Sons of Abraham’s Faith

But let us go on with our inquiry into some of the great founding fathers of our origin. There are people who are not pleased with our parents of one marriage, Adam and Noah — and perhaps not with Christ either. It is Abraham, in the end, that they appeal to, though they are forbidden to acknowledge any father but God. Very well: grant that Abraham is our father; grant that Paul is too — “In the Gospel,” he says, “I fathered you.” Then show yourself a son of Abraham as well. Your descent from him, you should know, does not go back to just any period of his life. There is a definite time at which he is your father. [a]

For if faith is the source from which we are counted Abraham’s sons — as the apostle teaches when he says to the Galatians, “So you know that those who are of faith, these are the sons of Abraham” — then when was it that Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness”? While he still had one marriage, I take it, since he was not yet circumcised. But if he changed afterwards to the opposite in both — to a second marriage by taking his slave woman, and to circumcision by the seal of the covenant — then you cannot acknowledge him as your father except at the time when he “believed God,” granted that you are his son by faith and not by flesh.

Otherwise, if it is the later Abraham you follow as your father, the twice-married one, then take him with his circumcision as well. If you reject his circumcision, it follows that you refuse his second marriage too. You will not be able to blend two characters of his that differ from one another in two separate ways. His second marriage began with circumcision; his one marriage, with uncircumcision. You accept the second marriage? Then admit circumcision as well. You hold on to uncircumcision? Then you are bound to one marriage as well. Indeed, it is so certain that you are the son of the Abraham of one marriage, exactly as of the uncircumcised Abraham, that the moment you are circumcised you stop being his son — since then you will not be “of faith,” but of the seal of a faith that had already been counted righteous while he was uncircumcised. You have the apostle; learn from him, along with the Galatians. In the same way, if you have entangled yourself in a second marriage, you are not the son of the Abraham whose faith came first, while he had one marriage. For although it is only afterwards that he is called “a father of many nations,” those nations are the ones who had to be counted “sons of Abraham” as the fruit of the faith that came before the second marriage.

From there, let matters look after themselves. Foreshadowings are one thing, laws another; images one thing, statutes another. Images pass away once they are fulfilled; statutes stand permanently, to be fulfilled. Images prophesy; statutes govern. What that second marriage of Abraham’s points forward to, the same apostle teaches in full — the interpreter of both covenants — just as he also lays it down that our “seed” is named in Isaac. And if you are “of the free woman” and belong to Isaac, he at any rate kept his marriage single to the end.

These, then, I take it, are the men in whom my origin is counted. The rest I pass over. And if I do look around at their examples — a David piling up marriages for himself, and by bloodshed at that; a Solomon as rich in wives as in everything else — you are told to “follow what is better.” Besides, you have Joseph, married once only, and on that count I will venture to say better than his father. You have Moses, who saw God at close range. You have Aaron the high priest. And the second Moses of the second people, the man who brought those who stand for us into the promise of God, the first in whom the Name of Jesus was set up — he was not twice married.

After the ancient examples of the patriarchs, let us move on in the same way to the ancient documents of the legal Scriptures, so that we may work through the whole of our canon in order. Some people sometimes claim that they have nothing to do with the law — the law Christ did not dissolve but fulfilled — and at other times snatch at whatever parts of it they please. So let us state plainly what we hold. The law has died in this sense, that its burdens, which by the apostles’ verdict not even the fathers could carry, have entirely ceased; but the parts that have to do with righteousness not only remain permanently in reserve, they have even been enlarged — the point being, of course, that our righteousness may run over and above the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. And if righteousness must, then chastity must too. [j]

Now the law does contain a rule that a man is to marry his brother’s wife if the brother has died childless, in order to raise up offspring for him; and this can fall to the same man over and over, as in the Sadducees’ crafty question. If people conclude from that rule that frequent marriage is permitted in other cases as well, their first duty is to understand the reason for the rule itself. Then they will see that the reason has now lapsed, and that the rule is among the parts of the law that have been cancelled. It was necessary for someone to succeed to a brother’s marriage if he died childless. First, because that ancient blessing, “Grow and multiply,” still had its course to run. Second, because the sins of the fathers used to be exacted from the sons as well. Third, because eunuchs and barren people used to be counted a disgrace. And so, to keep men who had died childless — not from any natural inability, but because death overtook them early — from being judged accursed along with the others, a substitute and, so to speak, posthumous offspring used to be supplied for them.

