Willed, Not Merely Allowed

I have no doubt, brother, that now your wife has been sent on ahead in peace you have set your whole mind to settling itself, and are thinking hard about putting an end to your solitude — and that of course you need advice. In a case like this each man ought to talk the matter over with his own faith and take the measure of its strength. But in this particular trial it is the necessity of the flesh that sets the mind working, and the necessity of the flesh is usually what pleads against faith at the bar of that same inner court. So faith needs advice from outside — an advocate, so to speak, to argue against what the flesh says it must have. That necessity can in fact be fenced in very easily, if you will look at what God wills rather than at what God allows. No one deserves anything by helping himself to a concession; he deserves it by obeying, and obeying promptly, what his Master wills. [a]

What God wills is that you be made holy. He wants his image — that is, us — to become his likeness as well, so that we may be holy just as he himself is holy. That good — being made holy, I mean — I divide into several kinds, so that we may be found in one of them. The first kind is virginity from one’s birth. The second is virginity from one’s second birth, that is, from the water of baptism: this second kind either keeps a married person pure by mutual agreement, or holds out in widowhood by choice. A third grade is left — marrying only once, when a marriage once entered has been cut short and sex is renounced from then on. The first virginity belongs to good fortune: you know nothing whatever of the thing you will afterwards wish to be rid of. The second belongs to virtue: you think little of a power whose strength you know perfectly well. The last kind — not marrying again once death has broken the marriage up — is the glory of virtue, and of moderation besides; for moderation means not fretting after a thing that has been taken away, and taken away by the Lord God, without whose will no leaf slides down from a tree and no sparrow worth one assarion falls to the ground.

And what moderation, after all, is there in that saying, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; as it seemed good to the Lord, so it has been done”? So if we bring back a marriage that has been taken away, we are plainly fighting against the will of God, wanting to have all over again a thing he did not want us to have. If he had wanted us to have it, he would not have taken it away. Unless, of course, we are to read even this as the will of God — as though he now wills us to have what a moment ago he did not will. It is no part of a good and solid faith to refer everything to the will of God in that fashion, or for each man to flatter himself by saying that “nothing happens without his permission,” until we can no longer see that there is something in our own power. Otherwise every sin will have its excuse, if we go on insisting that nothing is done by us apart from the will of God; and that definition will destroy our whole discipline — yes, and God himself — if either he produces by his own will things he does not will, or else there is nothing at all that God does not will. [g]

But there are things he forbids, and against which he threatens even eternal punishment; and of course things he forbids, and is offended by, are things he does not will. So too, on the other side, what he does will he commands, and marks down as acceptable, and repays with the reward of eternity. And so, once we have learned from his instructions which acts belong to which class — what he does not will and what he does — we still have a will, and a power of choosing between the two, exactly as it is written: “See, I have set good and evil before you; for you have tasted of the tree of knowledge.” So we ought not to charge to the account of the Lord’s will what lies under our own choice, as though the one who does not will what is evil either fails to will, or positively refuses, what is good. No: it is a will of our own when we will what is evil, against the will of God, who wills what is good.

If you ask further where that will comes from — the will by which we will something against the will of God — I answer: it has its source in ourselves. And I do not say it rashly, for you must answer to the seed you sprang from, if it is true, as it is, that the founder of our race and of our sin, Adam, willed the sin he committed. The devil did not put the will to sin into him; he only supplied the will with its material. On the other side, God’s will had come down to a matter of obedience. In the same way you too, if you fail to obey God — who has trained you by setting a rule of free action in front of you — will turn down the slope of doing what God does not will, and will do it willingly, through the freedom of your own will; and then you think you have been overthrown by the devil. He does will that you should will something God does not; but he does not make you will it, seeing that he did not reduce that first-formed pair of ours to the will to sin — no, nor did he bring them to it against their will, or while they were ignorant of what God did not will. God had plainly not willed the thing to be done, since he had made death the appointed consequence of doing it. So the devil’s work is one thing only: to try whether you do will what it rests with you to will. Once you have willed it, he does then make you his subject — not because he worked the willing in you, but because he found his opening in your willing. And so, since the only thing in our power is willing, and it is here that our mind toward God is put to the test — whether we will the things that agree with his will — the will of God has to be weighed over and over, deeply and anxiously; weighed, I say, to see what he may will even in secret.

