Book 3

1.1. The followers of Valentinus, who derive the conjugal pairs from above, from the divine emanations, approve of marriage; but the school of Basilides say that, when the apostles asked whether it might not be better not to marry, the Lord answered, "Not all can receive this saying; for there are eunuchs, some from birth, some by necessity." And they explain the saying in some such way as this: some men have from birth a natural aversion to women, and those who make use of this natural constitution do well not to marry. These, they say, are the eunuchs from birth; while the eunuchs by necessity are those theatrical ascetics who master themselves only because they are drawn on by the desire for fame; and those who have been mutilated by some misfortune have become eunuchs by necessity. Those, then, who are eunuchs by necessity are not eunuchs by reason. But those who for the sake of the eternal kingdom have made themselves eunuchs adopt this course of reasoning, they say, because of the things that result from marriage, fearing the distraction of providing for the necessities of life.

1.2. And "It is better to marry than to burn"—the apostle says this, they claim, so that you may not cast your soul into the fire, holding out night and day, and afraid that you may fall away from continence; for the soul that is set on holding out becomes divided in its hope. "Hold out, then," says Isidore in so many words in his Ethics, "against a contentious wife, that you may not be torn away from the grace of God; and when you have discharged the fire, pray with a good conscience. But when," he says, "your thanksgiving falls away into petition, and you ask henceforth not to do right but not to do wrong, then marry. But suppose a man is young, or poor, or downcast in spirit, and is unwilling to marry as reason directs—let such a one not separate from his brother. Let him say, 'I have entered into the holy place, I can suffer no harm.' But if he has some misgiving, let him say, 'Brother, lay your hand upon me, that I may not sin'; and he will receive help both for the mind and for the senses. Let him only will to accomplish the good, and he will attain it."

1.3. But sometimes with the mouth we say, "We do not wish to sin," while the mind is set upon sinning. Such a man does not do what he wishes only out of fear, so that the punishment may not be reckoned against him. Now humanity has certain things that are both necessary and natural, and others that are natural only. Clothing is both necessary and natural; but sexual intercourse is natural, yet not necessary. I have set down these utterances to refute those Basilidians who do not live rightly, on the supposition either that they have license to sin because of their perfection, or that in any case they will be saved by nature even if they sin now, because of their innate election—since not even the founders of their doctrines allow them to do the same things. Let them not, then, while creeping under the name of Christ and living more licentiously than the most unrestrained of the heathen, fasten blasphemy upon that name; for such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, whose end shall be according to their works.

1.4. Continence, then, is contempt of the body, in accordance with the confession we make to God. For continence has to do not only with sexual matters but with the other things too which the soul wrongly desires, not being satisfied with what is necessary. There is continence with respect to the tongue, to possessions, to their use, and to desire. It does not merely teach self-control; it actually furnishes us with self-control, since it is a power and a divine grace. So we must say what our people think on the matter set before us. We count blessed both celibacy and those to whom this has been granted by God; but we admire monogamy and the dignity of a single marriage, saying that we ought to share another's suffering and to bear one another's burdens, lest anyone who seems to stand firmly should himself also fall. And concerning a second marriage, the apostle says, "If a man burns, let him marry."

2.5. Those who trace their descent from Carpocrates and Epiphanes hold that women should be common property; and from them the greatest blasphemy has flowed against the name of Christ. This Epiphanes, whose writings are still in circulation, was the son of Carpocrates and of a mother named Alexandria; on his father's side an Alexandrian, on his mother's a Cephallenian. He lived in all seventeen years, and is honoured as a god at Same in Cephallenia, where a temple of dressed stone, with altars, sacred precincts, and a shrine of the Muses, has been built and consecrated to him; and the Cephallenians, gathering at the temple at the new moon, offer sacrifice to celebrate his apotheosis as his birthday, pour libations, feast, and sing hymns. He was educated by his father both in the ordinary curriculum and in the doctrines of Plato, and was the founder of the monadic knowledge, from which the sect of the Carpocratians took its origin.

2.6. This man, then, says in his work On Justice that the justice of God is a kind of community based on equality. The heaven, stretched out equally on every side, encircles the whole earth in a ring; the night displays all the stars alike; and the sun, the cause of the day and the father of light, God poured out from above equally upon all who have the power to see, and they all see in common, since He makes no distinction between rich and poor, commoner and ruler, foolish and wise, female and male, free and slave. Nor does He do anything contrary to this even among the irrational creatures, but pouring Himself out from above in common and equally upon all living things, He establishes justice for the good and the bad alike, since no one is able to have more or to deprive his neighbour, so as to double his own light at that neighbour's expense. The sun causes common food to spring up for all living things; the common justice is given to all alike; and toward such ends the race of oxen comes into being in the same way as the oxen, the race of swine as the swine, the race of sheep as the sheep, and so with all the rest; for in them justice is shown to be community. Then, in accordance with this community, all things are sown alike according to their kind, and common food is set forth, growing on the ground, for all the cattle and for all alike, controlled by no law, but present in harmony for all by the bounty of Him who gives and commands.

2.7. Nor has procreation any written law (for it would have been transcribed otherwise); rather, all sow and beget alike, having an inborn community given them by justice. To all alike the Maker and Father of all, having laid down justice as His own law, has granted in common the eye to see, making no distinction between female and male, rational and irrational—nothing whatever between any; but distributing sight equally by equality and community, He has bestowed it on all alike at a single command. But the laws of men, he says, being unable to punish ignorance, have taught men to transgress; for the particularity of the laws has cut up and gnawed away the community of the divine law—not understanding the saying of the apostle, who says, "Through the law I came to know sin." "Mine" and "thine," he says, crept in through the laws, so that the earth and possessions, and even marriage, are no longer enjoyed in common; for God made the vines for all alike, and they refuse neither sparrow nor thief; and the grain likewise, and the other fruits. But community, being violated, together with equality, gave birth to the thief of cattle and crops.

2.8. God, then, having made all things in common for man, and having brought the female together with the male in common, and having joined all the living creatures in the same way, declared justice to be community joined with equality. But those who have come into being in this way have denied the community that brought them together, and say: "Let the man who has married one woman keep her, although all can share in common, just as he has shown the rest of the animals do." Having said this in so many words, he then adds again in the very same words: "For He implanted in the males a strong and more vehement desire for the continuance of the kinds, which neither law nor custom nor anything else that exists can do away with; for it is a decree of God." And how can this man any longer be examined in our reckoning, when he openly abolishes through these arguments both the law and the gospel? For the one says, "You shall not commit adultery"; and the other says, "Everyone who looks with desire has already committed adultery." For the saying of the law, "You shall not covet," shows the one God proclaimed through the law and the prophets and the gospel; for it says, "You shall not covet your neighbour's wife." Now the neighbour is not the Jew to the Jew, for they are brothers and of the same Spirit; what remains, then, is that "neighbour" means a man of another nation. For how is he not a neighbour who is able to share in the Spirit? For Abraham is father not of the Hebrews only, but also of the Gentiles.

2.9. And if the woman who has committed adultery and the man who has fornicated with her are punished with death, it is surely plain that the commandment which says, "You shall not covet your neighbour's wife," speaks of the Gentiles, so that the man who, according to the law, has kept himself from his neighbour's wife and from his sister, may hear plainly from the Lord, "But I say, You shall not covet." And the addition of the word "I" shows the more pressing force of the commandment, and that both Carpocrates and Epiphanes fight against God—Epiphanes, who, in that very much-talked-of book, On Justice I mean, adds something like this in so many words: "Hence the saying of the lawgiver, 'You shall not covet,' is to be taken as if spoken in jest, and still more ridiculous is the addition, 'your neighbour's'; for the very one who gave desire, as that which holds together the things of generation, commands that it be taken away, though He takes it from no animal; and the words 'your neighbour's wife,' which force community into private ownership, are still more ridiculous."

2.10. Such, then, are the doctrines of these noble Carpocratians. They say that these men, and certain others who are zealous for similar evils, gather together for their banquets (for I would not call their assembly an agape), men and women together; and when they have eaten their fill—"in fullness, as they say, comes Cypris"—they overturn the lamps so as to put out the light that would shame their fornicating justice, and unite as they wish with whomever they please. Having practised this community in such an "agape," they then by day demand from whatever women they wish obedience to the Carpocratian law—I dare not call it the law of God. Such things, I think, Carpocrates ought to have legislated for the lusts of dogs and swine and goats. He seems to me also to have misheard Plato, who in the Republic says that the women are common to all—meaning that those who have not yet married are common to those who would ask for them, just as a theatre is common to all the spectators, but that each woman, once a man has secured her first, belongs to that man, and the married woman is no longer common.

2.11. Xanthus, in his work entitled Magica, says: "The Magi consider it lawful to have intercourse with their mothers and daughters and sisters, and that the women are common—not by force and in secret, but with the consent of both, when one man wishes to marry another's wife." Concerning these and similar sects, I think, Jude spoke prophetically in his epistle: "Likewise also these men, dreaming (for they do not lay hold of the truth waking), even to the point that their mouth speaks swelling words."

3.12. Now if Plato himself and the Pythagoreans, like the followers of Marcion later, had supposed generation to be evil (though Plato was far from holding women to be common), still the Marcionites suppose nature to be evil, made of evil matter and by a just Demiurge. By this reasoning, not wishing to fill up the world made by the Demiurge, they wish to abstain from marriage, setting themselves against their Maker and hastening toward the Good who called them—not, as they say, toward the God who is otherwise. Hence, wishing to leave nothing of their own here, they become continent not by free choice, but out of enmity toward their Maker, unwilling to use what He created. But these men, having departed from natural reasoning by their impious war against God, and despising the long-suffering and kindness of God—even if they do not wish to marry—still use the food He created and breathe the air of the Demiurge, being His works and remaining among His things; and they proclaim, as they say, a strange knowledge, though even in this respect they owe thanks to the Lord of the world, in that here they have received the good news.

3.13. But against these men, when we treat the discussion concerning first principles, we shall argue most precisely. As for the philosophers we mentioned, from whom the Marcionites, having impiously learned that generation is evil, give themselves airs as over their own doctrine—they do not hold it to be evil by nature, but evil to the soul that has perceived the truth; for they bring down the soul, which is divine, into this world here as into a place of punishment, and it is fitting, according to them, that souls embodied here should be purified. And this doctrine belongs no longer to the Marcionites, but to those who hold that souls are put into bodies, bound again into them, and decanted from one body to another—against whom there will be another occasion to speak, when we treat of the soul.

