On Modesty

But, they say, God is good and most good, and merciful and compassionate, and most abundant in mercy, which he sets before every sacrifice; not accounting the death of a sinner so great a thing as his repentance, the savior of all men, and especially of the faithful. And so the sons of God too ought to be merciful and peaceable, forgiving one another, even as Christ has forgiven us; not judging, lest we be judged. For to his own Lord one stands or falls: Who are you, that you judge another's servant? Forgive, and it shall be forgiven you. Such and so great are the futile arguments by which they both flatter God and pander to themselves, enervating discipline rather than invigorating it—with how many and contrary arguments can we strike back, which both press the severity of God and challenge our own constancy? For although God is good by nature, yet he is also just.

For according to the cause, as he knows how to heal, so also to smite, making peace, but also creating evil, preferring repentance, but also commanding Jeremiah not to intercede for a sinful people: For if they fast, he says, I will not hear their supplication; and again: And do you not worship for the people, and do not ask for them in prayer and supplication, for I will not hear them in the time when they call upon me, in the time of their affliction. And still further, the same one who sets mercy before sacrifice: And do you not worship for this people; and, Do not ask that they obtain mercy. And, Do not approach me on their behalf, for I will not hear those who ask for mercy—those, namely, who weep and fast out of repentance, and offer their affliction to God. For God is jealous, and one who is not mocked with the nose—by those, that is, who flatter his goodness.

And although he is patient, yet through Isaiah he threatens an end to his patience: I have been silent; shall I also be silent always, and endure? I have held my peace like a woman in travail; I will arise, and I will make to dry up. For fire shall go before his face, and shall burn up his enemies, slaying not the body only, but also the souls in gehenna. Moreover, how the Lord threatens those who judge, he himself shows: For with what judgment you have judged, it shall be judged of you. Thus he did not forbid judging, but taught how. Whence also the Apostle judges, and indeed in a case of fornication, that such a man should be delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, rebuking them also because brethren were not judged before the saints. For adding he says: For what have I to do to judge those who are outside? But you forgive, that it may be forgiven you by God.

Offenses are cleansed which one has committed against a brother, not against God. We profess in prayer, finally, that we will forgive our debtors. But it is not fitting to stretch further such a contentious rope from the authority of the Scriptures by alternate pulling in different directions, so that these seem to tighten the reins of discipline and those to loosen them, as though they were uncertain, and those to prostrate the support of repentance through leniency, these to deny it through austerity. Moreover, the authority of Scripture will stand within its own limits without mutual opposition, if both the support of repentance is determined by its own conditions without passive concession, and the very causes of it are first distinguished without confused proposition. We define the causes of repentance as offenses. These we divide into two outcomes: some will be remissible, others irremissible; according to which no one doubts that some deserve chastisement, others condemnation. Every offense is either blotted out by pardon or by punishment: by pardon, arising from chastisement; by punishment, arising from condemnation.

Concerning this difference we have already set forth certain disputes from the Scriptures, some retaining, some remitting offenses. But John also will teach: If anyone knows his brother to be sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and life shall be given to him; because he sins not unto death: this will be remissible. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that anyone should ask for that: this will be irremissible. Thus, where there is a condition or ground for asking, there also is remission: where there is no ground even for asking, there likewise is no remission. According to this difference of offenses, the condition of repentance also is distinguished. One kind will be that which can obtain pardon, namely in a remissible offense; another kind will be that which can by no means obtain it, namely in an irremissible offense. And it remains to examine specifically the status of adultery and fornication, into which class of offenses they ought to be placed.

But first I will dispose of an objection interposed from the other side against that kind of repentance which we are now defining as lacking pardon. For if, they say, some repentance lacks pardon, then it need not be performed at all by you. For nothing should be done in vain. But repentance will be performed in vain if it lacks pardon. But all repentance ought to be performed. Therefore let all obtain pardon, lest it be performed in vain; because it will not need to be performed if it is performed in vain. But further, it will be performed in vain if it lacks pardon. They oppose this argument with reason, certainly, because they have also usurped in their own power the fruit of this repentance, that is, pardon. For as far as concerns those from whom one obtains human peace; but as far as concerns us, who remember that the Lord alone grants offenses—and indeed mortal ones—it will not be performed in vain.

For being remitted to the Lord and thereafter prostrated before him, it will work pardon all the more by this very fact, that it implores it from God alone, that it does not believe human peace to be sufficient for its offense, that it prefers to blush before the Church rather than to communicate with her. For it stands at her doors, and by the example of its own mark admonishes others, and calls the tears of the brethren to its aid as well, and returns having transacted more business—namely compassion rather than communion. And if it does not reap peace here, it sows before the Lord: nor does it lose, but prepares its fruit: it will not be empty of profit, if it is not empty of duty. Thus neither is repentance of this kind vain, nor is discipline of this kind harsh. Both honor God; the former, by flattering itself with nothing, will obtain more easily; the latter, by assuming nothing to itself, will assist more fully.

We are able, therefore, having set aside the distinction of penance, to return now to the reckoning of the offences themselves, whether they be such as can obtain pardon from all. First, because we name adultery and fornication, usage demands it: faith also has a familiarity with certain names; thus in every work we maintain usage. Otherwise, if I say adultery and if I say defilement, it will be one and the same description of defiled flesh. For it makes no difference whether one assaults another man's wife or a widow, provided she is not his own woman: just as it makes no difference in respect of place, whether chastity is slaughtered in bedchambers or in carriages. Every murder outside the forest is robbery: so too wherever, or against whomsoever, he who uses himself otherwise than in marriage commits adultery and defilement upon himself. Therefore among us even secret unions, that is, those not previously professed before the Church, are in danger of being judged on a par with adultery and fornication.

Nor let those contracted under the pretext of marriage thereby evade the charge. But the other impious frenzies of lusts, against bodies and against sexes beyond the laws of nature, we remove not only from the threshold but from every roof of the Church; because they are not offences, but monstrosities.

Therefore, how greatly adultery—which is also the matter of fornication—is to be esteemed as a crime according to the work of the offence, the first law of God is at hand to show. For after forbidding the superstition of foreign gods and the fashioning of their idols; after commending the observance of the sabbath; after enjoining the second duty of religion toward parents after God, it built no other commandment upon such headings for establishing and admonishing, than: Thou shalt not commit adultery. For after spiritual chastity and holiness, bodily integrity followed. And this too it fortified, by immediately forbidding its enemy, adultery. Understand now what manner of offence it is, the restraint of which He ordained after idolatry. Nothing second is far removed from the first; nothing is so near to the first as the second: that which becomes something else from the first is in some manner the first.

And so adultery is akin to idolatry; for idolatry too, often reproached to the people under the name of adultery and fornication, will also be joined to it by lot, as it is by sequence; it will also cohere with it in condemnation, as it does in arrangement. Moreover, prefacing: Thou shalt not commit adultery; He adds: Thou shalt not kill: He has surely burdened adultery, which He places before murder. In the very forefront of the most holy law, in the first headings of the heavenly edict, marked by the proscription of the chief offences, you may discern from position the measure, from order the standing, from neighbourhood the merit of each. There is also a dignity of evil, in that it is placed at the summit or in the midst of the worst. I behold a certain pomp and platform of adultery, on this side the leadership of idolatry going before, on that side the escort of murder following after.

Between two most eminent peaks of wickedness it has without doubt worthily taken its seat, and through the midst of them, as though filling a vacant place, has filled it with equal authority of crime. Who will tear it away from the body of its associates, from the bond of neighbouring crimes, from the embrace of kindred offences—it that is enclosed by such flanks, supported by such ribs—so as to separate it alone unto the fruit of penance? Will not idolatry on this side, and murder on that, hold it fast? And if any voice be raised, will they not cry out: This rank is ours, this compact is ours? We are bounded by idolatry; by it as the dividing line we are joined together; to it as it shines forth from the midst we are united; divine Scripture has incorporated us, the very letters are our bonds, and now even it itself cannot exist without us. I indeed, Idolatry, very frequently furnish adultery with occasion.

My groves and my mountains know it, and the living waters, and the very temples in the cities, how greatly we contrive to overthrow chastity. I also, Murder, sometimes work out adultery's ends. To say nothing of tragedies, poisoners know today, magicians know, how many acts of seduction I avenge, how many rivalries I defend, how many guardians, how many informers, how many accomplices I remove.

Midwives also know how many adulterous conceptions are slaughtered. Even among Christians adultery does not exist without us: idolatry is present wherever it is the business of an unclean spirit; murder is also present wherever a man, when he is defiled, is killed. Therefore, either the aids of penance will be fitting for none of them, or also for us. Either we hold it back, or we follow it. These very facts speak for themselves. If facts are lacking in voice, the idolater stands by, the murderer stands by, and in the midst of them the adulterer stands by as well; they sit together at the office of penance, they bristle in sackcloth and ashes, they groan with the same breath, they entreat with the same prayers, they supplicate with the same knees, they invoke the same mother. What do you do, O most gentle and most humane discipline? Either you will owe this to all of them: for blessed are the peacemakers; or, if not to all, you ought not to be ours.

Do you indeed condemn the idolater and the murderer once for all, yet pluck the adulterer from their midst—the successor of idolatry, the predecessor of murder, the colleague of both? It is a respect of persons; you have left behind more pitiable penances.

By all means, if you show from what supports of examples and heavenly precepts you throw open the door of penance to adultery alone, and in it to fornication as well, our contest will now be fought along this line. Yet I must prescribe a rule for you, lest you stretch your hand toward the old things, lest you look back. For the old things have passed away, according to Isaiah, and the renewal is now new according to Jeremiah; and forgetting the things behind, we reach forward to the things before, according to the Apostle; and the Law and the Prophets until John, according to the Lord: for even if we have begun especially from the law in demonstrating adultery, it is rightly from that state of the law which Christ did not dissolve but fulfilled. For the burdens of the law until John have been cast off, not the remedies; the yokes of works have been rejected, not those of disciplines: liberty in Christ has done no injury to innocence.

