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Augustine of Hippo, On Marriage And Concupiscence
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on augustin’s forwarding to him what he calls his first book “on marriage and concupiscence.”
On Marriage and Concupiscence,
Chapter 1.—Concerning the Argument of This Treatise.
Chapter 2. [II.]—Why This Treatise Was Addressed to Valerius.
Chapter 3 [III.]—Conjugal Chastity the Gift of God.
Chapter 8 [VII.]—The Evil of Lust Does Not Take Away the Good of Marriage.
Chapter 15.—The Teaching of the Apostle on This Subject.
Chapter 18 [XVI.]—Continence Better Than Marriage But Marriage Better Than Fornication.
Chapter 19 [XVII.]—Blessing of Matrimony.
Chapter 20 [XVIII]—Why Children of Wrath are Born of Holy Matrimony.
Chapter 24.—Lust and Shame Come from Sin The Law of Sin The Shamelessness of the Cynics.
Chapter 30 [XXVII.]—The Evil Desires of Concupiscence We Ought to Wish that They May Not Be.
Chapter 31 [XXVIII.]—Who is the Man that Can Say, “It is No More I that Do It”?
Chapter 32.—When Good Will Be Perfectly Done.
Chapter 33 [XXX.]—True Freedom Comes with Willing Delight in God’s Law.
Chapter 34.—How Concupiscence Made a Captive of the Apostle What the Law of Sin Was to the Apostle.
Chapter 35 [XXXI.]—The Flesh, Carnal Affection.
Chapter 36.—Even Now While We Still Have Concupiscence We May Be Safe in Christ.
Chapter 1 [I.]—Introductory Statement.
Chapter 3.—The Same Continued.
Chapter 4.—The Same Continued.
Chapter 5.—The Same Continued.
Chapter 6.—The Same Continued.
Chapter 8.—Augustin Refutes the Passage Adduced Above.
Chapter 10 [IV.]—In What Manner the Adversary’s Cavils Must Be Refuted.
Chapter 11.—The Devil the Author, Not of Nature, But Only of Sin.
Chapter 12.—Eve’s Name Means Life, and is a Great Sacrament of the Church.
Chapter 13.—The Pelagian Argument to Show that the Devil Has No Rights in the Fruits of Marriage.
Chapter 14 [V.]—Concupiscence Alone, in Marriage, is Not of God.
Chapter 16 [VI.]—It is Not of Us, But Our Sins, that the Devil is the Author.
Chapter 18.—The Same Continued.
Chapter 19 [VIII.]—The Pelagians Misunderstand “Seed” In Scripture.
Chapter 20.—Original Sin is Derived from the Faulty Condition of Human Seed.
Chapter 21 [IX.]—It is the Good God That Gives Fruitfulness, and the Devil That Corrupts the Fruit.
Chapter 22.—Shall We Be Ashamed of What We Do, or of What God Does?
Chapter 24 [XI.]—What Covenant of God the New-Born Babe Breaks. What Was the Value of Circumcision.
Chapter 25 [XII.]—Augustin Not the Deviser of Original Sin.
Chapter 26 [XIII.]—The Child in No Sense Formed by Concupiscence.
Chapter 28 [XIV.]—Augustin’s Answer to This Argument. Its Dealing with Scripture.
Chapter 29.—The Same Continued. Augustin Also Asserts that God Forms Man at Birth.
Chapter 30 [XV.]—The Case of Abimelech and His House Examined.
Chapter 31 [XVI.]—Why God Proceeds to Create Human Beings, Who He Knows Will Be Born in Sin.
Chapter 32 [XVII.]—God Not the Author of the Evil in Those Whom He Creates.
Chapter 33 [XVIII.]—Though God Makes Us, We Perish Unless He Re-makes Us in Christ.
Chapter 36 [XXI.]—God Made Nature Good: the Saviour Restores It When Corrupted.
Chapter 39 [XXIV.]—Man Born of Whatever Parentage is Sinful and Capable of Redemption.
Chapter 40 [XXV.]—Augustin Declines the Dilemma Offered Him.
Chapter 43.—The Good Tree in the Gospel that Cannot Bring Forth Evil Fruit, Does Not Mean Marriage.
Chapter 45.—Answer to This Argument: The Apostle Says We All Sinned in One.
Chapter 47.—The Scriptures Repeatedly Teach Us that All Sin in One.
Chapter 48.—Original Sin Arose from Adam’s Depraved Will. Whence the Corrupt Will Sprang.
Chapter 49 [XXIX.]—In Infants Nature is of God, and the Corruption of Nature of the Devil.
Chapter 52 [XXX.]—Sin Was the Origin of All Shameful Concupiscence.
Chapter 53 [XXXI.]—Concupiscence Need Not Have Been Necessary for Fruitfulness.
Chapter 54 [XXXII.]—How Marriage is Now Different Since the Existence of Sin.
Chapter 55 [XXXIII.]—Lust is a Disease The Word “Passion” In the Ecclesiastical Sense.