3.14. Heraclitus, at any rate, plainly disparages generation when he says: "When they are born, they wish to live and to have their deaths"—or rather, to find rest—"and they leave children behind to become deaths in their turn." Empedocles too plainly agrees with him when he says:

I wept and wailed when I beheld the unfamiliar place.

And again:

For out of living things he made dead, changing their forms.

And again:

Alas, wretched race of mortals, deeply ill-fated: out of such strifes and groans you were born.

The Sibyl too says:

Mortal men and made of flesh, who are nothing,

like the poet who writes:

Earth nurtures nothing feebler than a man.

3.15. Yes, and Theognis too shows generation to be evil, when he speaks in some such way as this:

Best of all for men on earth is never to be born, nor ever to look upon the rays of the keen sun; but, once born, to pass the gates of Hades as swiftly as may be.

In agreement with these the tragic poet Euripides writes:

We ought, when a man is born, to gather together and mourn for him, in view of all the evils he goes to meet; but the dead, freed at last from his toils, we ought to send forth from his house rejoicing and with words of good omen.

And again he says the like:

Who knows whether to live is to be dead, and to be dead is to live?

3.16. Herodotus too plainly does the same when he makes Solon say: "O Croesus, every man is a creature of calamity." And his story of Cleobis and Biton clearly intends nothing else than to blame generation and to praise death.

As is the generation of leaves, so too is that of men,

says Homer. And Plato, in the Cratylus, attributes to Orpheus the doctrine that the soul is punished in the body, saying thus: "For some say that the body [sōma] is the tomb [sēma] of the soul, as though it were buried in the present life; and because the soul signifies whatever it signifies by means of the body, it is for this reason rightly called a 'sign' [sēma]. But it seems to me that the followers of Orpheus chiefly established this name, on the ground that the soul pays the penalty for whatever it pays the penalty."

3.17. It is worth recalling also the saying of Philolaus; for the Pythagorean says thus: "The ancient theologians and seers bear witness that, because of certain punishments, the soul has been yoked to the body and buried in it as in a tomb." Pindar too, speaking of the Eleusinian mysteries, adds:

Blessed is he who has seen those things and so goes beneath the earth; he knows the end of life, and he knows its God-given beginning.

Plato likewise, in the Phaedo, does not hesitate to write in some such way as this: "And those who established the rites for us were no ordinary men... [the soul] will dwell with the gods." And what of it when he says: "As long as we have the body, and our soul is commingled with such an evil, we shall never sufficiently attain that which we desire"? Does he not hint that generation is the cause of the greatest evils? And in the Phaedo he bears witness: "For it is likely that all who rightly lay hold of philosophy are unnoticed by others in that they practise nothing else than to die and to be dead."

3.18. And again: "Does not then, even here, the soul of the philosopher most of all dishonour the body and flee from it, and seek to be by itself, alone?" And does this not chime with the divine apostle, who says: "Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"—unless he is figuratively calling "the body of death" the like-mindedness of those who have been dragged down into vice. Even before Marcion, Plato is plainly turning away from intercourse, the beginning of generation, in the first book of the Republic. For, praising old age, he adds: "Know well that, for my part, the more the other pleasures of the body fade away, the more do the desires and pleasures concerning discourse increase"; and when sexual pleasure is mentioned: "Hush, man! I most gladly escaped it, as one escapes a raging and savage master."

3.19. Again in the Phaedo, disparaging generation, he writes: "Now the doctrine spoken about these things in secret, that we men are in a kind of guard-post." And again: "But those who are reckoned to have lived in an exceptionally holy way are those who, set free and released from these places in the earth as from prisons, attain to the pure dwelling above." Yet, even so disposed, he perceives that the world is well administered, and says: "One must not, then, set oneself free from this and run away." And, to put it briefly, he gave Marcion no occasion to reckon matter evil, since he himself spoke reverently about the world as follows: "From the one who composed all things it has acquired everything good; but from its former condition it has whatever is harsh and unjust that comes to be in heaven—these it both has from that condition itself and works into the living creatures."

3.20. And still more clearly he adds: "The cause of these things for it is the bodily element of its mixture, the companion of that ancient nature, because it partook of much disorder before it came into the present order of the world." No less, in the Laws, does he lament the race of men, speaking thus: "The gods, taking pity on the race of men, whose nature is born to toil, ordained for them, as rest from their labours, the recurring round of festivals." And in the Epinomis he runs through the causes of his pity and says this: "How, from the very beginning, it is hard for every living thing to come into being—first to share in the condition of those in the womb, then to be born, and still to be reared and educated: all this comes about through countless toils, as we all agree."

3.21. And what? Does not Heraclitus too call generation death, in agreement with Pythagoras and the Socrates of the Gorgias, when he says: "Death is all that we see when awake; sleep, all that we see asleep"? But enough of these things; and when we treat of first principles, then we shall also examine these contraries which the philosophers hint at and the school of Marcion lay down as doctrine. Only, I think it has been shown by us not obscurely that Marcion took the starting-points of his strange doctrines from Plato, both ungratefully and ignorantly.

3.22. Let our discussion concerning continence go forward. We were saying that the Greeks, suspecting the difficulty involved, uttered many things against the begetting of children, and that the followers of Marcion, taking these up impiously, are ungrateful to the Demiurge. For tragedy says:

It were better not to come to be than to be born, for mortals. And then I bear children amid bitter pains; and having borne them, if I bear them foolish, I groan in vain, beholding them base; and if I lose the good ones, if any are saved, I melt my wretched heart in dread. What good is this? Is it not enough to vex one single soul, and then to have toils upon it?

And again likewise:

To me it seems, now as long ago,

that men ought never to beget children, seeing into what toils we beget them.

And in what is said next he plainly traces the cause of evils back to first principles, speaking thus:

O you who were born to be wretched and to fare ill, you became a man, and a wretched life you took from there, whence for all began to give nourishment this air, breathing breath into mortals; do not, then, being mortal, presume against mortal things.

3.23. And again he renders the like as follows:

Of mortals none is blessed, nor happy; for no one yet was born free of grief.

And then again:

Alas, alas, how many are the chances of mortal woes, and how many their shapes; one could not name their limit.

And still likewise:

For of things among mortals there is nothing happy through to the end.

3.24. For this reason, they say, the Pythagoreans too abstained from sexual relations. But to me they seem rather to marry for the sake of begetting children, and to wish to master the pleasure of sex after the begetting of children. For this reason they mystically forbid the eating of beans—not because the pulse is wind-producing and hard to digest and makes dreams troubled, nor again because the bean is likened to a human head, as in that little verse,

It is all one to eat beans and the heads of one's parents,

but rather because beans, when eaten, make women barren. Theophrastus, at any rate, in the fifth book of his Causes of Plants, records that the husks of beans, placed about the roots of newly planted trees, dry up what is growing; and the domestic fowl, by feeding on them continually, become barren.

4.25. Of those who are led by heresy, we have mentioned Marcion of Pontus, who, because of his opposition to the Demiurge, refuses the use of worldly things. The cause of his continence—if indeed this is to be called continence—is the Demiurge Himself, against whom this giant who fights with God supposes himself to stand, and so is continent against his will, running down both the creation and the thing fashioned. And even if they make use of the saying of the Lord to Philip, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but follow me," let them consider this: that Philip too bears the same fashioning of the flesh, and yet had no defiled corpse. How then, having a body of flesh, did he have no corpse? Because he had risen from the tomb when the Lord put the passions to death, but lived to Christ. We have mentioned also the lawless community of women according to Carpocrates; but, having discussed the saying of Nicolaus, we passed over this. They say that he had a beautiful wife, and after the Saviour's ascension, being reproached by the apostles for jealousy, he brought his wife into the midst and gave leave for anyone who wished to marry her. For this act, they say, agrees with that saying, "One must abuse the flesh"; and accordingly, following both the deed and the saying simply and without examination, those who pursue his sect fornicate without restraint.

4.26. But I myself have learned that Nicolaus had relations with no other woman than the one he married; that of his children the daughters grew old as virgins, and the son remained unmarried and undefiled. Such being the case, the bringing of the wife of whom he was jealous into the midst of the apostles was the casting off of passion; and the continence with respect to the most eagerly pursued pleasures taught the meaning of "abusing the flesh." For he did not wish, I think, to serve two masters at once—pleasure and God—against the Saviour's commandment. They say, at any rate, that Matthias too taught thus: to fight against the flesh and to abuse it, yielding nothing to it for unrestrained pleasure, but to increase the soul through faith and knowledge.

4.27. There are some who proclaim the vulgar Aphrodite to be a mystical communion, insulting even the name; for "to do" something is called "to work" something evil, just as "to do" something good is also called by the same name "to work" it. So likewise communion is good in the sharing of money and food and clothing; but these men have impiously called any sort of sexual intercourse "communion." They say, at any rate, that one of them approached a beautiful young virgin of our company and said, "It is written, 'Give to everyone who asks of you.'" But she, very gravely, not understanding the man's lewdness, answered, "Concerning marriage, talk with my mother." O the godlessness! Even of the Lord's sayings these partners in lewdness make false use—these brothers in lust, a reproach not only to philosophy but to all human life, who falsify the truth, or rather demolish it as far as in them lies. For these thrice-wretched men celebrate as a sacred mystery the carnal and copulatory communion, and think that this leads them up into the kingdom of God.

4.28. Into the brothels, then, does such a communion lead; and swine and goats would be their fellow-partners; and among them the foremost place in their greater hopes would belong to the prostitutes who keep the roof, receiving without restraint all who wish to come. But you did not so learn Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, as the truth is in Christ Jesus: to put off, in regard to your former conduct, the old man who is corrupted according to the desires of deceit; and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and to put on the new man, who is created according to God in righteousness and holiness of the truth, after the likeness of the divine. Be therefore imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour. But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as becomes saints; nor filthiness nor foolish talking. For, teaching us to be pure even in our speech, the apostle writes: "This you know, recognizing that no fornicator," and so on, down to "but rather even reprove them."

