Extracts in On Marriage and Concupiscence

2.2.2They also say that the marriages now taking place were not instituted by God. This can be read in Augustine’s book, which I have just answered in four short books.

2.2.3“They shout against us with the greatest hostility that we condemn marriage and God’s work, by which God creates human beings from males and females, because we say that those born from such union inherit original sin. Whatever parents they are born from, we do not deny that they are still under the devil unless they are born again in Christ.”

2.2.4“They do not notice that the good of marriage cannot be accused because of the original evil derived from it, just as the evil of adultery and sexual immorality cannot be excused because of the natural good born from it. For just as sin, whether derived from the one or the other, is the devil’s work, so a human being, whether born from the one or the other, is God’s work.” (Genesis 1:28)

2.2.5“We say that those born from such union inherit original sin. Whatever parents they are born from, we do not deny that they are still under the devil unless they are born again in Christ.” (Genesis 2:24)

“He did not wish to be born from that same union of the two sexes.” (Genesis 1:28)

2.2.6“This shameful desire, which shameless people praise shamelessly, would not exist unless the human being had first sinned. But marriage would exist even if no one had sinned; children could have been conceived without this disease.”

2.3.7Most blessed brother, the teachers of our time, the authors of the wicked upheaval that still rages, have decided to bring insult and ruin upon the men whose holy efforts burn them, even at the cost of the ruin of the whole church. They do not understand how much honor they have given those men: they have shown that their glory could not be torn down without tearing down the catholic religion with it. For if anyone says that human beings have free will or that God creates those who are born, they are called a Caelestian and a Pelagian. So, to avoid being called heretics, people become Manichaeans. While fearing a false accusation, they fall into a real offense. They are like wild animals surrounded by feathers so that they can be driven into nets: lacking reason, empty fear pushes them into real destruction.

2.4.11Against those who condemn marriage and assign its fruits to the devil (Genesis 4:1).

2.4.12God, who formed Adam from mud, built Eve from a rib and said: “She will be called Life, because she is the mother of all the living” (Genesis 2:7, 22; Genesis 3:20).

From the first naming he showed the task for which she had been prepared, and said: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28).

Therefore God, the Creator of male and female, formed organs suited to procreation and arranged for bodies to be born from bodies. Yet the power of his action works in their production, governing everything that exists by the same power by which he created it.

If, then, offspring come only through sex, sex only through the body, and the body only through God, who can doubt that fruitfulness is rightly attributed to God?

2.5.15Through what, then, are those whom God made under the devil?

“Through sin, not through nature.”

But just as there can be no offspring without the sexes, there can be no sin without the will.

For you say that they are under the devil because they are born from the union of the two sexes.

2.6.16Whom, then, do you confess to be the creator of infants? The true God? But he did not make evil.

[Or the devil?] But he did not create human nature.

If union is evil, the condition of bodies is shameful too; so you also assign bodies to an evil creator.

God distinguished by sex what he would unite in action. Therefore bodily union comes from the one from whom bodies originate.

So many good things—bodies, sexes, unions—cannot have evil fruits. Nor are human beings made by God so that the devil may possess them under a lawful claim, as you say (Genesis 2:24).

2.7.17After the man knew his wife through natural appetite, divine Scripture says: “Eve conceived and bore a son, and called his name Cain.” But let us hear what Adam says: “I have acquired a human being through God” (Genesis 4:1). This establishes that the person whom divine Scripture testifies was acquired through God is God’s work.

2.7.18For Adam had fathered him through the power of his organs, not through a difference in merits.

2.8.19A little later divine Scripture says again: “Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore a son, and called his name Seth, saying: The Lord has raised up other seed for me in place of Abel, whom Cain killed” (Genesis 4:25).

To demonstrate that intercourse was instituted by God, the deity is said to have raised up the seed itself.

2.10.23You have certainly defined as evil by nature this desire without which there is no fruitfulness. How, then, is it aroused in old people through a heavenly gift? Now establish, if you can, that something you see God bestow as a gift belongs to the devil’s work.

2.12.25This union of bodies, with warmth, with pleasure, with seed, made by God, is recognized as praiseworthy within its proper measure. Sometimes it even becomes a great gift to the godly.

You must therefore confess that the original sin you invented has vanished.

