Only in the Lord

Not long ago, my dearest fellow servant in the Lord, I set out for you at some length, as far as I was able, what course a holy woman ought to take once her marriage has been brought to an end — however it ended. Now let us turn to the next best advice, allowing for human weakness. I am pushed to it by the example of certain women who, when the chance of abstinence was handed to them, by a divorce or by the death of a husband, not only threw away the chance at so great a good, but when they married again would not even keep in mind the rule that they are to marry, above all, in the Lord. [a]

And so my mind has been thrown into confusion. I am afraid that, having urged you myself to hold out with one husband only, and in widowhood, I may now, simply by mentioning a headlong remarriage, lay a stumbling block in your way. If your wisdom is complete, you know of course that the course you must keep is the more useful one. But that course is hard, and it has hardships of its own, and for that very reason it is the highest thing a widow’s life can aim at; so I have held back a little from pressing you toward it. And I would have had no reason to come back to the point with you at all, if by now I had not taken up a heavier worry.

For the nobler the bodily abstinence that serves widowhood, the more forgivable it looks if a woman does not keep it up: where a thing is difficult, it is easily excused. But marrying “in the Lord” is permitted, and it lies within our power — and so failing to observe what you are able to observe is that much more blameworthy. Add this as well. About widows and the unmarried, the apostle advises them to stay permanently as they are, when he says, “But I want everyone to hold out after my own example.” About marrying “in the Lord,” he no longer advises; he expressly orders. So it is here above all that we run a risk if we do not obey. A man can neglect a piece of advice more safely than an order: advice comes out of counsel and is laid before the will, to take or to leave, while an order comes down from authority and binds you to it. Brushing the first aside looks like freedom; brushing the second aside is defiance.

So when a certain woman lately took her marriage outside the fence of the church and joined herself to a pagan, and when I remembered that others had done the same in years gone by, I wondered at their own willfulness — or else at the collusion of the people advising them, since there is no passage of Scripture that grants a license for the thing. I wonder, I said to myself, whether they flatter themselves on that passage in the first letter to the Corinthians, where it is written: [e]

“If any of the brothers has an unbelieving wife and she agrees to the marriage, let him not send her away. In the same way, let a believing woman married to an unbeliever not send him away, if she finds her husband willing. For the unbelieving husband is made holy by the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife by the believing husband; otherwise your children would be unclean.”

It may be that they take this warning about married believers in a general sense, and think that a license is granted by it to marry unbelievers as well. God forbid that anyone who reads it that way is knowingly setting a trap for himself. But it is plain that this passage points to believers whom the grace of God found already inside a pagan marriage. Look at the words themselves. “If,” it says, “any believer has an unbelieving wife.” It does not say “takes an unbelieving wife.” It shows that a man who was already living in marriage with an unbelieving woman, and has since been converted by the grace of God, has a duty to stay with his wife — and the reason, plainly, is that no one who has come to faith should think he must turn away from a woman who is now, in a manner of speaking, “a foreigner and a stranger.” So he attaches a reason as well: that “we have been called to the Lord God in peace,” and that “the unbeliever may be won by the believer through the marriage.”

The closing sentence of the passage confirms that this is how it is to be understood: “As each one is called by the Lord, so let him remain.” And it is pagans who “are called,” as I take it, not believers. If he had been laying down a flat rule about the marriages of believers as such, he would in effect have given holy people permission to marry anybody at all. And if he had given such a permission, he would never have added a statement so different from his own permission and so contrary to it: “A woman, when her husband is dead, is free. Let her marry whom she wishes — only in the Lord.” Here at any rate there is nothing left to argue about, because the very point that might have been argued the Spirit has settled by a pronouncement of his own. In case we should make bad use of “let her marry whom she wishes,” he has added “only in the Lord” — that is, in the name of the Lord, which beyond question means “to a Christian.”