The whole law of piety, holiness, humanity, truth, chastity, justice, mercy, benevolence, and modesty remains. In which law blessed is the man who shall meditate day and night. Of which the same David again: The law of the Lord is blameless, converting souls; the judgments of the Lord are right, rejoicing hearts; the commandment of the Lord shines far, enlightening eyes. So also the Apostle: And so the law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy and good, namely, Thou shalt not commit adultery. But also above: Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid, but we establish the law, namely in those things which are also now forbidden by the New Testament, even prohibited with an accumulation of precept. Instead of Thou shalt not commit adultery: Whosoever shall look upon a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart; and instead of Thou shalt not kill: Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of hell-fire.

Wherefore consider whether the law of not committing adultery is kept safe, to which has been added the law of not even lusting. Moreover, if any examples shall applaud themselves into your bosom, they will not be set against this discipline which we defend. For the law built upon it is in vain, condemning also the origins of offences, that is, lusts and desires, no less than deeds, if today pardon of adultery is to be granted because it was also once granted. Why is discipline restrained today with a fuller benefit, unless perhaps that it may be indulged with a greater enticement of yours? You will then grant pardon also to idolatry and to every apostate, because we find the people themselves, so often guilty of these things, so often restored in former times. You will also share it with the murderer; because Ahab blotted out the blood of Naboth by entreaty; David purged the slaying of Uriah, and then the cause of it, adultery, by confession.

You will now also pardon incest, on account of Lot; and fornications together with incest, on account of Judah; and shameful marriages from prostitution, on account of Hosea; and not only frequent ones, but even several at once, on account of our fathers. For surely it is fitting that grace should now also be made equal in all things formerly indulged, if pardon of adultery is claimed from some ancient example. We indeed have also examples of the same antiquity on our side in support of our opinion, not merely of judgment not indulged, but even of judgment immediately executed upon fornication. And surely it suffices that so great a number—twenty-four thousand—of the people fornicating with the daughters of Moab fell in a single plague. But I prefer to derive the discipline from Christ, to the glory of Christ.

Let former times have had, if the Psychics so wish, even the power of all impurity; let the flesh have sported before Christ, nay, let it have perished before it was sought out by its Lord; it was not yet worthy of the gift of salvation, not yet fit for the office of holiness. It was still reckoned in Adam together with its vice, easily lusting after what it had seen as fair, and looking downward, and retaining its itch from fig leaves. The poison of lust clung everywhere, and the filth once cast could not be washed away, because not even the waters themselves had yet washed anything.

But when the Word of God descended into flesh not surrendered even to marriage, and the Word was made flesh, not to be surrendered even to marriage; which would approach the wood not for incontinence but for endurance; which would taste thence not something sweet but something bitter; which would pertain not to the lower regions but to heaven; which would be garlanded not with the leaves of wantonness but with the flowers of holiness; which would commit its cleansings to the waters; from that time onward whatever flesh in Christ dissolves the remaining ancient filth is already another thing, something new now emerges, not from the depth of seed, not from the mire of lust, but from pure water and a clean spirit. Why then do you excuse it from the past? It was not called the body of Christ, not the members of Christ, not the temple of God, when it was obtaining pardon of adultery.

And so, if from the time when it changed its state, and being baptized into Christ put on Christ, and was redeemed at a great price, namely by the blood of the Lord and of the Lamb, you hold any example, whether precept, whether form, whether sentence of fornication or adultery pardoned or to be pardoned; you have also from us a definition of the time from which the age of the question is to be reckoned.

You may begin from the parables, where the lost sheep is sought out by the Lord and carried back upon His shoulders. Let the very pictures on your cups come forward, if even in them the interpretation of that sheep will shine through, whether it agrees with a Christian or a pagan sinner in respect of restoration. For we lay down as a rule, from the discipline of nature, from the law of ear and tongue, from the soundness of mind, that answers are always given to what is provoked, that is, to the things that provoke. The provocation was, I think, that the Pharisees murmured with indignation at the Lord admitting publicans and pagan sinners and sharing table with them. To this end, to whom else is the Lord to be believed to have likened the restoration of the lost sheep, than to the lost pagan, of whom the matter was treating; not to a Christian, who was as yet nobody?

Or what manner of thing is it, that the Lord, as though a quibbler in his reply, passing over the present case which he ought to have struck back, should labour over a future one? But the sheep is properly a Christian, and the flock of the Lord is the people of the Church, and the good shepherd is Christ: and therefore the Christian is to be understood in the sheep, who has strayed from the flock of the Church. Therefore you wish the Lord to have answered nothing to the murmuring of the Pharisees, but to your presumption. And yet you will have to vindicate it in such a way as to deny that what you think applies to a Christian applies to a pagan. Tell me, is not every race of men one flock of God? Is not the same God the Lord and shepherd of all nations? Who is more lost from God than the pagan so long as he strays?

Who is more sought out by God than the pagan, when he is called back by Christ? Finally, this order comes first in pagans, since Christians are not made from pagans in any other way than by first being lost, and sought out by God, and carried back by Christ. So also this order ought to be observed, that we interpret such a thing in those in whom it comes first. But you, I think, would have wished Him to make the sheep lost not from the flock but from a chest or a cupboard. So also when He says the remaining number of the others is just, He does not thereby show them to be Christians when dealing with Jews, and pressing them especially on the point that they were indignant at the hope of the pagans; but in order to express, against the envy of the Pharisees, His grace and benevolence even toward one of the pagans, He set the salvation of one sinner through repentance above that of all the rest through justice.

Or were the Jews not just, and such as had no need of repentance, possessing the rudders of discipline and the instruments of fear—the Law and the Prophets? He placed them therefore in the parable, and if not as they were, but as they ought to have been, so that they might be the more put to shame, hearing that repentance was necessary for others and not for themselves. Likewise in the parable of the drachma, as provoked from the same subject-matter, we interpret the drachma equally as a pagan; even if lost in the house, as if in the Church; even if found by the light of a lamp, as if by the word of God. And yet this whole world is one common house of all, in which the grace of God shines more brightly in the pagan, who is found in darkness, than in the Christian, who is already in the light of God. Finally, to both the sheep and the drachma a single straying is ascribed.

For if they were being applied to a Christian sinner, after faith once lost, a second loss of them and a second restoration would be noted. I will now withdraw for a little while from this position, so as to commend it the more even by withdrawing, when I shall have in this way also covered over the presumption of the opposing party. I grant that a Christian sinner is already foreshadowed in each parable, yet it does not therefore follow that he who can be restored from the crime of adultery and fornication through repentance is to be affirmed. For although he may be said to have perished, it will be necessary to examine also the kind of perdition; because the sheep perished not by dying but by straying, and the drachma not by being destroyed but by lying hidden. Thus, what is safe may be said to have perished.

A believer therefore also perishes who has slipped into the spectacle of chariot-racing frenzy, and of gladiatorial bloodshed, and of theatrical filth, and of athletic vanity; into games, into banquets of worldly festivity; who has applied certain arts of curiosity to the service and ministry of another's idolatry; who has stumbled into a word of ambiguous denial or blasphemy; who for some such reason has been put outside the flock, or who has himself perhaps through anger, pride, rivalry, or—as often happens—through disdain of correction, broken away: he ought to be sought out and recalled. What can be recovered does not open, unless it has persisted outside. You will rightly interpret the parable, calling back a sinner who is still alive. But who has not pronounced the adulterer and fornicator dead the moment the sin was committed?

With what mouth will you restore the dead man to the flock on the authority of that parable, which calls back no dead animal? Finally, if you remember the prophets, when shepherds are rebuked—I think it is the voice of Ezekiel: Shepherds, behold, you devour the milk and clothe yourselves with the wool; what was strong you have slain; what was weak you have not healed; what was broken you have not bound up; what was driven away you have not turned back; what was lost you have not sought. Does he reproach them also concerning the dead, that they had not taken care to restore even that one to the flock? He plainly charges them with having caused the sheep to perish and to be devoured by the beasts of the field. Nor can they either perish unto death or be devoured, if they are left, so that those not lost unto death and those devoured might be taken back.

According to the example of the drachma also: even within the house of God, the Church, there may be certain offences of moderate weight, proportionate to the very drachma's measure and worth, which, lying hidden there and soon found there, are straightway passed through there with the joy of amendment. But adultery and fornication are not a drachma but a talent, for the seeking out of which there is need not of the light of a lamp's point, but of the full lance of the sun. The moment it appears, the man is straightway expelled from the Church, and does not remain there, nor does he bring joy to the Church that found him, but grief; nor does he summon the congratulation of neighbouring communities, but the sorrow of the nearest brotherhoods.

And so, even when our interpretation is compared with theirs, the arguments of the sheep and the drachma will point all the more to the pagan, inasmuch as they cannot apply to a Christian guilty of that offence for which they are pressed into service against a Christian by the opposing party.

But indeed the same outcome deceives most interpreters of parables, as very often happens in the dyeing of garments with purple; when you think you have rightly blended the balance of colours, and have believed you have brought their comparisons to life among themselves, once both surfaces have been trained and the lights brought out, the transferred contrast will vomit forth every error. By the same obscurity, then, in the parable also of the two sons, certain persons, harmonising the figures to the present moment, stray from the true light of that comparison which the subject-matter of the parable conceals. For they place two peoples in the two sons—the Jewish in the elder, the Christian in the younger. Nor indeed can they from that point arrange the Christian sinner in the younger son as one who will obtain pardon, unless they have expressed the Jewish in the elder.

Now, if I show that the Jewish people falls short of the comparison with the elder son, it will follow consequently that neither will the Christian be admitted to the configuration of the younger son. For although a Jew may be called a son, and an elder one, because he was first in adoption; and although he may begrudge the Christian the reconciliation of God the Father—which the opposing party seizes upon most of all—yet it will not be the Jew's word to the Father: Behold, how many years I serve thee, and I have never transgressed thy commandment. For when has the Jew not been a transgressor of the law, hearing with the ear and not hearing; hating in the gates him who reproves, and holding in contempt the holy word? So neither will the father's voice to the Jew be: Thou art always with me, and all that I have is thine.

