Two Wives at the Altar

And why should we not rather pick out, from the stock of old precedents, the ones that share in the later discipline and hand on to the new order the pattern the old one had? Look: in the old law I find the pruning knife already taken to the freedom of marrying over and over. Leviticus gives this warning: “My priests shall not multiply marriages.” And I can say this much — whatever is not once for all is already more than one. Whatever is not a unit is a number. Counting begins where the unit leaves off, and a unit is anything that happens once for all. But here, as on every other point, it was for Christ to “fulfill the law.” [a]

So among us the rule is laid down more fully and more carefully: the men chosen into the order of priests must be men of one marriage. That rule is kept so tightly that I can remember men removed from office for having married twice. “Then everyone else may,” you will say — “everyone the rule leaves out.” We will be fooling ourselves if we think that what is not allowed to priests is allowed to laymen.

Are we laymen not priests ourselves? It is written: “He has made us a kingdom too, and priests to his God and Father.” It is the church’s authority, and the honor that has been made holy by the Order sitting together, that set up the difference between the Order and the people. So where there is no session of the church’s Order, you make the offering, and you baptize, and you are priest — for yourself, alone. But where three are, there is a church, even if they are laymen. For each man lives by his own faith, and God shows no favoritism, since it is not the hearers of the law who are counted righteous before the Lord but the doers — as the apostle says as well.

So if in an emergency you have a priest’s right in your own person, you ought to keep a priest’s discipline as well, against whatever time the right may be needed. If you have married twice, do you baptize? If you have married twice, do you make the offering? How much worse a crime is it for a twice-married layman to act as a priest, when the priest himself, if he marries twice, loses the power to act as a priest at all! “But necessity,” you say, “is granted an allowance.” No necessity is excusable that can be avoided. In short: keep clear of being found guilty of a second marriage, and you will never put yourself in a position where you must administer what a twice-married man may not lawfully administer.

God wants every one of us so placed that we are fit, at any time and in any place, to carry out his sacred rites. There is “one God, one faith” — and one discipline as well. So much so, that unless laymen keep the rules that govern the choice of elders, where will elders come from at all? They are chosen for that office out of the laymen. So we are bound to insist that the command to keep away from a second marriage falls on the layman first, seeing that nobody can become an elder except a layman — and only one who has been a husband once for all.

Now let it be granted that marrying again is lawful — if everything lawful is good. The same apostle cries out: “All things are lawful, but not all are useful.” Tell me: can a thing that is “not useful” be called good? If even things that do nothing for salvation are lawful, then things that are not good are lawful too. So which ought you to choose: what is good because it is allowed, or what is good because it is useful? There is a wide gap, I take it, between permission and salvation. [h]

Of a good thing we do not say “it is allowed,” because a good thing does not wait to be permitted; it is simply taken up. What gets permitted is what there is some doubt about, whether it is good — and it might just as well not have been permitted, if it had no prior cause for existing at all. Second marriage, for instance, is permitted because of the danger of not being able to hold out. And unless permission for something less than good lay open to our choice, there would be no way of showing who obeys God’s will willingly and who obeys his own power instead, which of us keeps to what is set in front of him and which of us grabs at the opening that permission gives.

Permission is, for the most part, a test of discipline: discipline is proved by being tested, and the test works through permission. So it turns out that “all things are lawful, but not all are useful” — as long as it holds that a man who is granted a permission is being tested by it, and is judged in the course of that test, in the very matter he was permitted. The apostles, after all, had permission to marry and to take wives around with them. They had permission, too, to “live by the good news.” But the man who, when the occasion came, “did not use this right” challenges us to copy his example, and teaches us that our testing lies exactly where permission has laid the ground for proving whether we can do without.

If we look right into what the apostle means and read it out, second marriage will have to be called nothing but a kind of sexual immorality. He says that married people take this for their anxious care: “how to please each other.” He does not mean morally — he would not attack a good anxiety. He means them to be understood as anxious about clothes and jewelry and every sort of personal charm, so as to increase their power to attract. And pleasing by looks and dress is the very genius of the craving of the flesh, and that craving is the cause of sexual immorality. So tell me: does a second marriage look to you like a near neighbor of sexual immorality, when the very ingredients that belong to sexual immorality are found inside it? The Lord himself said: “Whoever has looked at a woman so as to crave her has already violated her in his heart.” And the man who has looked at her with a view to marriage — has he done it less, or more? What if he has gone on and married her? He would not have, if he had not wanted her with a view to marriage and looked at her with craving — unless it is possible to marry a wife you have neither seen nor wanted. [k]

I grant there is a wide difference between a married man wanting another woman and an unmarried man doing it. Still, every woman is “another” even to an unmarried man, as long as she belongs to somebody else; and the means by which she becomes a wife is no different from the means by which she becomes an adulteress. It is laws that seem to make the difference between marriage and sexual immorality — a difference in what is forbidden, not in the nature of the thing itself. Besides, what is the act that takes place in every man and woman to produce marriage, and sexual immorality as well? The mingling of flesh with flesh, of course; and the craving for it is what the Lord put on the same footing as sexual immorality.