So the Holy Spirit, who prefers that widows and unmarried women should hold out whole as they are, and who urges us to copy himself, lays down no other way of marrying a second time except “in the Lord.” That is the one condition on which he allows the loss of abstinence. “Only,” he says, “in the Lord.” He has hung a weight on his law — only. Say that word in whatever tone and manner you like, and it is heavy. It commands and advises at once; it enjoins and exhorts; it asks and it threatens. It is a tight, short saying, and eloquent by its very shortness. That is how the divine voice usually speaks, so that you understand at once and obey at once. For who could fail to see that the apostle foresaw many dangers and wounds to faith in marriages of this kind, and that this is why he forbids them? Or that his first precaution was against the defiling of holy flesh in pagan flesh? At this point someone says:

“Then what is the difference between a man whom the Lord chose for himself while he was in a pagan marriage and a man who was a believer beforehand, that the two should not take equal care of their flesh? The one is kept from marrying an unbeliever; the other is told to stay married to one. If a pagan defiles us, why is the one not separated, in the same way that the other is not allowed to be joined?”

I will answer, if the Spirit gives me the ability, and I put this before every other argument: the Lord is better pleased that a marriage should not be made than that a marriage should be broken at all. Divorce he forbids, except on the ground of sexual immorality; abstinence he commends. So let the first man be under the necessity of continuing, and let the second have, on top of that, the power not to marry. Second: if, as Scripture has it, those who are “laid hold of” by the faith inside a pagan marriage are not defiled by it, and the reason is that the other party is made holy along with them, then plainly those who were made holy before marriage, if they mix themselves with “strange flesh,” cannot make holy the flesh they were not “laid hold of” in. The grace of God makes holy what it finds. So what could not be made holy is unclean, and what is unclean has no share in what is holy, except to defile it and, by its own nature, to kill it.

If this is so, then it is certain that believers who make marriages with pagans are guilty of sexual immorality and are to be shut out of all dealings with the brotherhood, according to the letter of the apostle, who says that with people of that kind you are not even to share a meal. Or are we to produce our marriage tablets on that day before the Lord’s bench and plead that a marriage he himself forbade was properly contracted? Is what is forbidden here not adultery, not sexual immorality? Does letting a strange man in do any less violence to “the temple of God,” or mix “the parts of Christ” any less with the parts of an adulteress? As far as I know, “we are not our own; we were bought with a price” — and what a price? The blood of God. So in doing harm to this flesh of ours we do harm to him at first hand. What did that man mean who said that marrying an outsider was a sin, yes, but a very small one? Leave aside the injury done to flesh that belongs to the Lord: every deliberate sin against the Lord is a great one. The further it lay within our power to avoid it, the heavier the charge of defiance it carries. [n]

Now let us count up the other dangers, or wounds, to faith that the apostle foresaw, as I said — the ones that are worst not for the flesh only but for the spirit too. Who would doubt that faith is rubbed away, a little more each day, by living with an unbeliever? “Bad conversation ruins good character.” How much more a shared life, and an intimacy nothing can divide! Any woman who believes must obey God; there is no way around it. And how can she serve two masters — the Lord, and a husband, and a pagan husband at that? In obeying a pagan she will do what pagans do: making herself attractive, doing up her hair, worldly elegance, cheap flatteries, and the very privacies of marriage tainted. It is not the way it is among holy people, where what the body owes is paid with respect even for the necessity that requires it, modestly and with self-control, as under the eyes of God.

But let her see for herself how she pays her duties to her husband. To the Lord, at any rate, she cannot give satisfaction as discipline requires, with a servant of the devil at her side — his master’s agent for blocking the practices and duties of believers. If a station-day is to be kept, at daybreak her husband makes an appointment to meet his wife at the baths. If there are fasts to be observed, that is the day he holds a dinner party. If some work of love has to be done, family business was never more urgent. [t]

For what husband would let his wife go around from street to street to other men’s houses — and to the poorest cottages at that — in order to visit the brothers? Who will willingly bear having her taken from his side by meetings at night, when there is need? Who, in the end, will endure her absence all night long at the Passover services without anxiety? Who will send her off, with no suspicion of his own, to that Supper of the Lord which they slander? Who will let her slip into a prison to kiss a martyr’s chains — or even meet any of the brothers to exchange the kiss? To bring water for the feet of holy people? To save something for them out of her own food and her own cup? To long for them? To keep them in mind? If a brother arrives from abroad, what welcome is there for him in a house that belongs to an outsider? If a gift is to be handed out to anyone, the granary and the storeroom are locked.