For the Jews are pronounced apostate sons; begotten indeed, and brought up on high, but who have not reckoned the Lord, and who have forsaken the Lord, and have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel. We shall say that all things were plainly granted to the Jew, to whom even a more favourable condition and whatever was snatched from gluttony was given, not to mention the very land of the paternal promise. And so not less today the Jew, like the younger son, squanders the substance of God in a foreign land and begs, serving even now the princes thereof, that is, of this world. Let Christians therefore seek another brother of their own; for the parable has not received the Jew. They would have far more aptly equated the Christian with the elder son, and the Jew with the younger, according to the comparison of faith, if the order of the two peoples designated from the womb of Rebecca permitted a transposition—except that the closing clause would also stand in the way.

For it befits the Christian to rejoice, and not to grieve, over the restoration of the Jew; since our whole hope is joined with the remaining expectation of Israel. Thus, even if certain things correspond, yet with other things speaking against it, the equation of the examples is destroyed. Although even if all things could answer to the mirror, there is one chief danger in interpretations: lest the felicity of the comparisons be directed elsewhere than where the subject-matter of each parable has appointed. For we remember that even actors, when they adapt allegorical gestures to songs, express things far removed from the present play and scene and character, and yet express them most fittingly. But let extraordinary ingenuity see to that. For it has nothing to do with Andromache. So also heretics assign the same parables where they will, not where they ought—and most aptly exclude them. Why most aptly?

Because from the beginning, according to the occasions of the parables, they have fashioned the very subject-matters of their doctrines: it was open to them, loosed from the rule of truth, to seek out and put together those things of which the parables seem to speak.

But we, because we do not devise subject-matters from parables but interpret parables from subject-matters, do not labour greatly to twist everything in exposition, provided we guard against all contradictions. Why a hundred sheep? And why precisely ten drachmas?

And what are those brooms? It was necessary that one who wished to express how greatly pleasing to God is the salvation of a single sinner should name some quantity of number, from which he might describe one as having been lost; it was necessary that the appearance of one seeking a coin in the house should be fitted out with the aid of both brooms and a lamp. For curiosities of this kind both make certain things suspect, and by the subtlety of forced interpretations very often lead away from the truth. There are, however, things which are set down simply for the purpose of constructing, arranging, and weaving together the parable, so that it may lead to the point for which the example is provided. And the two sons will certainly look toward the same end as the coin and the sheep.

For those things which are connected with one another have the same cause, and likewise the same murmuring of the Pharisees concerning the Lord's intercourse with Gentiles: or, if anyone doubts that the tax-collectors in Judaea were Gentiles, in a land already long since seized by the hand of Pompey and Lucullus, let him read Deuteronomy: There shall be no tribute-payer from among the sons of Israel. Nor would the name of tax-collectors be so execrable before the Lord, unless they were foreigners selling passage through his very heaven and earth and sea. But when he joins sinners with tax-collectors, he does not immediately show them to be Jews, even if some could have been. But he distinguished one class of Gentiles by placing alongside one another those who were sinners by occupation, that is, tax-collectors, and others who were sinners by nature, that is, those who were not tax-collectors. Otherwise, he would not be noted as sharing a meal with Jews, but with Gentiles, whose table Jewish discipline forbids.

Now concerning the prodigal son, that which is more useful must first be considered: for the matching of examples, however most fitting to the image, will not be admitted if it shall prove most harmful to salvation. But we see the entire foundation of salvation, established in the tenor of discipline, subverted by that interpretation which is pressed from the opposite side. For if it is a Christian who squanders far from his father the substance received from God the Father—namely baptism, namely the Holy Spirit, and thence the hope of eternity—living as a Gentile, and if, stripped of the goods of the mind, he has also handed over his service to the prince of this age (to whom else but the devil?), and having been set over the feeding of swine—that is, the tending of unclean spirits—he comes to his senses and returns to his father; then not adulterers and fornicators, but idolaters and blasphemers and apostates, and every kind of renegade, will make satisfaction to the father by means of this parable.

And in this way the entire substance of the sacrament is most truly shattered. For who will fear to squander what he will afterwards recover? Who will take care to preserve forever what he will not be able to lose forever? Security in sin is also the desire for it. The apostate, then, will recover the former robe, the garment of the Holy Spirit, and the ring once more as the seal of the washing, and Christ will again be slain for him, and he will recline at that table on the throne from which those unworthily clothed are wont to be dragged away by torturers and cast into outer darkness, let alone those who have been stripped. It is therefore the more evident that the order of the prodigal son does not fittingly apply to a Christian. But if the image of the son does not even fully correspond to a Jew, the interpretation will be guided simply toward the Lord's purpose.

The Lord had come, of course, to save what was lost, as a physician more necessary to the sick than to the healthy. This he both figured in parables and proclaimed in his sayings. Who among men is lost? Who wavers in health, except one who does not know God? Who is safe and sound, except one who knows God? This parable also will mark these two kinds, kindred in their genus. See whether the Gentile possesses substance in God the Father of reckoning and wisdom and natural knowledge toward God; through which the Apostle also notes that the world in the wisdom of God did not know God through wisdom, which it had certainly received from God. This, then, he squandered, having wandered far from the Lord, made one with the errors and enticements and lusts of the age, where, driven by hunger for truth, he handed himself over to the prince of this age.

That one set him over the feeding of swine (that he might tend that herd familiar to demons), where he could not even partake of life-giving food, and at the same time saw others abounding in heavenly bread in divine service. He remembers his father God, returns having made satisfaction, receives his former robe—namely that condition which Adam lost by transgression—and also receives the ring, by which, being questioned, he seals the covenant of faith for the first time, and so from that point feeds on the richness of the Lord's body, that is, the Eucharist. This will be the prodigal son, who was never previously virtuous, who was prodigal from the start, because he was not a Christian from the start. Him also the Pharisees mourned, returning from the world to the father's embrace, in the persons of tax-collectors and sinners.

And therefore the elder brother's envy is fitted to this purpose alone; not because the Jews were innocent and obedient to God, but because they envied the nations their salvation—those, plainly, who ought always to have been with the father. And certainly the Jew groans at the first calling of the Christian, not at a second restoration: for the former shines even for Gentiles, but the latter, which is enacted in the churches, is not even known to Jews. I think I have rendered interpretations more suited both to the subject matter of the parables, and to the congruence of the facts, and to the protection of discipline. Otherwise, if the opposing party is eager to configure the sheep and the coin and the son's prodigality to the Christian sinner, so that adultery and fornication may be granted through repentance, then either all other equally capital sins must likewise be conceded, or adultery and fornication, as equally grave, must be kept equally unconcedable.

But it is the more evident that nothing else may be argued beyond that which was under discussion. Finally, if it were permitted to apply the parables elsewhere, we would rather direct the hope of them toward martyrdom, which alone, after all substance has been squandered, can restore the son, and will proclaim with joy the coin found among all things, even in the dung, and will bring back on the very shoulders of the Lord the sheep that fled through all rough and steep places into the flock. But we prefer, if perhaps we know less in the Scriptures, to know less rather than to know contrary to them. Accordingly we ought to keep the mind and the commandment of the Lord. The transgression in interpretation is no lighter than in conduct.

Having therefore shaken off the yoke of applying those parables to the Gentile in discussion, and having once perceived or accepted the necessity of interpreting them in no other way than the subject matter of the purpose requires, they now contend that the proclamation of repentance does not even apply to Gentiles, whose sins are not liable to it, being imputable of course to ignorance, which nature alone makes answerable to God. Furthermore, that remedies have no meaning for those to whom the dangers themselves have no meaning, but that the rationale of repentance holds where one sins with knowledge and will, where both the fault has meaning and grace has meaning, that it is he who mourns, he who grovels, who knows both what he has lost and what he is to recover, if he has offered repentance to God—who offers it certainly more readily to his sons than to strangers. Did Jonas therefore think repentance unnecessary for the Gentile Ninevites, when he was quibbling about the duty of preaching?

Or rather, foreseeing the mercy of God poured out even upon strangers, did he fear it would, as it were, destroy his proclamation? And so on account of a profane city not yet in possession of God, still sinning in ignorance, the prophet nearly perished?—except that he underwent the example of the Lord's passion, which was to redeem even repentant Gentiles. It is well that John also, preparing the ways of the Lord, was a herald of repentance no less to soldiers and tax-collectors than to the sons of Abraham.

The Lord himself presumed repentance for the Sidonians and Tyrians, had they seen the evidences of his mighty works. Yet I shall contend that repentance is more fitting for natural sinners than for voluntary ones. For one who has not yet made use of it will more deserve its fruit than one who has already abused it; and remedies will have more meaning when first applied than when grown stale. Surely the Lord is more generous to the ungrateful than to the ignorant, and is more quickly angered by the contempt of those who have rejected his clemency than he flatters them; and does not more willingly impart it to strangers than he has lost it among his sons, since he has so adopted the nations while the Jews make sport of his patience. But this is what the Psychics want: that God as a just judge should prefer the repentance of that sinner to his death, who preferred death to repentance. But if it is so, we earn merit by sinning.

Come then, you tightrope-walker of chastity and modesty, and of all holiness regarding sex, you who tread the thinnest thread of such discipline along pathless ways with suspended step, balancing the flesh with the spirit, governing the soul with faith, tempering the eye with fear. Why then do you stand entirely fixed in your place? Go on, certainly, if you are able, if you are willing, while you are so secure and as it were on solid ground. For if any wavering of the flesh, any distraction of the mind, any wandering of the eye should knock you from your course, God is good: he holds out his bosom to his own, not to Gentiles; a second repentance will receive you; you will once more be a Christian after being an adulterer. This is what you tell me, most benign interpreter of God.

But I would yield to you, if the scripture of the Shepherd, which alone loves adulterers, had deserved to be inscribed in the divine instrument, if it were not judged among the apocryphal and false writings even by every council of your own churches—itself an adulteress, and hence a patroness of its companions; by which you are also initiated in other matters; if perhaps that shepherd on whose behalf it will plead, whom you paint on the cup, himself also a prostituter of the Christian sacrament, fittingly an idol of drunkenness and an asylum of adultery to follow after the cup—from which you drink nothing more gladly than the sheep of second repentance.

