Prologue

RELIGION is the Golden Chain by which we are bound to God; and the Vow is the knot of this chain, by which we are bound more tightly to Him. For man is of so unstable and wandering a nature that, straying continually from his Creator, he is compelled not only by scourges and many blows to return, but, once returned, is restrained by chains and knots, so that he may depart no more; yet of his own accord, and with his own execution of it, he submits his neck willingly to his own bonds. Heretics, coveting a detestable liberty of wandering, detest these chains, which they hold so suspect that they do not even strive to draw near to God by them; hence, vagabonds, running outside the Church, they cast against us revilings and the empty darts of petty reasonings; these I shall blunt below, treating of solemn Vows; here, however, before I come to the quiddity and conditions of the Vow in general, I shall first set out the solution of certain arguments by which not so much sectarians as men of more easy judgment, in the name indeed of Christian, dissuade from vowing, thinking it to be the condition of slaves, and equal for Christians; so that, just as they [slaves] cannot validly confer on their Masters the dominion of any thing or the promise of obedience, since they are wholly His with their goods and services, so man, however free, is wholly God's, who, as he can abdicate nothing from himself, so can acquire nothing anew: Moreover, if the vow is a bond of obligation by which we are held to give something to God which we have not before given, we owe all things to God by a better right, both by force of that precept by which we are held to love Him with the whole heart, and by reason of so many benefits with which He is wont to heap us daily; In addition, the Evangelical law proclaims that we are free sons, not to be pressed down by the necessity of vows: These, like scarecrows of birds, are easily driven away; for who does not know that, although God absolutely disposes of us and ours at His pleasure, He nevertheless leaves to us that dominion over our acts and things by which we can freely use or abuse them, for His glory or our own ruin; whence although He be the universal Lord of all things, He does not therefore exclude the particular dominion founded in the liberty of each; And although the servant is wholly his Lord's, he nevertheless possesses the natural liberty by which he can devote or deny his fidelity to him: Nor does the precept of Divine love so press, that for its execution we must do all whatsoever things are possible of doing: But suppose it were so; it is not incompossible with the Vow that a thing otherwise precepted be taken up into its object, as we shall demonstrate in its own place: Nor will anyone of even moderate mind deny that there are many acts in individuo which do not fall under a precept; for it befits a rational and free creature that, as it does certain things under another's command, so also it do some things of its own free and free-willed choice; which votive promise does not violate; partly because it is undertaken voluntarily; partly also because, once undertaken, it suffers no necessity other than that of the precept, which in no way opposes the liberty of the sons; since, in that very respect in which they are the just sons of God, they are of necessity subject to the precepts of loving, honoring, obeying God and the like. And let these things have been said even of simple vows: But from solemn Vows (of which there will be question in the following disputation) how great a profit and increase the Church of God has always reaped from the very beginning of her existence, who even half-blind would not see? And although in our own tempestuous age many keep watch over the censured manners of Monks with Vigilantius; yet no one solicitous even in the least degree for his own salvation will deny that the eminence of the Religious state is such that, while the Monastic life is assaulted with chaff, the secular life meanwhile is crushed under beams: and however much worldly men trust in their own strength, there can be set against them that saying of Augustine, reported by D. Bonavent. Apolog. paup. resp. 1. cap. 2.: Slippery is the hope by which, amid the fomentations of sinners, he hopes to be saved; uncertain the victory to fight amid hostile arms, and impossible the deliverance to be surrounded by flames and not to burn; and that I may speak with Saint Jerome, contra vigilantium epist. 53.: There is no security in sleeping near a serpent, nor is it necessary to dismiss what is certain and pursue what is uncertain; for if I flee, I have escaped the sword; if I stand, I must either conquer or fall. Add the Scriptures, which counsel to sell or to destroy all the emoluments of this world; as the Seraphic Doctor shows most fully everywhere in his works. But this matter, inasmuch as it is sufficiently copious, we shall better cut into several disputations and questions.