4.29. Their doctrine flowed from a certain apocryphal book, and I will set down the passage that is the mother of their lewdness. And whether they themselves are the authors of the book (consider the madness, if they lie even against God out of incontinence), or whether they came upon others and conceived this fine doctrine after hearing it in a distorted way, the words of the passage are as follows: "All things were one; but since its unity did not seem good to be alone, there went forth from it an inspiration, and it had communion with it and made the Beloved; and from this there went forth from it an inspiration, with which it had communion and made powers that could neither be seen nor heard"—down to "each by its own name." For if these men, like the followers of Valentinus, posited spiritual communions, perhaps one might accept their supposition; but to refer the communion of carnal outrage to holy prophecy is the act of one who has given up all hope of salvation.

4.30. Such are the doctrines of the followers of Prodicus also, who falsely proclaim themselves "gnostics," saying that they are by nature sons of the first God; and, abusing their nobility and their freedom, they live as they please—and they please to live in a manner devoted to pleasure, holding that they are to be mastered by no one, as lords of the Sabbath, and as royal children born above every race; and to a king, they say, there is no written law. But, first of all, they do not do all that they wish, for many things will hinder them even when they desire and attempt them; and the things they do, they do not as kings but as runaway slaves, for they commit adultery in secret, fearing to be caught, shunning condemnation, and afraid of punishment. But how is incontinence and foul speech freedom? For "everyone who sins," he says, "is a slave"—the apostle says.

4.31. But how does the man who has given himself over to every desire conduct himself according to God, when the Lord has said, "But I say, You shall not covet"? Does a man willingly choose to sin, and lay it down as a doctrine to commit adultery, to indulge in pleasure, and to ruin the marriages of others—when we pity even others who sin against their will? And even if they have come into a strange world, if they do not prove faithful in what is another's, they will not possess what is true. Does a stranger insult the citizens and wrong them, instead of, like a sojourner, using what is necessary and living without offence to the citizens? How is it that, doing the same things as those who are hated by the nations because they do not do what the laws enjoin—that is, the unjust, the incontinent, the covetous, and the adulterers—they alone claim to have known God? For they ought, even when present among strangers, to live well, that they might truly display their royal character.

4.32. But indeed these men, having undertaken to live lawlessly, are hateful both to human lawgivers and to God. The man, at any rate, who pierced through the fornicator is shown in the book of Numbers to be blessed by God. "And if we say," says John in his epistle, "that we have communion with Him"—that is, with God—"and walk in darkness, we lie and do not do the truth; but if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have communion with Him, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from sin."

4.33. Whence, then, are those who do such things better than worldly men, when they are like the worst of worldly men? For those who are alike in their deeds are, I think, alike also in their natures. But those over whom they claim to excel in nobility, they ought also to surpass in character, so that they may escape being shut up in prison. For truly, as the Lord said, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of God." And concerning continence in foods, it is shown in Daniel. And, to put it briefly, concerning obedience David says in his psalm: "Wherein shall a young man set straight his way?" And at once he hears: "By keeping your word with his whole heart." And Jeremiah says: "Thus says the Lord: Do not walk in the ways of the nations."

4.34. From this point certain other defiled and worthless men, taking their start, say that man was fashioned by different powers, and that the parts down to the navel are of a more godlike craft, and the parts below of an inferior one—for which reason, they say, men desire intercourse. But it has escaped them that the upper parts also crave food, and in some men lust as well. And they oppose Christ too, who said to the Pharisees that the same God made both the outer man and the inner one. Moreover, appetite belongs not to the body, even though it arises through the body. There are certain others, whom we call Antitactae, who say that the God of the universe is by nature our Father, and that all that He has made is good; but that one of those who came into being from Him sowed the tares, having begotten the nature of evils, in which he wrapped us all, setting us against the Father. For this reason, they say, we too set ourselves against him to avenge the Father, working against the will of the second one. Since, then, this one said, "You shall not commit adultery," we, they say, will commit adultery, to abolish his commandment.

4.35. We would say to these men also that we have received that false prophets and all who counterfeit the truth are known from their works. But your works are slandered; how then will you say that you cling to the truth? For either there is no evil, and the one whom you blame as set against God is no longer worthy of blame, nor has he become the maker of any evil (for the tree is destroyed together with its fruit); or, if wickedness exists in fact, let them tell us what they say the given commandments concerning righteousness, continence, endurance, and forbearance, and the like, really are—whether base or noble. And if the commandment, forbidding most of the shameful deeds, were base, then wickedness will be legislating against itself for its own abolition, which is impossible; but if it is good, then by setting themselves against good commandments they confess that they set themselves against the good and do evil.

4.36. Moreover, the Saviour Himself, whom alone they claim to obey, forbade hatred and reviling, and says, "When you go with your adversary, try to be reconciled to him while you are his friend." Either, then, they will deny even Christ's exhortation by setting themselves against the one who is set against them, or, becoming friends with him, they will not contend against him. And what? Do you not know, my good men (for I would speak as if to people present), that by fighting against good commandments you are resisting your own salvation? For it is not the things rightly enjoined, but yourselves, that you overturn. The Lord said, "Let your good works shine"; but you make your lewdnesses conspicuous. Besides, if you wish to abolish the lawgiver's commandments, why is it that you try to abolish "You shall not commit adultery" and "You shall not corrupt boys" and whatever conduces to continence, on account of your own incontinence, but do not abolish the winter that He made, so as to make summer while it is still mid-winter, nor make the earth navigable and the sea passable, as those who composed the histories say the barbarian Xerxes wished to do?

4.37. And why do you not set yourselves against all the commandments? For when He said, "Increase and multiply," you who set yourselves against Him ought to make no use at all of intercourse; and when He said, "I have given you all things for food and enjoyment," you ought to enjoy nothing. And when He says, "An eye for an eye," you ought not to repay opposition with opposition; and when He commanded the thief to repay fourfold, you ought even to give more to the thief. Likewise again, setting yourselves against the commandment "You shall love the Lord," you ought not to love even the God of the universe; and again, when He said, "You shall not make a graven or molten image," it would follow that you should worship graven images. How then are you not impious, setting yourselves, as you say, against the Demiurge, yet emulating the deeds of prostitutes and adulterers? And how do you not perceive that you are making greater the one whom you regard as weak, if what he wishes comes to pass, and not what the Good one willed? For, on the contrary, your "father," as you call him, is shown by your very selves to be weak.

4.38. These men too gather words culled out of certain prophetic passages and badly stitched together, taking literally what was said allegorically. For they say it is written, "They resisted God and were saved." And some add "the shameless God," and they receive this oracle as a command given them, and reckon it salvation to resist the Demiurge. Now "the shameless God" is not written; but even if it were so, understand, you fools, that the one called the devil is meant as "shameless," either as slandering man, or as accuser of those who sin, or as apostate. The people, at any rate, concerning whom the passage is spoken, being chastised for their sins, and bearing it heavily and groaning, murmured this saying, that the other nations transgress and are not punished, while they alone are checked at every turn—just as Jeremiah said, "Why does the way of the impious prosper?" Like this is the saying in Malachi, the one mentioned above: "They resisted God and were saved." For the prophets, receiving oracles, are shown not only to hear certain things from God, but also themselves to report, by way of objection, the things commonly said by the people, raising them as certain questions on behalf of men—from which the saying before us happens to derive.

4.39. And does not the apostle, aiming at these men, write in his epistle to the Romans: "And not, as we are blasphemed, and as some say that we say, 'Let us do evil that good may come'—whose condemnation is just"? These are they who, in their reading, by the pitch of the voice distort the Scriptures to suit their own pleasures, and by transposing certain accents and stops do violence to what is prudently and beneficially enjoined, bending it toward their own indulgences. "You who provoke God by your words," says Malachi, "and you say, 'In what have we provoked Him?'—in your saying, 'Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and in them He has taken pleasure'; and, 'Where is the God of justice?'"

5.40. So that we may not, by clawing further at this topic, recall yet more absurd heresies, nor again, being forced to speak against each one severally, both be ashamed on their account and prolong these notes to the utmost length, come, let us divide all the heresies into two classes and answer them. For either they teach men to live indifferently, or, striking too high a note, they proclaim a continence based on impiety and on love of enmity. Let us first treat the former class. If it is permitted to choose every kind of life, then plainly the life of continence too; and if every life is without danger to the elect, then plainly the life of virtue and prudence is far more without danger. For if license has been granted to the lord of the Sabbath such that, even if he live licentiously, he is unaccountable, much more will the man who conducts himself decently not be liable. For "all things are permitted, but not all things are profitable," says the apostle. And if all things are permitted, then plainly to be prudent is permitted too.

5.41. As, then, the man who has used his license to live according to virtue is praiseworthy, so much more is He who gave us license, free and sovereign, and granted us to live as we wish, to be revered and worshipped, in that He did not leave our choices and avoidances enslaved by necessity. But if both have freedom from fear—both he who has chosen incontinence and he who has chosen continence—still the dignity is not the same. For the one who has run aground on pleasures gratifies the body, while the prudent man frees from the passions the soul, which is mistress of the body. And though they say we have been called to freedom, let us only not make our freedom an occasion for the flesh, as the apostle says. But if we are to gratify desire, and to count the disgraceful life a matter of indifference, as they say, then either we must obey all the desires—and if so, we must do all the most lewd and unholy deeds, following those who urge us on; or we shall avoid some of the desires, and then we are no longer to live indifferently, nor to be slaves without restraint to the basest parts of us, the belly and the genitals, men who flatter our dead self for desire's sake. For desire, when ministered to for enjoyment, is fed and brought to life, just as, when curtailed, it withers away.

5.42. And how is it possible for a man who has been overcome by the pleasures of the body to be made like the Lord, or to have knowledge of God? For desire is the beginning of every pleasure, and desire is a kind of pain and anxiety, reaching out for something through want. So those who have chosen this manner of life seem to me to do nothing other than, as the saying goes,

to suffer in vessels turned to shame,

choosing for themselves an evil drawn down upon them, both now and afterward. If, then, all things were permitted, and there were no fear of failing of one's hope through evil deeds, perhaps they would have some pretext for living wickedly and pitiably. But since a blessed life has been shown to us through commandments, which all must hold to, not disregarding any of the things said nor making light of what is fitting, even the least, but following wherever reason leads—and if we fall away from it, we must of necessity fall into an immortal evil, but if we follow the divine Scripture, by which believers make their way, we are made like the Lord as far as we are able—we must not live indifferently, but must keep ourselves pure of pleasures as far as we are able, and take care of the soul, which must be devoted to the divine alone. For the mind, being pure and freed from all wickedness, is in a way receptive of the power of God, the divine image rising up within it. "And everyone who has this hope set on the Lord," he says, "purifies himself, even as He is pure."