But I draw upon the scriptures of that Shepherd who cannot be broken: him John immediately presents to me, saying with the washing of repentance and his office: Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance, and say not: we have Abraham as our father—lest, that is, they should again take up the enticements of sin from the grace of the fathers: For God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. So also he follows us, that those who sin up to this point should bring forth fruit worthy of repentance. For what ripens from repentance, if not the effect of amendment? But even if pardon is rather the fruit of repentance, this too cannot stand without the cessation of sin. Thus the cessation of sin is the root of pardon, just as pardon is the fruit of repentance.

Thereupon, as regards the Gospel, the question of the parables has now been discussed. But if the Lord also did something of this kind for sinners in his deeds—as when he permits a sinful woman even the contact of his body as she washes his feet with tears and wipes them with her hair, and inaugurates his burial with ointment; as when to the Samaritan woman already in her sixth marriage, not an adulteress but a prostitute, he even showed who he was—a thing he did not easily do for anyone—nothing is thereby granted to our adversaries, even if he had already extended pardon of sins to Christians. For now we say: this is permitted to the Lord alone, and today the power of his indulgence operates. Yet with respect to those times in which he lived on earth, we define this: that nothing prejudices against us if pardon was granted even to Jewish sinners.

For Christian discipline is reckoned from the renewal of the Testament and, as we have stated above, from the redemption of the flesh, that is, the Lord's passion. No one was perfect before the order of faith was found, no one was a Christian before Christ was taken up into heaven, no one was holy before the Holy Spirit was presented from heaven as the determiner of discipline itself.

And so those who have received another Paraclete in the Apostles and through the Apostles—one who was not even properly recognized in the Prophets—now no longer possess him even in the Apostles. Come now, let them at least teach from the apostolic writings that stains of the flesh sprinkled after baptism can be washed away by repentance: in the Apostles also we salute the form of the old law, concerning the demonstration of how great adultery is; lest perchance it be thought more lenient in the newness of disciplines than in the oldness.

When the Gospel first thundered and shook the old things, so that there was debate about the question of whether the law was to be retained or not, the Apostles issued this first rule by the authority of the Holy Spirit to those who had already begun to be chosen from among the nations: It seemed good, they say, to the Holy Spirit and to us, to lay upon you no further burden than these necessary things, to abstain from sacrifices, and from fornications, and from blood, by observing which you will do rightly, being carried along by the Holy Spirit. It is enough that here too adultery and fornication are kept in their place of honor between idolatry and murder: for the prohibition of blood we shall understand as referring far more to human blood. Furthermore, what kind of crimes did the Apostles wish to be seen as those which they alone single out for observance from the former law, which they alone prescribe as necessarily to be abstained from?

Not that they permit other things, but that they set forth these alone as utterly unpardonable—they who, for the sake of the Gentiles, made the other burdens of the law pardonable. Why then do they excuse our neck from so great a yoke, unless in order always to lay upon them these compacts of discipline? Why do they grant so many bonds of indulgence, unless in order to bind them perpetually to the more necessary things? They loosed from many things, so that we might be bound to observe the more harmful ones. The matter was transacted by way of compensation: we gained many things, so that we might render some. But compensation cannot be revoked—and it will be revoked by the same means, namely by the repetition of adultery, and of bloodshed, and of idolatry. For the whole law will then be taken up again, if the condition of pardon is dissolved.

But the Holy Spirit did not make a light compact with us—even making it of his own accord, so as to be the more honored. No one dissolves his pledge except an ingrate. He will neither take back what he dismissed, nor dismiss what he retained. The status of the Last Testament is always unchangeable, and assuredly the recitation of that decree and counsel will cease with the age. He has sufficiently denied pardon to those things whose custody he chose; he has vindicated what he did not equally concede. Hence it is that neither to idolatry nor to bloodshed is peace restored by the Churches. I think it is not permissible to believe that the Apostles fell away from this their determination; or if some can believe it, they will be obliged to prove it.

We are well aware also of their suspicions here. For they truly suspect that the apostle Paul, in the second letter to the Corinthians, gave pardon to that same fornicator whom in the first he pronounced to be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh—the impious heir of his father's marriage-bed—and as if he himself afterwards reversed his pen when writing: But if any one has caused grief, he has not grieved me, but in part, lest I burden you all. Such a rebuke as is made by many is sufficient. So that on the contrary you should rather grant forgiveness and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up by excessive sorrow. Wherefore I beseech you to confirm love toward him. For to this end also I wrote, that I might know your proof, that you are obedient to me in all things. But if you forgive any one, I also forgive.

For indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I have forgiven in the person of Christ, lest we be defrauded by Satan: for we are not ignorant of his devices. What is here understood concerning the fornicator, concerning the defiler of his father's bed, concerning the Christian who surpassed the shamelessness of the Gentiles?—since he would assuredly have absolved with a special pardon one whom he had condemned with a special wrath. He shows mercy more obscurely than he shows indignation; he is more open in austerity than in leniency: and yet anger is more readily oblique than indulgence; sadder things are more hesitant than gladder ones. It was a matter of modest indulgence, of course; which, if it were now to be estimated, when even the greatest things are not usually granted without proclamation, is far from being granted without any indication.

And you indeed, bringing the penitent adulterer into the church to implore the brotherhood, prostrate him in the midst, decked out with sackcloth and ashes, in disgrace and horror, before the widows, before the presbyters, seizing the fringes of all, licking the footsteps of all, clinging to the knees of all, and with as many enticements of pity as you can toward the man's undoing, you harangue as a good shepherd and blessed Papa, and in the parable of the sheep you seek your goats, your sheep lest it leap again from the flock—as if what was not permitted even once were henceforth permitted—and you fill the rest also with fear, while being especially indulgent. But would the Apostle have so abjectly pardoned the wicked lust of fornication laden with incest, that he did not even exact from him at least that garb of penitence which you ought to have learned from him, did not threaten anything about the future, said nothing further about the rest?

Nay rather, he even of his own accord entreats them to confirm love toward him—as one making satisfaction, not as one being pardoned: and yet I hear of love, not of communion. As to what he writes to the Thessalonians: But if any one does not obey our word by this epistle, note that man, and do not associate with him, that he may be ashamed, not counting him as an enemy, but admonishing him as a brother. So he could equally have said that to the fornicator only love was granted, not also communion. But to the incestuous man not even love—since he had ordered him to be removed from their midst, and far more certainly from their hearts. But he feared lest they be defrauded by Satan in regard to the loss of that person whom he himself had cast to Satan; or lest he be swallowed up by an abundance of grief, whom he had consigned to the destruction of the flesh.

Here they now interpret the destruction of the flesh as a function of penitence, because it seems that by exterminating the flesh through fasts and filth and all neglect and deliberate ill-treatment one makes satisfaction to God; so that from this they argue that the fornicator—nay, that incestuous man—was not handed over to Satan by the Apostle for perdition but for correction, as one who would afterwards obtain pardon on account of the destruction, that is, the affliction of the flesh, and therefore did obtain it. Indeed the same apostle handed over Hymenaeus and Alexander to Satan, that they might be corrected so as not to blaspheme, as he writes to his Timothy. But he himself also says that a thorn was given to him, an angel of Satan, by whom he was buffeted lest he exalt himself.

If they touch on this too, so that we understand those handed over to Satan by him as handed over for correction, not for perdition, what resemblance is there between blasphemy and incest, and a soul untouched by these things—nay, elevated from nothing other than the highest holiness and from all innocence—which in the apostle was perhaps restrained by buffetings, through pain, as they say, of the ear or the head. But incest and blasphemy deserved to hand over whole men into the very possession of Satan himself, not of his angel. And concerning this there is indeed a difference—nay, it matters greatly for this very point—that we read those men handed over by the Apostle to Satan, but to the Apostle an angel of Satan was given. Finally, when Paul entreats the Lord, what does he hear? My grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness. Those who are handed over to Satan cannot hear this.

But the crime of Hymenaeus and Alexander, if it is also in that man, is irremissible in the age to come—namely blasphemy; assuredly the Apostle would not against the Lord's boundary, under hope of pardon, have handed over to Satan those already sunk from faith into blasphemy. Whence also he pronounced them shipwrecked as to faith, no longer having the consolation of the ship of the Church: for pardon is denied to those who have crashed from faith into blasphemy. Otherwise, Gentiles and heretics emerge daily from blasphemy. But even if he said: I have handed them over to Satan, that they might receive discipline not to blaspheme—he said this concerning the others who, when those men were handed over to Satan, that is, cast outside the Church, were to be instructed that blaspheming is not to be done.

Thus therefore he also handed over the incestuous fornicator not for correction but for perdition to Satan, to whom he had already passed over by sinning beyond the Gentiles, so that they might learn that fornication is not to be committed. Finally, he says: for the destruction of the flesh, not for torment; condemning the very substance through which he had fallen—which had already perished from that point, baptism being lost—so that the spirit, he says, may be saved in the day of the Lord. And concerning this too let it be asked whether the spirit of that man himself will be saved. Therefore the spirit polluted by so great a crime will be saved, the flesh being lost on this account, so that it may be saved in punishment. Therefore the contrary interpretation will reckon punishment without the flesh, if we lose the resurrection of the flesh.

It remains therefore that he spoke of that spirit which is reckoned in the Church as being saved—that is, kept whole and uncontaminated from the contagion of impurities in the day of the Lord—by the expulsion of the incestuous fornicator; since he adds: Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? And yet incestuous fornication was not a little, but a great leaven.

And so, having discussed these matters that had intervened, I return to the second letter to the Corinthians, to prove that that saying of the Apostle also, Let this rebuke which was inflicted by many suffice for such a man, does not apply to the person of the fornicator. For if he had pronounced that he was to be delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, he had surely condemned him rather than rebuked him. There was therefore another person for whom he wished the rebuke to suffice; since the fornicator had received not a rebuke according to his judgment, but a condemnation. For I also offer this very point for your consideration: whether in the first Epistle there were others who had grieved the Apostle by behaving disorderly, and who were grieved by him, receiving a rebuke in accordance with the sense of the second Epistle, from among whom someone in that letter might have been able to obtain pardon.