But now the “end of the times” has cancelled “Grow and multiply,” since the apostle brings in another command: “What remains is that those who have wives should be as though they had none,” because “the time has been drawn short.” The sour grape the fathers chewed has stopped “setting the sons’ teeth on edge,” for “each will die in his own sin.” And eunuchs have not only lost their disgrace but have even come to deserve grace, being invited into “the kingdoms of the heavens.” So the law of succeeding to a brother’s wife is buried, and its contrary holds the field: not succeeding to a brother’s wife. And so, as we said before, a rule that has lost its force once its reason lapsed cannot supply a ground of argument for something else.

So a wife, when her husband has died, will not marry; for if she marries, she will of course be marrying his brother, since “we are all brothers.” Again, a woman who intends to marry has to marry “in the Lord” — that is, not one of the nations, but a brother — since even the ancient law forbids marriage outside one’s own tribe. And since Leviticus too carries a warning — “Whoever takes his brother’s wife, it is uncleanness, a disgrace; he will die childless” — there is no doubt that while the man is forbidden to marry a second time, the woman is forbidden as well, having no one left to marry but a brother. How agreement is to be established between the apostle and the law, which he is not attacking as a whole, will be shown when we come to his own letter. Meanwhile, as far as the law goes, the lines of argument drawn from it suit us better than them.

In fact that same law forbids priests to marry a second time. It also directs a priest’s daughter, if she is widowed or divorced and has had no children, to go back to her father’s house and be fed from his bread. The clause “if she has had no children” is not there so that she may marry again if she has — how much more will she keep from marrying if she has sons! — but so that, if she has, she may be fed by her son rather than by her father, and the son too may carry out God’s command, “Honor father and mother.”

And as for us, Jesus, the Father’s highest and great Priest, clothes us out of his own store — since those “who are baptized in Christ have put on Christ” — and has made us “priests to God his Father,” as John says. The reason he calls back that young man who was hurrying off to his father’s funeral is to show that we are the priests he means: the men the law used to forbid to be present at the burial of parents. “Over every dead soul,” it says, “the priest shall not go in, and over his own father and over his own mother he shall not be defiled.”

“Does it follow, then, that we too are bound to keep this prohibition?” No, of course not. Our one Father, God, is alive, and so is our mother, the church; we who live to God are not dead, and we do not bury our dead, since they too are alive in Christ. In any case, we are called priests by Christ, and we are debtors to one marriage, in keeping with God’s ancient law, which at that time prophesied about us in its own priests.

Turning now to the law that is properly ours — the Gospel, that is — what kind of examples meet us, before we come to definite teachings? Look: right on the threshold, as it were, two priestesses of Christian holiness present themselves, One Marriage and Self-Restraint. The one is moderate, in Zechariah the priest; the other absolute, in John the forerunner. The one makes God favorable; the other preaches Christ. The one proclaims a perfect priest; the other displays “more than a prophet” — the man who not only preached Christ and pointed him out in person, but even baptized him. For who was fitter to perform the opening rite on the body of the Lord than flesh of the same kind as the flesh that conceived that body and gave it birth? And in fact the one who gave birth to Christ was a virgin who would marry once for all after her delivery, so that both titles of holiness might be fulfilled in Christ’s parentage, through a mother who was both a virgin and the wife of one husband. [x]

Again, when he is presented in the temple as an infant, who is it that takes him into his arms? Who is the first to recognize him in spirit? A man “just and careful” — and certainly not a twice-married man, if only because otherwise Christ would have been more worthily preached a moment later by a woman: an aged widow, “the wife of one man,” who by living devoted to the temple was already showing in her own person what sort of people ought to belong to the spiritual temple — the church, that is. Such were the eyewitnesses the Lord found in infancy, and he had no different ones when he was grown.

Peter is the only one I find to have been married, and that from the mention of his mother-in-law. I am led to presume him a man of one marriage by considering the church, which, built upon him, was to appoint every grade of her order from men of one marriage. The rest, since I do not find them married, I am obliged to understand as either eunuchs or men of self-restraint. And if among the Greeks, through the carelessness of ordinary usage, women and wives go under one common word — though there is a word proper to wives — that is no reason to read Paul as though he showed that the apostles had wives. For if he were arguing about marriage, as he does further on, and could better have named some particular case, it would be right for him to say, “Have we not the right to take wives around with us, like the other apostles and Cephas?” But when he adds the words that show he has given up pressing for his keep — “Have we not the right to eat and drink?” — he is not showing that wives were taken around by the apostles; even men who have none still have the right to eat and drink. He means simply women, who used to look after them in the same way as when they traveled with the Lord.

