One Marriage, One God

The heretics do away with marriage; the Soulish pile it up. The first will not marry even once; the second will not marry only once. What are you doing, Law of the Creator? Caught between eunuchs who are strangers to you and bridegrooms who are your own, you have as much to complain of in the over-obedience of your own household as in the contempt of outsiders. Those who abuse you do you just as much harm as those who will not use you at all. In fact that kind of self-restraint deserves no praise, because it is heretical; and that kind of license has no defense, because it is soulish. The one blasphemes, the other runs wild. The one destroys the God who made marriage; the other makes him blush. Among us, though — and we are entitled to be called Spiritual, deservedly, because we recognize the gifts of the Spirit — self-restraint is as devout as license is modest, since both the one and the other agree with the Creator. Self-restraint honors the law of marriage; license keeps it within bounds. The one is not forced on anybody; the other is regulated. The one acknowledges the power of free choice; the other acknowledges a limit. We allow one marriage, just as we hold one God. The law of marriage gains in honor when it is joined to modesty. [a]

But to the Soulish, since they do not receive the Spirit, the things that are the Spirit’s give no pleasure. And so, as long as what is the Spirit’s gives them no pleasure, what is of the flesh will please them instead, since flesh is the Spirit’s opposite. “The flesh,” says the apostle, “has cravings against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” And what will the flesh crave, except what is more of the flesh? That is why, in the beginning, it came to be estranged from the Spirit. God said: “My Spirit will not remain in these men forever, because they are flesh.”

And so they reproach the discipline of one marriage as a heresy. There is no other reason why they find themselves driven to deny the Paraclete than this: they take him to be the founder of a new discipline, and one they find extremely harsh. So this is already the first ground on which we have to join battle, in a general handling of the subject — whether there is any room for maintaining that the Paraclete has taught anything of a kind that can be charged either with novelty, against the tradition all the churches hold, or with being a burden, against the “light burden” of the Lord. [f]

On each point the Lord himself has given his ruling. For in saying, “I still have many things to say to you, but you are not yet able to bear them; when the Holy Spirit has come, he will lead you into all truth,” he sets it plainly enough before us that the Spirit will bring teachings that may be thought new, as never published before, and burdensome in the end, as if that were the very reason they were not published. “It follows, then, that by this line of argument anything you please that is new and burdensome can be put down to the Paraclete — even if it has come from the enemy spirit.” No, of course not. For the enemy spirit would be obvious from the difference in his preaching. He would begin by adulterating the rule of faith, and go on from there to adulterating the order of discipline, because what stands first is corrupted first — and faith comes before discipline. A man must necessarily hold heretical views of God first, and only then of God’s arrangements.

But the Paraclete, who has many things to teach in full that the Lord put off until he should come, just as he had defined beforehand, will begin by bearing emphatic witness to Christ — to the Christ we believe in, together with the whole order of God the Creator — and will glorify him, and will bring back to remembrance the things about him. And once he has been recognized in this way, on the ground of the cardinal rule, he will reveal those “many things” that belong to the disciplines; and the soundness of his preaching will command belief for these revelations, however “new” they are, since they are only now being revealed, and however “burdensome” they are, since not even now are they found bearable. And they are revelations of no other Christ than the one who said that he had “many other things” still to be taught in full by the Paraclete — no less burdensome to men of our own day than to those who then were “not yet able to bear them.”

As for whether one marriage is a “burden” — let the still shameless “weakness of the flesh” look to that. For now let us come to an agreement on whether it is “new.” In fact we make a broader claim than that. Even if the Paraclete had in our own day laid down a virginity or a self-restraint total and absolute, so as not to let the heat of the flesh work off its froth even in a single marriage, even then he would not seem to be bringing in anything “new.” For the Lord himself opens “the kingdoms of the heavens” to “eunuchs,” being himself a virgin as well; and it is with an eye on him that the apostle — abstinent himself for the same reason — gives the preference to self-restraint. “But he leaves the law of marriage intact.” Intact, plainly — and we shall see on what terms — and yet already undoing it, so far as he gives the preference to self-restraint. “It is good,” he says, “for a man not to touch a woman.” It follows that it is bad to touch her, for nothing is the opposite of good except bad. And so he says, “What remains is that those who have wives should be as though they had none” — which makes it all the more binding on those who have none to keep from getting them. He gives his reasons for the advice as well: that the unmarried think about God, while the married think about how, in their marriage, each may please the other. [j]