Let us observe, then, the whole of the first Epistle, written, so to speak, not with ink but with gall, swelling, indignant, disdainful, threatening, reproachful, and shaped against certain persons as though they were the bondsmen of each several cause. For so had schisms, and jealousies, and dissensions, and presumptions, and elations, and contentions demanded it: that they should be burdened with reproach, and beaten back with correction, and purged out by pride, and deterred by severity. And what a sting of humbling reproach: I give thanks to God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any should say that I baptized in my own name. For I judged not myself to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And: I think that God hath set forth us apostles last as it were appointed to death; for we are made a spectacle unto this world, and to angels, and to men, and we are made as the filth of this world, the offscouring of all things. And: Am I not free?

Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Christ Jesus our Lord? From what loftiness of brow was he compelled to pronounce: But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: for I know nothing against myself: and: No man shall make my glorying void. Know ye not that we shall judge angels? Moreover, what freedom of open rebuke, how unsheathed the edge of the spiritual sword? Now ye are full, now ye are rich, now ye reign. And: If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know. Does he not also then strike someone in the face? For who, he says, maketh thee to differ? And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? Does he not also smite those others to the mouth?

But some with conscience of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered to an idol. And thus sinning against the brethren, and wounding their weak conscience, they sin against Christ. And indeed even by name: Have we not power to eat and to drink, and to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas? And: If others be partakers of this power over you, are not we rather? Likewise he also fixes those others with a singular stroke. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall; and: But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God. With such a closing clause, unveiled as a curse: If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema, Maranatha, he surely struck someone.

But I will take my stand rather where the Apostle burns most hotly, where the fornicator himself also gave trouble to others: As though I were not coming to you, some are puffed up. But I will come to you shortly, if the Lord permit, and will know, not the speech of them which are puffed up, but the power. For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. What will ye? Shall I come unto you with a rod, or in the spirit of meekness? For what lay beneath? It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife. And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you! For whom should they mourn? Surely for one who was dead. To whom should they mourn? Surely to the Lord. How, that he might be taken away from among them?

Surely not that he should be given outside the Church; for this would not be asked of God, since it was within the office of the president; but that through this death, both the common and the peculiar death of the flesh itself—which was already a corpse, which was already a bier, rotting with irrecoverable uncleanness—he ought more fully to be taken away from the Church. And therefore, as he could be taken away in the meantime, he judged that such a one was to be delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. For the curse followed upon her who was cast to the devil, so that she might be discharged from the sacrament of blessing, never to return to the camp of the Church.

We see therefore that in this place the Apostle's severity is divided between a certain puffed-up person and a certain incestuous one; armed against the one with a rod, against the other with a sentence: the rod which he threatened, the sentence which he executed; the one still flashing, the other immediately thundering—with which he rebuked, and with which he condemned. And it is certain from this that the one who was rebuked trembled under the threat of the rod, while the one who was condemned perished under the execution of the penalty: the former straightway fearing the blow departed, the latter paying the penalty. When the letters of the same apostle to the Corinthians repeat the granting of pardon, it happens plainly, but it is uncertain to whom, because neither the person nor the cause is specified. Let me compare the matter with the meanings. If the incestuous man is set against it, the puffed-up man will be there as well.

Certainly the account is sufficiently maintained when the puffed-up man was rebuked and the incestuous man was condemned: the puffed-up man is forgiven, but as one who was rebuked; the incestuous man does not appear to be forgiven, as one who was condemned. If pardon was granted to him for whom there was fear of being swallowed up by excessive grief, the rebuked man was still in danger of being swallowed up, failing on account of the threat and grieving on account of the rebuke; but the condemned man, both in guilt and in sentence, was already reckoned as swallowed up, having not to grieve but to suffer what before his suffering he could have grieved over. If pardon was granted for this reason, lest we be defrauded by Satan, the loss is guarded against in him who had not yet perished: nothing is guarded against regarding what is past, but regarding what is still safe.

But the condemned man, and indeed delivered into Satan's possession, had already at that point perished to the Church when he had committed such a crime, let alone when he was also cast out by the Church itself. How could one fear to suffer loss of him whom one had already lost as snatched away, and could not have held as condemned? Finally, what will it befit a judge to grant indulgence for—that which has been settled by pronouncement? Or that which has been suspended by interlocutory order? And surely that judge who is not accustomed to rebuild what he has destroyed, lest he be held a transgressor.

Come now, if the first Epistle had not grieved so many persons, if he had rebuked no one, terrified no one, if he had struck only the incestuous man, if he had sent no one into his cause in his favour, had confounded the puffed-up man; would you not more rightly suspect and more faithfully argue that there was rather some quite different person among the Corinthians at that time in the same cause, who, having been rebuked and terrified and already wounded by grief, and therefore, the measure of the offence permitting, afterwards obtained pardon—rather than that you should interpret it of the incestuous fornicator?

For this you ought to have read, and if not in the epistle, yet in the very school of the Apostle himself, impressed more clearly by modesty than by his pen; lest, that is, you should taint Paul the apostle of Christ, teacher of the nations in faith and truth, vessel of election, founder of churches, censor of disciplines, with such great levity, as either to have condemned rashly one whom he was shortly to absolve; or to have rashly absolved one whom he had not rashly condemned—for the sake of mere fornication of simple unchastity alone, let alone for incestuous marriage, and impious wantonness, and parricide-like lust, which he does not even compare to the nations' practices, lest he should reckon it a custom; which he had judged in his absence, lest the accused should gain time; which he had condemned with the power of the Lord also invoked, lest it should seem a human sentence.

He therefore made sport both of his own spirit, and of the angel of the Church, and of the power of the Lord, if he rescinded what he had pronounced by their counsel.

If you also extend the following passages of that Epistle to the Apostle's threatening, they too will not be comparable to the blotting out of the incestuous man's offence, lest the Apostle be here also suffused with the incongruity of the later meanings. For what manner of thing is it that, having just now bestowed upon the incestuous fornicator the right of return to ecclesiastical peace, he should immediately have pressed upon them the turning away from uncleannesses, the cutting off of stains, the exhortation to holiness—as though he had decreed nothing contrary a little before?

Compare, then, whether it belongs to him to say: Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not, but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty—to him who had condemned openly not dishonesty only but even wickedness: or whether it belongs to the same man to excuse some unchastity, who among the titles of his labours, after straits and pressures, after fastings and watchings, also proclaimed chastity; or whether it belongs to the same man to receive reprobates of every kind into communion, who writes: For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? Or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? Or what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? Will he not consistently hear: And how dost thou distinguish what thou hast joined above upon the restoration of the incestuous man?

For with that man incorporated again into the Church, righteousness is also joined with iniquity, and darkness communicates with light, and Belial is in concord with Christ, and the unbeliever shares the sacraments with the believer. And let the idols look to themselves—the very corrupter of God's temple comes together into God's temple. For here also: For ye, he says, are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean thing. This also thou dost unroll, O Apostle, while at the very same time thou thyself dost stretch out thy hand to so great a gulf of uncleannesses, and dost still add: Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

I ask thee: would one who impresses such things upon our minds have recalled some fornicator into the Church? Or does he write this so that he may not now seem to thee to have recalled him? These things, as they ought to prescribe to what precedes, so also ought they to prejudge what follows; for saying at the end of the Epistle: Lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and that I shall bewail many which have sinned already, and have not repented of the uncleanness and fornication and lasciviousness which they have committed; he surely did not establish that those whom he was going to find in the Church were to be received back if they had entered upon repentance, but to be mourned and without doubt to be cast out, that they might lose their repentance. And moreover it does not accord with this, that he should here have shown something about communion, who above had denied it to light and darkness, to righteousness and iniquity.

But all those persons are ignorant of the Apostle, who understand anything contrary to the nature and purpose of the man himself, contrary to the form and rule of his teaching—as though one who is a teacher of all holiness even from his own example, an execrator and expurgator of all impurity, and everywhere such, should be presumed to have restored the Church to the incestuous man sooner than to any more lenient offender.

It is necessary, therefore, that the Apostle be shown to them even in those passages, whom I shall defend in the second letter to the Corinthians as being such as I have known him in all his writings—he who also in the first letter, first of all, dedicated the temple of God: Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Lord dwelleth in you? Who also, for the consecrating and purifying of the temple, wrote the law of the temple-keeper: If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God defile: for the temple of God is holy, which ye are.

Come now, who has ever restored to God one altogether defiled—that is, one delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh—since he had laid this foundation: Let no man deceive himself, that is, let no man presume that one defiled can be restored to God anew; just as again, among other things, and indeed before other things, denying that adulterers and fornicators and the effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind shall inherit the kingdom, he prefaced it with: Be not deceived, namely, if ye think that they shall inherit it. But from those from whom the kingdom is taken away, life is certainly not permitted either, which life is in the kingdom. He also presses on: But such indeed ye were; but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.

By how much he counts those sins as acceptable before the reception of baptism, by so much does he establish them as unforgivable after baptism; since it is not lawful to be washed again. Recognize Paul also in what follows, the immovable pillar of disciplines: Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats; but God shall destroy both it and them; but the body is not for fornication, but for God. For let us make man, said God, in our image and likeness: and God made man, in the image and likeness of God made he him. The Lord for the body; for the Word also was made flesh. And God both raised up the Lord, and will raise us up by his own power; on account, namely, of the body's bond with him. And therefore: Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Because Christ also is the temple of God: Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.

Shall I take the members of Christ and make them the members of a harlot? Know ye not that he who is joined to a harlot is made one body? For they two shall be one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. If fornication is revocable by pardon, how shall I flee it, being about to be an adulterer again? I shall have profited nothing if I flee it; I shall be one body, to which by sharing I shall be joined. Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who fornicates sins against his own body.

