Love, Desire, and Women Made Perfect

The well-ordered bent of our love for people, as Clement puts it, looks for the common good — whether that comes by suffering as a martyr or by teaching, in what we do and in what we say; and teaching is of two kinds, unwritten and written. And this is what love is: to love God and to love our neighbor. “It lifts us to heights beyond telling. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love bears all things, endures all things. Love joins us to God; love does everything in harmony. In love all God’s chosen ones were made perfect. Apart from love nothing is pleasing to God.” And it is said: “Of its perfection there is no telling. Who is fit to be found in it, except those whom God counts worthy?” The apostle Paul speaks right to the point: “If I hand over my body and do not have love, I am ringing bronze or a clashing cymbal.” He means: if I am to bear witness, but not out of the settled love that belongs to a man who truly knows — if instead it is out of fear and out of the reward I am counting on, and I merely move my lips in bearing witness to the Lord, so as to confess the Lord — then I am an ordinary man making a noise with the Lord’s name, and I do not know him. For there is a people that loves with its lips, and there is another that hands over the body to be burned. “And if I give away everything I own to feed the poor,” he says — meaning, not on the principle of sharing out of love, but for the sake of a return, either from the man who got the benefit or from the Lord who promised one; “and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains,” and can throw off the passions that blind me, and yet am not faithful to the Lord out of love, then “I am nothing” — nothing, that is, next to the man who bears witness as one who truly knows. I belong with the crowd, and I am reckoned no better than they are. [a]

“Now all the generations from Adam to this day have passed away. But those who have been made perfect in love, by the grace of God, hold their place among the godly, who will be shown for what they are at the appearing of the kingdom of Christ.” Love does not let a man sin. But if he does fall into anything of the kind, because the adversary got in the way, then, following David, he will sing: “I will praise the Lord, and it will please him better than a young bull with horns and hoofs. Let the poor see it and be glad.” For he says, “Sacrifice to God a sacrifice of praise, and pay the Lord your vows; and call on me in the day of trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will glorify me.” “For the sacrifice God wants is a broken spirit.”

God, then, being good, “is love,” as it is said. And his love “does no wrong to a neighbor” — never injuring, never taking revenge, but in a word doing good to everyone, after the image of God. So “love is the fulfilling of the law” — as Christ is, that is, the coming of the Lord who loves us; and so is our teaching when it is done in love, and the discipline that follows Christ. By love, then, the commands not to commit adultery and not to covet your neighbor’s wife are fulfilled — the same sins that fear forbade in an earlier time. The same deed, then, comes out differently depending on whether it is done out of fear or carried through by love, worked by faith or worked by knowledge. Their rewards, quite rightly, are different too. For the man who truly knows there are prepared “the things no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and which have never entered a human heart”; but to the man who has practiced plain faith the Lord promises a hundred times over what he left behind — a promise that turns out to be one a human mind can take in.

Having come this far, I remember a man who called himself one of those who truly know. Explaining the words “But I tell you, anyone who looks at a woman so as to crave her has already committed adultery,” he held that it was not bare craving that stood condemned, but craving in which the deed that follows from it is carried through inside the craving itself and goes beyond it. A dream, after all, makes use of both the imagination and the body. That is why the historians tell this ruling of Bocchoris the Just. A young man fell in love with a courtesan and talked the girl into coming to him the next day for an agreed price. But his craving was satisfied ahead of time and without warning, since he took hold of her in a dream; so when the girl he loved came as agreed, he would not let her in. She learned what had happened and demanded her fee, saying that this was exactly how she had satisfied her lover’s craving. So they went to the judge. He ordered the young man to hold the purse with the money in it out in the sun, and told the courtesan to take hold of its shadow — his joke being that the image of a fee was the right payment for the image of an embrace.

