Edict of the Overseer of Overseers

Modesty is the flower of manners, the honor of our bodies, the grace of the sexes, the soundness of our blood, the guarantee of our stock, the ground of holiness, the advance sign of every good disposition. It is rare, it is hard to bring to perfection, and it is almost never held onto for life; yet it will linger in the world up to a point, if nature has laid the first groundwork of it, if training has talked people into it, and if the censor’s severity has cut back its excesses — on the assumption, that is, that every good quality of mind comes about either by birth, or by training, or by outside compulsion. [a]

But the power of evil things keeps winning ground, which is the mark of the last times, and so good things are now not allowed to be born, the seed being so corrupted; nor to be trained, study being so deserted; nor to be enforced, the laws being so disarmed. In fact the very modesty I am beginning to write about has by now gone so far out of use that it is taken to mean not the renouncing of the appetites but only the moderating of them, and a man passes for chaste enough as long as he has not been too chaste. But let the world’s modesty look to itself, along with the world — along with the nature it sprang from, if it used to come by birth; its study, if by training; its slavery, if by compulsion. Except that it would have been unhappier still if it had survived only to prove barren, since it was not in God’s household that its work was done. I would rather have no good thing at all than a useless one. What is the use of a thing’s existing, if its existing is of use to nobody? It is our own good things whose standing is sinking now. It is the whole system of Christian modesty that is being shaken at the foundation — the modesty that draws everything it has from heaven: its nature through “the washing of rebirth,” its training through preaching, its censor’s severity through the judgments that each Testament sets out. And it is under a steadier outside compulsion than any, arising from the dread or the desire of the eternal fire and the eternal kingdom.

Against this modesty, could I have looked the other way? I hear that an edict has actually been published, and a final one at that. The Pontifex Maximus — that is, the overseer of overseers — issues his edict: “To those who have discharged their repentance I remit the sins both of adultery and of fornication.” What an edict! Nobody could write “Well done!” across that one. And where is this generosity to be posted up? On the very spot, I suppose: on the very doors of lust, under lust’s own signboards. That is the place to publish a repentance like this — where the offense itself does its business. That is the place to read out the pardon — where men will go in on the strength of it. But it is in the church that this is read, and in the church that it is announced; and the church is a virgin! Far, far from Christ’s betrothed be a proclamation like that. She is the true one, the modest one, the holy one; she will keep even her ears unstained. She has nobody to make such a promise to, and if she had, she would not make it — since even the earthly temple of God could sooner be called by the Lord “a den of robbers” than a den of adulterers and fornicators.

So this too will go into my indictment against the Soulish — and against the agreement I once kept with them myself, which will only make them throw it in my teeth the harder as a mark of fickleness. Breaking off a partnership is never in itself evidence of wrongdoing. As if it were not easier to go wrong with the majority, when it is in the company of the few that truth is loved! But a change of mind that does me good will disgrace me no more than I would want a change that does me harm to be an ornament to me. I do not blush at an error I have stopped holding, because I am glad to have stopped holding it, and because I see myself to be the better and the more modest for it. Nobody blushes at his own improvement. Even in Christ, knowledge had its stages of growth, and the apostle passed through those stages too. “When I was a child,” he says, “I spoke as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away the things that had been the child’s.” That is how thoroughly he turned from the opinions he began with. And he did not sin by becoming a zealot for traditions that were no longer ancestral but Christian, when he wished a cutting-off on the men who were advising that circumcision be kept.

And I could wish the same fate on the men who lop off the pure and genuine wholeness of the flesh — who amputate not the outermost skin but the inmost likeness of modesty itself — while they promise pardon to adulterers and fornicators, in the teeth of the first discipline of the Christian name. The pagan world itself bears such loud witness to that discipline that when it sets out to punish it in our women, it does so by defiling their bodies rather than by torturing them, meaning to wring out of them the thing they hold dearer than life. But now that glory is being put out, and put out by the very men who ought to be all the more unbending in refusing pardon for defilements of this kind, seeing that they make the fear of giving way to adultery and fornication their reason for marrying as often as they please — since “it is better to marry than to burn.” No doubt it is for the sake of self-control that a lack of self-control is necessary: the burning is to be put out with fires!

