for He would have wished to celebrate them as often as they were held. But these arguments might rather be thought forced from conjectures, if the very sentences had not stood by them—the sentences which the Lord uttered in His treatment of divorce, when He now forbids what was once permitted: first, because from the beginning it was not so, as neither was the number of marriages; then, because whom God has joined man shall not separate, that is, lest he act against the Lord. For He alone shall separate who also joined; and He shall separate, not however through the hardness of divorce, which He rebukes and restrains, but through the debt of death, since one of two sparrows does not fall to the ground without the Father's will.