2.13.26But if you say, “They still had sexual capacity, but no offspring,” (1 Corinthians 15:38) I will answer: the Creator gave the child whom the Creator promised. The child who is born is God’s work, not the work of intercourse. For he who made the first human being from dust (Genesis 2:7) forms everyone from seed. Just as the mud then taken as material was not the creator of the human being, so now that power of pleasure, producing and mixing the seed, does not itself complete the work. It offers God material from nature’s store, from which he is pleased to make a human being.

2.13.27The apostle’s authority confirms this too. For when blessed Paul spoke of the resurrection of the dead, he said: “Fool, what you sow is not brought to life” (1 Corinthians 15:36); and below: “But God gives it a body as he wishes, and to each kind of seed its own body” (1 Corinthians 15:38). If, then, God gives human seed its own body, as he does to everything—a thing no wise or godly person denies—how will you prove that anyone is born guilty? I ask you at last to see the snares in which the claim of natural sin is strangled.

But come, I beg you, treat yourself more kindly. Believe me, God made you too; but, as must be confessed, a serious error has infected you. For what could be more irreligious than to say that God did not make the human being, or made the human being for the devil, as you say; or that the devil made God’s image, the human being (Genesis 1:26–27)? That is recognized as no less foolish than ungodly. Is God, then, so poor and so shameless that he had nothing to give holy people as a reward except what the devil poured into those he deceived as a vice?

Do you wish to know that God is shown to have given this power of procreation even to people who are not holy? When Abraham, frightened by a foreign people, called Sarah, his wife, his sister, Abimelech, the king of that region, is reported to have taken her for use at night. But God, concerned for the holy woman’s honor, came to Abimelech in a dream and restrained the king’s boldness, threatening death if he continued to violate the marriage. Then Abimelech said: “Lord, will you destroy an ignorant and righteous nation? Did they not themselves say they were brother and sister?” Abimelech rose in the morning, took a thousand silver double-drachmas, sheep, calves, male servants and female servants, and gave them to Abraham. He sent the woman away from him untouched. Abraham prayed to God for Abimelech, and God healed Abimelech, his wife, and his female servants (Genesis 20:2–7, 14–17).

At Abraham’s prayer God healed, by the power of his hidden providence, what had been removed from the sexual organs of those lowly women, because God had closed every womb in Abimelech’s household (Genesis 20:18). See, then, whether something should be called evil by nature when God sometimes removes it in anger and restores it when appeased. He makes the children of the godly and the ungodly alike. Their becoming parents belongs to nature, which rejoices in God as its Creator; their being ungodly belongs to the wickedness of their pursuits, which comes to each person from free will.

2.19.34Let us learn from the apostle that children born from marriage are good by nature. Speaking of the ungodly, he says: “Abandoning the natural use of the woman, they burned with desire for one another, males doing what is shameful with males” (Romans 1:27). He therefore shows that the use of the woman is natural and, within its proper bounds, praiseworthy; shameful conduct, however, is committed by a person’s own will against the modesty of the created order. So the kind of desire and its proper measure are rightly praised in those who use it well, while its excess is punished in those who act shamefully.

Indeed, at the same time that God revived Abraham’s and Sarah’s bodily organs, withered by age, he punished those same organs at Sodom with a rain of fire (Genesis 18:10–14; 19:24). If, then, you think the vigor of the organs must be condemned because through it the Sodomites became covered in shameful deeds, you will also condemn bread and wine as created things, since divine Scripture indicates that these too were means of their sin. For the Lord says through the prophet Ezekiel: “These, indeed, were the wrongs of your sister Sodom: pride; she and her children overflowed with an abundance of bread and wine, and they did not help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49). Now choose whichever you prefer: either count the bodily union as God’s work, or likewise declare bread and wine evil as created things. If you do that, you will plainly be proved a Manichaean.

Anyone who keeps natural desire within bounds uses a good thing well; anyone who fails to keep it within bounds uses a good thing badly. Why, then, do you say: “The good of marriage cannot be condemned because of the original evil derived from it, just as the evil of adultery cannot be excused by the natural good born from it”? With these words you have granted what you denied and taken away what you granted. Nothing occupies you more than making yourself hard to understand.

Show bodily marriage without sexual union, or give this activity a single name and call marriage either good or evil. You certainly promised to define marriage as good. If marriage is good, if the human being who is the fruit of marriage is good, and if this fruit, God’s work, cannot be evil when born through good from good, where, then, is the original evil that so many prior findings have ruled out?

2.23.38By a new kind of argument, you profess to be Catholic while taking the Manichaean’s side, saying that marriage is both a great good and a great evil.

