The Plea of Weakness

“But there is this too: writing to Timothy, he says he wants the younger women to marry, bear children, and keep house.” He is speaking there of the women he has just named — the younger widows. Widowhood catches them while they are young; they are courted for a good while; and then, having once had Christ in their affections, they “want to marry, and stand condemned, because they have set aside their first pledge” — the pledge, that is, by which they were found in widowhood, and which they professed and then failed to keep. That is why he “wants” them to marry: so that they will not first profess widowhood and afterward break the pledge of it. He is not licensing them to marry as often as they refuse to hold out in a widowhood beset by temptation — or rather, spent on their own comfort. [a]

“We read him writing to the Romans as well: ‘A woman who is under a husband is bound to her husband while he lives; but if he dies, she has been released from the law of her husband.’ So while the husband is alive she will be reckoned an adulteress if she is joined to a second husband; but if the husband has died, she has been freed from his law, so that she is no adulteress if she is made another man’s wife.”

Read the sequel as well, though, and the meaning that flatters you slips out of your hands. He says: “And so, my brothers, you too have been put to death to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another — to him who was raised from the dead — so that we may bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sin, which the law set working, were at work in our bodies to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the law, having died to that in which we were held, so that we serve God in newness of spirit and not in oldness of the letter.”

So then: he tells us to be put to death to the law through the body of Christ — which is the church, and consists in the newness of the spirit — and not through the oldness of the letter, which is the law. He takes you out from under a law that does not stop a wife whose husband is dead from becoming another man’s wife, and he puts you in the opposite condition: you are not to marry when you have lost your husband. And just so far as you would not be counted an adulteress for becoming a second husband’s wife after your first husband’s death, supposing you were still bound to act under the law — just so far, because your condition is now a different one, he judges you guilty of adultery in advance if you do marry another after your husband’s death. You have now been put to death to the law; so what was lawful cannot go on being lawful for you, now that you have walked out of the law in whose eyes it was lawful.

Now suppose the apostle really had given outright permission to marry when a partner has been lost after coming to the faith. He would have done it exactly as he did the other things he did against the strict letter of his own rule, to suit the times. He circumcised Timothy because of false brothers smuggled in among them. He brought men who had shaved their heads into the temple, because the Jews were watching closely — and this from the man who takes the Galatians to task for wanting to live under the law. But the times required him to “become all things to all people, so as to gain them all”; to be “in labor with them until Christ should be formed in them”; and to cherish the little ones of the faith “like a nurse,” teaching them some things “by way of allowance, not by way of command” — for allowing is one thing and ordering is another. On that footing he permitted a temporary license of remarriage on account of “the weakness of the flesh,” just as Moses permitted divorce on account of “the hardness of the heart.” [e]

And here we will supply what that meaning of his still needs. If Christ set aside what Moses laid down, on the ground that “from the beginning it was not so” — and if, that being the case, Christ is not on that account reckoned to have come from some other Power — then why may the Paraclete not also have set aside an allowance that Paul granted, on the ground that a second marriage too “was not from the beginning”? Why should that make him suspect, as though he were some foreign spirit, so long as what he lays over the top is worthy of God and of Christ?

If it was worthy of God and of Christ to pull up hardness of heart once the time for indulging it had fully run out, why should it not be still more worthy of God and of Christ to shake off weakness of the flesh now that the time has been drawn in tighter still? If it is right that a marriage not be broken off, then of course it is honorable that it not be repeated. In the world’s own reckoning both count as marks of good discipline: the first under the name of harmony, the second under the name of modesty. Hardness of heart held the field until Christ’s time; let weakness of the flesh be content with having held it until the time of the Paraclete. The New Law abolished divorce — it had something to abolish. The New Prophecy abolishes second marriage, which is no less a divorce of the first. But hardness of heart gave way to Christ more readily than weakness of the flesh gives way now. Weakness lays claim to Paul for its support more than hardness ever laid claim to Moses — if you can call it claiming his support to snatch at his allowance and refuse his rule, dodging his more considered judgments and his steady “I want,” and not letting us give the apostle the obedience he says he would rather have.

And how long will this utterly shameless “weakness” keep up its war of extermination against the better things? The time for indulging it ran only until the Paraclete began his work — for the Lord himself put off until his coming the things that in his own day “could not be borne,” and no one is entitled to be unable to bear them now, since the one through whom the strength to bear them is given is not lacking. How long will we plead “the flesh” because the Lord said, “the flesh is weak”? He had said first that “the spirit is willing,” so that the spirit might beat the flesh — so that the weaker might give way to the stronger. And again he says, “Let the one who can take it in, take it in.” That is to say: let the one who cannot go his way. That is what the rich man did. He went his way, not having “taken in” the command to divide his goods among the poor, and the Lord left him to his own mind. Christ is not to be charged with harshness for that. What each person’s bad choice rests on is his own free will. He says: “Look, I have set good and evil before you.” Choose the good. If you cannot, because you will not — and he has shown that you can if you will, since he has set both before your free choice — then you ought to leave the one whose will you do not do.