Why, then, do they also hand out indulgence, under the name of repentance, for crimes they have supplied remedies against by their law of marrying over and over? For remedies will be idle while the crimes are indulged, and the crimes will stay if the remedies are idle. Either way they are trifling, anxious and negligent at once: taking the emptiest of precautions against offenses they let off, and letting off, most absurdly, the offenses they take precautions against. Either precaution is not to be taken where quarter is given, or quarter is not to be given where precaution is taken. They take precautions as though they did not want the thing done, and grant indulgence as though they did want it done. If they do not want it done, they ought not to grant indulgence; if they are willing to grant indulgence, they ought not to take precautions. Besides, adultery and fornication cannot be ranked at the same time among the middling sins and among the greatest, so that both courses lie equally open with regard to them — the anxiety that takes precautions and the confidence that hands out pardon. But since they are of the kind that holds the topmost place among crimes, there is no room both for indulging them as though they were middling and for guarding against them as though they were the worst.

With us, on the other hand, precaution is taken against even the greatest — the highest, if you like — in this way: that after coming to faith a man is not permitted to know even a second marriage, marked off though it is, to be sure, from the work of adultery and fornication by the marriage contract and the dowry papers. And so, with the utmost strictness, we shut the twice-married out of communion, as men who bring the Paraclete into disrepute by the disorder of their discipline. We fix that same line at the threshold for adulterers and fornicators as well: they are sentenced to pour out tears that win no peace, and to get nothing more back from the church than the publishing of their disgrace.

“But,” they say, “God is good, and best of all, and tender-hearted, and a pitier, and rich in tender mercy, which he holds dearer than any sacrifice. He does not count the sinner’s death worth as much as his repentance. He is the Savior of all people, and most of all of those who believe. And so it will be fitting for the sons of God too to be tender-hearted, and peacemakers, giving in their turn just as Christ has given to us, and not judging, so that we may not be judged. For a man stands or falls to his own lord; who are you, to judge someone else’s servant? Forgive, and forgiveness will be given to you.” [n]

With such enormous trifles as these they flatter God and pamper themselves, unmanning discipline instead of bracing it. And how forcefully, on the other side, we for our part can answer them — with arguments that set the severity of God before us as a warning and stir up our own steadiness. Because although God is good by nature, he is just as well. It stands to reason: just as he knows how to heal, so he knows how to strike — “making peace, and creating evils.” He prefers repentance, and yet he ordered Jeremiah not to pray that trouble be turned away from a sinful people: “If they fast, I will not listen to their plea.” And again: “And do not pray for this people, and do not make request for them in prayer and petition, because I will not listen to them at the time when they call on me, in the time of their affliction.” And earlier still, this same God who prefers mercy over sacrifice says: “And do not pray for this people, and do not ask that they be shown mercy, and do not come to me on their behalf, because I will not listen to them.” And that, of course, is said at the very moment when they are suing for mercy, when out of repentance they are weeping and fasting and offering God their self-affliction.

For God is jealous, and he is not one to be sneered at — sneered at, that is, by the men who flatter his goodness. And though he is patient, through Isaiah he threatens that his patience will come to an end: “I have kept quiet. Shall I keep quiet and hold back forever? I have been silent, like a woman in labor. I will rise up, and I will dry them out.” For “a fire will go out ahead of his face and will burn his enemies up” — striking down not the body only, but the souls too, into hell.

Besides, the Lord himself shows the manner in which he threatens those who judge: “For with the judgment you judge, judgment will be given on you.” So he has not forbidden judging; he has taught how to do it. That is why the apostle judges too, and in a case of fornication at that: that such a man is to be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. And he scolds them likewise because brothers were not being judged before the bench of the holy ones; for he goes on to say, “What business is it of mine to judge those who are outside?”

“But you are to forgive,” they say, “so that forgiveness may be granted you by God.” The sins that are cleansed that way are the ones a man may have committed against his brother, not against God. In our prayer, in short, we declare that we will grant forgiveness to our debtors.