5.43. But for those still led by the passions it is impossible to receive the knowledge of God; nor then to attain the hope, having acquired no knowledge of God. And of the man who fails of this end, ignorance of God seems to be the accusation, while the conduct of his life makes plain his ignorance of God. For it is altogether impossible at once to be a man of knowledge and not to be ashamed of pampering the body. Nor can the saying "Pleasure is the good" ever harmonize with the truth that the honourable alone is good, or that the Lord alone is honourable, and God alone good and alone to be loved. "In Christ you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ. If, then, you were raised together with Christ, seek the things above, set your minds on the things above, not the things on the earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God"—not the fornication that they practise. "Put to death, therefore, your members that are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, on account of which the wrath comes." Let them too, then, put away wrath, anger, malice, blasphemy, foul speech out of their mouth; having put off the old man with his desires, and having put on the new man, who is renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him who created him.

5.44. For their manner of life clearly convicts those who have known the commandments, since as is a man's reason, so is his life; and the tree is known from its fruits, not from its flowers and leaves. Knowledge, then, comes from the fruit and the conduct, not from the word and the flower; for we do not say that knowledge is bare reasoning, but a kind of divine science, that light which has come to be in the soul out of obedience to the commandments, which makes plain all things in the world of becoming, and prepares a man to know himself and teaches him to come into possession of God. For what the eye is in the body, that knowledge is in the mind. And let them not call slavery to pleasure "freedom," as though bile were sweet; for we have learned that freedom which the Lord alone gives us, releasing us from the pleasures and desires and the other passions. "He who says, 'I have known the Lord,' and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and in him the truth is not"—John says.

6.45. To those who, with a fair name, are impious through continence, both against the creation and against the holy Demiurge, the Almighty and only God, and who teach that one must not accept marriage and the begetting of children, nor introduce into the world others destined to be unfortunate, nor supply nourishment to death—to these we must say the following. First, the saying of the apostle John: "And now many antichrists have come, whence we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us." Next, we must refute them by resolving the things they bring forward, in some such way as this. To Salome, when she asked, "How long shall death have power?" the Lord said—not that life is evil and the creation wicked—"As long as you women bear children," teaching the natural sequence; for upon generation there always follows decay.

6.46. The law, then, has chosen to lead us out from luxury and all disorder, and this is its purpose, to lead us up out of unrighteousness into righteousness, choosing prudent marriages and the begetting of children and a civic life. And the Lord did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it—to fulfil it not as one defective, but in that, by His coming, the prophecies of the law were brought to completion; since even before the law the things of right conduct were proclaimed through the Word to those who lived justly. Now the many, not knowing continence, conduct themselves in the body, not in the spirit; but the body without the spirit is earth and ashes. And indeed the Lord judges adultery from the intention. For what? Is it not possible to use marriage with continence, and not to try to dissolve what God has joined together? Such things are taught by those who divide the marriage union, on whose account the name is blasphemed. And these men, who say that intercourse is defiled, having themselves received their own existence from intercourse—how are they not defiled?

6.47. But of those who have been sanctified, I think the seed too is holy. Now not only the spirit, but also our character and life and body, ought to be sanctified by us; for on what ground does the apostle Paul say that the wife is sanctified by the husband, or the husband by the wife? And what is it that the Lord said to those who asked Him about divorce, whether it was lawful to put away a wife, since Moses had permitted it? "For your hardness of heart," He says, "Moses wrote this; but have you not read that to the first-formed man God said, 'You two shall be one flesh'? So that he who puts away his wife, except for the cause of fornication, makes her commit adultery." "But after the resurrection," he says, "they neither marry nor are given in marriage." And indeed it is said of the belly and of foods: "Foods for the belly, and the belly for foods; but God will bring to nought both this and these"—rebuking those who think they should live like boars and goats, that they may eat and copulate without fear.

6.48. If, then, they have already received the resurrection, as they say, and for this reason reject marriage, let them neither eat nor drink; for the apostle said that the belly and foods are brought to nought in the resurrection. How then do they hunger and thirst and suffer the things of the flesh, and the other things that he who through Christ has received the perfect resurrection that is hoped for will not suffer? But indeed even those who worship idols abstain from both foods and sex. "The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking," he says. Note that even the Magi take care to abstain from wine and from animal food and from sex, while serving angels and demons. And as humility is meekness, not the maltreatment of the body, so too continence is a virtue of the soul, which is not in the open but in secret.

6.49. There are some who openly call marriage fornication, and lay it down as doctrine that it was given by the devil; and these great boasters say that they imitate the Lord, who neither married nor possessed anything in the world, boasting that they have understood the gospel better than others. But the Scripture says to them: "God sets Himself against the proud, but gives grace to the humble." Then they do not know the reason why the Lord did not marry. For first, He had His own bride, the Church; and next, He was not a common man, that He should have need of some helper after the flesh; nor was it necessary for Him to beget children, since He abides eternally and was born the only Son of God. And this same Lord says: "What God has joined together, let not man put asunder." And again: "As it was in the days of Noah—they were marrying, being given in marriage, building, planting—and as it was in the days of Lot, so shall be the coming of the Son of Man." And, to show that He does not speak to the Gentiles, He adds: "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" And again: "Woe to those who are with child and to those who give suck in those days." Yet these things too are spoken allegorically. For this reason He did not even fix the times which the Father has set in His own authority, so that the world might continue through the generations.

6.50. As for "Not all receive this saying; for there are eunuchs who were so born, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven; let him who can receive it, receive it"—they do not know that, after the saying about divorce, when some asked, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not profitable for a man to marry," then the Lord said, "Not all receive this saying, but those to whom it is given." For this is what those who asked wished to learn: whether, when a wife has been condemned for fornication and cast out, He permits a man to marry another. They say, too, that not a few athletes abstain from sex, practising continence for the sake of bodily training—such as Astylus of Croton and Crison of Himera. And Amoebeus the harper, though newly married, abstained from his bride. And Aristotle of Cyrene alone overlooked Lais, who was in love with him.

6.51. Having sworn to the courtesan that he would take her away to his homeland if she would help him in something against his rivals, when he had accomplished it, gracefully fulfilling his oath, he had a most lifelike image of her painted and set it up at Cyrene—as Ister relates in his work On the Peculiarities of Contests. So that not even celibacy is virtuous, unless it comes about through love toward God. Concerning those who loathe marriage, the blessed Paul says: "In later times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and to teachings of demons, who forbid marriage and command abstinence from foods." And again he says: "Let no one disqualify you in self-imposed worship, in humility, and in unsparing treatment of the body." And the same man writes this also: "Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be loosed. Are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife." And again: "Let each man have his own wife, lest Satan tempt you."

6.52. And what? Did not the ancient righteous men too partake of the creation with thanksgiving? Some of them even begot children, marrying with continence. And to Elijah the ravens brought food, bread and meat. And the prophet Samuel, having reserved a thigh from what he was eating, brought and gave it to Saul to eat. But these men, who claim to surpass them in conduct and in life, will not be able even to be compared with their deeds. "Let not him who does not eat despise him who eats, and let not him who eats judge him who does not eat; for God has received him." But indeed the Lord, speaking of Himself, says: "John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Behold, a man gluttonous and a wine-drinker, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners.'" Or do they reject the apostles too? For Peter and Philip begot children, and Philip even gave his daughters to husbands.

6.53. And Paul does not hesitate, in a certain epistle, to address his own consort, whom he did not carry about with him because of the convenience of his ministry. He says, then, in a certain epistle: "Have we not the right to take about a sister, a wife, as the other apostles do?" But these men, fittingly to their ministry, gave their undistracted attention to the preaching, and took the women about not as wives but as sisters, to be fellow-ministers to the women who kept the house, through whom the teaching of the Lord made its way without reproach even into the women's quarters. For we know also all that the noble Paul ordains concerning women deacons in the other epistle to Timothy. Yet this same man has cried aloud that the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, nor indeed abstinence from wine and meat, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Which of them goes about wearing a sheepskin and a leather belt, as Elijah did? Which has clothed himself in sackcloth, otherwise naked and unshod, as Isaiah did? Or wears only a linen loincloth, as Jeremiah did? And the gnostic firmness of John's life—who will imitate it? Yet even living thus, the blessed prophets gave thanks to the Creator.

6.54. The justice of Carpocrates, and of those who like him pursue the unrestrained community, is overthrown in some such way as this. For just after saying, "Give to him who asks of you," He adds, "And from him who would borrow do not turn away"—teaching this kind of community, not the lecherous kind. For how can there be one who asks and receives and borrows, unless there is one who has and gives and lends? And what of it when the Lord says, "I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, I was naked and you clothed me"? And then He adds: "Inasmuch as you did it to one of these least, you did it to me." Does He not lay down the same things in the Old Testament too? "He who gives to the poor lends to God," and "Do not withhold from doing good to the needy," it says.

6.55. And again: "Let not acts of mercy and faith forsake you," He said. "Poverty humbles a man; but the hands of the manly make rich." And He adds: "Behold a man who did not give out his money at interest"—he is acceptable; and "a man's own wealth is reckoned the ransom of his soul." Does He not make it plain outright? As, then, the world is composed of opposites—of hot and cold, dry and wet—so too of those who give and those who receive. And again, when He says, "If you wish to be perfect, sell your possessions and give to the poor," He reproves the man who boasted that he had kept all the commandments from his youth; for he had not fulfilled "You shall love your neighbour as yourself." And it was then that, being brought to completion by the Lord, he was taught to give a share out of love.