We all know what things are plain; but in what sense these very plain things are plain has to be examined thoroughly. Some things seem to smack of “the will of God” simply because he allows them; but it does not follow at once that everything permitted comes out of the bare and absolute will of the one who permits it. Every permission has a concession for its source. And though a concession is not made without willing, still, since its cause lies in the person it is granted to, it comes, as it were, out of an unwilling will — a will that has met with something that produced it and forced its hand. See what kind of willing it is when somebody else is the cause of it. Then there is a second sort of willing to be considered: pure willing. God wills us to do certain acts that please him, and in these it is not a concession that stands behind us but discipline that gives the orders. But if he has given some other acts a preference over these — acts, that is, which he wills more — can there be any doubt that the acts we are to go after are the ones he wills more? For the ones he wills less, because he wills others more, are to be treated as though he did not will them at all. By showing what he wills more, he has wiped out the lesser willing with the greater. And so far as he has set each of the two before you to know about, so far he has made it your duty to go after the one he has declared he wills more. Then, if the point of his declaring it was that you should go after what he wills more, there is no doubt: unless you do, you smack of going against his will, by going against his higher will; and instead of earning a reward you give offense, by doing what he does will and turning down what he wills more. Partly you sin; partly, even if you do not sin, you still deserve no reward. And is being unwilling to deserve a reward not itself a sin? [m]

So then: if second marriage finds the source of its permission in that “will of God” which we call a concession, we shall deny that a thing which has a concession for its cause is pure willing. And if it finds it in a will to which some other will is preferred as higher — the will, that is, which regards abstinence as more desirable — then we have already learned from what has been argued above that the lower is cancelled by the higher. Let me have touched on these matters in passing, so that I may now follow the course of the apostle’s words. First of all, no one will think me irreverent for pointing out what he says himself: that he brought in the whole concession about marriage from his own judgment — from human sense, that is, not from a divine command. For when he has laid down his ruling about “the widowed and the unmarried,” that they are to “marry if they cannot hold back,” since “it is better to marry than to burn,” he turns round to the other class and says, “But to the married I give this charge — not I, but the Lord.” By handing his own person over to the Lord in that way, he shows that what he had said above he had spoken not in the Lord’s person but in his own: “It is better to marry than to burn.”

Now that saying does belong to people whom the faith catches while they are unmarried or widowed. Still, since everybody clutches at it as a licence to marry, I should like to go thoroughly into the question of what sort of good he is pointing at when he points to something “better than” a penalty — a thing which can only look good by comparison with something very bad, so that the reason marrying is good is that burning is worse. A thing deserves the name “good” if it keeps that name without being compared — I do not say with evil, but even with some second good; so that even when it is set beside another good and thrown into the shade by it, it still keeps possession of the name “good.” But if it takes the nature of an evil to force the word “good” out of us, then the thing is not so much good as a lesser sort of evil, driven to the name of good by being overshadowed by a greater evil. Take the comparison away, in short. Do not say, “It is better to marry than to burn”; and I doubt you will have the nerve to say, “It is better to marry,” without adding what it is better than. So what is not better is not good either, since you have taken away and removed the comparison that made the thing better and so forced it to be counted good. “It is better to marry than to burn” is to be understood the same way as “It is better to lack one eye than two.” Withdraw the comparison, and it will not be better to have one eye, because it is not good either. So let no one snatch a defense of marriage out of this passage. It properly concerns “the unmarried and widows,” for whom no marriage is yet on the books — though I hope I have shown that even they must understand what kind of thing the permission is.

On second marriage, though, we know plainly what the apostle has pronounced: “You have been loosed from a wife; do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you will not have sinned.” Here again, as in the earlier case, he has brought in the order of this discourse from a suggestion of his own, not from a divine command. And there is a wide gap between a command of God and a suggestion of a man. “I have no command of the Lord,” he says, “but I give advice, as one who has obtained mercy from the Lord to be trustworthy.” In fact, neither in the Gospel nor in Paul’s own letters will you find a command of God as the source from which marrying again is permitted. That confirms the teaching that the single marriage must be kept: what is not found to be permitted by the Lord is acknowledged to be forbidden. [q]

Add this to it: even this bringing in of human advice at once begins to think better of its own extravagance, and reins itself in and calls itself back, when it goes on to add, “Such people, however, will have pressure of the flesh”; when he says that he “spares them”; when he adds that “the time is wound up,” so that “even those who have wives ought to act as if they had none”; when he compares the worries of the married and of the unmarried. For by teaching through all this the reasons why marrying is not expedient, he is arguing people away from the very thing he had granted a concession for above. And that is how it stands with a first marriage — how much more with a second. And when he urges us to copy his own example, he is of course showing what he does wish us to be, namely abstinent; and by the same stroke he declares what he does not wish us to be, namely people who cannot hold back. So he too, while he wills one thing, gives no free or genuine permission for the thing he does not will. Had he willed it, he would not have permitted it; he would have commanded it.

