What Marriage Is For

The right time for intercourse is a question only married people need to weigh. For those who are married, the aim and the plan is to have children, and the goal is that the children turn out good. It is like farming. The reason a farmer casts his seed is that he is thinking about food, but the goal of farming is the gathering of the crop. And the farmer who works living soil is far the better of the two: the one is after food for the moment, while the other is taking care that the whole world should continue, and that is what a farmer’s work really amounts to. The one plants and sows for his own sake; the other for God’s. For God said, “Multiply,” and he must be obeyed. In this a man becomes the image of God to the degree that he works together with God in the making of a man. Not every field is fit to take seed; and even if any field were, it would not be so for the same farmer. One must not sow on rock. And the seed itself must not be treated with contempt: it is the leader and the beginning of everything that is born, and it is a substance that carries the plans of nature inside it. To take what nature has ordered and force it, for no reason, into passages nature never made for it, is an act of deep contempt for God. So look at how wisely Moses once used a symbol to shut down fruitless sowing. “You are not to eat the hare,” he says, “or the hyena.” He does not want people sharing in the character of those animals, or tasting an appetite like theirs; these creatures are carried into mating by something close to madness. They say the hare grows a new opening every year, so that it has as many openings as the years it has lived; and so, in forbidding the eating of the hare, Moses is warning us away from the sexual use of boys. And the hyena, they say, changes from male to female one year and back the next; so the man who keeps off the hyena is being told not to break out into adultery. [a]

Now I agree, as everyone does, that in this prohibition the supremely wise Moses is telling us not to resemble these animals. But I do not accept the explanation that has been given of the symbol. Nature can never be forced to change. What has once been stamped on it cannot be turned into its opposite by passion. Passion is not nature; passion defaces a form, it does not recast it in a new shape. It is true that many birds are said to change with the seasons, in color and in voice — the blackbird, for instance, which turns from black to yellow, and from a singer into a chatterer. The nightingale in the same way alters both its color and its note by turns. But they do not alter their nature itself, so as to become female from male in the change. A new crop of feathers is like a new set of clothes: it produces a kind of coloring in the plumage, and a little later that fades in the hard cold of winter, the way a flower loses its color. The voice too is damaged by the cold and weakened. The outer skin is thickened by the air around it, the arteries in the neck are compressed and filled, and they press hard on the breath; and the breath, badly hemmed in, comes out as a stifled sound. Then in spring, when the breath comes back into keeping with the air around it and loosens, it is freed from that cramped state and carried through arteries that are open again, though until then they were blocked. Then it no longer warbles a dying melody but gives out a clear, high note; the voice runs wide, and spring becomes the song of the birds’ voices.

So it must not for a moment be believed that the hyena ever changes its nature. The same animal does not carry the genitals of both male and female at once, as some have imagined — the people who invented the monstrous idea of hermaphrodites and made up this male-female nature standing between man and woman. They are badly mistaken, because they have not noticed how fond of all her children Nature is, the mother who bears them. This animal — the hyena, I mean — is extremely lustful, and so beneath its tail, in front of the passage for waste, there has grown a fleshy swelling very like the female organ in shape. But this piece of flesh has no passage running out of it into any useful part: not into the womb, and not into the bowel. It is only a large hollow, which takes in an appetite that goes nowhere, at seasons when the passages used in conceiving young are turned away from it. And this same thing has grown on the male hyena as well as on the female, because the animal is remarkably given to being mounted: the male in turn both mounts and is mounted. That is also why a female hyena is so seldom found, for the animal does not conceive often, since among them the sowing that is against nature runs to excess. This, I think, is why Plato in the Phaedrus, when he rejects the love of boys, calls it a beast: men who hand themselves over to pleasure take the bit in their teeth and, in their lust, couple the way four-footed animals do, and try to sow children where no child can come. “God gave them up,” as the Apostle says, “to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature, and the males in the same way left the natural use of the woman and burned in their desire for one another, males working shame with males and receiving in themselves the payment their error deserved.” But nature has not granted even to the most lustful animals to put seed into the passage for waste. Urine is discharged into the bladder; food, once moistened, into the stomach; the tear into the eye; blood into the veins; wax into the ears; mucus into the nostrils. At the end of the bowel is the seat, and waste is put out through it. In the hyena alone, then, did an odd nature devise this extra part for extra intercourse; and that is why it is hollow to a point, to serve the parts that itch, and then the hollow goes blind — because the thing was not built to produce anything. From this it is plain to us, and past arguing, that we must keep clear of lying with males, of sowings that can bear no fruit, of intercourse from behind, and of couplings with the man-woman, which nature cannot knit together. We are to follow nature herself, who forbids all this by the very build of the parts, since she made the male not for receiving seed but for giving it out.

