Bound to the Dead

From here on I can see that we are being challenged by an appeal to the apostle. So that his meaning may be grasped the more easily, we must press this point all the harder: a woman is more tightly bound not to take another husband once her husband is dead. [a]

Think it through. Divorce is either caused by discord or else causes discord; death, on the other hand, is an event that comes by God’s law and not by anyone’s wrongdoing — a debt that everyone owes, the unmarried included. So if a divorced woman, cut off from her husband in soul as well as body through discord, anger, hatred, and the things that breed them — an injury, an insult, a grievance of whatever kind — is still bound to a man who is now a personal enemy, not to say a husband, how much more will a woman belong to her husband even when he is dead? It was no fault of hers and none of his, but an event under the Lord’s law, that has left her — not separated from him, but left behind by him — and even in death she owes him concord. She does not turn away from a man from whom she has heard no word of divorce. She is still with the man to whom she has written out no divorce. The man she was unwilling to lose, she keeps. And she has within her the mind’s own freedom, which sets before a person, in imagined enjoyment, everything he does not have.

In fact, let me ask the woman herself. Tell me, sister: did you send your husband on ahead of you in peace? What will she answer? Will she say, “In discord”? Then she is all the more bound to the man with whom she has a case still to be argued at God’s bar; and a woman who is bound to someone has not left him. Will she say, “In peace”? Then she is obliged to go on in that peace with the man she no longer has the power to divorce — and even if she had been able to divorce him, she would not have been free to marry.

Indeed, she prays for his soul, and asks refreshment for him in the meantime, and a share with him in the first resurrection; and she makes the offering for him on the yearly return of the day he fell asleep. If she does not do these things, then in the true sense she has divorced him, so far as it lies with her — and all the more wickedly, in that she did as much as she was able toward a divorce she had no power to grant; and with all the greater insult, since the insult is greater still if her reason for doing it is that he did not deserve better.

Or are we, I ask, to stop existing after death — as some Epicurus would have it, and not as Christ does? If we believe in the resurrection of the dead, then of course we will be bound to those with whom we are going to rise, and to whom we will each give an account of the other. “But if in that age they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be equal to the angels, is not the fact that the married state will not be restored a reason why we shall not be bound to the spouses we have lost?” On the contrary. We shall be bound to them all the more, because we are destined for something better: to rise into a partnership that is spiritual, and to recognize both our own selves and those who are ours. How else shall we sing our thanks to God through all eternity, if no sense and no memory of this debt is left in us — if we are made over again in substance but not in consciousness?

So then, we who will be with God will be together, since we will all be with the one God — even though the wages differ, even though there are “many dwelling places” in the house of the same Father, and even though we have worked for the one denarius of the same pay, that is, of eternal life. And in that life God will be even further from separating those he has joined than he is in this lesser life, where he forbids them to be separated.

That being so, how will a woman have room for another husband when her own is still hers, and will be hers into the future? (We are speaking to both sexes, even though what we say addresses only one, since one and the same discipline binds them both.) She will have one husband in spirit and one in the flesh. That is adultery: one woman knowingly attached to two men. Suppose the one has been parted from her flesh but stays on in her heart — in the very place where thought, with no bodily contact at all, commits adultery in advance by craving and contracts a marriage by the will alone. Then he is her husband to this hour, since he still holds the very thing that made him her husband: her mind. And if another man takes up residence there, that will be a crime. Besides, he has not been shut out merely because he has withdrawn from the baser bodily traffic. He is a more honorable husband in proportion as he has become the purer.