“But look again. A woman whose husband is dead, he says, may marry anyone she wishes to marry, only ‘in the Lord.’” Ah, but “she will be happier,” he says, “if she stays permanently as she is, in my opinion; and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.” We see two pieces of advice: the one above, where he grants the concession of marrying, and the one just afterwards, where he teaches abstinence in the matter of marrying. “Which of them, then, are we to agree to?” Look at them carefully, and choose. In granting the concession he offers the advice of a prudent man; in pressing abstinence he affirms the advice of the Holy Spirit. Follow the admonition that has divinity for its patron.

It is true that believers likewise “have the Spirit of God”; but not all believers are apostles. So when the man who had called himself a believer went on to add that he “had the Spirit of God” — which nobody would doubt even of an ordinary believer — his reason for saying it was to claim apostolic standing again for himself. For apostles have the Holy Spirit in the proper sense, having him in full, in the workings of prophecy and the power of mighty deeds and the proofs of tongues; not in part, as everyone else has him. So he attached the Holy Spirit’s authority to the form of advice he would rather have us attend to; and it stopped being advice from the Holy Spirit and became at once, in view of his majesty, a command.

For laying down the law of marrying once, the very origin of the human race is our authority, testifying plainly as it does to what God set up in the beginning as a pattern for later generations to examine with care. When he had shaped the man and had foreseen that a partner was needed for him, he borrowed one of his ribs and built him one woman — though of course neither the Craftsman nor the material would have run short. There were more ribs in Adam, and hands in God that never tire; but in God’s sight there were not more wives. And so the man of God, Adam, and the woman of God, Eve, by carrying out one marriage between them, laid down a pattern for mankind out of the authority of the precedent they came from and out of God’s first will. “There shall be,” he said at the last, “two in one flesh” — not three, not four. On any other reckoning there would no longer be “one flesh,” nor “two joined into one flesh.” They will be that if the joining and the growing together into one happens once for all. If it happens a second time, or more often, the flesh at once stops being one, and there will be no “two joined into one flesh,” but plainly one rib divided among several. [v]

But when the apostle interprets “the two shall be joined into one flesh” of the church and Christ — of the spiritual marriage of the church and Christ, since Christ is one and his church is one — then we are bound to recognize that the law of one marriage is doubled for us and pressed on us a second time: once in line with the founding of our race, and once in line with the sacred sign of Christ. We take our origin from one marriage in each case: bodily in Adam, spiritually in Christ. The two births combine in laying down one binding rule of marrying only once, and in respect of both of them a man degenerates if he oversteps the limit of the single marriage. Marrying more than once began with a man under a curse. Lamech was the first to join himself to two women and so make three into “one flesh.”

“But the blessed patriarchs, after all, coupled themselves not only with more wives than one, but with concubines besides.” [z]

Is that going to make it lawful for us to marry without limit as well? I grant that it will — if there are still patterns left, sacred signs of something to come, for your marriages to stand for; or if there is still room for that command, “Increase and multiply,” that is, if no other command has come in on top of it. But another has: “The time is already wound up; it remains that even those who have wives should act as if they had none.” By commanding abstinence and holding back intercourse, the seed-bed of our race, this later command has abolished that “Increase and multiply.” As I think, moreover, each pronouncement and each arrangement belongs to one and the same God: the God who back at the beginning sent out a sowing of the race by an indulgent slackening of the reins on marriage alliances, until the world should be filled up and the material for the new discipline should come of age — but who now, at the far edge of the times, has called in the command he had sent out and taken back the concession he had granted. And he had good reason both for stretching it out at the beginning and for pruning it back at the end. Slackness is always allowed at the beginning of a thing. A man plants a wood and lets it grow so that at his own time he may cut it. The wood was the old order, which is being pruned down by the new good news, in which, moreover, “the axe has been laid to the roots.” In the same way “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” has now grown old, ever since “Let no one pay back evil for evil” grew young. And I think that even where human institutions and decrees are concerned, later things prevail over earlier ones.