ABSTRACT
It remains to consider the lot of the 30-fold: married women, the lowest rung of the ladder of devoutness, many of whom still, within the household, displayed conspicuous piety. Because they were more hemmed about with others, their situation was more complex; added to which, there are direct grounds for comparison between them and their pagan counterparts (as there are not for institutionalised celibates) which raise some interesting problems. Was, for instance, the experience of a Christian matrona much different from that of the pagan matrona of a few generations earlier? In this age of the ‘gentrification’ of Christianity, were her relations with her husband, gens and offspring visibly altered, specifically in terms of her Christianity ? And how much did this effect, if any, alter in different echelons of society ? We must also consider how great was the influence in this period of ascetic Christianity on actual marriages and the concept of marriage. Peter Brown has offered a view of married couples in the later Empire as representing in their persons ‘a miniature of civic order’ (in Veyne 1987:248); would this idea of marriage survive the beliefs of the couple supposedly being remodelled along eschatological lines, totally at odds with the ideals of public life? The Fathers viewed marriage as a potential ‘problem’ coming between the Christian and his duty. ‘Originally, marriage had the two purposes [of procreation and the passion of nature]; but now… there is only one reason remaining for it; the prevention of indecency and licentiousness’ (John Chrysostom On Virginity 19). Reading the mass of texts on this by a number of church writers using all their authority, there is a temptation to begin to see this as a common belief; but there is a great difficulty in knowing how far, in fact, their contemporary readership hoisted in this view. We must consider whether ordinary Christian men and women saw marriage as a ‘problem’, or if the Fathers modified their ideals for womanhood to suit married women they knew; if marriage could be an end in itself for the Christian couple, or if it must necessarily be a consolation for lost chastity. Some believers attempted a compromise; a celibate marriage where the couple remained together, but abstained from physical relations. Where did such continent marriages, a peculiarly Christian phenomenon, rank in the hierarchy of devotion? Was a continent marriage seen as an achievement in its own right, or as a second-best for those who could not make the final break? Then, too, when bringing up a bishop or a saint (or a family of them, in some cases) gave one reflected lustre, we will examine whether one could somehow palliate the loss of one’s own chastity through the means of procreating saints; and whether the merit acquired this way might be relative or superior to the
credit given for a continent marriage. And finally, a question that recurrently suggests itself on reading the Fathers on marriage; did the church foster a competition in piety-and particularly in chastity-between man and wife?