“But some husband does put up with our practices and gives us no trouble.” Then here is a sin in itself: that pagans know our practices; that we lie at the mercy of what an unjust man knows; that it is thanks to him that we do any good work at all. A man who puts up with a thing cannot be ignorant of it; and if he is kept ignorant because he will not put up with it, then he is feared. But Scripture commands both things — that we work for the Lord without any second person knowing of it, and without pressure on ourselves. So it makes no difference which side you sin on: your husband’s knowing, if he is tolerant, or your own distress in dodging his intolerance. [w]

“Do not throw your pearls to the pigs,” he says, “or they will trample them to pieces and turn and knock you over as well.” Your pearls are the marks that set even your daily way of life apart. The more carefully you take pains to hide them, the more suspect you will make them, and the more exposed to the clutch of pagan curiosity. Will you go unnoticed when you sign your bed or your body, when you blow away something unclean, when you get up in the night to pray? Will you not be taken for someone at work on a piece of magic? Will your husband not find out what it is you secretly taste before any food? And if he knows it is bread, does he not believe it is the bread they say it is? And will every husband, knowing nothing of the reason for these things, simply put up with them, without a murmur, without wondering whether it is bread or poison?

Some do put up with them, it is true — but so that they can trample on such women and make sport of them. They hold their wives’ secrets in reserve against the danger they believe in, in case they are ever injured. They put up with wives whose dowries they turn into the wages of silence by throwing the Christian name in their teeth, threatening them all the while with a suit before an executioner for arbitrator. Most women do not see it coming, and have found it out either by having their property extorted from them or by losing their faith.

The servant of God lives in the middle of another household’s business. And in the middle of it, on all the memorial days of the demons, at every celebration for the emperors, at the beginning of the year and the beginning of the month, she will be unsettled by the smell of incense. She will have to go out of a doorway wreathed with laurel and hung with lamps, as though out of some new establishment for the public appetites. She will have to sit with her husband, often at club dinners, often in taverns. And she who used to wait on holy people will sometimes have to wait on unjust ones. [z]

Will she not recognize in this a verdict passed in advance on her own condemnation — that she waits on the very people she was expecting to judge? Whose hand will she long for now? Whose cup will she share? What will her husband sing to her, or she to her husband? From a tavern, I suppose, she who dines on God will hear something! What mention of God comes up out of hell? What calling on Christ? Where is faith fed by a bit of Scripture dropped into the talk? Where is the Spirit? Where is refreshment? Where is the blessing of God? Everything there is foreign, everything hostile, everything condemned — aimed by the evil one at wearing salvation away.

These things may happen to those women too who came to faith while inside a pagan marriage and stayed in it. Still, they have their excuse: God “laid hold of” them in these very circumstances. They are told to persevere in the marriage; they are made holy; and they are given the hope of “winning” their husbands. [ac]

“If a marriage of that kind stands ratified before God, then why should this one not go forward and prosper too, instead of being harried by pressures and tight places and hindrances and defilements, when it already has some part of the sanction of God’s grace?”

Because in the first case the wife, called out of the pagans to the practice of some outstanding heavenly virtue, is by the visible proofs of a marked favor from God a thing of dread to her pagan husband. He is less ready to trouble her, less busy laying traps for her, less diligent in playing the spy. He has felt “mighty works”; he has seen the evidence tried out; he knows she is changed for the better. So even he, by his own fear, is a candidate for God. Men of that kind, with whom the grace of God has set up a close acquaintance, are more easily “won.” But to go down into forbidden ground unasked and of your own accord is quite another thing. What does not please the Lord offends the Lord, of course, and is of course brought in by the evil one. Here is a sign of it: the only pagans who find the Christian name agreeable are the ones who are courting. And so some pagan men are found not to shrink back in horror from Christian women, precisely in order to wipe them out, to drag them away, to shut them out of the faith. As long as a marriage of this kind is procured by the evil one and condemned by God, you have your reason for not doubting that it can never in any case be carried through to a good end.