Whether a Man Should Marry

Since pleasure and craving seem to fall under the subject of marriage, marriage has to be discussed as well. Marriage is the first union of a man and a woman for the begetting of legitimate children. So Menander the comic poet says: [a]

We are asking whether we ought to marry, which is one of those questions that are called relative. Some men must marry; a man must be in a certain condition; and he must marry a woman in a certain condition. Not everyone is to marry, and not at every time. There is a season when it is fitting, and a person for whom it is fitting, and an age up to which it is fitting. Not every man ought to take a wife, and not every woman is to be taken, and not always, and not in every way, and not without thought. Only the man who is in the right circumstances should marry, and such a woman, and at the time required, and for the sake of children — a woman who matches him in every way, and who does not love the husband who loves her under force or compulsion. That is why Abraham, calling his wife a sister, says, “She is my sister by my father, but not by my mother; and she became my wife.” He is teaching us that children of the same mother ought not to marry each other.

Let me run briefly through what has been said about it. Plato ranks marriage among the good things that come to us from outside: it provides for the continuing of our race, and hands down a kind of permanence, like a torch, to our children’s children. Democritus rejects marriage and the having of children, because of the many annoyances that come with them and the way they pull a man away from more necessary things. Epicurus agrees, and so do all who put the good in pleasure and in freedom from trouble and pain. In the Stoics’ opinion, marriage and the rearing of children are matters of indifference; in the Peripatetics’ opinion, a good. In short, these men carried their doctrines through in words and became slaves to their pleasures: some kept concubines, some mistresses, and most of them boys. And that famous wise foursome in the Garden, with their mistress, honored pleasure by what they did. Men like these will not escape the curse on yoking a donkey together with an ox: they judge that certain things do not suit them, and then order other people to do them — or the other way around. Scripture showed this briefly when it says, “What you hate, do not do to anyone else.”

But those who approve of marriage say that nature has fitted us for it, as the make of our bodies shows, male and female. And they are forever repeating the command, “Increase and multiply.” Even granting all this, they think it shameful that a human being, made by God, should be less restrained than the animals without reason, which do not mate with many partners at random but with one of their own kind — pigeons and ringdoves and creatures like them. Besides, they say, “The childless man falls short of the completeness that belongs to nature, since he has not put a successor of his own in his place. A man is complete when he has produced his like out of himself — or rather, when he sees that he has produced the same, that is, when the child he has fathered comes to the same nature as the father who begot him.” So we must certainly marry: for our country’s sake, for the succession of children, and, as far as it depends on us, for the completing of the world. The poets, too, pity a marriage half finished and childless, and call the fruitful one happy. But it is illness in the body that shows most clearly how necessary marriage is. A wife’s care, and the steadiness of her constant attention, go beyond what any other relative or friend will put up with, and outdo them all in sympathy; most of all, she takes willingly to sitting up through the night. And in truth, as Scripture says, she is the help a man needs. Menander the comic poet, then, runs marriage down and yet brings out its advantages on the other side. He answers a man who has said:

Then he adds:

— and so on. Marriage is a help, too, to people getting on in years: it provides a spouse to take care of a man, and rears children by her to feed his old age.

as the tragic poet Sophocles has it. Lawgivers, moreover, do not allow unmarried men to hold the highest public offices. The lawgiver of the Spartans laid a fine not only on staying a bachelor, but on keeping to one marriage, and on marrying late, and on living alone. And the famous Plato orders the man who has not married to pay a wife’s maintenance into the public treasury and to hand the magistrates a suitable sum for expenses. For if men will not father children, never having married, they do all they can to make people scarce; they dissolve cities, and the world that is made up of cities, and they do away with the bringing of life into being that God appointed — which is an offense against God. It is unmanly and weak, too, to shy away from living with a wife and children. Where losing a thing is an evil, having it is certainly a good; and that holds for everything else as well. Now the loss of children, they say, is among the greatest evils; so having children is a good thing, and if that is so, marriage is a good thing too. As the lines say:

And so Homer makes this a thing to be prayed for in earnest: “a husband and a house” — yet not simply that, but along with good agreement. For other people’s marriage is an agreement for self-indulgence, but the marriage of philosophers leads to the agreement that follows reason. It tells wives to make themselves beautiful not in their outward appearance but in their character, and it tells husbands not to treat their wedded wives as mistresses, with bodily wantonness for their aim, but to take marriage as a help through the whole of life and for the best self-control.

Far better, in my opinion, than the seeds of wheat and barley that are sown in their proper seasons is the man who is sown, for whom everything else grows; and that seed is what farmers who keep themselves in hand are always sowing. So every foul and defiling practice must be cleared out of marriage, or we will be taunted with the mating of the animals without reason as being more in keeping with nature than the human coupling that brings children. Some of them, it must be granted, stop at the season appointed for them, and leave the making of life to the working of Providence. The tragedians describe Polyxena: murdered though she was, as she died she still took great care to fall decently, “hiding what should be kept from the eyes of men.” Marriage, for her, was a disaster. To be subject to the passions, then, and to give in to them, is the most extreme slavery, just as keeping them under is the only freedom. The divine Scripture says accordingly that those who have broken the commands are sold to strangers — that is, to sins foreign to their nature — until they turn back and repent. Marriage, then, is a holy image, and it must be kept clean of the things that defile it. We are to rise from sleep with the Lord, and to go to sleep with thanksgiving and prayer —

confessing the Lord through the whole of our life, holding reverence in the soul and extending self-control to the body. For it pleases God when decency is carried over from the tongue into what we do. Filthy talk is the road to shamelessness, and the end of both is filthy conduct.

That Scripture advises marriage, and allows no release from the union, is stated outright in the law: “You are not to divorce your wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality.” And it counts as sexual immorality the marriage of people who have separated while the other partner is still alive. A wife who does not dress and adorn herself beyond what is fitting keeps herself clear of slanderous suspicion, while she gives herself steadily to prayers and petitions, avoids leaving the house often, shuts herself away as far as she can from the sight of everyone not related to her, and thinks running the household more important than idle chatter. “Anyone who takes a woman who has been divorced,” it is said, “commits adultery; and whoever divorces his wife makes her an adulteress” — that is, he forces her into adultery. And it is not only the man who divorces her who is guilty of this, but the man who takes her, since he gives the woman her opportunity to sin; if he did not take her, she would go back to her husband. What, then, does the law say? To check the rush of the passions, it commands that an adulteress be put to death once she is convicted of the act, and that if she is from a priestly family she be burned. The adulterer, too, is stoned to death, but not in the same place, so that not even their death may be shared. And the law is not at odds with the good news but agrees with it. How could it be otherwise, when one Lord is the author of both? The woman who has been sexually immoral is living in sin and is dead to the commands; but the woman who has repented, born again, as it were, by the change in her life, has a new birth of life. The old prostitute is dead, and the woman brought back by repentance has come to life again. The Spirit bears witness to what has been said through Ezekiel, when he declares, “I do not want the death of the sinner, but that he should turn.” They are stoned, then, as people dead through hardness of heart to the law they did not believe. But for the woman of a priestly family the punishment is greater, because “from the one to whom much has been given, more will be required.” Let me bring this second book of the Stromata to an end here, because of the length and the number of its chapters.