When Jeremiah — that is, the Spirit speaking through him — says, “My house has become a hyena’s cave,” he is turning in disgust from that food which is made of dead bodies, and rebuking the worship of images by a wise piece of allegory. The house of the living God really ought to be clean of idols.

Moses forbids eating the hare as well. The hare mates in every season, mounting the female while she crouches, taking her from behind; it is one of the animals that leap on from the rear. It conceives every month, and conceives again on top of a pregnancy. It mates and gives birth, and as soon as it has given birth it is mounted by whatever hare comes along — it is not content with one marriage — and conceives again while it is still nursing. Its womb has two chambers. And it is not only an empty womb that drives it to mate — whatever is empty wants filling — but it also happens that while they are carrying young, the other part of the womb is gripped by desire and raves with appetite; and that is why they conceive twice over. So the prohibition, put as a riddle, was urging us to keep away from violent appetites, from couplings back and forth, from intercourse with pregnant women, from mating by turns, from the sexual abuse of boys, from adultery and from lust. And that is why Moses forbade these things openly, and not in riddles, saying: “You shall not be sexually immoral; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not molest children.”

So the Word’s rule has to be kept with all our strength. Nothing whatever is to be done against the laws, and the commands are not to be weakened. Evil craving has a name: hybris, wanton violence. Plato called the horse of craving “wanton” because he had read, “They became to me maddened horses after women.” And the angels who came to Sodom will show us what the punishment of lust is. They burned up the men who wanted to abuse them, and the city with them, marking out by that plain sign the fire which is what lust bears as fruit. What happened to the people of long ago was written down, as we said before, to warn us — so that we would not be caught by the same vices, and would take care not to fall into the same punishments.

Boys should be thought of as sons, and other men’s wives should be looked at as one’s own daughters. To keep pleasures in check, to be master of the stomach and of what lies below the stomach, is the greatest rule there is. If wise reason will not let a man move even a finger at random — as the Stoics themselves admit — how much more must men who are chasing after wisdom hold command over the part by which intercourse is had? That, it seems, is why the organ is called aidoion, the part of modesty: because this part of the body more than any other has to be used with modesty. Nature has allowed us to use what is useful and fitting, in food and in lawful marriage alike, as far as is proper, and she has allowed us to want children. But whoever goes chasing what is beyond measure slips out of what is according to nature, and injures himself by unions that are against the laws.

Before anything else, it is right that we never use young men the way we use women. And that is why the man whom Moses made a philosopher says one must not sow “on rocks and stones, since the seed will never take root there and receive a nature able to generate.” So the Word gave the plainest possible command through Moses: “You shall not lie with a male as with a female; it is detestable.” Besides this, the excellent Plato, gathering it from the divine Scriptures, advised that a man “must keep away from every female field except his own,” taking the law from this: “You shall not give your seed to your neighbor’s wife, to lie with her and be defiled by her.” The seed sown in concubines is void and adulterous. Do not sow where you do not want what is sown to be born to you. Do not touch any woman at all except your own wife: she is the only one with whom you are allowed the pleasures of the flesh, and that in order to receive lawful children. These are the only things the Word counts lawful.

For men who share in the divine gift of bringing a work into being, the seed must not be thrown away, or treated with contempt, or sown as though you were entrusting it to horns. So this same Moses forbids intercourse even with a man’s own wife, if she happens to be held by her monthly bleeding. It is not right to pollute the generative seed, which is soon to be a human being, with the body’s purging, or to flood and bury it under the foul flow of matter and the filth that is being cleared away; and the seed of generation degenerates and is made useless if it is robbed of the furrows of the womb. Nor does Moses ever bring in one of the ancient Hebrews lying with his wife while she was pregnant. Pleasure by itself, even taken inside a marriage, is against the laws, unjust, and foreign to reason. So Moses again draws men away from pregnant women, until they have given birth.

The womb sits under the bladder and above the bowel called the rectum, and stretches its neck out between the shoulders of the bladder. The mouth of that neck, where the seed comes in, is filled and then shuts; it is emptied again once childbirth has cleared it, and when the fruit has been set down it takes in seed again. There is nothing shameful in our naming, for the good of our hearers, the parts in which a child is conceived — parts God was not ashamed to make. So the womb, thirsty for the bearing of children, takes in the seed and refuses intercourse that is shameful and worth blaming: after the sowing it closes its mouth and from then on shuts lust out altogether. Its own appetites, which before were busy with loving embraces, are turned inward, and being taken up with the making of a child, they work together with the Maker. It is wrong, then, to keep troubling nature when she is already at work, by breaking out needlessly into wanton appetite.

