g 46. OPPOSITION TO MONASTICISM. JOVINIA.N. 225
faith Ijorn again by baptism, cannot be o^'ercome (subverti) b}' the deviL (3) There is no difference between abstaining from food and enjojdng it with thanksgiving. (4) All, who keep the baptismal covenant, will receive an equal reward in heaven.
He insisted chiefly on tlie first point ; so that Jerome devotes the whole first book of his refutation to this point, wliile he disposes of all the other heads in the second. In favor of the moral equality of married and single life, he appealed to Gen, ii. 24, w^here God himself institutes marriage before the fall ; to Matt. xix. 5, where Christ sanctions it ; to the patriarchs before and after the flood ; to Moses and the prophets, Zacharias and Elizabeth, and the apostles, particularly Peter, who lived in wedlock ; also to Paul, who himself exhorted to marriage,' required the bishop or the deacon to be the husband of one wife,'' and advised young widows to marry and bear children.^ He declared the prohibition of marriage and of divinely provided food a Manichsean erroi". To answer these arguments, Jerome indulges in utterly unwarranted inferences, and speaks of marriage in a tone of contempt, which gave offence even to his friends." Augustine was moved by it to present the advantages of the married life in a special work, De hono conjugali, though without yielding the ascetic estimate of celibacy."
Jovinian's second point has an apparent affinity with th(
' 1 Cor. vii. 36, 39. ' 1 Tim. iii. 2, 12.
' 1 Tim. V. 14; comp. 1 Tim. ii. 15 ; Heb. xiii. 4.
* From 1 Cor. vii. 1, for example (" It is good for a man not to touch a woman "), ne argues, witliout qualification, 1. i. c. 1 (Opera, ii. 246) : " Si bonum est mulierem non tangere, malum est ergo tangere, nihil enim bono contrarium est, nisi malum ; si autem malum est, et ignoscitur, ideo conceditur, ne malo quid deterius fiat. . . . Tolle fornicationem, et non dicet [apostolus], unusqnisque uzorem suam habeat." Immediately after this (ii. 24*7) he argues, from the exhortation of Paul to pray without ceasing, 1 Thess. V. 17: "Si semper orandum est, nunquam ergo conjugio scrviendum, quoniam quotiescunque uxori dcbitum reddo, orare non possum." Such sophistries and misinterpretations evidently proceed upon tlie lowest sensual idea of marriage, and called forth some opposition even at that age. He himself afterward felt that he had gone too far, and in his Ep. 48 (ed. Vallars. or Ep. 30, ed. Bened.) ad Pammachium, endeavored to save himself by distinguishing between the gymnastit (polemically rhetorical) and the dogmatic mode of writing.
* De bono conj. t. S: "Duo bona sunt connubium et contineutia, quorum alte rum est melius."
230 THIRD PERIOD. A.D, 311-590.
Augustiuian and Calvin istic doctrine of the j)ersevertmtia sane toruTTi. It is not referred by him, however, to the eternal and unchangeable counsel of God, but simply based on 1 Jno. iii. 9, and v. 18, and is connected with his abstract conception of the opposite moral states. He limits the hnpossibility of relapse to the truly regenerate, who " plena fide in baptismate renati sunt," and makes a 'distinction between the mere baptism of water and the baptism of the Spirit, which involves also a distinction between the actual and the ideal church.
His third point is aimed against the ascetic exaltation of fasting, with reference to Rom, xiv. 20, and 1 Tim. iv. 3. God, he holds, has created all animals for the service of man ; Christ attended the marriage feast at Cana as a guest, sat at table with Zaccheus, with publicans and sinners, and was called by the Pharisees a glutton and a wine-bibber ; and the apostle says : To the pure all things are pure, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.
He went still further, however, and, with the Stoics, denied all gradations of moral merit and demerit, consequently also all gradations of reward and punishment. He overlooked the process of development in both good and evil. He went back of all outward relations to the inner mind, and lost all subordinate diiferences of degree in the great contrast between true Christians and men of the world, between regenerate and unregeuerate ; whereas the friends of monasticism taught a higher and lower morality, and distinguished the ascetics, as a special class, from the mass of ordinary Christians. As Christ, says he, dwells in believers, without diflerence of degree, so also believers are in Chiist without diifereuce of degree or stages of development. There are only two classes of men, righteous and wicked, sheep and goats, five wise virgins and five foolish, good trees with good fruit and bad trees with bad fruit. He appealed also to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, who all received equal wages. Jerome answered him with Buch things as the parable of the sower and the different kinds of ground, the parable of the different numbers of talents with corresponding rewards, the many mansions in the Father's house (l)y which Jovinian singularly understood the different