Besides: if Christ reproves the scribes and Pharisees for sitting in Moses’ official chair and not doing what they taught, how likely is it that he should seat men in his own official chair who were careful to command holiness of the flesh but not to practice it — the very holiness he had commended to them in every way, to teach and to practice alike? He commended it first by his own example, then by every other argument: while he tells them that “the kingdom of the heavens” belongs to children; while he ranks alongside those children others who after marriage remained virgins; while he calls them to copy the simplicity of the dove, a bird not only harmless but chaste, in which one male knows one female; while he denies that the Samaritan woman’s man is a husband, so as to show that a plurality of husbands is adultery; while, in the disclosure of his own glory, he prefers to have Moses and Elijah with him out of so many holy men and prophets — the one a man of one marriage, the other a celibate by his own choice (for Elijah was nothing else than John, who came “in the power and spirit of Elijah”); while that “glutton and drinker,” the man forever at lunches and dinners “in the company of tax collectors and sinners,” dines once for all at one single wedding, though of course many people were marrying around him — for he chose to attend weddings only as often as he wished weddings to happen.

But suppose these lines of argument are thought forced and built on guesswork, because no settled teachings have stood parallel with them. There are such teachings — the ones the Lord uttered in dealing with divorce. Divorce was permitted before; he now forbids it. First, because “from the beginning it was not so,” just as with a plurality of marriages. Second, because “what God has joined, man shall not separate” — the fear being that a man may go against the Lord. The only one who is to “separate” is the one who “joined,” and he separates not through the harshness of divorce, which he blames and holds in check, but through the debt of death, since indeed “one of two sparrows does not fall to the ground apart from the Father’s will.” So if man is not to separate by divorce those whom God has joined, it follows just as fitly that man is not to join by marriage those whom God has separated by death. Joining what was separated will be as much against the will of God as separating what was joined. [ag]

So much for not destroying the will of God, and for putting back in force the law of “the beginning.” But another reason works alongside it — no, not another, but the very reason that imposed the law of “the beginning” and moved the will of God to forbid divorce: the fact that a man who dismisses his wife, except on the ground of adultery, makes her commit adultery, and a man who marries a woman dismissed by her husband of course commits adultery himself. A divorced woman cannot even marry lawfully; and if she does anything of that kind without the name of marriage, does it not fall under adultery, since adultery is a crime committed by way of marriage? God’s verdict runs within narrower limits than men’s: universally, whether through marriage or promiscuously, the admission of a second man is pronounced adultery by him.

For let us see what marriage is in God’s eyes, and so we shall learn what adultery is as well. Marriage is this: when God joins “two into one flesh,” or else, finding them already joined in the same flesh, sets his seal on the joining. Adultery is this: when the two have been parted — in whatever way — and other flesh, alien flesh rather, is mixed in: flesh of which it cannot be said, “This is flesh out of my flesh, and this is bone out of my bones.” For that was done and said once for all; and as at the beginning, so now, it cannot be said of any other flesh.

So you will have no ground for saying that God does not will a divorced woman to be joined to another man “while her husband lives,” as though he did will it “when he is dead” — since if she is not bound to him when he is dead, no more is she while he is living. “Whether divorce breaks a marriage apart or death does, she will not be bound to the man by whom the binding tie has been broken off.” To whom, then, will she be bound? In God’s eyes it makes no difference whether she marries during his lifetime or after his death. For it is not against him that she sins, but against herself. “Any sin a man may commit is outside the body; but the one who commits adultery sins against his own body.” And — as we laid down above — whoever mixes with himself “other” flesh, over and above that first flesh which God either joined so as to make the two or else found already joined, commits adultery.

And the reason he has abolished divorce, which “was not from the beginning,” is that he may strengthen what “was from the beginning” — the permanent joining of “two into one flesh” — for fear that necessity or opportunity for a third union of flesh should break in; and he permits divorce for no cause but one, if the evil he is guarding against happens to have occurred already. And divorce so truly “was not from the beginning” that among the Romans it is not until after the six hundredth year from the founding of the city that any act of this kind of “hard-heartedness” is set down as having been committed. But they indulge in adulteries all round without even divorcing their partners; for us, even if we do divorce, not even marriage will be lawful.