And lest you should seize upon this saying as a license for fornication, as though you were about to sin against your own property and not the Lord's, he takes you away from yourself and adds you to Christ, as he had arranged: And ye are not your own; immediately adding: For ye were bought with a price, namely with the blood of the Lord; glorify and bear the Lord in your body. He who gives this command—consider whether he has pardoned one who has dishonored the Lord, and who has cast him out of his body, and that indeed through incest. If you wish to drink in all the knowledge of the Apostle, so as to understand with what great security of judgment he cuts down and uproots and hews out the whole forest of lusts with his axe, and permits nothing to sprout again from any regrowth, behold him desiring souls to fast even from the lawful fruit of nature, I mean from the fruit of marriage.

Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman: but on account of fornication let every man have his own wife; let the husband render to the wife, and the wife to the husband, what is due. Who does not know that he unwillingly relaxed the clasp of this good thing, so as to meet fornication head-on—which if he has indulged or indulges to anyone, he has certainly broken the counsel of his own remedy, and will now be held to bridling marriages of continence, if fornication, on account of which they are permitted, shall not be feared; for it will not be feared if it is forgiven. And yet he professes to have pardoned the use of marriage, not to have commanded it: for he wishes all to cleave to himself. But if lawful things are pardoned, what hope have those who hope for unlawful things?

He also says to the unmarried and to widows that it is good to persevere after his example; but if they have failed, to marry, because it is better to marry than to burn. By what fires, I ask, is it worse to burn? By those of concupiscence, or of punishment? And yet, if fornication has pardon, the concupiscence of it does not burn: but it is more the Apostle's concern to provide against the fires of punishment. But if it is punishment that burns, then fornication has no pardon, since punishment awaits it. Meanwhile also, forbidding divorce, he provides in its place, by the Lord's precept against adultery, either the perseverance of widowhood or the reconciliation of peace, because he who puts away his wife except for the cause of adultery makes her commit adultery; and he who marries one put away by her husband commits adultery. How many remedies does the Holy Spirit establish, so that what he does not wish to be forgiven again may not be committed again!

Now if he everywhere says it is best for a man to be thus: If thou art joined to a wife, seek not to be loosed, so as not to give place to adultery. Art thou loosed from a wife, seek not a wife, so as to keep the opportunity for thyself. But even if thou hast taken a wife, and if a virgin has married, she has not sinned; yet such shall have tribulation in the flesh. And here too he permits by way of sparing. But for the rest, he declares that the time is short, so that even those who have wives should be as though they had none; for the fashion of this world passes away, which now, of course, no longer desires: Increase and multiply. Thus he wishes us to live free from anxiety, because the unmarried care for the things of the Lord, how they may please God; but the married think again of the things of the world, how they may please their spouse.

Thus he pronounces that he who keeps his virgin does better than he who gives her away; thus also he decrees that woman more blessed who, having lost her husband and entered upon the faith, has loved the opportunity of widowhood; thus he commends all these counsels of continence as divine: I think, he says, that I also have the Spirit of God. Who is this most audacious champion of all impurity, the plainly most faithful advocate of adulterers and fornicators and the incestuous, who has taken up this cause in their honor against the Holy Spirit, so as to recite false testimony concerning his apostle? Paul indulged nothing of the sort—he who strives to blot out the whole necessity of the flesh even under honorable titles. He indulges, to be sure, not adulteries, but marriages: he spares, to be sure, matrimonies, not debaucheries: he tries not even to pardon nature, lest he flatter guilt; he strives to restrain the intercourse of blessing, lest the intercourse of cursing be excused.

This remained for him—to cleanse the flesh even from its impurities; for from stains he cannot cleanse it. But this is the custom of the perverse and the ignorant and heretics, and now also of all the psychics, to arm themselves against the whole army of sentences of the entire Scripture on the occasion of some ambiguous passage.

Appeal to the apostolic battle-line; look upon his Epistles; all of them hold forth for chastity, for purity, for holiness, all of them hurl their darts against the business of luxury and wantonness and lust. What, finally, does he write to the Thessalonians as well? For our appeal is not of seduction, nor of uncleanness; and: This is the will of God, your sanctification, that ye abstain from fornication, that every one of you know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor, not in the lust of concupiscence, as the Gentiles who know not God. What do the Galatians read? The works of the flesh are manifest. What are these? In the first place he set fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, of which I tell you beforehand, as I have also told you in time past, that they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. And what do the Romans learn more than not to forsake the Lord after faith? What then shall we say? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?

God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we live any longer therein? Or know ye not that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death: that as Christ was raised from the dead, so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him. But if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more, death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once, but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Christ Jesus.

Therefore, since Christ died once, no one who has died with Christ to sin, and especially to so great a sin, can live again; or if fornication and adultery can be committed again, then Christ will also be able to die again. But the Apostle presses on, forbidding sin to reign in our mortal body, whose weakness of flesh he knew. For as ye presented your members as servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, so now present your members as servants to righteousness unto sanctification. For although he may seem to be disputing in part from Judaism, yet he directs the integrity and fullness of disciplines toward us, on whose behalf, as they labored in the law through the flesh, God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law, he says, might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

For they that are after the flesh mind the things of the flesh; and they that are after the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. And the mind of the flesh he affirmed to be death. Then also enmity, and that those who are in the flesh, that is in the mind of the flesh, cannot please God. And: If ye live after the flesh, he says, ye shall die. But what do we understand by the mind of the flesh and the life of the flesh, except that which one is ashamed to name? For the Apostle would have named the rest of the flesh's works as well. Likewise also, reminding the Ephesians of their former ways, he warns them concerning the future: Among whom we also all once lived, fulfilling the desires and pleasures of the flesh. Marking out finally those who had denied themselves—that is, those who called themselves Christians—because they had given themselves over to the working of all uncleanness: But ye, he says, have not so learned Christ.

And again he speaks thus: Let him that stole steal no more. But also let him who committed adultery hitherto commit adultery no more; and let him who fornicated hitherto fornicate no more. For he would have added these things also, if he had been accustomed to extend pardon to such persons, or had wished pardon to be extended at all—he who, not wishing to be defiled even by a word: Let no corrupt speech, he says, proceed out of your mouth. Likewise: But fornication and all uncleanness, let it not even be named among you, as becometh saints (so far is it from being excused), knowing this, that no fornicator or unclean person hath any inheritance in the kingdom of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words. For because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the sons of disobedience. Who deceives with vain words, if not he who preaches that adultery is remissible?

Not perceiving that even its foundations have been dug up by the Apostle; when he restrains drunkenness and reveling, as also here: And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. He also shows the Colossians what members they are to mortify upon the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil concupiscence, and filthy speech. Grant now, in the face of so many and such great sentences, that one thing which you hold: the few are overshadowed by the many, the doubtful by the certain, the obscure by the manifest. Even if the Apostle had certainly pardoned that Corinthian his fornication, there would be something which he did once against his own rule for the sake of the occasion. He circumcised Timothy alone, and yet he abolished circumcision.

But these things, he says, will pertain to the prohibition of all impurity and the enjoining of all chastity, with the place of pardon nonetheless preserved, which is not straightway denied if offences are condemned, since the time of pardon runs concurrently with the condemnation which it excludes. It followed that this too savoured of the Psychics, and therefore we have reserved for this place those things which from antiquity have openly been grounds for denying ecclesiastical communion in cases of this kind. For even in the Proverbs of Solomon, which we call Paroemiae, speaking specifically of the adulterer as nowhere expiable: But the adulterer, he says, through poverty of understanding acquires the destruction of his own soul, endures pains and dishonours. And his ignominy shall not be blotted out for ever. For the indignation full of jealousy will not spare the husband in the day of judgement.

If you should think this was said of a pagan, you have certainly already heard it concerning the faithful through the passage: Go out from the midst of them, and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean thing. You have straightway in the Psalms the blessed man who went not in the counsel of the ungodly, and stood not in the way of sinners, and sat not in the seat of pestilence. Whose voice also afterwards: I sat not with the assembly of vanity, and with those who act unjustly I will not enter (this concerning the church of those who act wickedly) and with the ungodly I will not sit: and, I will wash my hands among the innocent, and will compass thine altar, O Lord, so that alone he speaks for many, since indeed, with the holy thou shalt be holy, and with the elect thou shalt be elect, and with the perverse thou shalt be perverse.

And elsewhere: But to the sinner God says: Why dost thou expound my justifications, and takest my covenant in thy mouth? If thou sawest a thief, thou didst run with him, and with adulterers thou didst place thy portion. Hence therefore the Apostle also, instructed by these things, says: I wrote to you in the Epistle, not to mingle with fornicators, not indeed with the fornicators of this world, and the rest: Otherwise, you would need to go out of the world: but now I write to you, if any one who is named a brother among you be a fornicator, or an idolater (for what is so closely joined?), or a defrauder (for what is so near?), and the rest, with such persons not even to take food, much less the Eucharist. A little leaven, namely, makes the whole lump tasteless. Likewise to Timothy: Lay hands hastily on no man, neither be partaker of other men's sins. Likewise to the Ephesians: Be ye not therefore partakers with them; for ye were sometimes darkness.

And yet more pressingly: Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them: for the things which are done by them in secret, it is shameful even to speak of. What is more shameful than acts of impurity? But if he also commands the Thessalonians to withdraw from a brother who walks idly, how much more also from a fornicator! For these things were ordained by Christ who loves his Church, who gave himself for it that he might sanctify it, cleansing it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present to himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle, and that after the washing it might be holy and without reproach, thenceforth namely without the wrinkle of old age, as a virgin, without the spot of fornication, as a bride, without the reproach of baseness, as one cleansed.

What if even here you should conceive to reply that communion is indeed taken away from sinners, or especially from those defiled in the flesh, but is to be restored for the present, namely after the circuit of penitence, according to that clemency of God whereby he wills the penitence of a sinner rather than his death? For this foundation of your opinion must be assailed on every side.

