Letters

⁷ In another passage we have discussed the reasons which led Paul to say: “Now concerning virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment, as one that has obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful.” Here also, while we have extolled virginity, we have been careful to give marriage its due. “Had the Lord commanded virginity,” we said, “He would have seemed to condemn marriage and to do away with that seed-plot of humanity from which virginity itself springs.

Had He cut away the root how could He have looked for fruit? Unless He had first laid the foundations, how could He have built the edifice or crowned it with a roof made to cover its whole extent?” If we have spoken of marriage as the root whose fruit is virginity, and if we have made wedlock the foundation on which the building or the roof of perpetual chastity is raised, which of my detractors can be so captious or so blind as to ignore the foundation on which the fabric and its roof are built, while he has before his eyes both the fabric and the roof themselves?

Once more, in another place, we have brought forward the testimony of the apostle to this effect: “Are you bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Are you loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife.” To this we have appended the following remarks: “Each of us has his own sphere allotted to him. Let me have mine, and do you keep yours. If you are bound to a wife, do not put her away. If I am loosed from a wife, let me not seek a wife. Just as I do not loose marriage-ties when they are once made, so do you refrain from binding together what at present is loosed from such ties.”

Yet another passage bears unmistakable testimony to the view which we have taken of virginity and of wedlock: “The apostle casts no snare upon us, nor does he compel us to be what we do not wish. He only urges us to what is honorable and seemly, inciting us earnestly to serve the Lord, to be anxious always to please Him, and to look for His will which He has prepared for us to do. We are to be like alert and armed soldiers, who immediately execute the orders given to them and perform them without that travail of mind which, according to the preacher, is given to the men of this world 'to be exercised therewith.'” At the end, also, of our comparison of virgins and married women we have summed up the discussion thus: “When one thing is good and another thing is better; when that which is good has a different reward from that which is better; and when there are more rewards than one, then, obviously, there exists a diversity of gifts.

The difference between marriage and virginity is as great as that between not doing evil and doing good— or, to speak more favorably still, as that between what is good and what is still better.”