Grant, then, that you marry “in the Lord,” as the law and the apostle require — supposing you care even about that. How do you have the face to ask for a wedding that is not lawful for the very people you ask it of? Of an overseer who has married once, of elders and deacons bound by the same pledge, of widows whose order you have refused in your own person? And of course they will hand out husbands and wives as freely as they hand out scraps of bread — for this is how they read “Give to everyone who asks you.” And they will join you together in a virgin church, the one bride promised to the one Christ! And you will be praying for your husbands, the new one and the old. Take your pick which of the two you will play the adulteress to. Both, I should think. But if you have any sense, keep quiet about the dead one. Let your silence stand as his divorce, already ratified in another man’s marriage settlement. That is how to earn the new husband’s favor — by forgetting the old one. You ought to be taking more trouble to please the man for whose sake you were not willing to please God. [g]

This, the Psychics will have it, is conduct the apostle approved — or else never gave a thought to — when he wrote: “The woman is bound for as long as her husband lives; but if he has died, she is free; let her marry whom she wishes, only in the Lord.” It is out of this one passage that they get their defense of the license of a second marriage — no, of marriages to any number at all, once a second is allowed. What has stopped being a once-for-all thing is open to any number you like.

But the sense in which the apostle did write will become clear once we agree, first, that he did not write it in the sense the Psychics make of it. And we shall come to that agreement if we first call to mind the passages that stand at odds with this one, when it is measured against his teaching, his will, and Paul’s own discipline. If he permits second marriages, which were not so “from the beginning,” how can he say that all things are being gathered back to their beginning in Christ? If he wants us to repeat the marriage bond, how does he maintain that “our seed is called” from Isaac, a man married once, as its founder? How does he make marrying once the foundation of his whole arrangement of church order, if the rule does not hold good beforehand among laymen, out of whose ranks the church order comes? How does he call men who are still in the married state away from the enjoyment of marriage, saying that “the time has been drawn in short,” if he is calling back into marriage those whom death had let out of marriage?

If these passages stand at odds with the one in question, then it will be agreed — as I said — that he did not write in the sense the Psychics make of it, since it is easier to believe that one passage has an explanation agreeing with the rest than that an apostle taught principles that contradict one another. And that explanation we shall be able to find in the subject matter itself. What was the subject matter that led the apostle to write such words? The inexperience of a new church only just coming up, which he was rearing on milk and not yet on the solid food of stronger teaching — inexperience so great that the infancy of their faith kept them from knowing yet what they were to do about the needs of the body and of sex.

The very shapes that inexperience took can be made out from the apostle’s written replies. He says: “Now concerning the things you write about: it is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of cases of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife.” He is showing that there were people whom the faith had found already married, and who were afraid that from then on it might not be lawful for them to enjoy their marriage, because they had come to believe in the holy flesh of Christ. And even so, it is “by way of allowance” that he makes the concession, “not by way of command” — indulging the practice, not ordering it. What he “would rather” was that everyone should be what he himself was.

In the same way, when he sends a written answer on divorce, he shows that some had been turning that question over too, mainly because they did not suppose they were to keep on, now that they had faith, in marriages made while they were still pagans. They also asked for advice “about virgins” — where there was no “command of the Lord” — and were told that “it is good for a man to remain permanently as he is”: as he is, that is, at the point where the faith found him. “You have been bound to a wife: do not look to be loosed. You have been loosed from a wife: do not look for a wife.” “But if you do take a wife, you have not sinned” — because for a man who had been “loosed from a wife” before he believed, the wife he takes after believing is his first and will not be counted a second: our life itself dates its beginning from the time we came to believe.

But here he says he “is sparing them”; otherwise “hardship in the flesh” would soon follow, given the straits of the times, which had no room for the encumbrances of marriage — and anxiety ought rather to be felt about earning the Lord’s favor than a husband’s. And so he takes his permission back. In the very same passage, then, where he lays it down that “each one ought to remain permanently in the calling in which he was called,” he adds: “A woman is bound as long as her husband lives; but if he has fallen asleep, she is free: let her marry whom she wishes, only in the Lord.” And by that he also shows that the woman meant is one whom the faith itself found already “loosed from a husband,” just as the man was found “loosed from a wife” — the loosing having come about by death, of course, and not by divorce, since to a divorced woman he would grant no permission to marry, in the teeth of the first command. And so “a woman, if she marries, will not be sinning,” because a man who is her first husband after she believed will not be reckoned a second — any more than a wife taken in that way will be counted a second wife.

