‘We do not reject marriage,’ said Pamphilius.
‘Well, if you don’t reject marriage, at any rate you reject love.’
‘On the contrary, we reject everything except love. For us it is the basis of everything.’
‘I do not understand you,’ said Julius. ‘As far as I have heard from others and from yourself, and judging by the fact that you are not yet married though you are the same age as myself, I conclude that your people do not marry. Those who are already married continue to be so, but the others do not form fresh marriages. You do not concern yourself about continuing the human race. And if you were the only people the human race would long ago have died out,’ he concluded, repeating what he had often heard said.
‘That is unjust,’ replied Pamphilius. ‘It is true that we do not set ourselves the aim of continuing the human race, and do not make it our concern in the way I have often heard your philosophers speak of it. We suppose that our Father has already provided for that. Our aim is simply to live in accord with His will. If it is His will that the human race should continue, it will do so, if not it will end. That is not our affair, nor our care. Our care is to live in accord with His will. And His will is expressed both in our teaching and in our revelation, in which it is said that a husband shall cleave unto his wife and they twain shall be one flesh.
‘Marriage among us is not only not forbidden, but it is encouraged by our elders and teachers. The difference between marriage among us and marriage among you consists only in the fact that our law reveals to us that every lustful look at a woman is a sin, and so we and our women, instead of adorning ourselves to stimulate desire, try so to avoid it that the feeling of love between us as between brothers and sisters, may be stronger than the feeling of desire for a woman which you call love.’
‘But all the same you cannot suppress admiration for beauty,’ said Julius. ‘I feel sure, for instance, that the beautiful girl with whom you were bringing the grapes evokes in you the feeling of desire – in spite of the dress which hides her charms.’
‘I do not yet know,’ said Pamphilius, blushing. ‘I have not thought about her beauty. You are the first to speak to me of it. To me she is as a sister. But to continue what I was saying about the difference between our marriages and yours, that difference arises from the fact that among you lust, under the name of beauty and love, and the worship of the goddess Venus, is evoked and developed in people. With us on the contrary lust is considered, not as an evil – for God did not create evil – but as a good which begets evil when it is out of place: a temptation as we call it. And we try by all means to avoid it. And that is why I am not yet married, though very possibly I may marry to-morrow.’
‘But what will decide that?’
‘The will of God.’
‘How will you know it?’
‘If you never seek its indications you will never discern it, but if you constantly seek them they become clear, as divinations from sacrifices and birds are for you. And as you have your wise men who interpret for you the will of the gods by their wisdom and from the entrails of their sacrificed animals and by the flight of birds, so we too have our wise men who explain to us the will of the Father according to Christ’s revelation and the promptings of their hearts and the thoughts of others, and chiefly by their love of men.’
‘But all this is very indefinite,’ retorted Julius. ‘Who will indicate to you, for instance, when and whom to marry? When I was about to marry I had the choice of three girls. Those three were chosen from among others because they were beautiful and rich, and my father was agreeable to my marrying any one of them. Of the three I chose Eulampia because she was the most beautiful, and more attractive to me than the others. That is easily understood. But what will guide you in your choice?’
‘To answer you,’ said Pamphilius, ‘I must first tell you that as by our teaching all men are equal in our Father’s eyes, therefore they are also equal in our eyes both in their station and in their spiritual and bodily qualities, and consequently our choice (to use a word we consider meaningless) cannot in any way be limited. Anyone in the whole world may be the husband or wife of a Christian.’
‘That makes it still more impossible to decide,’ said Julius.
‘I will tell you what our Elder said to me about the difference between the marriage of a Christian and a pagan. A pagan, such as yourself, chooses the wife who in his opinion will give him the greatest amount of personal enjoyment. In such circumstances the eye wanders and it is difficult to decide, especially as the enjoyment is to be in the future. But a Christian has no such choice to make, or rather, when choosing, his personal enjoyment occupies not the first but a secondary place. For a Christian the question is how not to infringe the will of God by his marriage.’
‘But in what way can there be an infringement of God’s will by marriage?’
‘I might have forgotten the Iliad which we used to read and study together, but you who live among sages and poets cannot have forgotten it. What is the whole Iliad? It is a story of the infringement of God’s will in relation to marriage. Menelaus and Paris and Helen; Achilles and Agamemnon and Chryseis – it is all a description of the terrible ills that flowed and still flow from such infringements.’
‘But in what does the infringement consist?’
‘In this: that a man loves a woman for the enjoyment he can get by connexion with her and not because she is a human being like himself. He marries her solely for his own enjoyment. Christian marriage is possible only when a man loves his fellow men, and when the object of his carnal love is first of all an object of this brotherly love. As a house can only be built rationally and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when something has been prepared on which to paint it, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and permanent when it is based on the respect and love of one human being for another. Only on that foundation can a reasonable Christian family life be established.’
‘But still,’ said Julius, ‘I do not see why such a Christian marriage, as you call it, excludes the kind of love for a woman that Paris experienced.…’
‘I do not say that Christian marriage does not admit of any exclusive feeling for one woman: on the contrary, only then is it reasonable and holy. But an exclusive love for one woman can arise only when the previously existent love for all men is not infringed.
‘The exclusive love for one woman which the poets sing, considering it as good in itself without being based on the general love of man, has no right to be called love. It is animal lust and very often changes into hatred. The best examples of how such so-called love (eros) becomes bestial when it is not based on brotherly love for all men, are cases of the violation of the very woman the man is supposed to love, but who causes her to suffer and ruins her. In such violence there is evidently no brotherly love, for the man torments the one he loves. In un-Christian marriage there is often a concealed violence – as when a man who marries a girl who does not love him, or who loves another, compels her to suffer, and has no compassion for her, using her merely to satisfy his “love”.’
‘Granted that that is so,’ said Julius, ‘but if the maiden loves him there is no injustice and I don’t see the difference between Christian and pagan marriage.’
‘I do not know the details of your marriage,’ replied Pamphilius, ‘but I know that every marriage based on nothing but personal happiness cannot but result in discord, just as among animals, or men differing little from animals, the simple act of taking food cannot occur without quarrelling and strife. Each wants a nice morsel, and as there are not enough choice morsels for all, discord results. Even if it is not expressed openly it is still there secretly. The weak man desires a dainty morsel but knows that the strong man will not give it to him, and though he knows it is impossible to take it away directly from the strong man, he watches him with secret and envious malice and avails himself of the first opportunity to take it from him by guile. The same is true of pagan marriage, but there it is twice as bad because the object of desire is a human being, so that the enmity arises between husband and wife.’