And I may press the point that what is merely permitted is not good in the full sense. For what is good in the full sense is not a matter of permission; it does not have to be asked for in order to be lawful. Permission sometimes has its cause even in necessity. And in this case the man who permits marriage does not will it. His will points the other way. “I want you all,” he says, “to be as I am too.” And when he shows that staying so is “better,” what, I ask, does he prove himself to will, except what he has just called “better”? So if he permits something other than what he willed — permitted not by choice but out of necessity — he shows that what he unwillingly allowed as a concession is not good in the full sense. And when he says, “It is better to marry than to burn,” what sort of good are we to take that to be, which is better than a punishment, and which cannot look “better” except in comparison with something very bad? A thing is good when it keeps that name in itself, without comparison — not only with an evil, but even with some other good — so that even when it is set beside a greater good and overshadowed by it, it still keeps the name of good. But if comparison with an evil is the means that forces it to be called good, then it is not so much good as a lesser sort of evil, which, put in the shade by a greater evil, is driven into the name of good. Take away the qualifying clause, in short, so that you 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. Once that is done, it stops being “better”; and not being “better,” it is not “good” either, the clause having been removed which, by making it better than another thing, forced it in that sense to count as good. It is better to lose one eye than two. But withdraw the comparison of either evil, and it will not be better to have one eye — because having one eye is not even good.

And what now, if he grants the whole concession to marry out of his own judgment — that is, a human one — and out of the necessity we have mentioned, since “it is better to marry than to burn”? In fact, when he turns to the second case and says, “But to the married I give this charge — not I, but the Lord” — he shows that what he had said above did not come from the Lord’s authority but from human judgment. But when he turns their minds back to self-restraint — “I want you all to be as I am” — he says, “And I think that I too have the Spirit of God”; so that whatever he had allowed out of necessity, he might take back again on the Holy Spirit’s authority. And John too, when he advises that “we ought to walk as the Lord walked,” was of course urging us to walk in holiness of the flesh as well as in the rest of his example. And he says it more plainly still: “And everyone who has this hope in him makes himself chaste, just as he too is chaste.” For elsewhere again we read: “Be holy, just as he too was holy” — holy in the flesh, that is. He would not have said it of the Spirit, since the Spirit is recognized as holy without anything working on him from outside, and does not wait to be told to be holy, holiness being his own nature. The flesh, though, has to be taught holiness; and in Christ the flesh was holy.

So if all this wipes out the license to marry — whether we look into the terms on which the license is granted, or into the preference for self-restraint that is laid on us — why could the same Spirit not come after the apostles, to lead discipline into “all truth” through the stages of the times (as the Preacher says, “A time for everything”), and by now lay a final bridle on the flesh, calling us away from marriage no longer sideways but out in the open, now that more than ever “the time has been drawn short” — about 160 years having gone by since then? Would you not turn it over in your own mind of your own accord? “This discipline is old. It was shown in advance even at that early date, in the Lord’s own flesh and will, and after that, in turn, in the advice and the examples of his apostles. We were marked out for this holiness long ago. The Paraclete is bringing in nothing new. What he gave warning of, he is now appointing for good; what he put off, he is now requiring.” And by turning these thoughts over you will easily persuade yourself that it was far more open to the Paraclete to preach the oneness of marriage, when he could have preached its abolition; and that it is more believable that he should have moderated what it would have suited him even to abolish — if you understand what Christ’s “will” is. Here too you ought to recognize the Paraclete in his character as Comforter, in that he excuses your weakness from an absolute self-restraint.

Setting aside now any mention of the Paraclete, as an authority belonging to us, let us unroll the documents that both sides share, the Scriptures from the beginning. This is the very thing we can prove: that the rule of one marriage is neither new nor strange, but on the contrary both ancient and the Christians’ own — so that you may see that the Paraclete restored it rather than founded it. As for its antiquity, what older pattern can be produced than the very fountainhead of the human race? God shaped one female for the male, taking one rib of his — and one, of course, out of a number of them. And in the speech that came before the work itself, he said: “It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make a helper suited to him.” He would have said “helpers” if he had meant him to have more wives than one. And he added a law about the future as well — that is, if the words “And the two shall become one flesh” were spoken as prophecy. Two: not three, and not more, since they would no longer be “two” if there were more. The law held. In fact, with the founders of our race the oneness of marriage lasted to the very end — not because there were no other women, but because the reason there were none was that the firstfruits of the race should not be contaminated by a double marriage. Otherwise, had God so willed it, there could have been others; at the least he might have taken from the abundance of his own daughters, having in each of them no less an Eve, taken out of his own bones and flesh, if reverence had allowed it to be done. But where the first crime is murder, opened with a brother’s murder, no crime so deserved the second place as a double marriage. For it makes no difference whether a man has had two wives one after another, or whether two taken at the same time make the pair. The number of them is the same, joined together or taken separately. Still, God’s arrangement, once it had suffered violence through Lamech, stood firm to the very end of that race. No second Lamech arose, in the sense of being husband to two wives. What Scripture does not record, it denies. It was other wickednesses that brought on the flood — avenged once for all, whatever their nature was, and not “seventy-seven times,” which is the vengeance that double marriages have deserved. [t]

