Commenting on Jerome’s exalted understanding of a life of consecrated celibacy over being married in his Against Jovinian, J.N.D. Kelly wrote that:
Clearly what shocked
Jerome most was the claim that the sexually abstinent are in no way superior to
married people who enjoy normal sexual relations. So he devoted the whole of
the first book (some typical, quite unfounded jibes against Jovinian’s
prose-style apart) to its rebuttal. Jovinian had appealed to divine blessings
on marriage (e.g. Gen. 1, 28: ‘Be fruitful and multiply'; Matt. 19, 5: ‘What
God has joined, let no man put asunder’); to revered figures in the Bible (e.g.
Solomon and St Peter) had married; to statements attributed to St Paul (e.g.
Heb. 13, 4: ‘Marriage is honourable . . .’); to the respect accorded to wedlock
in classical antiquity; to the implicit Manichaeism of those who denigrated
sex. Step by step Jerome follows him, pointing out that Adam and Eve embarked
on marriage only after their sin, and that while marriage was intended to ‘replenish
the earth’ (Gen. 1, 28), ‘virginity replenishes paradise’ (Against Jovinian 1,
16). With great ingenuity he explains away the marriage, even the polygamy,
of the patriarchs, but claims that the figures closest to God in the Bible
were all virgins (Joshua, Elijah, John the Baptist, etc.). Solomon’s was an
awkward case, but the sharp things he said about marriage in Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes, above all his hymn in praise of chastity (so he interpreters Song
of Songs), prove that he had learned his bitter lesson (Against Jovinian 1,
28-31). St Peter’s marriage took place before he heard the gospel; his statement
(Matt. 19, 27), ‘We have left all and followed You,’ proves that, once a
disciple, he abandoned it. Even so, Jerome asserts (Against Jovinian 1,
26), his marriage made him less dear to Jesus than the unmarried John, and even
the blood of martyrdom could not wash its ‘defilement’ away. But it was St
Paul whom he made his chief oracle, twisting the famous texts of 1 Corinthians
7 and 1 Timothy to wrest from them an even greater aversion to marriage and
second marriages than they contain: ‘I suspect the goodness of something which
can only be reckoned a lesser evil because of the extreme evil of something
else’ (Against Jovian 1, 9 [at the end]. For his discussion of St
Paul [1, 6-15] he drew lavishly, without admitting it, on Tertullian’s
[Montanist] treatise De monogamia). (J.N.D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life,
Writings, and Controversies [London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.,
1975], 183, emphasis added)