6.56. He did not, then, forbid being rich rightly, but only being rich unjustly and insatiably; for a possession hastened on with lawlessness becomes the less. For there are some who, by sowing, gain the more, and some who, by gathering, are diminished. Concerning whom it is written: "He scattered, he gave to the poor; his righteousness abides for ever." For the one who sows and gathers more is he who, through earthly and temporary giving, acquires the heavenly and eternal things; but the other is he who shares with no one, but heaps up vainly upon the earth, where moth and rust destroy—of whom it is written: "Gathering his wages, he gathered them into a bag full of holes." It is of this man that the Lord says in the gospel that his land bore well; and then, wishing to store up the fruits and to build greater barns, he said to himself, by way of impersonation: "You have many good things laid up for many years; eat, drink, be merry." "You fool," He said, "this very night they require your soul of you. The things you have prepared, whose shall they be?"

7.57. Now human continence—I mean the kind taught by the philosophers of the Greeks—professes to fight against desire and not to be subservient to it in action; but ours professes not to desire, so that a man may not endure while desiring, but may be continent even with respect to desiring. And it is not possible to obtain this continence otherwise than by the grace of God. For this reason He said, "Ask, and it shall be given you." This grace Moses too received, though clothed in a needy body, so that for forty days he neither hungered nor thirsted. As it is better to be healthy than for the sick man to discourse about health, so to be light is better than to talk about light, and the continence that is according to truth is better than that taught by the philosophers. For where there is light, there is no darkness; but where desire sits enthroned, even if it is quiet in its outward activity through the body, it consorts in memory with what is not present.

7.58. Let our discussion proceed generally, concerning marriage and food and the rest: to do nothing from desire, but to will only those things that are necessary. For we are not children of desire, but of will. And the man who has married for the sake of begetting children must practise continence, so as not even to desire his own wife, whom he ought to love, begetting children with a dignified and prudent will. For we have not learned to make provision for the flesh unto its desires, but, walking becomingly as in the day—in Christ, and in the luminous conduct of the Lord—not in revelling and drunkenness, not in chambering and lewdness, not in strife and jealousy.

7.59. But indeed we ought to see continence not as concerning one single kind of thing, namely sexual matters, but also concerning the other things which our soul, given to luxury, desires, not being content with what is necessary, but fussing over extravagance. Continence is to despise money, to look down on luxury, possessions, and spectacles, to master the mouth, to rule over evil thoughts. Indeed, even certain angels, becoming incontinent and being seized by desire, fell down here from heaven. And Valentinus, in his epistle to Agathopus, says: "Enduring all things, Jesus was continent; He worked at being a god; He ate and drank in a manner of His own, not giving up His food; so great was the power of His continence that the food was not even corrupted within Him, since He had no corruption in Himself." We, then, for love toward the Lord and for the sake of the good itself, embrace continence, sanctifying the temple of the spirit; for it is good, for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, to make oneself a eunuch of all desire, and to cleanse the conscience from dead works, in order to serve the living God.

7.60. But those who, out of hatred toward the flesh, ungratefully long to be quit of the union according to marriage and of the partaking of suitable foods—they are both ignorant and godless, practising continence without reason, like most of the other nations. The Brahmans, at any rate, eat no living thing and drink no wine; but some of them take food daily, as we do, while some take it every three days, as Alexander Polyhistor says in his Indica. They despise death and count life as nothing; for they believe there is rebirth; and they worship Heracles and Pan. But the Indians called Semnoi live naked all their lives. These practise truth and foretell the future and worship a certain pyramid, beneath which they believe the bones of some god are laid. Neither the gymnosophists nor those called Semnoi have intercourse with women, for they think this contrary to nature and unlawful, and for this reason they keep themselves pure. The Semnai women too remain virgins. And they are thought to observe the heavenly bodies and, by the signs from them, to prophesy certain things to come.

8.61. Since those who introduce the doctrine of indifference do violence to a few Scriptures and think they argue in favour of their own indulgence—and indeed that one, "Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace" (and certain others of this kind, which it is not reasonable to recall on such occasions; for I am not fitting out a pirate ship)—come now, let us briefly cut through their attempt. For the noble apostle himself, in what he adds to the aforesaid saying, will dispel the charge: "What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace? God forbid." Thus divinely and prophetically he at once overthrows the sophistical art of pleasure.

8.62. They do not understand, it seems, that we must all be made manifest before the judgement-seat of Christ, that each may receive, through the body, according to what he has done, whether good or evil—that each may receive back what he has done through the body. So that, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, no longer sinful; the old things have passed away; we have washed away the old life; behold, things have become new—chastity instead of fornication, continence instead of incontinence, righteousness instead of unrighteousness. "For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what communion has light with darkness? And what agreement has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what concord has the temple of God with idols? Having, then, these promises, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God."

9.63. Those who set themselves against the creation of God through their fair-named continence cite also those things spoken to Salome, which we mentioned earlier; they are reported, I think, in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. For they say that the Saviour Himself said: "I came to destroy the works of the female"—by "the female" meaning desire, and by its "works" generation and decay. What then would they say? Has this administration been destroyed? They would not say so; for the world remains under the same dispensation. But the Lord did not lie; for in truth He destroyed the works of desire—love of money, contentiousness, love of glory, madness for women, pederasty, gluttony, profligacy, and the like; of which the generation is the corruption of the soul, since we become dead through our trespasses; and this was the female—incontinence. But generation and decay in the creation must necessarily come about, as the primary thing, until the complete separation and the restoration of the elect, on account of which even the substances commingled with the world are assigned to their proper places.

9.64. Hence it is fitting that, when the Word had signified the consummation, Salome said: "Until when shall men die?" Now Scripture calls "man" in two ways: both the visible man and the soul; and again, the man who is saved and the one who is not. And the death of the soul is called sin. Therefore the Lord answers guardedly: "As long as women bear children"—that is, as long as the desires are active. "For this reason, as through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so death passed to all men, in that all sinned; and death reigned from Adam to Moses," says the apostle. But by a natural necessity of the divine dispensation death follows upon generation, and upon the union of soul and body there follows their dissolution. And if generation is for the sake of learning and knowledge, then dissolution is for the sake of restoration. And as woman is reckoned the cause of death because of bearing children, so for the same reason she shall be called the leader unto life.

9.65. So she who began the transgression was called "Life," because she becomes the cause of the succession both of those who are born and of those who sin—the mother alike of the righteous and of the unrighteous, since each of us makes himself righteous or, on the contrary, prepares himself for disobedience. Hence I, for my part, do not think the apostle loathes life in the flesh when he says: "But in all boldness, as always, now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if to live in the flesh—this too is for me the fruit of work; what I shall choose I do not know. I am hard pressed between the two, having the desire to depart and to be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for your sake." For he showed clearly, I think, through these words, that the departure from the body is the perfection of love toward God, while the presence in the flesh is a thankful endurance for the sake of those who need to be saved.

9.66. But why do these men, who follow anything rather than the gospel rule that accords with truth, not bring forward also what follows in the words spoken to Salome? For when she said, "I did well, then, in not bearing children," as though it were not fitting to accept generation, the Lord answers, saying: "Eat every herb, but the one that has bitterness do not eat." For He signifies through these words too that it is in our power, and not by the constraint of a prohibiting commandment, to choose either continence or marriage; and further makes plain that marriage cooperates somewhat with the creation.

9.67. Let no one, then, count marriage according to reason a sin, unless he supposes the rearing of children to be bitter (for, on the contrary, to many childlessness is most grievous); nor, if the begetting of children seems bitter to anyone, drawing him away from divine things by its necessary occupations, let him who does not easily bear the solitary life desire marriage; for what is well-pleasing, when joined with prudence, is harmless, and each of us is master of the choice of whether to beget children. But I observe how some, on the pretext of marriage—those who have abstained from it not according to holy knowledge—have slid down into misanthropy, and love is gone from among them; while others, entangled in it and given to pleasure under the indulgence of the law, as the prophet says, have become like the beasts.

10.68. Who are the "two or three gathered in the name of Christ," among whom the Lord is in the midst? Does He not mean by "the three" husband and wife and child, since a wife is joined to a husband by God? But even if a man wishes to be unencumbered, not choosing the begetting of children because of the distraction of begetting children, "let him remain unmarried," says the apostle, "as I also am." They interpret the Lord as meaning that with the many is the Demiurge, the God who makes generation, but with the one, the elect, is the Saviour, who is plainly the Son of another God, the Good. But this is not so; rather, God is by His Son with those who marry prudently and beget children, and the same God likewise is with the man who is continent according to reason. But the "three" might also be otherwise—wrath, desire, and reason; or flesh, soul, and spirit, by another account.

10.69. And perhaps the aforesaid triad hints at the calling first, the election second, and third the class ranked into the first honour; with whom is the all-overseeing power of God, divided without division. He, then, who uses in due measure the natural activities of the soul desires the things that are suitable and hates the things that harm, as the commandments enjoin: "You shall bless the one who blesses, and curse the one who curses," it says. But when, rising above even these—wrath and desire—he loves the creation in deed for the sake of the God and Maker of all, he will live in a gnostic way, having acquired the effortless habit of continence in his likeness to the Saviour, having united knowledge, faith, and love, being one from this point on in his judgement, and truly spiritual, wholly and altogether unreceptive of the reasonings of wrath and desire—the man who is being perfected after the image of the Lord by the very Craftsman, the perfect man, already worthy to be called brother by the Lord, friend and son at once. So the two and the three are gathered together into the same thing—the gnostic man.

10.70. The concord of the many, too, might be reckoned from the three with whom the Lord is: the one Church, the one man, the one race. Or was it not that with the one—the Jew—the Lord was a lawgiver, and prophesying even then, sending Jeremiah to Babylon, but also calling those of the Gentiles through prophecy, He gathered the two peoples; and a third was created out of the two, one new man, in whom indeed He walks about and dwells, in that very Church? Law and prophets together with the gospel are gathered, in the name of Christ, into one knowledge. So those who do not marry out of hatred, or who use the flesh indifferently out of desire, are not in the number of those saved ones with whom the Lord is.

11.71. These things having been shown thus, come, let us now set down how many Scriptures are opposed to these sophists of the heresies, revealing the rule of the continence kept according to reason. And the discerning man, choosing for each of the heresies the Scripture properly opposed to it, will use it in season for the overthrow of those who lay down doctrines contrary to the commandments. From of old, then, the law, as we have said before, declared beforehand "You shall not covet your neighbour's wife," anticipating the closely related saying of the Lord under the new covenant, when the same Lord says in His own person: "You have heard the law commanding, 'You shall not commit adultery'; but I say, 'You shall not covet.'" That the law wished men to use their wives prudently and for the begetting of children alone is plain from its forbidding the unmarried man to mingle at once with a captive woman, but permitting him, if he has once desired her, to mourn thirty days, having shaved her hair too; and if even so his desire did not wither, then to beget children, the impulse that had mastered him having been tested over the appointed length of time and shown to be a reasonable appetite.