That this is truly so is clear from what he adds: “only in the Lord.” The question under discussion was about a woman who had had a pagan husband and had come to believe after losing him — the worry being that she might take it for granted that she could marry a pagan even after believing. Though not even that is any concern of the Psychics.

And let us be clear that in the Greek original it does not stand in the form which, through an alteration of two syllables — whether cunning or innocent — has passed into common use: “But if her husband shall have fallen asleep,” as though it were speaking of the future, and so seemed to apply to a woman who loses her husband when she is already a believer. If that were how it stood, license would be let loose with no limit at all, granting a fresh husband as often as one was lost, without even the restraint in marrying that suits pagans. But suppose it did stand that way, referring to time to come — “If any woman’s husband shall have died” — the future would apply just as much to a woman whose husband dies before she believed. Take it whichever way you like, so long as you do not overturn the rest.

For these other passages agree with the sense I have given: “You were called as a slave: never mind it.” “You were called uncircumcised: do not be circumcised.” “You were called circumcised: do not undo it.” And with them agrees, “You have been bound to a wife: do not look to be loosed; you have been loosed from a wife: do not look for a wife.” It is plain enough that these passages have to do with people who, finding themselves in a new and recent “calling,” were consulting the apostle about the circumstances in which the faith had caught them.

That, then, will be the interpretation of the passage — to be tested by whether it fits the time and the occasion, and the examples and arguments that come before it, and the sentences and senses that follow it, and above all the apostle’s own personal advice and practice. For there is nothing so much to be guarded against as being found to contradict yourself.

Now listen to the very fine-spun reasoning on the other side. “It is so true that the apostle permitted marriage to be repeated, that the only men he tied down strictly to the yoke of one marriage were those in the clerical order. What he prescribes to certain individuals he does not prescribe to all.” [v]

Does it follow, then, that to overseers alone he does not prescribe what he enjoins on everyone, just because what he prescribes to overseers he does not enjoin on everyone? Or is it laid on everyone because it is laid on overseers, and laid on overseers because it is laid on everyone? Where do overseers and clergy come from? Is it not from everyone? If everyone is not bound to marry once only, where are men married once to be got from for the clerical rank? Will a separate order of the once-married have to be set up, to make the selection for the clergy from?

No — but when we are puffing ourselves up and setting ourselves against the clergy, then “we are all one”; then “we are all priests, because he has made us priests to his God and Father.” And when we are called on to level ourselves fully with the priestly discipline, we lay the priestly headbands aside — and we are still their equals!

The matter in hand, when the apostle was writing, was church order: what sort of men ought to be ordained. So it was fitting that the whole shape of the discipline common to all should be set out on the front of it, as an edict to be observed, in a manner of speaking, universally and carefully — so that the laity would know all the better that they must keep for themselves the very order that was indispensable in their overseers, and so that the office of honor itself would not flatter itself into any license on the ground of the privilege of position.

The Holy Spirit foresaw that some would say, “Everything is lawful for overseers” — just as that overseer of yours from Utina had no fear even of the Scantinian law. Why, how many twice-married men preside in your churches, insulting the apostle, of course; or at the very least not blushing when these passages are read out with them presiding!

Come then, you who think that a special law of one marriage is made with reference to overseers: give up the rest of the disciplinary titles as well, which are ascribed to overseers along with marrying once. Refuse to be “above reproach, sober, of good character, orderly, hospitable, easy to teach.” Better still, be “given to wine, quick with your hand to strike, quarrelsome, money-loving, no ruler of your own house, careless of your children’s discipline” — and do not court “a good name even from outsiders,” either. For if overseers have a law of their own that teaches marrying once, then the other qualities too, which go fittingly along with it, will have been written for overseers exclusively; while with laymen, to whom marrying once is not suitable, the other qualities also have nothing to do. There, Psychic — you have got clear of the whole binding force of the discipline, if you please! Be consistent, then, in ruling that “what is enjoined upon certain individuals is not enjoined upon all.” Or else, if the other qualities really are common to all and only marrying once is imposed upon overseers, then tell me, please: are they the only ones to be pronounced Christians, since they are the only ones on whom the whole of the discipline is conferred?