Section 5

Notice how much Paul expands on the husband’s duty of love. He speaks at length about Christ, about one’s own flesh, and about the words, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother.” But he does not expand in the same way on the wife’s fear. Why? Because he especially wants the principle of love to prevail. Where love is present, the other things follow; fear alone does not necessarily produce them.

A husband who loves his wife will bear with much even if she is not especially obedient. Harmony is difficult indeed when husband and wife are not bound together by the strong rule of love; fear by itself will not accomplish this. Paul therefore spends more time on love because it is the stronger bond.

The wife may appear to receive the harder command because she is told to fear her husband, but in another sense she receives the advantage: the more demanding duty is laid on the husband—the duty to love. Someone may say, “But what if my wife does not fear me?” You must still love her; fulfill what belongs to you. Even when others fail to do what belongs to them, we must do what belongs to us.

For example, Paul says, “Submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.” What if the other person does not submit? You must still obey God’s law. So too here: even if the wife is not loved as she ought to be, let her still fulfill her own duty so that the failure is not hers. And even if the wife does not fear her husband as Paul asks, let the husband still love her so that nothing is lacking on his side. Each has received his own responsibility.

This, then, is marriage according to Christ: a spiritual marriage, with a spiritual birth—not from blood and not from the pains of childbirth. Isaac’s birth too had something of this character; Scripture says, “The things of women had ceased to happen to Sarah.” And the union Paul is speaking of in its highest sense is not one governed by passion or merely by bodies, but wholly spiritual: the soul is joined to God in an unspeakable union known fully to Him alone. This is why Paul says, “The one who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” See how earnestly he seeks both to unite flesh with flesh and spirit with spirit.

Where, then, are the heretics who condemn marriage? If marriage were something disgraceful, Paul would never have called Christ and the Church Bridegroom and Bride. He would never have used as an exhortation the words, “A man shall leave his father and mother,” and then said that this speaks “concerning Christ and the Church.”

The Psalmist also speaks of the Church in this way: “Hear, daughter, and see; incline your ear; forget your people and your father’s house, and the King will desire your beauty.” For this reason Christ too said, “I came forth from the Father and have come.” But when I say that He “left the Father,” do not imagine a change of place such as occurs among human beings. Just as He is said to have “come forth,” not because He moved away spatially from the Father but because of the Incarnation, so also with the expression that He “left the Father.”

Why, then, did Paul not also say of the wife, “She shall be joined to her husband”? Because at this point he was speaking about love, and he was addressing the husband. To the wife he speaks about fear and says, “The husband is the head of the wife,” and again that “Christ is the head of the Church.” To the husband he speaks about love. He entrusts that whole duty to him and directs the language of love toward him, binding him closely to his wife.

For if a man leaves his father for the sake of his wife and then abandons that very wife as well, what excuse could he deserve? Do you not see how much honor God wishes the wife to receive, since He has drawn you away from your father and fastened you to her?

Someone may say, “What if I do everything required of me and she still does not respond?” Scripture has already said, “If the unbeliever separates, let the unbeliever separate. The brother or sister is not enslaved in such cases.”

But when you hear the word “fear,” require the kind of fear appropriate to a free woman, not the fear demanded from a slave. She is your own body; if you treat her as a slave, you insult yourself by dishonoring your own body.

What kind of fear does Paul mean here? Not contradicting simply for the sake of opposition, not rising up in rebellion, and not craving the first place. Let the word “fear” go no further than this. If you love her as you have been commanded, you will accomplish something greater. Indeed, then it will no longer be fear alone that produces harmony; love itself will do its work.

Woman, he says, is in some ways the weaker sex and therefore needs much help and much considerate accommodation.

And what are we to say of those joined in second marriages? I do not say this to condemn them—certainly not, for the Apostle himself permits a second marriage. Rather, with even greater consideration, provide everything your wife needs, do everything for her, and endure hardship for her. This obligation rests upon you.

Paul does not need here to introduce examples from pagan life, as he often does elsewhere. The example of Christ is great and powerful enough—especially for his teaching about the order of marriage. Yet he also says, “A man shall leave his father and mother.” There is the natural example.

He does not say merely, “and he shall live with his wife,” but, “he shall be joined to her,” showing the closeness of the union and the intensity of love. Nor is even this enough for him. By what follows he describes the union so strongly that the two no longer appear as two. He does not say merely that they become “one spirit” or “one soul”—that kind of unity can exist among many people—but that they become “one flesh.”