Wantonness has many names and many kinds; when it has bent toward this sexual excess it is called lagneia, lewdness — a word for a lustful, shameless, public leaning toward intercourse. And when it has grown, a whole crowd of diseases comes along with it: appetite for rich food, heavy drinking, love of women, extravagance, and with that a hunger for every pleasure; and over all of them craving rules like a tyrant. Countless related passions grow up beside these, and out of them habits of excess are carried to their limit. Scripture says: “Whips are made ready for the man with no self-control, and punishments for the shoulders of fools” — calling the strength of that excess, and its stubborn staying power, “the shoulders of fools.” And so: “Take empty hopes away from your servants,” he says, “and turn unfitting cravings away from me. Let the appetite of the stomach and of intercourse not take hold of me.”

So we have to keep far off from the many kinds of harm done by men who lie in wait. It is not only into Crates’ Wallet that no foolish hanger-on sails, and no lustful whoremonger who takes his pleasure in the hinder part, and no scheming prostitute, and no other beast of pleasure of that sort — it is into our city too. Let good and honorable work, then, be sown throughout the whole of our life.

In short, whether a man ought to marry or to keep entirely clear of marriage — for that too is a matter of inquiry — we have set out in our book On Self-Control. But if the question is whether a man should take a wife at all, how can he then be freely allowed to use intercourse constantly, the way he uses food, as if it were a necessity? You can see the sinews drawn apart like threads on a loom and torn in the violent straining of the act. It throws a fog over the senses as well, and drains the strength. This is plain both in animals without reason and in bodies in training. Among athletes, the ones who abstain beat their opponents; while animals led away from mating are pulled along and all but dragged, their whole strength and drive gone, as though the nerve had been taken out of them. The sophist from Abdera called intercourse “a little epilepsy,” reckoning it an incurable disease. Do not the collapses that follow get put down to the size of the emptying, and of what leaves the body? For a human being is born out of a human being, and is torn out of him. See how great the loss is: a whole human being is drawn off in the emptying of intercourse. Scripture says, “This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” A man, then, is emptied of as much seed as he seems to amount to in body, since what leaves him is the beginning of another; and the boiling up of that matter unsettles the body’s frame and loosens and shakes it. It was a neat answer, then, that the old man gave when he was asked how he was doing now with sex: “Better words, please. I ran away from that gladly, as from a wild and raving master.”

Still, let marriage be granted and allowed: the Lord does want the human race filled up. But he does not say, Be lustful. He did not want you handed over to pleasure as if you had been born for intercourse. Let the Instructor shame us, calling out through Ezekiel: “Be circumcised of your immorality.” Even animals without reason have their fitting season for sowing. To come together for anything other than having children is to do violence to nature. Nature is to be our teacher, and the fitting times she wisely brings in have to be carefully observed — I mean old age and childhood. To the one she has not yet granted marriage; the other she does not want marrying any longer. But she does not want people busy at marriage all the time either. Marriage is the desire to have children, not a disorderly discharge of seed, which is both against the laws and foreign to reason.

Our whole life will run according to nature if we hold our cravings in from the start, and do not use wicked and spiteful arts to destroy the human race that is born by God’s providence. Women who use deadly drugs to hide their immorality — drugs that lead straight to ruin — destroy every trace of humanity along with the unborn child.

As for the rest, married men will need the Instructor: that the mysteries of nature not be celebrated by daylight, and that no one coming home in the morning — from church, say, or from the marketplace — should mate like a rooster, when it is the hour for prayer and reading and for the work that belongs to the day. In the evening a man should rest, after dinner and after the thanksgiving offered to God for the good things we have received. And nature does not always give time for the union of marriage to be carried through; the union is more to be desired the longer it waits. Nor should anyone behave without limit or self-control at night, as if in the dark. Modesty is the light of reason, and it must be shut up inside the soul. We shall be no different from Penelope at her loom if by day we weave the teachings of self-control and by night, once we have come to bed, unravel them. If a man has to behave honorably at all, he has far more reason to show honor to his own wife, by keeping clear of dishonorable unions. Let there be a witness worth trusting, out of your own house, that you deal chastely with your neighbors. No woman can think anything honorable of a man when his honor has not been proved to her, as if by sure evidence, in those keen pleasures. Goodwill that runs headlong into intercourse blooms for a short time and grows old with the body; sometimes it grows old before its time, when lust has already gone slack and whorish appetites have spoiled the self-control that belongs to marriage. Lovers’ hearts have wings, and love’s provocations are often put out by regret; and love often turns into hatred, once a man has had his fill and feels the reproach.