11.72. Hence you could not show, according to Scripture, any one of the men of old approaching a pregnant woman; but later, after the pregnancy and after the suckling of the child that was born, you would find the wives again being known by their husbands. You will find, for instance, that Moses' father too kept this aim, leaving a space of three years after the birth of Aaron before begetting Moses. And again, the tribe of Levi, keeping this law of nature from God, entered the promised land fewer in number than the others; for a race does not easily increase to a multitude when the men who have undertaken marriage according to the laws sow seed, but wait not only for the pregnancy but also for the suckling.

11.73. Hence with good reason Moses too, leading the Jews little by little toward continence, ordered them, when they had abstained from sexual pleasure for three days in succession, to listen to the divine words. We, then, are temples of God, as the prophet said: "I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people," if we conduct ourselves according to the commandments, whether each of us severally or the whole Church together. "Therefore come out from their midst and be separated," says the Lord, "and touch no unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and you shall be to me sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty." Not, as they say, from those who have married, but from the Gentiles who still live in fornication, and moreover from the aforesaid heresies, He commands us prophetically to be separated, as from those who are unclean and godless.

11.74. Hence Paul too, aiming at men like those mentioned, says: "Having, then, these promises, beloved, let us cleanse our hearts from every defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. For I am jealous over you with the jealousy of God; for I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ." Now the Church does not marry another, having gained her Bridegroom; but each of us has the authority to marry, according to the law, whichever woman he wishes—I mean the first marriage. "But I fear lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is toward Christ"—very carefully and didactically the apostle has spoken.

11.75. Wherefore the admirable Peter too says: "Beloved, I exhort you as sojourners and pilgrims to abstain from the fleshly desires, which war against the soul, keeping your conduct good among the nations; because this is the will of God, that by doing good you should silence the work of foolish men; as free, and not having your freedom as a cloak for wickedness, but as servants of God." Likewise Paul too writes in the epistle to the Romans: "We who died to sin, how shall we still live in it? For our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be brought to nought"—down to "and do not present your members as weapons of unrighteousness to sin."

11.76. And having come to this point, I think I should not leave it unremarked that the apostle proclaims the same God through the law and the prophets and the gospel; for the "You shall not covet," written in the gospel, he attaches to the law in the epistle to the Romans, knowing that the Father who proclaimed through the law and the prophets and the Father who through Himself was preached as good news are one. For he says: "What then shall we say? Is the law sin? God forbid. But I did not know sin except through the law; for I would not have known desire if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'" And even if the heterodox who set themselves against us suppose that Paul went on to speak in opposition to the Creator in what follows, "For I know that there does not dwell in me—that is, in my flesh—any good," let them read the things said before and the things that follow; for he had said before, "But the sin that dwells in me," on account of which it was consistent to say that "no good dwells in my flesh."

11.77. Consistently with this he added: "But if I do what I do not wish, it is no longer I who work it, but the sin that dwells in me, which, warring against the law of God and of my mind, takes me captive in the law of sin that is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And again (for he never tires of helping in any way whatever) he does not hesitate to add: "For the law of the Spirit has freed me from the law of sin and death, since through His Son God condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." Besides this, still clarifying what he has said, he cries out: showing that the body is "dead because of sin," in that it is no longer a temple but is still a tomb of the soul—for whenever it is sanctified to God, the Spirit will raise it. "He who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, who will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit that dwells in you."

11.78. Again, then, rebuking the lovers of pleasure, he adds these things: "For the mind of the flesh is death; for those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, and the mind of the flesh is enmity toward God, for it does not submit to the law of God. And those who are in the flesh"—not, as some lay it down as doctrine, but as we have said before—"cannot please God." Then, by way of distinction from these, he says to the Church: "But you are not in the flesh but in the spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone has not the Spirit of Christ, he is not His. But if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh; for if you live according to the flesh, you are going to die; but if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God." And against the nobility and freedom contemptibly introduced by the heterodox who boast in their lewdness, he adds, saying: "For you did not receive a spirit of slavery again unto fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, in which we cry, 'Abba, Father'"—that is, we received it for this, that we might know Him to whom we pray, the one who is truly Father, the only Father of all that is, who chastises unto salvation as a Father, and... fear He threatens.

12.79. The partners who by agreement, for a season, give themselves to prayer—this is a teaching of continence. For he added "by agreement," so that no one should dissolve the marriage; and "for a season," so that the married man, not practising continence by necessity, should not at some time slip into sin, sparing his own consort but falling into another's desire. By this same reasoning he said that the man who thinks he behaves unseemly in keeping his daughter a virgin does well to give her in marriage. And the purpose of each—both of the man who has made himself a eunuch and of the man who has joined himself in marriage for the begetting of children—ought to remain firm, never yielding to the worse. For if he is able to intensify his life, he will gain for himself a greater worth in God's eyes, being continent at once purely and with reason; but if, having transgressed the rule he chose for greater glory, he then... falls away from his hope. For just as celibacy has, so too does marriage have, its own services and ministries pertaining to the Lord—I mean the care of children and of a wife. For it seems that to the man perfect in marriage the intimacy of the union becomes a pretext—he who has undertaken the care of all things in the common household.

For He says that bishops must be appointed who have practised presiding over their own household and over the whole Church. Let each, then, in the work to which he was called, fulfil his ministry, that he may become free in Christ, receiving the appropriate reward of his ministry.

12.80. And again, discoursing about the law and using an allegory: "For the married woman," he says, "is bound by law to her living husband," and so on. And again: "The wife is bound for as long a time as her husband lives; but if he dies, she is free to be married, only in the Lord; but she is happier if she remains so, according to my judgement." But in the former passage he says, "You were put to death to the law"—not to marriage—"so that you might become another's, His who was raised from the dead"—a bride and a Church, who must be pure both from the inward thoughts that are contrary to the truth and from those who tempt from without; that is, from those who pursue the heresies and persuade her to fornicate away from the one husband, God Almighty—lest, as the serpent deceived Eve, the so-called Life, we too, through the lecherous craftiness of the heresies, transgress the commandments. But the second passage establishes monogamy. For it is not to be supposed, as some have interpreted, that the binding of a woman to a man indicates the entanglement of the flesh with corruption; for he is accusing the notion of godless men who attribute the invention of marriage outright to the devil—a notion through which the lawgiver is in danger of being blasphemed.

12.81. It is Tatian the Syrian, I think, who dared to lay down such doctrines. He writes, at any rate, in so many words in his work On Perfection according to the Saviour: "Agreement, then, is suited to prayer; but communion in corruption dissolves the intercession." Indeed, very shamefully, through his concession, he forbids it; for, having conceded that they may come together again because of Satan and incontinence, he declares that the one who will be persuaded is going "to serve two masters"—through agreement, God; through disagreement, incontinence and fornication and the devil. He says this in interpreting the apostle; but he sophistically subverts the truth, fabricating a lie out of what is true. For we too confess that incontinence and fornication are devilish passions; but agreement mediates in prudent marriage, leading continently to prayer and joining in wedlock, with dignity, for the begetting of children. "Knowing" is even named as the proper season of begetting children by the Scripture, when it says: "Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore a son, and called his name Seth; for God has raised up for me another seed in place of Abel." Do you see against whom they blaspheme, those who loathe the prudent sowing of seed and attribute generation to the devil? For not just "a god" did he address, who by prefixing the article indicated the Almighty.

12.82. And the apostle's addition, "that you may come together again, because of Satan," cuts off beforehand the danger of ever being turned aside to other desires; for the temporary agreement, putting the natural appetites to shame, does not altogether repel them, and on their account he again introduces the union of marriage—not for incontinence and fornication and the work of the devil, but so that one may not fall under incontinence and fornication and the devil. And Tatian too separates the old man and the new, but not as we say. We agree with him in saying that the old man is the law and the new is the gospel; only not in the way he wishes, abolishing the law as belonging to another God. But the same Man and Lord, renewing the old, no longer permits polygamy (for then God required it, when it was necessary to increase and multiply), but introduces monogamy for the sake of begetting children and of the care of the house, for which the woman was given as a helper. And if to anyone, because of incontinence and burning, the apostle grants a second marriage by way of indulgence, this man too does not sin against the covenant (for it is not forbidden by the law), yet he does not fulfil the heightened perfection of the conduct that is according to the gospel; but he gains for himself a heavenly glory who remains by himself and keeps undefiled the union that has been dissolved by death, and who obeys the dispensation in a well-pleasing manner, since by it he has become undistracted in the service of the Lord. Nor indeed does the divine providence through the Lord now command, as of old, that one be baptized after the marriage-bed; for the Lord did not, by binding the believers, compel them to abstain from begetting children, He who through one baptism washed away the whole of intercourse for ever—the same Lord who in one baptism comprised the many washings of Moses.

12.83. From of old, then, the law, prophesying our regeneration through carnal generation, attached baptism to the seminal deposit of seed, not loathing the generation of man; for what shows itself as a begotten man, this the deposit of seed can produce. So not many acts of intercourse make for fruitfulness, but the womb's reception declares the generation, the seed being shaped into an embryo in nature's workshop. And how can marriage be old and merely a discovery of the law, while the marriage according to the Lord is of a different kind, the same God being kept by us? For what God has joined together, man could never reasonably put asunder. Much more shall the Son too keep the things that the Father commanded. And if the same is both lawgiver and evangelist, He never contends with Himself. For the law lives, being spiritual and understood in a gnostic way. But we were put to death to the law through the body of Christ, that we might become another's, His who was raised from the dead, who was prophesied by the law, that we might bear fruit to God.

