Monday, August 19, 2024

A refusal to reduce one's morals to the measure of one's behavior

     "For if a man lives with a woman for a time, until he finds another worthy either of his high station in life or his wealth, whom he can marry as his equal, in his very soul he is an adulterer, and not with the one whom he desires to find but with her with whom he now lives in such a way as not to be married to her.  The same is true for the woman, who, knowing the situation and willing it, still has relations unchastely with him, with whom she has no compact as a wife.  On the other hand, if she remains faithful to him and, after he has taken a wife, does not plan to marry and is prepared to refrain absolutely from such an act, surely I could not easily bring myself to call her an adulteress; yet who would say that she did not sin. . . ."

     St. Augustine, De bono conjugali 5, as trans. Wilcox (FC 27), p. 15Larissa Carina Seelbach, "'Das webiliche Geschlecht ist ja kein Gebrechen, sondern Natur:  Augustins Wertschätzung der Frau (the title, also (?), of a 302-page dissertation published in 2002), Augustinus-Studientag 2004, Toscanasaal der Residenz, Würzburg, as published on the Zentrum für Augustinus-Forschung website, but also on pp. 71-91 of Würde und Rolle der Frau in der Spätantike:  Beiträge des II. Würzburger Augustinus-Studientages am 3. Juli 2004, ed. Cornelius Mayer unter Mitwirkung von Alexander Eisgrub =Res et signa 3 =Cassiacum 39, no. 3 (Würzburg, 2007).  "Later, however, Augustine left no doubt about the reprehensibility of his earlier behavior.  In his treatise De bono conjugali he put [it] with unmistakable clarity. . . .  This is precisely what Augustine himself had done, in that he had treated his second concubine as, so to speak, a 'temporary solution.'"
     Presumably the way he treated his first concubine (?) Augustine covered in the paragraph immediately preceding?

No comments: