The Things of the Lord

Do you flatter yourself because of your virginity? Remember that Adam and Eve fell while they were virgins, and that the perfect purity of their bodies did them no good when they sinned. The virgin who sins is to be compared to Eve, not to Mary. We do not deny that in this present life there is the remedy of repentance; but we urge you rather to hope for a reward than to look for pardon. For it is shameful that those who are expecting the crown of virginity should ask for leniency, and that those who have cut themselves off even from lawful things should do anything unlawful. It must be remembered that it is lawful to be joined in marriage. And just as those are to be praised who, out of love for Christ and for the glory of the kingdom of heaven, have despised the tie of marriage, so those are to be condemned who, after vowing themselves to God, fall back on the apostle’s remedy because they take pleasure in giving way to their desires. So, as we have said, those who refuse marriage are despising not unlawful things but lawful ones. [a]

And if people of that kind swear; if they speak evil of others; if they disparage others or listen patiently to those who do; if they repay evil for evil; if they lay themselves open to the charge of coveting other people’s property, or of greed in holding on to their own; if they nurse the poison of revenge or envy; if they say or even think anything unfitting against the institutions of the law or of the apostles; if, from a desire to please in the flesh, they show themselves off dressed up and adorned; if they do any other unlawful things, as is all too common; then what will it profit them to have spurned what is lawful while they practice what is not? If you want it to be to your advantage that you have despised lawful things, take care not to do any of the things that are unlawful. For it is foolish to have feared what is by its nature the lesser thing and not to fear what is in itself the greater; or not to avoid the things that are forbidden, while the things that are allowed are treated with contempt.

For the apostle says, “The unmarried woman cares for the things of the Lord, how she may please God, so that she may be holy both in body and in spirit; but the married woman cares for the things of this world, how she may please her husband.” So he declares that the married woman pleases her husband by thinking of worldly things, while the unmarried woman pleases God, because she has no anxiety about the things of the world. Then let him tell me: whom does she want to please, the woman who has no husband and yet cares for the things of the world? Will not the married woman be preferred to her in that case? Yes, for the married woman, by caring for the things of the world, at least pleases her husband; but the other pleases neither a husband, since she has none, nor God.

But we must not pass over in silence what he said: “The unmarried woman cares for the things of the Lord, how she may please God, so that she may be holy both in body and in spirit.” She cares, he says, for the things of the Lord; she does not care for the things of the world, or of people, but for the things of God. What, then, are the things of the Lord? Let the apostle tell us: “Whatever things are holy, whatever things are just, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue, and if there is any praise of doctrine.” These are the things of the Lord, on which holy and truly apostolic virgins meditate and think, day and night, without a break. The resurrection of the dead is the Lord’s. Immortality is the Lord’s. Incorruption is the Lord’s. That splendor of the sun promised to the saints is the Lord’s, as it is written in the Gospel, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” The many mansions of the righteous in the heavens are the Lord’s. The fruit that is produced, whether thirtyfold, or sixtyfold, or a hundredfold, is the Lord’s. Virgins who think on these things, and on the works by which they may be able to merit them, are thinking of the things of the Lord. The law of the New and Old Testaments is the Lord’s as well, in which the holy words of his lips shine out; and if virgins meditate on these things without ceasing, they are thinking of the things of the Lord. In that case the saying of the prophet is fulfilled in them: “The eternal foundations are on solid rock, and the commands of God are in the heart of the holy woman.”