So where is the harshness on our side, if we break off fellowship with people who do not do God’s will? Where is the heresy, if we judge that a second marriage, being unlawful, is next door to adultery? What is adultery but an unlawful marriage? The apostle does brand the people who used to forbid marriage outright, and who at the same time banned foods that God created. But we no more abolish marriage by refusing to repeat it than we condemn food by fasting more often than others do. Abolishing a thing is one matter and regulating it is another; laying down a law against marrying is one thing, setting a limit to marrying is another. [l]

Let me put it plainly. The people who charge us with harshness, or think there is heresy in this cause of ours, coddle “the weakness of the flesh” so far that they think it has to be propped up by marrying often. Why then, in another case, do they neither prop it up nor coddle it with allowances — when torture, that is, has driven it to deny the faith? Surely the weakness that fell in battle deserves more excuse than the weakness that fell in the bedroom; the one that gave out on the rack, than the one that gave out on the wedding bed; the one that yielded to cruelty, than the one that yielded to appetite; the one that was overcome groaning, than the one that was overcome in heat. Yet the first they put out of the church, because it did not “endure to the end”; the second they shore up, as though it had endured to the end. Ask why each of them failed to endure to the end, and you will find the more honorable cause belongs to the weakness that could not stand up under savagery, not to the weakness that could not stand up under modesty. And even so, “weakness of the flesh” does not excuse a man for giving way when his blood is being wrung out of him — let alone for giving way to indecency.

But I have to smile when “weakness of the flesh” is brought up against us — a weakness that ought rather to be called strength at full stretch. Marrying a second time is a feat of strength. Getting up out of the ease of self-restraint and going back to the works of the flesh takes solid loins. A “weakness” like that is good for a third marriage, and a fourth, and perhaps even a seventh; it gains in strength every time it gains in weakness. It will no longer have an apostle’s authority behind it, but some Hermogenes, who marries more women than he paints. He has matter in plenty — which is why he supposes that even the soul is made of matter, and so, far more than other men, he does not have the Spirit from God. He is not even Soulish any longer, since not even that soul of his comes from the breath of God. [n]

Suppose a man pleads poverty, and so openly admits that his flesh is up for hire and that he is marrying for his keep — forgetting that we are to do no fretting about food and clothing. He has God to look to, who fosters even the ravens and raises even the flowers. Suppose he pleads that his house is lonely — as if one woman were company for a man who is always on the point of flight. He certainly has a widow he may take in; and of that sort of wife he is allowed not one but any number. Suppose he is thinking about descendants, with eyes looking back like Lot’s wife, so that having had no children from his first marriage becomes his reason for marrying again. A Christian, of all people, hunting for heirs — a man disinherited from the whole world! He has brothers; he has the church for a mother.

It is a different matter, of course, if people believe that at Christ’s bar, as at Rome’s, cases go by the Julian laws, and imagine that the unmarried and the childless cannot take their share in full under God’s will. Let people who think that way go on marrying to the very end, so that in this tangle of flesh they may be caught by the appointed end of the world, as happened at Sodom and Gomorrah and on the day of the flood. Let them add a third item to the saying: “Let us eat and drink and marry, for tomorrow we die.” They do not stop to think that the woe pronounced on women who are pregnant and nursing will fall far heavier and more bitter in the shaking of the whole world than it did in the ruin of one corner of Judea. Let them pile up, by their repeated marriages, the sort of fruit that suits the last days: heaving breasts, queasy wombs, whimpering babies. Let them get children ready for Antichrist, so that he may spend his savagery on them more hotly than Pharaoh did. He will bring murdering midwives to them.

They will have a fine-sounding plea to make before Christ, no doubt — the everlasting “weakness of the flesh.” But it will not be an Isaac, our father who married once, who sits in judgment on that weakness; nor a John, Christ’s famous celibate by choice; nor a Judith the daughter of Merari; nor any of the many other examples among the holy ones. It is pagans who are marked out to be our judges. [w]

A queen of Carthage will rise and pass sentence on the Christians. She was a refugee living on foreign soil, and at that very moment founding so great a state; she had every reason, unasked, to want a royal marriage; and yet, for fear of going through a second marriage, she chose rather to burn than to marry. Sitting on the bench beside her will be the Roman matron who, having known another man — by violence in the night, but known him all the same — washed the stain out of her flesh with blood, so as to avenge on her own body the honor of one marriage. And there have been women who preferred to die for their husbands rather than marry after their husbands were dead.

In any case, one marriage and widowhood both serve the idols as their attendants. Only a woman married once hangs the wreath on Fortuna Muliebris, or on Mother Matuta. The Pontifex Maximus marries once and once only, and so does the wife of a flamen. The priestesses of Ceres are widowed by friendly separation while their husbands are still living and with their husbands’ consent. And there are others who may judge us on the score of complete self-restraint: the virgins of Vesta, and of Achaean Juno, and of Scythian Diana, and of Pythian Apollo. On the score of self-restraint the priests of the famous Egyptian bull will judge the “weakness” of Christians too.

Blush, flesh, you who have put on Christ! Let it be enough for you to marry once — the thing you were made for at the beginning, and the thing the end is calling you back to. Go back at least to the first Adam, if you cannot go on to the last. Once and once only he tasted the tree; once he felt craving; once he covered his shame; once he blushed in God’s presence; once he hid his guilty color; once he was driven out of the paradise of modesty; and from then on he married once. If you were “in him,” you have your rule; if you have crossed over “into Christ,” you will have to be better still. Produce us a third Adam, and a twice-married one, and then you will be able to be what neither of the two leaves you room to be.