“So by now,” somebody says, “are you demolishing the first marriage too — the single one?” And not without reason, if I am, since it too is made of the very thing that sexual immorality is made of. That is why the best thing for a man is not to touch a woman, and why the virgin’s holiness stands first of all: it has no kinship with sexual immorality. And if these things can be urged even against a first and single marriage, in the cause of abstinence, how much more do they settle the case against a second one in advance?

Be thankful that God allowed you to marry once for all. And you will be thankful if you do not go finding out that he has allowed it a second time. But you abuse an allowance when you use it without moderation. Moderation takes its name from modus, a measure. It is not enough for you to have dropped, by marrying, from that highest rank of unstained virginity; you roll yourself down into a third rank, and a fourth, and perhaps further, once you have failed to hold out at the second — since the man who dealt with contracting second marriages did not choose to forbid even more of them. So let us marry daily. And let the last day catch us at our marrying, like Sodom and Gomorrah — the day when the “woe” spoken over “women who are pregnant and nursing” comes true, that is, over the married and over those who cannot hold out; for it is marriage that produces wombs and breasts and babies. And when is there an end of marrying? After the end of living, I suppose!

Let us give up what belongs to the flesh, so that at last we may bear the fruits of the Spirit. Take the opportunity — you did not ask for it, but it is a good one — of having nobody to pay a debt to and nobody to be repaid by. You have stopped being a debtor. Lucky man! You have let your debtor go; take the loss. And what if you come to find that what we have called a loss is a gain? Abstinence will be the trade by which you deal in a great fortune of holiness; by economizing on the flesh you will make the Spirit your profit. [q]

Think about our own conscience, and see how differently a man feels when he happens to be without his wife. His taste runs to the Spirit. If he is praying to the Lord, he is close to heaven. If he is bent over the Scriptures, he is “wholly in them.” If he is singing a psalm, it satisfies him. If he is ordering out a demon, he is sure of himself. That is why the apostle recommended abstaining for a set time, so as to give prayers more force — to teach us that what is useful “for a time” should be practiced by us always, so that it may always be useful.

Prayer is needed by men daily, at every moment; so abstinence is needed too, since prayer is needed. Prayer comes out of the conscience. If the conscience blushes, the prayer blushes. It is the spirit that conducts prayer to God. If the spirit stands accused by its own reddening conscience, how will it have the nerve to conduct prayer up to the altar, when a blushing prayer leaves its own holy attendant red-faced too? For there is a prophetic word in the Old Testament: “You shall be holy, because God is holy.” And again: “With the holy you will be made holy; with the innocent man, innocent; with the chosen, chosen.” Our duty is to walk in the Lord’s discipline in a way that is “worthy” of it, not by the filthy cravings of the flesh. The apostle says the same: “to have a taste for the flesh is death, but to have a taste for the spirit is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And through the holy prophetess Prisca the good news is preached this way: “The holy servant will know how to serve holiness. For purity brings agreement, and they see visions; and when they turn their faces downward they even hear plain voices, as saving as they are secret.” If this dulling of the spiritual senses drives the Holy Spirit away even when the flesh is given room to work in a first marriage, how much more when it is set to work in a second!

In that case the disgrace is doubled, since in a second marriage two wives are pressing on the same husband — one in spirit, one in flesh. You cannot hate the first wife. You keep an even more devoted affection for her, since she has already been received into the Lord’s presence; you make requests for her spirit; you present offerings for her every year. So will you stand before the Lord with as many wives as you name in prayer? Will you make the offering for two? Will you commend the two of them to God through the service of a priest ordained on the strength of his one marriage, or even consecrated on the strength of his virginity, with widows of one husband standing around him? And will your sacrifice go up with a face that does not redden? And among all the other gifts of a good mind, will you ask for chastity — for yourself and for your wife? [x]

I know the excuses we use to put a good color on our insatiable appetite of the flesh. Here are our pretexts. We need something to lean on. There is a house to run, a household to govern, chests and keys to guard, the wool-spinning to hand out, the food to see to, the cares to be cut down all round. Of course no houses do well except married men’s! The households of unmarried men, the estates of eunuchs, the fortunes of soldiers and of men who travel without wives have all gone to ruin! Are we not soldiers ourselves? Soldiers under a stricter discipline, in fact, because we are under so great a commander. Are we not travelers ourselves, in this world? Then why, Christian, are you built in such a way that you cannot travel without a wife? [y]