The names of shameless talk, of foul postures, of whorish kissing and wantonness of that kind should not even be mentioned by people who follow the blessed Apostle, who says plainly: “But sexual immorality and every kind of uncleanness, or the craving to have more, must not even be named among you, as is fitting for holy people.” So someone put it rightly: “Intercourse has never done anyone any good; a man is doing well if it has not harmed him.” Even lawful intercourse is dangerous, except so far as it is for having children. About intercourse against the laws Scripture says: “A woman who sells herself will be reckoned like a boar; but a woman who belongs to a husband is a tower of death to those who use her.” It compared the prostitute’s temper to a he-goat, or a boar. “Death” is its word for the adultery committed with a woman who is kept under guard. And your own Greek poetry, after its fashion, reproaches the house and the city in which they carry on their excess, when it writes:

The chaste, on the other hand, it admires:

because that is against nature. These sins of theirs most people count as delights. And those who are better than they are know such things to be sins, but are beaten by pleasure, and darkness is the veil over what they do. For a man violates his own marriage as an adulterer if he uses it in a whore’s way, and does not hear the voice of the Instructor, who cries out: “The man who climbs into his bed, who says in his soul, Who sees me? Darkness is all around me, the walls are my covering, no one sees my sins. Why should I be afraid that the Most High will remember?” Such a man is utterly wretched, dreading nothing but human eyes, and thinking he will get past God’s notice. “For he does not know,” says the Scripture, “that the eyes of the Most High are ten thousand times brighter than the sun; they look on all the ways of men and cast their glance into the hidden places.” So the Instructor threatens them again, speaking through Isaiah: “Grief is coming to those who make their plans in secret and say, Who sees us?” A man may escape the light our senses know, but the light of the mind he cannot escape. For how, as Heraclitus asks, can anyone hide from what never sets? Let us not, then, wrap ourselves in the dark; the light lives in us. “And the darkness,” it is said, “did not take it in.” Night itself is lit up by self-controlled reason. Scripture has called the thoughts of good men “lamps that never sleep.” Even to attempt concealment, with regard to what you are doing, is on any showing to sin. And every man who sins wrongs himself more than he wrongs his neighbor; if he commits adultery, the neighbor is not wronged as much as he is, because he has committed adultery and has made himself worse and cheaper. A man who sins becomes, in the measure that he sins, worse and of less account than he was; and the man who has been beaten by low pleasures now has license fastened to him altogether. So the man who is sexually immoral is wholly dead to God, and is left by the Word as a dead body is left by the spirit. What is holy shrinks, and rightly, from being defiled; but the pure may always lawfully touch the pure. Do not, I beg you, put off your modesty at the same time as you put off your clothes; it is never right for a just man to strip himself of self-control. For look: this mortal body is to put on immortality. Then the insatiable appetite that rushes into license will be trained by self-control, set free from the love of what decays, and will hand the man over to a chastity that lasts forever. “For in this world they marry and are given in marriage.” But when we are done with the works of the flesh, and clothed in immortality, the flesh itself now pure, we go after what belongs to the measure of the angels.

So in the Philebus, Plato, who had been a student of the foreigners’ philosophy, gave the hidden name of atheists to the men who destroy and pollute, as far as it lies with them, the divinity living in them — that is, the Word — by keeping company with their vices. Men who are consecrated to God, then, must never live as mortals live. “Nor is it fitting,” as Paul says, “to make the members of Christ the members of a prostitute; nor may the temple of God be made a temple of base passions.” Remember the twenty-four thousand who were rejected for sexual immorality. What happened to the people who were sexually immoral, as I said already, are patterns set there to correct our cravings. And the Instructor warns us in the plainest terms: “Do not go after your cravings; hold back from your appetites. For wine and women will carry off the wise, and the man who clings to prostitutes will grow more reckless. Rot and worms will take him for their inheritance, and he will be held up as a public example to greater shame.” And again — for he never tires of doing good — “The man who turns his eyes away from pleasure crowns his life.”

It is not right, then, to be beaten by sex, or to gape stupidly after lusts, or to be moved by appetites that have nothing to do with reason, or to want to be defiled. Only the man who has taken a wife is allowed to sow, being then a farmer, and only when the season admits sowing. Against every other kind of excess, the best medicine is reason. It helps, too, to go without being full: it is fullness that kindles lusts and makes them leap out after pleasures.