12.84. Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. We were put to death, then, to the law—that is, to the sin indicated by the law, which the law reveals but does not generate, by its commanding of the things to be done and its forbidding of the things not to be done, convicting the underlying sin, that sin might appear. But if marriage according to the law is sin, I do not know how anyone can claim to have known God while saying that the ordinance of God is sin; but since the law is holy, marriage is holy. This mystery, then, the apostle refers to Christ and the Church. As what is born of the flesh is flesh, so what is born of the spirit is spirit, not only as regards the birth but also as regards the learning. So the children are holy—the things well-pleasing to God—when the words of the Lord have wedded the soul. Fornication, then, and marriage are distinct, since the devil stands far off from God. "And you too were put to death to the law through the body of Christ, that you might become another's, His who was raised from the dead." For there is also understood, by close connection, that we became obedient, since indeed, according to the truth of the law, we obey the same Lord who exhorts us from afar.

12.85. And perhaps it is concerning such men that the Spirit fittingly says outright: "In later times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and to teachings of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars, seared in their conscience, and forbidding to marry and to abstain from foods, which God created to be partaken of with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who have known the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified through the word of God and intercession." We must not, then, forbid marriage by way of constraint, nor the eating of meat or the drinking of wine; for it is written: "It is good not to eat meat nor to drink wine, if one eats with offence"; and "It is good to remain as I also am"—but let both the one who uses with thanksgiving and the one who does not use, himself also with thanksgiving,

12.86. live according to reason, with continent enjoyment. And in general all the epistles of the apostle, teaching prudence and continence, and containing thousands of commandments concerning marriage and the begetting of children and the management of a house, nowhere reject prudent marriage; but, preserving the continuity of the law, they accept, in accordance with the gospel, both the man who uses marriage with thanksgiving to God and prudence, and the man who lives in celibacy as the Lord wishes, each as he was called, having chosen without stumbling and perfectly. "And the land of Jacob was praised above all the land," says the prophet, glorifying the vessel of His Spirit. But someone runs down generation, calling it corruptible and perishing, and forces the point, saying that with reference to the begetting of children the Saviour said, "Do not lay up treasure on earth, where moth and rust destroy," and is not ashamed to add the prophet's words to these: "You shall all grow old as a garment, and the moth shall eat you." But neither do we contradict the Scripture, that our bodies are corruptible and by nature in flux; only, perhaps he was prophesying corruption to those to whom he spoke as sinners. But the Saviour did not speak about the begetting of children; rather, urging toward the sharing of communion, He spoke to those who wish only to acquire a superfluity of wealth, and are unwilling to help the needy.

12.87. Wherefore He says: "Work not for the food that perishes, but for that which abides unto eternal life." Likewise they bring forward also that saying: "The sons of that age neither marry nor are given in marriage." But if anyone considers carefully that this question is about the resurrection of the dead, and those who asked it, he will find that the Lord does not reject marriage, but heals the expectation of carnal desire in the resurrection. And "the sons of this age" He did not say by way of contrast with sons of some other age, but as equivalent to "those who have come to be in this age, being sons through generation, beget and are begotten"—since no one will come into this life without generation; but this generation, which admits of like corruption, no longer awaits the one who has once been separated from this life. "One, then, is your Father who is in heaven"—but He is also the Father of all by virtue of creation. "Call no one your father on earth," He says—meaning, do not regard as the cause the one who sowed you by carnal sowing as the substance of your being, but as a fellow-cause of generation, or rather a minister of generation.

12.88. So He wishes us, when we have turned, to become again as little children, recognizing the true Father, having been born again through water, this being another sowing than the sowing in creation. "Yes," he says, "the unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord; but the married man, how he may please his wife." What of it? Is it not permitted, even to the wife, while pleasing according to God, to give thanks to God? Is it not granted even to the married man, together with his consort, to be anxious about the things of the Lord? But just as the unmarried woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy in body and in spirit, so too the married woman is anxious about the things of her husband and the things of the Lord, in the Lord, that she may be holy in body and in spirit; for both are holy in the Lord, the one as a wife, the other as a virgin. And to abash and check those prone to a second marriage, the apostle harmoniously strikes a higher note and at once says: "Every sin is outside the body; but he who fornicates sins against his own body."

12.89. But if anyone dares to call marriage fornication, again, running back to the law and the Lord, he blasphemes. For just as covetousness is called fornication, being opposed to contentment, and just as idolatry is the apportioning out from the one God to many gods, so fornication is a falling away from the one marriage into many; for fornication and adultery are taken in three ways by the apostle, as we have said. Concerning these the prophet says: "You were sold for your sins"; and again: "You were defiled in a strange land"—accounting defiled the communion that is entangled with another's body, and not that which is given in wedlock for the begetting of children. Wherefore the apostle too says: "I wish, then, that the younger women marry, bear children, manage their households, giving no occasion to the adversary for reviling; for some have already turned aside after Satan."

12.90. Yes, and he heartily approves of the husband of one wife, whether he be presbyter or deacon or layman, who uses marriage blamelessly; "and she shall be saved through child-bearing." And again the Saviour, calling the Jews a wicked and adulterous generation, teaches that, not having known the law as the law intends, but having followed the tradition of the elders and the commandments of men, they "commit adultery against the law," not having received it as a husband and lord of their virginity. And perhaps He knows them to be enslaved to strange desires, on account of which, being continually enslaved to sins, they were sold to the foreigners—since among the Jews women were not appointed common, but adultery too was forbidden. And the man who said, "I have married a wife and cannot come to the supper," was a divine example for the refutation of those who, for pleasures' sake, fall away from the divine commandment; since, by this reasoning, neither those who were righteous before the coming nor those who married after the coming—even if they be apostles—shall be saved. And if they again bring forward this, that the prophet too says, "I have grown old among all my enemies," let them understand by "enemies" their sins; and there is one such sin—not marriage, but fornication—since otherwise let them call generation too sin, and the Creator of generation.

13.91. With such things Julius Cassianus too, the founder of the Docetic doctrine, makes his attempt. In his work On Continence, or On Celibacy, at any rate, he says in so many words: "And let no one say that, because we have such parts—so that the female is shaped one way and the male another, the one for receiving, the other for sowing—intercourse is therefore permitted by God. For if this arrangement were from God, toward whom we hasten, He would not have called the eunuchs blessed, nor would the prophet have said that they are not a fruitless tree"—transferring the figure from the tree to the man who by free choice makes himself a eunuch of such a notion.

13.92. And still contending for the godless opinion, he adds: "How would one not reasonably also blame the Saviour, if He refashioned us and freed us from error and from the communion of the parts and the appendages and the genitals?"—laying down doctrines like Tatian's in this. But he came out of the school of Valentinus. For this reason Cassianus says: "When Salome asked when the things she inquired about would be known, the Lord said, 'When you have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female.'"

13.93. First, then, in the four gospels handed down to us we do not have this saying, but in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. Next, he seems to me to be ignorant that by "male" it hints at the impulse of wrath, and by "female" desire, which, when acted upon, are followed by repentance and shame. So whenever a man, gratifying neither wrath nor desire—which, indeed, increased by custom and bad nourishment, overshadow and veil the reason—but having stripped off the mist that comes from these, ashamed through repentance, unites spirit and soul in obedience to the Word, then, as Paul too says, "there is in you neither male nor female." For the soul, departing from this form by which male and female are distinguished, is transferred into unity, being neither of the two. But this noble fellow holds, in a rather Platonic way, that the soul, being divine and from above, made female by desire, comes down here into generation and decay.

14.94. Indeed he forces Paul to say that generation consists from the deceit, through these words: "But I fear lest, as the serpent deceived Eve, your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is toward Christ." But the Lord too came confessedly to the things that had gone astray; yet they had not gone astray from above into this present generation (for generation is created, and a creation of the Almighty, who would never bring a soul down from better to worse), but the Saviour came to us who had gone astray in our minds, which were corrupted by our disobedience to the commandments, through our love of pleasure—perhaps because our first-formed father anticipated the proper time and reached out for the grace of marriage before the hour, and so erred, since "everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her," not having awaited the time of God's will.

14.95. The same, then, was the Lord, even then, who judged the desire that anticipated marriage. Whenever, then, the apostle says, "Put on the new man, who is created according to God," he speaks to us who were fashioned by the will of the Almighty as we were fashioned; and by "old" and "new" he speaks not with reference to generation and regeneration, but with reference to the life that is in disobedience and the life that is in obedience. But Cassianus holds that the "coats of skin" are the bodies; concerning which we shall later show that he, and those who hold the like doctrines, are in error, when we take up, in due course, the explanation of the generation of man, after the necessary preliminaries. He says further: "Those who are ruled by earthly things both beget and are begotten; but our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we await a Saviour." We too know that this is well said, since we ought to conduct ourselves as strangers and pilgrims: those who marry as though not marrying, those who possess as though not possessing, those who beget children as begetting mortals, as though about to leave their possessions behind, as though about to live even without a wife if need be—using the creation without passionate attachment, but with all thanksgiving and high-mindedness.

15.96. Again, when he says, "It is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of fornication let each man have his own wife," he then, as it were explaining, says again: "lest Satan tempt you." For he does not say this to those who use marriage continently for the begetting of children only, on account of incontinence, but to those who desire to go beyond the begetting of children, lest the adversary, blowing strongly, should stir up appetite as a wave into other men's pleasures. Or perhaps, since the adversary opposes those who live righteously out of envy and contends against them, wishing to draw these too into his own band, he means to give them occasions for a laborious continence.

15.97. With good reason, then, he says, "It is better to marry than to burn"—so that the husband may render to the wife her due, and the wife to the husband, and they may not deprive one another of the help given for generation through the divine dispensation. And: "Whoever does not hate," they say, "father or mother or wife or children, cannot be my disciple." He does not exhort us to hate our kindred; for He says, "Honour father and mother, that it may be well with you." Rather He says: do not be led away by irrational impulses, nor join yourself to civic customs; for a household is composed of a family, and cities of households, just as Paul too said that those who are busied with marriage seek to please the world. Again the Lord says: "Let him who has married not cast her out, and let him who has not married not marry"—he who, according to a purpose of celibacy, has confessed that he will not marry, let him remain unmarried.