A man dreams, then, when his soul gives its consent to what it sees. But the man who looks in order to crave is dreaming while awake. And that is so not only, as that self-styled knower said, when along with the sight of the woman he pictures the act in his mind — for that is already the deed of craving, as craving — but also, the Word says, when a man looks at a beautiful body and the flesh seems fair to him in the way of craving. If he looks at it with the flesh and with sin, he is judged for having admired it. The man who looks at beauty with a pure love, on the other hand, does not think the flesh beautiful but the spirit. He admires the body, as I judge it, as an image, and by its beauty he carries himself over to the Artist and to the beauty that is real. He shows the holy token, the bright stamp of righteousness, to the angels who wait at the ascent — I mean the anointing that marks a man out as accepted, the settled temper that lives in a soul made glad by its share in the Holy Spirit. This is the glory that shone out on the face of Moses, which the people could not look at; that is why he took a veil over the glory, for the sake of those who were looking with the flesh. For the ones who collect the toll hold back anybody bringing in goods that belong to this world, anybody weighed down with his own passions. But the man who is free of everything dutiable, who is full of knowledge and of the righteousness that shows in what he does — him they pass through with their good wishes, blessing the man along with his work. “And his leaf will not fall away” — the leaf of the living tree that is fed “by the channels of water.” The righteous man is compared to trees that bear fruit, and not merely to trees whose nature it is to grow tall. And in the offerings made under the law there were men whose task was to look the victims over for blemishes. Those who are expert in such matters distinguish appetite from craving. Craving, being contrary to reason, they assign to pleasures and to self-indulgence; appetite, being a movement in line with reason, they assign to the needs of nature.

Man and woman alike can share in this perfection. It was not only Moses, then, who heard God say, “I have spoken to you once, and twice, and said: I have seen this people, and look, they are stiff-necked. Let me wipe them out and blot their name from under heaven, and I will make you into a great and wonderful nation, much greater than this one.” And he answered not for himself but for the rescue of them all: “By no means, Lord. Forgive this people their sin — or else blot me out of the book of the living.” How great his perfection was, wanting to die together with the people rather than be saved alone! [p]

But Judith too became perfect among women. With the city under siege, at the elders’ request she went out into the foreigners’ camp, thinking nothing of the danger for her country’s sake and putting herself into the enemy’s hands, trusting God. And she was rewarded for that trust straight away: a woman, she got the better of the enemy of her faith and came away holding the head of Holofernes. And Esther again, made perfect by faith, who rescued Israel from the king’s power and the satrap’s cruelty: one woman, worn down with fasting, held back ten thousand armed hands and cancelled the tyrant’s decree by her faith. The king she calmed, Haman she stopped, and Israel she kept from harm by her perfect prayer to God. I say nothing of Susanna and of Moses’ sister. Miriam shared the prophet’s command of the host and stood above every Hebrew woman who had a name for wisdom; and Susanna, in her extraordinary modesty, went as far as death, condemned by men who lusted after her, and remained to the end the unshaken martyr of chastity.

Dion the philosopher tells of a woman named Lysidica who was so modest that she bathed with her clothes on; and of Philotera, who, when she was going into the bath, drew her tunic back little by little as the water covered what was bared, and then, rising by degrees, put it on again. And did not Leaena of Attica bear torture like a man? She was in on the plot of Harmodius and Aristogeiton against Hipparchus, and though she was tortured hard she never said a word. And they say that the women of Argos, led by the poet Telesilla, put the hardy Spartans to flight simply by showing themselves, and that she made the women fearless of death. The man who composed the Danais speaks in the same way about the daughters of Danaus:

and so on. The rest of the poets sing of Atalanta’s speed in the hunt, of Anticlea’s love for her child, of Alcestis’ love for her husband, of the courage of Macaria and of the Hyacinthides. What more shall I say? Did not Theano the Pythagorean get so far in philosophy that when a man stared hard at her and said, “What a beautiful arm,” she answered, “Yes — but it is not on public display”? The same good sense shows in another answer of hers that is on record. Asked how soon a woman may go to the Thesmophoria after being with a man, she said, “After her own husband, at once; after another man’s, never.”

