Marriage 2.19.34

Let 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?