Chapter 57 [XXXIV.]—The Great Sin of the First Man.
Chapter 60.—Let Not the Pelagians Indulge Themselves in a Cruel Defence of Infants.
Chapter 20 [XVIII]—Why Children of Wrath are Born of Holy Matrimony.
This is the reason, indeed, why of even the just and lawful marriages of the children of God are born, not children of God, but children of the world; because also those who generate, if they are already regenerate, beget children not as children of God, but as still children of the world. “The children of this world,” says our Lord, “beget and are begotten.”78 Luke xx. 34. Augustin quotes an interpolation current in the Latin Bibles of his day, and found also in certain Greek (D. Origen) and Syriac (Curetonian version) witnesses. From the fact, therefore, that we are still children of this world, our outer man is in a state of corruption; and on this account our offspring are born as children of the present world; nor do they become sons of God, except they be regenerated.79 See De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, ii. 11 [ix.]. Yet inasmuch as we are children of God, our inner man is renewed from day to day.80 2 Cor. iv. 16. And yet even our outer man has been sanctified through the laver of regeneration, and has received the hope of future incorruption, on which account it is justly designated as “the temple of God.” “Your bodies,” says the apostle, “are the temples of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, and which ye have of God; and ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a great price: therefore glorify and carry God in your body.”81 1 Cor. vi. 19, 20. Note the odd interpolation “and carry,” which was a common Latin reading. The whole of this statement is made in reference to our present sanctification, but especially in consequence of that hope of which he says in another passage, “We ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”82 Rom. viii. 23. If, then, the redemption of our body is expected, as the apostle declares, it follows, that being an expectation, it is as yet a matter of hope, and not of actual possession. Accordingly the apostle adds: “For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.”83 Rom. viii. 24, 25. Not, therefore, by that which we are waiting for, but by that which we are now enduring, are the children of our flesh born. God forbid that a man who possesses faith should, when he hears the apostle bid men “love their wives,”84 Col. iii. 19. love that carnal concupiscence in his wife which he ought not to love even in himself; as he may know, if he listens to the words of another apostle: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever, even as also God abideth for ever.”85 1 John ii. 15–17. The last clause, though not in Jerome’s Vulgate, was yet read by some of the Latin Fathers—by Cyprian and Lucifer, for instance, and something like it also by one of the Egyptian versions.
CAPUT XVIII.
20. Cur e sancto conjugio nascantur filii irae. Propter hanc ergo fit ut etiam de justis et legitimis nuptiis filiorum Dei, non filii Dei, sed filii saeculi generentur: quia et ii qui generant, si jam regenerati sunt, non ex hoc generant ex quo filii Dei sunt, sed ex quo adhuc filii saeculi. Dominica quippe sententia est, Filii hujus saeculi generant, et generantur (Luc. XX, 34). Ex quo itaque sumus adhuc filii hujus saeculi, exterior homo noster corrumpitur, ex hoc et hujus saeculi filii generantur, nec filii Dei nisi regenerentur fiunt: sed ex quo sumus filii Dei, interior de die in diem renovatur (II Cor. IV, 16). Quamvis et ipse exterior per lavacrum regenerationis sanctificatus sit, et spem futurae incorruptionis acceperit, propter quod et templum Dei merito dicitur: Corpora vestra, inquit Apostolus, templum in vobis Spiritus sancti est, quem habetis a Deo: et non estis vestri; empti enim estis pretio magno. Glorificate ergo et portateDeum in corpore vestro (I Cor. VI, 19, 20). Hoc totum non solum propter praesentem sanctificationem, sed maxime propter illam spem dictum est, de qua idem alio loco dicit: Sed et nos ipsi primitias spiritus habentes, et ipsi in nobismetipsis ingemiscimus, adoptionem exspectantes, redemptionem corporis nostri. Si ergo redemptio corporis nostri, secundum Apostolum, exspectatur; profecto quod exspectatur, adhuc speratur, nondum tenetur. Unde adjungit et dicit: Spe enim salvi facti sumus. Spes autem quae videtur, non est spes: quod enim videt quis, quid sperat? Si autem quod non videmus, speramus, per patientiam exspectamus (Rom. VIII, 23-25). Non itaque per hoc quod exspectamus, sed per hoc quod toleramus, carnales filii propagantur. Absit ergo ut fidelis homo (Coloss. III, 19), cum audit ab Apostolo, Diligite uxores vestras, concupiscentiam carnis diligat in uxore, quam nec in se ipso debet diligere, audiens alterum apostolum, Nolite diligere mundum, nec ea quae in mundo sunt: quisquis dilexerit mundum, non est charitas Patris in illo; quia omnia quae in mundo sunt, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et ambitio saeculi, quae non est a Patre, sed ex mundo est. Et mundus transibitet concupiscentia ejus: qui autem fecerit voluntatem Dei, manet in aeternum, sicut et Deus manet in aeternum (I Joan. II, 15-17).