Themisto of Lampsacus, daughter of Zoilus and wife of Leontes of Lampsacus, studied Epicurean philosophy; so did Myia, the daughter of Theano the Pythagorean, and Arignote, who wrote the history of Dionysius. And the daughters of Diodorus, the one they called Cronus, all became dialecticians — Philo the dialectician gives their names in his Menexenus: Menexene, Argia, Theognis, Artemesia, and Pantaclea. I remember a woman Cynic as well, called Hipparchia, from Maroneia, the wife of Crates; hers was the case of the so-called dog-wedding, celebrated in the Painted Stoa. Arete of Cyrene, too, the daughter of Aristippus, educated her son Aristippus, who got the nickname Mother-taught. Lastheneia of Arcadia and Axiothea of Phlius studied philosophy with Plato. And Aspasia of Miletus, about whom the comic writers have a great deal to say, was trained by Socrates in philosophy and by Pericles in public speaking. I leave out the rest, since the discussion is already long — not naming the poets Corinna, Telesilla, Myia, and Sappho, nor the painters, such as Irene the daughter of Cratinus and Anaxandra the daughter of Nealces, on the report of Didymus in his Table Talk. The daughter of Cleobulus, the sage and ruler of Lindos, was not ashamed to wash the feet of her father’s guests. And Abraham’s wife, the blessed Sarah, made the loaves baked in the ashes for the angels with her own hands; and among the Hebrews the daughters of chiefs pastured sheep. That is why Homer’s Nausicaa goes out to the washing pools.

The wise woman, then, will choose first of all to persuade her husband to join her in what leads to happiness. And if that proves impossible, let her aim hard at virtue on her own, keeping her husband’s agreement in everything, so as never to do anything against his will — except in what is counted as contributing to virtue and salvation. But if a man keeps either his wife or a servant girl from that way of life when her heart is set on it, then what he is plainly doing is deciding to drive her away from righteousness and self-restraint, and choosing to make his own house a wicked and unrestrained one. It is not possible for any human being, man or woman, to become competent at anything at all without instruction, hard work, and practice. And virtue, as we have said, does not depend on others but above all on ourselves. Other things a man can hold down by making war on them; but what depends on a person’s own self is entirely beyond anyone else’s reach, however doggedly he keeps at it. For it is a gift given by God, and it is not in anyone else’s power. So a lack of self-restraint should be counted the evil of no one but the man who is guilty of it, and self-restraint the good of the man who is able to practice it.

Euripides describes the woman who loves her husband as she should, and gives her this advice: [ad]

And again he adds something of the same kind:

Then, showing her gentle and kind even in misfortune, he adds:

And:

So a marriage carried through according to the Word is made holy, if the union is under God and is conducted “with a true heart, in the full assurance of faith, with hearts sprinkled clean from a bad conscience and the body washed with pure water, holding on to the confession of hope; for the one who promised is faithful.” And the happiness of a marriage should never be measured by wealth or by looks, but by virtue. “Beauty,” says the tragedy,

Then, by way of advice, he says:

And so on. Scripture was exactly right to say that woman is given by God to man as “a helper.” It is clear enough, in my view, that she will take it on herself to put right, by good sense and by persuasion, each of the annoyances in the running of the house that begin with her husband. And if he will not give way, then she will do her best, as far as human nature allows, to lead a life free of sin — whether it turns out to be necessary to die, in accordance with reason, or to live. She counts God her helper and partner in such a life, her true defender and Savior both for the present and for what is to come, and makes him the leader and guide of everything she does. She reckons self-restraint and righteousness her work, and makes the favor of God her goal. So the apostle puts it gracefully in his letter to Titus, that “the older women should behave as befits people devoted to God, should not be slanderers, should not be enslaved to a lot of wine; that they should advise the young women to love their husbands and love their children, to be sensible, chaste, keepers of the house, good, and subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God is not spoken against.” But rather, he says, “Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord — watching carefully that there is no sexually immoral or godless person among you, as Esau was, who gave up his birthright for a single meal; and that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many are defiled.” And then, putting the finishing stroke to the question of marriage, he adds: “Marriage is to be held in honor by all, and the bed undefiled; but God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.”

And since it has been shown that, as far as perfection goes, there is one aim and one end belonging to the man and to the woman alike, Peter says in his letter: “Though for a little while now, if it must be so, you have been made sad by all kinds of trials, so that the testing of your faith — far more precious than gold, which perishes even though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and honor and glory at the revealing of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and though you do not see him now, you trust him and rejoice with a joy beyond words and full of glory, receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” And that is why Paul rejoices, for Christ’s sake, that he was “in labors more abundantly, in beatings beyond measure, often near death.”