“But even as things stand, I need a partner for the work of the house.” Then take a wife of the Spirit. Choose one out of the widows: beautiful in faith, dowered with poverty, sealed with age. You will make a good marriage that way. More than one wife of that kind is pleasing to God. “But Christians take thought for descendants” — Christians, who have no tomorrow! Should God’s servant long for heirs, when he has disinherited himself from the world? And is it a reason for a man to marry again, that he has no children by his first marriage? Is this to be the first benefit he gets from it, that he now wants a longer life, when the apostle himself is in a hurry to be “with the Lord”? Yes, of course: he will be the least encumbered of men when persecution comes, the steadiest under martyrdom, the readiest to hand out his goods, the most restrained in getting more — and at the end he will die undistracted by any care, having left children behind him, to perform the last rites at his grave, perhaps!

Or is it out of concern for the commonwealth that such marriages are made? For fear the states run short if no new generations are brought up? For fear the rights of law, for fear the lines of trade, sink into decay? For fear the temples are left empty? For fear there is nobody left to raise the shout, “The Christians to the lion!”? — because these are the shouts that men who go hunting for offspring want to hear. The well-known burden of children — and in our case above all — should be enough by itself to advise widowhood: children whom men have to be compelled by law to take on, because no wise man would ever have wanted sons of his own free will.

And what will you do if you succeed in filling your new wife with the same scruples of conscience that you have? Are you to break up the pregnancy with drugs? I take it that it is no more lawful for us to harm a child on its way to birth than one already born. Or will you have the nerve, once your wife is pregnant, to beg God for a remedy against so heavy a worry — the remedy you turned down when it lay in your own hands? You will go looking ahead, I suppose, for some woman who cannot bear children, or one already old enough to feel the chill of her years. A prudent plan — and above all, worthy of a believer! For of course we have never believed in any woman bearing a child when she was barren, or old, when God willed it. And he is all the likelier to do it if somebody, presuming on his own foresight, dares God to a contest. In fact, we know of a case among our own brothers: a man who took a barren woman in a second marriage for his daughter’s sake, and became a father a second time just as he had become a husband a second time.

To this appeal of mine, dearest brother, examples from the pagans can be added as well. We have often put them in evidence ourselves, whenever something good and pleasing to God is recognized even among outsiders and given its testimony. One marriage is held in such high honor among the pagans that even a virgin, marrying in due form, has a woman married only once appointed to attend her; and if you say that this is done for the sake of the omen, then plainly it is for the sake of a good omen. Again, in certain ceremonies and public offices, having had one husband takes precedence: at any rate the wife of a flamen must have married only once, which is the flamen’s own law too. And the fact that the chief pontiff himself must not repeat a marriage is, of course, a credit to marrying once. [ad]

But when Satan apes God’s sacred rites, it is a challenge to us — or rather a reason to blush, if we are slow to show God the abstinence that some render to the devil, keeping virginity for life in one case and widowhood in another. We have heard of Vesta’s virgins, and Juno’s in the town in Achaia, and Apollo’s among the people of Delphi, and Minerva’s and Diana’s in some places. We have heard, too, of men who abstain, among them the priests of that famous Egyptian bull; and of women dedicated to the African Ceres, in whose honor they even give up marriage of their own accord and live on into old age, avoiding from then on all contact with males, down to their own sons’ kisses. So the devil, it seems, has discovered a chastity that ruins, to go along with his pleasures — which makes the guilt run deeper in a Christian who refuses the chastity that helps toward salvation.

Some of the pagans’ own women will stand as testimony against us too, women who won fame for stubbornly keeping to one husband. Take Dido: a refugee on foreign soil, who ought rather to have wanted marriage with a king, with no one pressing her, and who yet, for fear of going through a second union, chose to burn instead of to marry. Or the famous Lucretia: though it was only once, by force, and against her will, that she had submitted to a strange man, she washed her stained flesh in her own blood, so as not to go on living when in her own eyes she was no longer a woman of one husband. A little more trouble will supply you with more examples from our own women, and better ones than these, since it is a greater thing to live in chastity than to die for it. It is easier to lay down your life because you have lost a good thing than to keep on living and hold on to the thing you would rather die for.

How many men, then, and how many women, hold their place in the church’s orders because of abstinence — people who preferred to be married to God, who have restored the honor of their flesh, and who have already dedicated themselves as sons of that age to come, by killing off in themselves the craving of lust and that whole tendency which could never be let inside Paradise. From which we may suppose that people who wish to be received into Paradise ought at last to begin leaving off the thing that Paradise has stayed clear of.