But it is not becoming to stretch the rope of controversy any further on the authority of scriptures like these, hauling it now one way and now another, so that one passage seems to pull the reins of discipline tight and another to slacken them, as though the matter were uncertain — the one cheapening the help repentance gives, by leniency, the other refusing it, by harshness. In fact the authority of scripture will hold within its own limits, without contradicting itself. The help repentance gives is settled by its own conditions, without unlimited concession, and the grounds of it are marked off beforehand, without confusion, in the way the case is stated. We agree that the grounds of repentance are sins. These we divide into two heads: some will be forgivable, some unforgivable. In line with that, it will be in doubt to nobody that some deserve correction and some deserve condemnation. Every sin is discharged either by pardon or else by penalty — by pardon as the outcome of correction, by penalty as the outcome of condemnation.

On this difference we have already set out certain passages of scripture that stand against each other, the one retaining sins and the other forgiving them; but John will teach us as well. “If anyone knows his brother to be sinning a sin that is not to death, he shall ask, and life will be given to him” — because he is not sinning to death, this will be forgivable. “There is a sin to death; I do not say that anyone is to make request about that” — this will be unforgivable. So where asking has force, forgiving has force too; where asking has no force, forgiving has none either. According to this difference between sins, the standing of repentance is divided as well. There will be a kind that can possibly obtain pardon — in the case of a forgivable sin; and there will be a kind that can by no means obtain it — in the case of an unforgivable one. What is left is to examine, specifically, which class adultery and fornication ought to be assigned to.

But before doing that, I will make short work of an answer that meets us from the other side, about the kind of repentance I have just been defining as the kind that is without pardon. “Why then,” they say, “if there is a repentance that lacks pardon, it follows at once that such repentance must not be practiced by you at all. For nothing is to be done in vain. Now repentance will be practiced in vain if it is without pardon. But all repentance is to be practiced. Therefore let us grant that all of it obtains pardon, so that it may not be practiced in vain — because it will not be a thing to practice, if it is practiced in vain. And in vain it is practiced, if it is to lack pardon.” [v]

They are within their rights to press that against us, since they have seized and kept in their own hands the fruit of this repentance as of any other — that is, pardon. As far as they are concerned, at whose hands repentance obtains man’s peace, it is indeed in vain. But as far as we are concerned, who remember that the Lord alone grants sins their pardon — the deadly ones, of course — it will not be practiced in vain. For repentance, once it is referred back to the Lord and lies flat on the ground before him, will by that very fact be the better able to win pardon: because it begs it from God alone, because it does not believe that man’s peace is adequate to its guilt, because as far as the church goes it prefers the blush of shame to the privilege of communion. It stands before her doors, and by the example of its own branding it warns everyone else; and at the same time it calls the tears of the brothers to its aid, and comes home with a richer cargo than their communion — their compassion. And if it does not reap the harvest of peace here, still it sows the seed of it with the Lord. It does not lose its fruit; it prepares it. It will not go without its pay, if it does not go without doing its duty. So repentance of this kind is not empty, and discipline of this kind is not harsh. Both honor God. The first, by laying no flattering ointment on itself, will the more readily succeed; the second, by claiming nothing for itself, will the more fully help.

Now that the distinction between the kinds of repentance has been drawn, we are able at last to go back to weighing up the sins — whether they are the sort that can obtain pardon at human hands. To begin with, ordinary usage requires us to call adultery fornication as well. Faith, too, is on familiar terms with a number of names for one thing; and so in every one of our little books we keep carefully to usage. Besides, whether I say adulterium or stuprum, the charge of contaminating the flesh will be one and the same. It makes no difference whether a man assaults another man’s bride or another man’s widow, so long as she is not his own woman — just as no difference is made by places, whether it is in a bedroom or in a tower that modesty is butchered. Every killing is banditry, even outside a wood. [w]

So too, whoever enjoys any intercourse other than the marriage bed, in whatever place and in the person of whatever woman, makes himself guilty of adultery and fornication. Accordingly, among us, secret unions as well — unions, that is, not first declared in the presence of the church — run the risk of being judged next door to adultery and fornication; and we must not let them slip the charge if they are afterward woven together under the covering of a marriage. But all the other frenzies of the passions — offenses against both bodies and sexes, and beyond the laws of nature — we banish not only from the threshold but from all shelter of the church, because they are not sins but monstrosities.