Section 4

I have heard many people say, “So-and-so became wealthier through marriage. He was poor, but because he married a rich woman, he is now wealthy and lives in luxury.” What are you saying, man? You want to profit from a woman, and you are not ashamed or embarrassed? Do you not wish to sink into the ground when you seek profit in such a way? Are these the words of a man?

A wife has one responsibility: to preserve what the household gathers, maintain its resources, and care for the home. God gave her for this reason as well, so that in these matters, along with everything else, she might help us.

Our life is ordinarily made up of two spheres, public and private affairs. God divided these: He assigned to the woman the oversight of the household and to men the affairs of the city—the marketplace, courts, councils, military commands, and the rest. A woman cannot throw a spear or shoot an arrow; but she can take the spindle, weave at the loom, and arrange the affairs of the home well. She cannot present an opinion in the city council; but she can give counsel in the house, and often she understands household matters better than her husband does.

She cannot administer public affairs, but she can raise children well, the chief treasure of the household. She can notice wrongdoing among female servants, care for the chastity of those serving, give her husband freedom from these concerns, and relieve him from every such household care: storerooms, wool-working, preparation of meals, proper clothing, and all the other matters that it would neither suit a man nor be easy for him to manage, however much he might try.

Even this is a work of God’s generosity and wisdom: the one useful in greater matters is inferior and useless in smaller ones, so that the wife’s contribution becomes necessary. If God had made the man equally capable in both spheres, women would have seemed easy to disregard. On the other hand, if the greater and more publicly useful sphere had been entrusted to the woman, women might have been filled with excessive pride.

For this reason, he says, God did not give both spheres to one sex, lest the other be diminished and appear unnecessary. Nor did He distribute both equally to each, lest rivalry and conflict arise from equality of rank, with women competing to claim the same precedence as men. Instead, God both provided for peace and preserved the fitting order of each: dividing life into these two spheres, He gave the more necessary and useful sphere to the man and the lesser and inferior sphere to the woman, so that the man would be highly valued because his service is necessary, while the woman, because her service is lesser, would not rise up against her husband.

Knowing all this, let us seek one thing above all: virtue of soul and nobility of character, so that we may enjoy peace and live continually in harmony and love.

A man who marries a wealthy woman may find that he has taken a mistress rather than a wife. If women, even apart from wealth, are full of pride and easily fall into love of glory, he asks, how will they be bearable to their husbands if wealth adds still another cause for superiority? But a man who marries a woman of equal standing or poorer condition has received a helper and ally and brought good things into the household. Her own poverty forces her to care for her husband with great concern, to yield to him and obey him in everything. It removes every occasion for rivalry, conflict, arrogance, and insult, and becomes a bond of peace, harmony, love, and agreement.

Let us not therefore seek how to possess more money, but how to possess peace and enjoy happiness. Marriage exists not so that we fill our homes with war and conflict, not so that we have disputes and rivalries, turn against one another, and make life unlivable. It exists so that we may receive help, have a harbor and refuge, find comfort from the troubles that press upon us, and speak with our wife in joy.

How many wealthy men have married wealthy women and increased their property, yet destroyed their happiness and harmony, filling the dinner table with daily quarrels and disputes? And how many poor men have married women poorer than themselves and enjoy peace, seeing the sunlight with great gladness? Meanwhile some rich men, surrounded on every side by luxury, have because of their wives prayed to die and escape the present life. Wealth is therefore of no use if we do not obtain a good soul.

And why speak only about peace and harmony? Marrying for a large fortune has often damaged a man even in the possession of money itself. A man may commit all his property in relation to the dowry, then, if his wife dies prematurely, be compelled by her family to repay the whole dowry. Like someone suffering shipwreck at sea who barely saves his own body, after many disputes, quarrels, insults, and court cases he barely escapes with his body free.

Greedy merchants sometimes fill a ship with countless loads and place on it more weight than it can bear, sinking the vessel and losing everything. So too men who seek excessively wealthy marriages, thinking that through a wife they will surround themselves with still greater property, may lose even what they already possess. Just as one sudden wave can sink an overloaded ship, so an untimely death can suddenly take away the wife and with her all the wealth the husband thought he had gained.