Preface to the Former Edition

In publishing a treatise on Marriage, now polished with a second care, we are surely conscious that we are treating that head of Catholic doctrine which is of the greatest moment and, especially in our age, demands most exact study and most exquisite diligence. For the matter at issue is one which, although it pertains properly to the Church, also touches civil society and pervades the family; from which it has come about that civil powers have not hesitated to assert for themselves a right over that which the Church testifies has been committed by God to herself alone, and thence a struggle of human authority against the divine authority of the Church has broken forth. But besides a dissension of this sort, which is due indeed partly to ignorance, but most of all to the malice under which certain men labor, who in these times preside, to our harm, over public affairs; if we wish to search out the cause and root of this very malice, there will appear another, deeper and more universal stain of evil, which strives to overthrow the divine right of the Church and the divine institution of marriage. It is that unbridled license, impatient of every obligation, which, first wandering and diffused, now reduced into a certain order and system,

attacks the foundations of civil and religious society and, while it turns all things upside down, abusing the divine gift of reason, endeavors also to shake the sanctity of marriage and to prostitute the chaste union of man and woman to ungoverned lust. For men in this our age do not merely wish to indulge their desires, but besides this they claim for themselves a right to fulfill them, and compel reason, if it can be done, to patronize their vices and to illumine with specious lights what is base and wicked. Now that opinion is spread abroad in books and resounds also in schools, which formerly was veiled by the darkness of mysteries and brothels. It is, namely, the doctrine of libertines, to which an atheistic society, having nothing to oppose, yields obedience even unwillingly: that the end of the coming together of a man with a woman is pleasure alone; that this coming together is determined by the love of the one toward the other; that those who love one another are spouses; that the man and woman are bound by no obligation; that she is not subordinated to the man; that any women whatever are common to any man, and conversely men to a woman; that there is no family; that the offspring which is begotten is to be nourished and educated by society, to which alone it belongs; whence, by the civil power already imbued with the principles of this doctrine, there are to be instituted establishments for the nursing of infants, and, for forming their minds as soon as they have scarcely attained the use of reason, public schools, to which all are to be obliged, every care or power concerning the instruction of offspring being withdrawn from parents. Thus the modern socialists and communists, the Fourierists, the Saint-Simonians, and others of the same bran; concerning whom see the excellent work of

Avogadro de la Motta, Teorica dell' Istituzione del Matrimonio, etc., part II, chapters 19 and 20. There is indeed nothing new in this battle against the divine institution of marriage except the excess of shamelessness and the veil of voluptuous science. For in the first centuries of the Church the Gnostics handed down the same principles and reduced them to practice. For, according to the witness of Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, book III, impious men existed who openly attributed to the devil the invention of that marriage, namely the society of man and woman which is joined with perpetual obligation; among whom the same writer counts Tatian the Syrian. And in the same place he reports that Epiphanes, from whom flowed the heresy of the Carpocratians, taught, among other things, this also: that since God had made all things in common for man, and had joined the female with the male in common, and had likewise coupled all living things, he proclaimed that justice is communion with equality; and therefore that one man can have intercourse with all women, as the other living things do. Whence he testifies that there are also those who proclaim common sexual intercourse to be a mystical communion, and practice it, and say that they do this in order to oppose the Creator who forbids fornication. He attributes the same doctrine to the Marcionites, concerning whose founder Marcion Tertullian testifies, Against Marcion, book I, chapter 1, that he abolished nuptials. The same things pleased the Manichaeans, who, according to the witness of Augustine, On Heresies, no. 46, if they used wives, nevertheless avoided conception and generation, lest the divine substance, which enters into them through food, should be bound in fleshly chains in offspring; whence in Against Faustus, book XXX, he says

that they especially detest that intercourse which alone is honorable and conjugal. This pest was derived to their heirs, namely the Albigenses in the Middle Age, who, poured out into every lust, abhorred nuptials. Cf. Natalis Alexander, century XIII, part I, chapter 3. Modern sects, moreover, are connected with the ancient ones in a continuous series.

It is indeed irksome to refute these most shameful inventions. The sole end of man is placed in animal pleasure; the human race is brought back to the multitude of swine from the herd of Epicurus; the foundations of all rights, by which rational creatures are mutually bound, are shaken; the family, only the appearance of it being retained, is utterly abolished; and the structure of all social life is dissolved, and in place of the moral law of justice, by which the human mind is to be ruled, physical and material force is substituted as the supreme reason. The propagators of these errors cannot be refuted by arguments of reason, since they are led by a perverse will alone, which refuses to look upon the light of truth. Their refutation, therefore, belongs rather than to theologians, to those to whom the care of society has been committed by God, and who can commit no greater sin than if they allow men of this sort to go unpunished.

These things, therefore, being set aside, we shall rather have to contend with those who, while reverencing the divine institution of marriage, nevertheless dissent in many things from the doctrine of the Church. To this doctrine, indeed, a splendid light has been added in this most recent age, with the Apostolic See bearing the torch before us, so that the darkness sent in by enemies may be dispersed. There exist, indeed, distinguished documents on this article of faith

which the most recent Roman Pontiffs have given us, especially the three Piuses, VI, VII, and IX, and most recently Our Most Holy Lord Leo XIII; by these the knowledge of the truth has received increase, so that many things are now investigated and certain for us which were doubtful and obscure to theologians not very far removed from this age. This fruit has been borne for us, as often happens, by the assault of adversaries, who, while they strive to extinguish the light of the Church, rather sharpen its force, so that they may be overwhelmed by its very brightness.

In this matter of Christian Marriage, dogmatic writers, moral writers, and canonists are engaged. But we shall have to treat only those things which Theology claims for itself as contained in the Word of God, whether written or handed down; for these things, and not others, our hearers required of us. The questions indeed are not many, but for the most part they are difficult, and one of them also (On the words of Christ, Matt. XIX, 3 ff.) does not yet seem to have attained full light. What lay in us, we have furnished for the benefit of our hearers, and now we publish the treatise in type: for by the same right by which the others have gone forth, this one also can be joined with them.

We said these things by way of preface in the former edition; now that this second edition follows, the reader must be admonished by us of this one thing: not a few things here have been changed, especially in the demonstrations to be brought forward.