We say therefore that the clemency of God, if it had been fitting to demonstrate itself thus even to those who have fallen after faith, the Apostle would have said: Have no fellowship with the works of darkness, unless they have done penitence; and: Not even to take food with such persons, unless after they have wiped the dust from the brethren's shoes with their old age; and: He who shall defile the temple of God, God shall defile him, unless he has shaken the ashes of all hearths from his head in the Church: for he ought to have defined in like manner what he had condemned, since he would have condemned it only up to a point and under a condition, if he had condemned it with a temporal and conditional and not a perpetual severity.

But since in all his Epistles he both forbids such a person to be admitted after faith, and thrusts one already admitted away from communion, without hope of any condition or time, he stands rather on the side of our opinion, showing that the Lord prefers that penitence which is before faith, which is before baptism, to be held of more account than the death of the sinner, since sins are to be washed away once through the grace of Christ, who once died for our sins. For this the Apostle also establishes in his own person. For affirming that Christ came for this purpose, to save sinners, of whom he himself had been the first, what does he add? And I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. Thus that clemency of God, preferring the penitence of a sinner to his death, looks to those who are still ignorant and still unbelieving, for whose liberation Christ came, not to those who already know God and have learned the sacrament of faith.

But if the clemency of God belongs to those who are still ignorant and unbelieving, assuredly penitence also invites clemency to itself, with that form of penitence after faith preserved, which will be able to obtain pardon from the bishop for lighter offences, or for greater and irremissible ones from God alone.

But since we have been dealing with Paul all along, when does John also seem to applaud the opposing side with something?—as though in the Apocalypse he had plainly placed the aid of repentance at the disposal of fornication, where the Spirit commands the angel of the Thyatirans that he has something against him, because he holds the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and teaches and seduces my servants to commit fornication and to eat of things sacrificed to idols. And I have granted her a space of time, that she might enter into repentance, and she is not willing to enter into it in respect of her fornication. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and her adulterers along with her into the greatest tribulation, unless they repent of her works. But it is well that this agrees with the Apostles and with the rules of faith and discipline. For whether I, he says, or they, so we preach.

It is therefore of the whole interest of the mystery to believe that nothing has been conceded by John which has been denied by Paul. Whoever shall observe this equality of the Holy Spirit will be led by Him into His meanings. For a heretical woman, who had taken up teaching what she had learned from the Nicolaitans, was secretly introducing it into the Church, and was rightly being urged to repentance. For who doubts that a heretic deceived by false teaching, once the error is afterward recognized and expiated by repentance, both obtains pardon and is brought back into the Church? Hence also among us a heretic is admitted on equal footing with a pagan, indeed even above a pagan, being purified through the baptism of truth in both the old and new man.

Or if you are certain that that woman, after living faith, afterward expired into heresy, so that you would claim pardon from repentance for her not as for a heretic but as for a believing sinner, let her indeed do penance, but to the end of her adultery, yet not thereby to obtain restoration as well. For this will be the repentance which we also acknowledge is indeed owed, but we reserve the pardon of it to God. Finally, the same Apocalypse in its later portions has decreed the shameless and fornicators, just as the cowardly and unbelieving and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters—those who shall have been such in the faith—to the lake of fire without any conditional condemnation.

For it will not seem to speak of pagans when it has pronounced concerning the faithful: Those who overcome shall inherit these things, and I will be their God, and they shall be to me as sons; and has thus subjoined: But for the cowardly and unbelieving and shameless and fornicators and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters, a share in the lake of fire and sulphur, which is the second death. So also again: Blessed are those who act according to the commandments, that they may have power over the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the holy city. Dogs, sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, outside; namely those who do not act according to the commandments: for it belongs to those who were within to be cast outside. Otherwise, what is it to me to judge those who are outside? Had preceded. They also seize immediately upon the epistle of John. It is said: The blood of His Son cleanses us from every sin.

Shall we therefore always and in every manner sin, if He always and from every sin cleanses us; or if not always, then not after faith either; and if not from every sin, then not from fornication either. But from what point did he begin? He had declared that God is light, and that there is no darkness in Him, and that we lie if we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness. But if, he says, we walk in the light, we shall have fellowship with Him, and the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord cleanses us from every sin. Therefore, walking in the light, do we sin, and sinning in the light shall we be cleansed? By no means. For he who sins is not in the light, but in darkness. Hence he also shows how we are cleansed from sin by walking in the light, in which sin cannot be committed, so much so that he says we are thus cleansed, not in that we sin, but in that we do not sin.

For walking in the light, and not sharing in the darkness, we shall live as those cleansed, not by having put away sin, but by not having admitted it. For this is the power of the Lord's blood: that those whom it has already cleansed from sin, and thereafter established in the light, it thereafter keeps clean, if they persevere in walking in the light. But he adds, you say: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive them to us, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness: surely not from uncleanness? Or if so, then also from idolatry. But the meaning is otherwise. For behold, again: If we say, he says, that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.

Furthermore: Little children, these things I have written to you, that you may not sin; and if you shall have sinned, we have an advocate with God the Father, Jesus Christ the just, and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins. According to these things, you say, it is established both that we sin and that we have pardon. What then shall be made of it, when proceeding further I find something else? For he denies that we sin at all, and treats this point at greatest length, so as to concede nothing of the sort, setting forth that sins once blotted out by Christ will have no pardon afterward: in which our understanding is directed to an exhortation to chastity. Everyone, he says, who has this hope, purifies himself, because He also is pure. Everyone who commits sin also commits iniquity, and sin is iniquity.

And you know that He was manifested to take away sins; namely those admitted up to that point; since indeed he subjoins: Everyone who abides in Him does not sin: everyone who sins has neither seen nor known Him. Little children, let no one deceive you: everyone who does righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous. He who commits sin is of the devil, because the devil sins from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. For He has also destroyed them, freeing man through the washing, the bond of death being forgiven. And therefore everyone who is born of God does not commit sin, because the seed of God abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest.

In what, unless in this: that the former do not sin, from the time they were born of God; the latter sin, because they are of the devil; just as if they had never been born of God? For if he says: He who is not righteous is not of God, he who is not chaste—how shall he again be of God, who has already ceased to be so? It is therefore close to saying that John slipped in his first Epistle when he denied that we are without sin, but now prescribes that we are not to sin at all: and there indeed flattering us with something concerning pardon, but here strictly denying that they are children of God, whosoever shall have sinned. But far be it. For neither do we ourselves slip from the distinction of sins from which we set out. For here too John commended that distinction, namely that there are certain sins of daily occurrence, to which we are all exposed.

For to whom does it not happen either to be angry unjustly, and beyond the setting of the sun; or to lay a hand on someone; or to curse readily; or to swear rashly; or to break the pledge of an agreement; or to lie out of shame or necessity? In business, in duties, in gain, in sustenance, in sight, in hearing—how many temptations are there, so that if there were no pardon for these, salvation would belong to no one! For these, therefore, there will be pardon through Christ the advocate of the Father. But there are also things contrary to these, as graver and deadly matters, which admit no pardon: murder, idolatry, fraud, denial, blasphemy, and certainly also adultery and fornication, and whatever else is a violation of the temple of God. For these Christ will no longer be an advocate; these will not be admitted at all by one who has been born of God, who will not be a son of God if he has admitted them.

Thus the reasoning of John will be consistent in its distinction, as he arranges the differentiation of sins, now allowing that the sons of God sin, now denying it. For he was looking ahead to the closing words of his letter, and was preparing these thoughts for it, being about to say more plainly at the end: If anyone knows his brother to be sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and the Lord will give him life, for him who does not sin unto death. For there is a sin unto death? I do not say that anyone should ask concerning it. He himself also remembered that Jeremiah was forbidden by God to intercede for the people sinning mortally. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin unto death. But we know that everyone who is born of God does not sin; namely the sin which is unto death.

Thus nothing now remains, except that you either deny that adultery and fornication are mortal sins, or confess that they are irremissible, for which not even prayer is permitted.

The discipline of the Apostles therefore properly instructs and determines, principally, every guardian of holiness toward the temple of God, and everywhere eradicates from the Church all sacrilege against chastity, without any mention of restoration. Yet I wish by way of abundance to bring in also the testimony of some companion of the Apostles, one fit to confirm the discipline of the masters from close at hand by right. For there exists also the epistle of Barnabas to the Hebrews, a man of quite sufficient authority, seeing that Paul placed him beside himself in the practice of abstinence: "Or is it only I and Barnabas who have not the power to do this"? And certainly the Epistle of Barnabas is more received among the Churches than that apocryphal Shepherd of adulterers.

Admonishing his disciples therefore, leaving aside all beginnings, to press on rather toward perfection, and not again to lay the foundation of repentance from dead works: "For it is impossible," he says, "for those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the sweet word of God, when the age is now declining and they have fallen away, to be recalled again to repentance, crucifying again in themselves the Son of God and putting him to shame. For the earth which drinks in the rain that often comes upon it, and brings forth herbs fit for those on whose account it is also tilled, receives the blessing of God: but that which bears thorns is rejected and near to a curse, whose end is to be burned".

He who learned this from the Apostles and taught it together with the Apostles, never knew that a second repentance had been promised by the Apostles to an adulterer and fornicator; for he interpreted the law most excellently, and preserved its figures now in the very truth itself. To this kind of discipline, finally, provision was made concerning the leper: "But if the discoloration has spread over the skin, and has covered all the skin from head to foot throughout all his appearance, and the priest when he sees it shall pronounce him clean, because it has all turned white, he is clean. But on whatever day living color of this kind is seen in him, he is unclean". For he wished a man converted from his former condition of flesh into the whiteness of faith—which is reckoned a blemish and a stain in the world—to be understood as wholly renewed and clean, who is no longer parti-colored, no longer sprinkled with the old and the new.

But if after the abolition something of that former state has revived in his flesh, what had been reckoned as dead through sin is to be judged unclean, and can no longer be expiated by the priest. Thus adultery, relapsing from its former state and defiling the unity of the new color from which it had been excluded, is an inexpiable vice. Likewise concerning the house: if certain spots and hollows had been reported in the walls to the priest, before he entered to inspect it, he commands all things to be removed from the house, so that what was in the house should not become unclean. Then the priest entering, if he found hollows turning green or red, and their appearance lower than the surface of the wall; he should go out to the door and shut up that house for seven days.

