1.6. If someone is without fault, a husband of one
wife, having faithful children, not accused of excess or insubordinate. For a
bishop must be without fault, as a steward of God, not brash, not prone to
anger, not given to wine, not a striker, not one who seeks after disgraceful
gain.
. . .
And so “he who desires the
episcopacy desires a noble task.” “Task,” he says, not honor, not glory. “But
he ought to have a good testimony with those who are outside, so that he does
not fall into reproach, and into the snare of the devil.” Now as for his words
“husband of one wife,” we should understand them as follows: It is not that we
are to think that every monogamous man is better than the one who has been
married twice; but that he is able to exhort unto monogamy and continence, who
offers the example of himself in his teaching. For let there be some young man
who has lost his spouse, and overcome by the necessity of the flesh has taken a
second wife, whom he also immediately loses. Then he lives continently. But let
there be another man who was married to an older woman and made use of his
wife, as the majority think happiness consists, and he never ceased from the
work of the flesh. Which of the two seems better to you, chaster, more
continent? Surely it is the one who was unhappy (infelix) even in the
second marriage and afterward lived chastely and piously, and not the one who
was not separated from his wife’s embrace in old age. Therefore let him not
congratulate himself, whoever is chosen as if monogamous, that he is better
than every twice-married man, since in him happiness is chosen more than will.
Certain ones think the
following about this passage. It was a Judaic custom, they say, to have two or
more wives, because even in the old law we read this about Abraham and Jacob.
And they want this to be a command now, lest the one who is to be chosen bishop
equally should have two wives at the same time. Many, more superstitiously than
truly, think that likewise those ones are not to be chosen for the priesthood
who, when they were pagans and had one wife, who was lost, after the baptism of
Christ, married another. Though assuredly, if this is to be observed, those
ones ought to be excluded from the episcopate who, while practicing wandering
lust among prostitutes previously, having been reborn, took one wife. And it
would be much more detestable that he has fornicated with many than to be found
twice-married, since in one there is the unhappiness of marriage, in the other
there is a lasciviousness that is prone to committing sin.
Montanus and those who are
adherents of the schism of Novatus presume for themselves the name of the
“purified.” They think that second marriages are to be kept from communion of
the church, though the apostle, when giving this instruction about bishops and
priests, assuredly relaxed [it] in respect to the rest. It is not because he is
encouraging them to second marriages, but that he makes a concession to the
necessity of the flesh. Tertullian too wrote a heretical book about monogamy,
which no one who reads the apostle will fail to know is contrary to the
apostle. And indeed it is under our control that a bishop or priest be without
fault and have one wife. Otherwise, what follows, “having faithful children,
not given to the accusation of excess, and not insubordinate,” is outside of
our will. (St. Jerome’s Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon
[trans. Thomas P. Scheck; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
2010], 291-93)
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