The So-Called Chastity of the Philosophers

I am pleased that, though you burn with the greatest longing to know the truth, you still bring forward some foolish points. For by raising these objections you make the value of the catholic faith seem better established and, if I may use the expression, more thoroughly explored. What wise man would make such contradictory statements: yesterday to maintain that the heavenly purity of chastity could not possibly be granted to any mortal even by God’s grace, and now to hold that even the pagans obtained it by their own strength? But since, as I said, you have certainly raised these objections out of a desire to get at the truth, consider what we hold on these points. [a]

First, we certainly must not think that the philosophers reached such chastity of soul as is required of us, who are commanded that not only sexual immorality but uncleanness should not even be named among us. They had a sort of partial chastity, some small share of it: namely, self-control of the flesh, by which they could hold their lust back from sexual intercourse. But this inward purity of mind and continual purity of body they could not reach, I will not say in act, but even in thought.

Finally Socrates, the most famous of them all, as they themselves regard him, was not ashamed to admit this about himself. A man who read character from faces looked at him and said, “The eyes of a corrupter of boys.” His students rushed at the man, brought him to their master, and wanted to avenge the insult. But Socrates, it is said, checked their anger with these words: “Stop, my friends, for I am one, but I hold myself back.”

It is quite clearly shown, then, not only by our own assertions but by their own admissions, that it was only the doing of indecent acts, that is, the disgrace of intercourse, that they held back by force of necessity, and that the desire for this passion and the delight in it were not shut out of their hearts.

But with what horror must one repeat this saying of Diogenes! What the philosophers of this world were not ashamed to put forward as something remarkable cannot be spoken or heard by us without shame. They relate that he said to a man who was to be punished for the crime of adultery: “Do not buy with your death what is sold for nothing.”

It is clear, then, that they did not know the virtue of the true chastity we are seeking. And so it is quite certain that our circumcision, which is in the spirit, cannot be gained except by the gift of God alone, and that it belongs only to those who serve God with a spirit wholly crushed in sorrow.