2.24.39You declare a human being guiltless if born from fornication, but not innocent if born from marriage. That is where your statement leads: a natural good can arise from adultery, while original evil is derived even from marriage.

2.25.40One of these statements is true; the other is false.

It is true that the person born from adultery cannot excuse the guilt of the adultery, because what the adulterers did belongs to the fault of their will; what they produced, however, deserves the praise given to fertility. If someone sows stolen wheat, the harvest that grows is not guilty. So I condemn the thief but praise the crop. I pronounce the newborn innocent on account of the good quality of the seed, as the apostle says: “God gives it a body as he wishes, and to each kind of seed its own body” (1 Corinthians 15:38). But I condemn the wrongdoer, who sinned through a perverse intention.

2.26.41Certainly, if evil is derived from marriage, marriages can be condemned and cannot be excused. You place their work and fruit under the devil’s authority, because every cause of evil is without good. The person born from marriage is attributed to seed, however, not to crimes. The cause of the seed lies in the constitution of bodies. Whoever misuses those bodies damages the merit of what is good, not its kind. It is therefore perfectly clear that good is not the cause of evil.

If, then, original evil is derived even from marriage, the marital union is the cause of evil, and that through which and from which an evil fruit appeared must itself be evil. As the Lord says in the Gospel: “A tree is known by its fruits” (Matthew 12:33; compare Matthew 7:16–20). Why do you think anyone should listen to you when you say that marriage is good, yet declare that nothing but evil comes from it? Marriage, then, is clearly guilty if original sin is derived from it, and it cannot be defended unless its fruit is shown to be innocent. But marriages are defended and pronounced good; their fruit is therefore shown to be innocent.

2.27.44Through what, then, is sin found in the infant? Through the will? The infant had none. Through marriage? But marriage belongs to the parents’ activity, and you had already said that they did not sin in this act—although, from what follows, it appears you had not really granted that. Are the marriages themselves therefore to be cursed because they caused the evil? Yet they indicate only the activity of the persons involved. The parents, then, who caused sin through their union, are rightly subject to condemnation.

If we follow your view, there can now be no doubt that married people are handed over to eternal punishment, since their activity brought about the devil’s rule over human beings. And where is the statement you made a little earlier, that the human being is God’s work? For if evil enters people through their origin, and the devil gains authority over people through that evil, you are calling the devil the maker of human beings, since from him comes the origin of those being born. But if you believe that God makes the human being and that married people are innocent, see how impossible it is to maintain that original sin is derived from them (Genesis 2:24).

2.28.47The one being born does not sin; the one who begot the child does not sin; the one who created the child does not sin. Through what cracks among so many defenses of innocence do you imagine that sin entered?

2.28.48If sin comes from the will, the will that commits sin is evil. If it comes from nature, nature is evil.

If nature is God’s work, the devil’s work is not allowed to pass through God’s work (John 1:3).

2.29.49In one person, the intention is rightly condemned and the origin praised, because there are two things to which opposite judgments can be applied. In an infant, however, there is only one thing: nature alone, because there is no will. That one thing, then, must be assigned either to God or to a demon. If nature comes through God, there can be no original evil in it. If it comes from the devil, there will be no basis for claiming the human being as God’s work. Thus anyone who defends original evil is thoroughly Manichaean.

2.30.52Again you say: “There would be no desire if the human being had not first sinned, but marriage would exist even if no one had sinned.”

2.31.53Those marriages, then, which you say could have existed without desire, without bodily movement, and without the need for the sexes, are pronounced praiseworthy by you. But the marriages now taking place you declare to have been invented by the devil. Those which you dream could have been instituted you judge good. But the marriages of which divine Scripture says, “A man will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two will be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), you profess to be evils of the devil. In the end, you say they ought to be called a disease rather than marriage.

2.33.55You say, then, that those who were never born could have been good. But those who have filled the world, for whom Christ died, you declare to be the devil’s work, born from a disease, and guilty from the beginning. I have therefore proved that all you are doing is denying that God created the human beings who actually exist.

2.34.57If, before sin, God created what human beings would be born from, but the devil supplied what would arouse their parents, holiness will undoubtedly be assigned to the newborn and guilt to those who beget them. Since this most clearly condemns marriage, please remove this view from the churches’ midst. Truly believe that through Jesus Christ all things were made, and without him nothing was made (John 1:3).