But again: the second human race takes its fresh start from one marriage as its mother. Once more it is “two joined into one flesh” who undertake the work of “growing and multiplying” — Noah, that is, and his wife, and their sons, each in a single marriage. Even among the animals themselves one marriage is recognized, for fear that even the beasts should be born of adultery. God said: “Out of all the beasts, out of all flesh, you shall bring two into the ark, so that they may live with you, male and female. They shall be taken from all the flying creatures according to their kind, and from all the creeping things of the earth according to their kind; two out of all of them shall come in to you, male and female.” And in the same wording he orders sets of sevens to be gathered to him, made up of pairs, male and female — one male and one female. What more shall I say? Not even the unclean birds were allowed in with two females apiece.

So much for the witness of first things, the warrant of our origin, and the prior verdict of God’s own arrangement — which is of course a law, and not merely a record. For if it “was so done from the beginning,” we find ourselves directed back to the beginning by Christ. Just so in the question of divorce: when he said that this had been permitted by Moses because of their hard hearts, but from the beginning it had not been so, he was surely calling back to “the beginning” the law that a marriage is one and undivided. And so those whom God joined “from the beginning,” “two into one flesh,” no man is to separate at the present day either. The apostle too, writing to the Ephesians, says that God “had purposed in himself, at the stewardship of the fulfilling of the times, to call back to the head” — that is, to the beginning — “all things in Christ, the things that are above the heavens and above the earth, in him.” So too the Lord takes to himself the two letters of Greek, the first and the last, as figures of the beginning and the end, which come together in himself: so that, just as Alpha rolls on until it reaches Omega, and Omega rolls back again until it reaches Alpha, he might show that in himself there is both the run of the beginning down to the end and the run of the end back up to the beginning — so that every ordering of things, ending in him through whom it began (through the Word of God, that is, who was made flesh), may have an end that answers to its beginning. [x]

And so truly are all things called back in Christ to “the beginning” that even faith comes back from circumcision to the wholeness of that first flesh, as “it was from the beginning”; and freedom in food, with abstinence from blood alone, as “it was from the beginning”; and the oneness of marriage, as “it was from the beginning”; and the shutting down of divorce, which was not “from the beginning”; and last of all, the whole man back into Paradise, where he was “from the beginning.” Why then ought Christ not to restore Adam there at least as a man of one marriage, when he cannot present him in the entire perfection he had when he was sent out of it? Accordingly, so far as the restoring of the beginning goes, the logic both of the ordering you live under and of your hope demands this of you: that what was “from the beginning” should be in accordance with “the beginning” — a beginning you find counted in Adam and counted over again in Noah. Take your pick, then, which of the two you reckon your “beginning.” In both, the censor’s authority of one marriage claims you for itself.

But again: if the beginning passes on to the end, as Alpha to Omega, and the end passes back to the beginning, as Omega to Alpha, and our origin is in this way carried over into Christ — the soulish into the spiritual, since “what is spiritual was not first, but what is soulish; then what is spiritual” — then let us see, in the same way as before, whether you owe this very same thing to that second origin as well: whether the last Adam meets you in the very same form as the first. For the last Adam, that is Christ, was entirely unmarried, as even the first Adam was before his exile. But the more perfect Adam — Christ, more perfect on this count as well, in that he was more entirely pure — makes your weakness a present of the example of his own flesh, and stands before you, if you are willing to copy him, as a celibate in the flesh by his own choice. If, however, you are not equal to that, he stands before you as a man of one marriage in the spirit, having one church as his bride, on the pattern of Adam and Eve — the pattern the apostle explains as that great mystery of Christ and the church, teaching that through the spiritual it answered to one marriage in the flesh. So you see in what way, renewing your origin in Christ as well, you cannot trace that origin down without professing one marriage — unless you are in the flesh what he is in the spirit; though what he was in the flesh, you ought just as much to have been.