Then, returning on the seventh day, if he observed that the mark had spread over the walls, he should command those stones in which the leprosy had been to be pulled out and cast outside the city into an unclean place, and other smooth and solid stones to be taken and put in the place of the former ones, and the house to be plastered with other plaster.

For when one comes to Christ the high priest of the Father, all impediments must first be removed from the house of our humanity in the time of the week, so that the house which remains—flesh and soul—may be clean; and when the word of God has entered it, and found spots of redness and greenness, they must be immediately pulled out and cast forth outside—the deadly and blood-stained thoughts; for the Apocalypse also placed death upon the green horse, and the warrior upon the red one: and in their place it lays smooth and well-fitted and firm stones, such as are made in Abraham, so that the man may thus be fit for God. But if after recovery and reformation the priest again observes in the same house something from the former causes and spots, he pronounced it unclean, and commanded its materials and stones and all its structure to be pulled down and cast into an unclean place.

This will be the man of flesh and soul, who after baptism and the entry of the priests, being reformed, again takes up the roughness and spots of the flesh, and is cast outside the city into an unclean place; delivered, that is, to Satan for the destruction of the flesh; and is no longer rebuilt in the Church after his ruin. So also concerning intercourse with a slave-woman who had been reserved for a man, not yet redeemed, not yet freed: "Provision shall be made for her," he says, "and she shall not die", because she for whom she was being kept had not yet been manumitted. For the flesh not yet manumitted by Christ, for whom it was being kept, was defiled with impunity; but now that it has been manumitted, it has no pardon.

If the Apostles knew these things more fully, they certainly took more care of them. But I will now descend to this point as well, distinguishing between the teaching of the Apostles and their power. Discipline governs a man, power assigns, separately what belongs to power, but God is the Spirit. What then did he teach? Not to have fellowship with the works of darkness. Observe what he commands. But who could grant remission of sins? This belongs to him alone. "For who forgives sins but God alone?"—and certainly mortal sins which have been committed against him and against his temple; for those which carry guilt against yourself, you are commanded to forgive even seventy times seven in the person of Peter. Therefore, if it were established that even the blessed Apostles themselves had pardoned something of this kind, whose pardon would be competent from God, not from man, they would have done so not from discipline but from power.

For they also raised the dead, which God alone does; and restored the infirm, which none but Christ does; indeed they also inflicted plagues, which Christ was unwilling to do. For it was not fitting for him to be severe, who had come to suffer. Ananias and Elymas were struck, Ananias with death, Elymas with blindness, so that by this very fact it might be proved that Christ could have done these things also. So also the prophets, in the same way and together with it, had forgiven adultery to the penitent, because they also gave proofs of severity. Show me therefore now, O apostolic man, prophetic examples, and I will acknowledge the divinity, and vindicate for yourself the power of remitting sins of this kind. But if you have been allotted only the duties of discipline, and do not preside by authority but by ministry, who or how great are you to grant pardon? You who, exhibiting neither prophet nor apostle, lack that virtue whose it is to grant pardon?

But, you say, the Church has the power to forgive sins. This I both acknowledge more fully and set forth, I who have the Paraclete himself in the new prophets saying: "The Church is able to forgive sin, but I will not do it, lest they commit other sins also." What if a pseudo-prophetic spirit pronounced this? And yet it would have been more the part of an overthrower both to commend himself by clemency and to restrain others toward sinning. Or if even this it was eager to claim in accordance with the spirit of truth, then the spirit of truth can indeed grant pardon to fornicators, but is unwilling to do so with harm to the many. I now inquire from your own judgment, on what ground you usurp this right for the Church.

If, because the Lord said to Peter: "Upon this rock I will build my Church; to you I have given the keys of the kingdom of heaven," or: "Whatsoever you shall bind or loose on earth shall be bound or loosed in heaven"; on that account you presume that the power of binding and loosing has been derived also to you, that is, to every Church akin to Peter; what sort of man are you, overturning and changing the manifest intention of the Lord, who conferred this personally upon Peter: "Upon you," he says, "I will build my Church"; and: "I will give to you the keys," not to the Church; and: "Whatsoever you shall loose or bind," not whatsoever they shall loose or bind. For so also the outcome teaches. In him the Church was built, that is, through him; he himself initiated the key; see how: "Men of Israel, give ear to the words that I speak; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you", and the rest.

He himself finally first in the baptism of Christ opened the entrance to the heavenly kingdom, in which sins formerly bound are loosed, and those not loosed are bound, according to true salvation; and he bound Ananias with the bond of death; and he loosed the man lame in his feet from the infirmity of his condition. So also in that dispute about keeping the law or not, Peter first of all, moved by the Spirit, and having spoken beforehand of the calling of the nations: "And now," he says, "why do you tempt the Lord by placing upon the brethren a yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of Jesus we shall be saved even as they". This judgment both loosed what had been omitted of the law, and bound what had been reserved. So entirely does the power of binding and loosing emancipated to Peter have nothing to do with the capital sins of the faithful.

To whom if the Lord had commanded to forgive even a brother sinning against him seventy times; he would certainly have commanded him afterward to bind nothing, that is, to retain nothing, unless perhaps those things which someone has committed against the Lord, not against a brother; for it is prejudged that sins against God are not to be forgiven, when those committed against a man are pardoned. What now also to the Church, and indeed to your Church, O psychic? For according to the person of Peter this power will belong to spiritual men, either to an apostle or to a prophet. For the Church itself is properly and principally the Spirit himself in whom is the Trinity of the one Godhead, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. He gathers that Church which the Lord placed in three. And so thenceforth also every number of those who have agreed in this faith is reckoned as the Church from its author and consecrator.

And therefore the Church will indeed forgive sins; but it is the Church of the Spirit through a spiritual man, not the Church which is a number of bishops: for the right and judgment belongs to the Lord, not to the servant; to God himself, not to the priest.

But you now pour out this power even upon your martyrs, so that whoever by agreement has put on bonds still soft, in the new name of custody, adulterers at once besiege them, fornicators at once approach them, already prayers ring round about them, already tears flood around them from every stained person; and none buy access to the prison more eagerly than those who have ruined the Church. Men and women are violated in darkness plainly familiar from the habits of lust, and they seek peace from those whose own peace is in peril. Others flee to the mines, and return from there as communicants, where now another martyrdom is necessary for sins new after martyrdom. For who on earth and in the flesh is without fault? What martyr is a dweller in the world, suppliant to money, subject to the physician and the moneylender?

Suppose now under the sword with the head already poised, suppose on the gibbet with the body already stretched out, suppose on the stake with the lion already granted, suppose on the wheel with the fire already heaped up, in the very, I say, security and possession of martyrdom—who permits a man to give what must be reserved for God? By whom these things have been condemned without excuse; which not even the apostles, as far as I know, themselves also martyrs, judged to be things that could be forgiven. In short, Paul had already fought with beasts at Ephesus, when he decrees destruction for the incestuous man. Let it suffice for a martyr to have purged his own sins. It is the mark of an ungrateful or arrogant person to scatter upon others as well what he will have obtained at great cost. Who has paid for another's death by his own, except the Son of God alone? For even in his very passion he freed the robber.

For to this end he had come, that he himself, pure from sin and holy in all things, might die for sinners. Accordingly, you who imitate him in forgiving sins—if you yourself have committed no sin, plainly suffer for me; but if you are a sinner, how will the oil of your torch be able to suffice for both you and me? I have even now wherewith to prove Christ. If Christ is in the martyr for this reason, that the martyr may absolve adulterers and fornicators, let him disclose the secrets of the heart, so as to grant sins in that manner, and he is Christ; for thus the Lord Jesus Christ showed his power: Why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier, to say to the paralytic, Thy sins are forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and walk? Therefore, that you may know that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins, I say to you, paralytic, Arise and walk.

If the Lord took such care only for the proof of his power, that he might expose thoughts and so command health, lest he should not be believed able to forgive sins, it is not lawful for me to believe the same power in anyone without the same proofs. Yet when you demand pardon for adulterers and fornicators from a martyr, you yourself confess that crimes of this kind can be washed away only by one's own martyrdom, you who presume upon another's. But if this is so, then martyrdom too will be another baptism. For I have, he says, another baptism also. Whence also from the wound of the Lord's side water and blood flowed out, the provision of both washings. I ought therefore also by the first washing to free another, if I am able by the second, and we must needs pour it into the bosom.

Whatever authority, whatever reason restores ecclesiastical peace to the adulterer and fornicator, the same ought also to come to the aid of the murderer and idolater when penitent, certainly to the denier, and assuredly to that one whom the cruelty of the contest of confession, struggling under torments, cast down. Otherwise, it is unworthy of God and of his mercy—who prefers the repentance of a sinner to his death—that those should return more easily into the Church who fell through lust than those who fell in combat. Indignation presses us to speak. Will you recall bodies defiled rather than bodies bloodied? Which repentance is more pitiable, that which prostrates flesh that has been tickled, or that which prostrates flesh that has been torn? Which plea for pardon is more just in all cases—that which a willing, or that which an unwilling sinner implores? No one is compelled to deny willingly, no one fornicates unwillingly: there is no force toward lust except lust itself; it does not know how to be compelled in what it desires.

Denial, moreover—how many devices of the torturer and kinds of punishment compel it? Who has denied more, he who lost Christ under torment, or he who lost him under pleasure? He who, while losing him, grieved? Or he who, while losing him, made sport? And yet those scars engraved in the Christian combat, and assuredly enviable before Christ, because they desired to conquer, and glorious even so, because in not conquering they yielded, upon which even the devil himself still gazes with his own unhappiness, but chastely; with mourning repentance, but not blushing to turn to the Lord for pardon. Pardon is granted again to those who have denied in an expiable manner; theirs alone is the flesh that is weak. And yet no flesh is so strong as that which crushes the spirit.