15.98. To both, then, the same Lord, through the prophet Isaiah, gives the appropriate promises, speaking in some such way as this: "Let not the eunuch say, 'I am a dry tree.' Thus says the Lord to the eunuchs: If you keep my Sabbaths and do all that I command, I will give you a place better than sons and daughters." For celibacy alone does not justify, nor indeed the eunuch's Sabbath, if he does not do the commandments. And to those who have married He adds, saying: "My elect shall not toil in vain, nor beget children for a curse, for they are a seed blessed by the Lord." For to the man who has begotten children according to reason, and reared them, and educated them in the Lord, as also to the one who has begotten through true instruction, there is laid up a reward, as also to the elect seed. But others take the begetting of children to be a curse, and do not understand that the Scripture speaks against those very people. For the truly elect of the Lord do not lay down such doctrines, nor do they beget children unto a curse, as the heresies do.

15.99. So a eunuch is called not the man who has been forced in his members, nor indeed the unmarried man, but the man barren of truth. Such a one was formerly a dry tree; but having obeyed the Word and kept the Sabbaths by abstaining from sins and having done the commandments, he will be more honoured than those who are educated by mere reason without right conduct. "Little children," He says, "yet a little while I am with you"—the Teacher. Wherefore Paul too, writing to the Galatians, says: "My little children, for whom I again travail in birth until Christ be formed in you." And again, writing to the Corinthians: "For though you have countless tutors in Christ," he says, "yet not many fathers; for in Christ, through the gospel, I begot you." For this reason the eunuch shall not enter into the Church of God—the man barren and fruitless both in conduct and in word; but those who have made themselves eunuchs of all sin for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, these are blessed, who fast from the world.

16.100. "Cursed be the day on which I was born, and let it not be longed for," says Jeremiah—not calling generation simply cursed, but in despair over the sins of the people and their disobedience. He adds, at any rate: "Why was I born to see toils and pains, and that my days have been spent in shame?" For indeed all who proclaim the truth were persecuted and endangered because of the disobedience of their hearers. "Why did not the womb of my mother become my tomb, that I might not see the trouble of Jacob and the toil of the race of Israel?" says Esdras the prophet. "No one is clean from filth," says Job, "not even if his life be one day." Let them tell us where the newborn infant has fornicated, or how the one who has done nothing has fallen under the curse of Adam. It remains for them, it seems, to say consistently that generation is evil—not only that of the body, but also that of the soul, for the sake of which the body too exists. And when David says, "In sins was I conceived, and in iniquities did my mother bear me in the womb," he speaks prophetically of his mother Eve; but Eve became the mother of the living, and even if he was conceived in sin, yet he himself was not in sin, nor was he sin.

16.101. And if every man who turns from sin to faith turns from the sinful custom, as from a mother, to life, one of the twelve prophets will bear witness for me, who says: "Shall I give my firstborn for impiety, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" He does not slander the one who said, "Increase and multiply," but calls the first impulses from generation, in accordance with which we do not know God, "impieties." But if anyone on this ground calls generation evil, let him also, on that other ground, call it good, in that in it we come to know the truth: "Awake righteously, and do not sin; for some have ignorance of God"—plainly those who sin; since our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against the spiritual powers, and the world-rulers of darkness are able to make trial of us, on account of which the pardons exist.

For this reason Paul too says, "I buffet my own body and bring it into subjection," because "everyone who competes is continent in all things"—instead of "is continent unto all things," not abstaining from all things, but using continently the things he has chosen—"those, indeed, that they may receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible one," conquering in the struggle, and not being crowned without dust and effort. Already some even prefer the widow to the virgin in respect of continence, since she has despised the pleasure of which she has had experience.

17.102. But if generation is evil, then let the blasphemers say that the Lord, who partook of generation, is in evil, and that the virgin who bore Him is in evil. Alas for these evils! They blaspheme the will of God and the mystery of the creation by slandering generation. For these reasons there is Docetism for Cassianus; for these reasons there is also, for Marcion, and yes, for Valentinus too, the "psychic body"; because they say: "Man was made like the beasts when he came to copulation." But it is when a man, truly enraged, wishes to mount another's bed, that such a one is then made bestial in truth: "They became horses mad for the female; each neighed after his neighbour's wife." And even if the serpent took the practice of intercourse from the irrational animals and persuaded Adam to consent to the union with Eve as a matter of chance—as though the first-formed had not used this by nature, as some claim—still the creation is again blasphemed, as having made men weaker than the nature of the irrational creatures, whom the first-formed of God followed.

17.103. But if nature led them, as it leads the irrational creatures too, to the begetting of children, yet they were moved sooner than was fitting, being still young, led astray by deceit—then the judgement of God is just upon those who did not await His will, but generation is holy, through which the world is established, through which the substances are, through which the natures, through which the angels, through which the powers, through which the souls, through which the commandments, through which the law, through which the gospel, through which the knowledge of God. "And all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass; and the grass withers and the flower falls; but the word of the Lord abides"—the word that anointed the soul and united it with the Spirit. And how, without the body, would the dispensation according to the Church among us reach its completion?—seeing that He Himself, the Head of the Church, came indeed in the flesh, but formless and without comely shape, teaching us to look toward the formless and incorporeal nature of the divine cause. "For a tree of life," says the prophet, "comes to be in good desire," teaching that the desires that are in the living Lord are noble and pure.

17.104. But further they wish that the intercourse of husband with wife in marriage, called "knowing," should be a sin; for this, they say, is indicated by the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the figure "knew" teaching the transgression of the commandment. But if this is so, then the knowledge of the truth too is an eating of the tree of life. It is possible, then, for prudent marriage to partake of that tree as well; and it has been said before by us that marriage can be used both well and badly, and this is the tree of knowledge—if we do not transgress the law of marriage. What? Did not the Saviour heal the body of its passions just as He healed the soul? But He would not, if the flesh were the enemy of the soul, have fortified it against the soul by restoring it to health. "But this I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption"; for sin, being corruption, cannot have communion with incorruption, which is righteousness. "Are you so foolish?" he says; "having begun in the spirit, are you now being perfected in the flesh?"

18.105. The righteousness, then, and the harmony of the Saviour's teaching, which is dignified and sure, some have strained, as we have shown, receiving continence blasphemously, with all godlessness—although it is possible to choose celibacy according to the sound rule, with piety, giving thanks for the grace given, not hating the creation nor despising those who have married; for the world is created, and celibacy too is created, and let both give thanks in the state in which they were appointed, if they know also for what purposes they were appointed. But others, kicking against the rein, have run riot, becoming in truth "horses mad for the female," neighing after their neighbours' wives, pouring themselves out without restraint and persuading their neighbours to love pleasure—wretchedly attending to those Scriptures, "Cast in your lot among us, and let us all have one purse, and let there be one bag for us all."

18.106. On account of these men the same prophet, counselling us, says: "Do not go in the way with them; turn aside your foot from their paths; for not unjustly are nets stretched out for the birds; for they, partaking of bloodshed, lay up evils for themselves"—that is, laying claim to uncleanness and teaching their neighbours the like; "warriors, strikers, with their tails," according to the prophet—which the Greeks call "stings." And those whom the prophecy hints at might be: the licentious, the incontinent, who are "warriors with their tails," children of darkness and of wrath, murderers of themselves and slayers of their neighbours. "Cleanse out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump," the apostle cries to us. And again, vexed with certain such men, he ordains that we are not to associate, "if any one called a brother be a fornicator or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber—with such a one not even to eat." "For I through the law died to the law," he says, "that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and I no longer live"—as I lived according to the desires—"but Christ lives in me," through obedience to the commandments, purely and blessedly; "so that then I lived in the flesh fleshly, but the life I now live in the flesh, I live in faith"—the faith of the Son of God.

18.107. "Do not go off into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter into a city of the Samaritans," the Lord says, turning us away from the contrary manner of life, since "the destruction of lawless men is evil. And these are the ways of all who accomplish lawless things." "Woe to that man," says the Lord; "it were good for him if he had not been born, rather than that he should offend one of my elect; it were better for him that a millstone be hung about him and that he be sunk into the sea, than that he pervert one of my elect"; for the name of God is blasphemed because of them. Wherefore the apostle nobly writes: "I wrote to you in the epistle not to associate with fornicators"—down to—"But the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." And, to show that he does not call marriage fornication, he adds: "Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body?" Or will anyone call a virgin a harlot before she marries? "And do not deprive one another," he says, "except by agreement for a season"—by the word "deprive" indicating the debt of marriage, the begetting of children, which he made plain in what went before, saying, "Let the husband render to the wife her due, and likewise the wife to the husband."

18.108. After which creation, by virtue of housekeeping and faith in Christ, she is a helper; and still more plainly he says: "To those who have married I command—not I, but the Lord—that a wife should not be separated from her husband (but if she is separated, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband), and that a husband should not put away his wife. But to the rest I say—I, not the Lord: if any brother..."—down to—"but now they are holy." What do those say to these things who run down the law and marriage, as if it were permitted only according to the law, and not also according to the new covenant? What can those say to these ordinances who loathe sowing and generation? Since indeed he legislates that the bishop who presides well over his house should lead the Church, and he establishes the household of the Lord by the wedlock of one wife.

18.109. "All things, then, are pure to the pure," he says; "but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled." And concerning pleasure that is contrary to the rule, "Do not be deceived," he says: "neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor effeminate nor sodomites nor covetous nor thieves, no drunkards, no revilers, no robbers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of us, but we were washed"—we who had been in these things. But others, washing into this lewdness, baptize from prudence into fornication, laying down as doctrine the gratifying of pleasures and passions, teaching men to become incontinent instead of prudent, and resting their hope on the shamelessness of the genitals; making their pupils outcasts of the kingdom of God, and not enrolled, having undertaken, under the name of falsely-called knowledge, the journey into the outer darkness. "Finally, brothers, whatever things are true, whatever dignified, whatever just, whatever pure, whatever lovely, whatever of good report; if there be any virtue and if any praise, think on these things. The things you have both learned and received and heard and seen in me, these do; and the God of peace shall be with you."

18.110. And Peter in his epistle says the like: "So that your faith and hope are toward God, having purified your souls in obedience to the truth, as children of obedience, not conformed to the former desires in your ignorance, but as He who called you is holy, be you also yourselves holy in all your conduct; because it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy.'" But indeed the controversy with the falsely-named pretenders to knowledge, having become necessary, has led us beyond what is needful and stretched out our discourse to a great length. Wherefore this is where the third of our notebooks of gnostic memoranda concerning the true philosophy, the Stromateus, comes to its end.