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Celibacy ^†

(Célibat)

*CELIBACY (Ancient and modern history, and Morality) is the state of a person who lives without becoming committed to marriage. This state can be considered in itself under three different aspects: (1) with regard to the human race; (2) to society; (3) to Christian society. But before considering celibacy in itself, we are going to present in a few words its situation and its changing circumstances among men. M. Morin, of the Academy of Belles-lettres,¹ reduces its history to the following propositions: Celibacy is as old as the world; it is as widespread as the world; it will last as long as, and infinitely longer than, the world.

Abridged history of celibacy. Celibacy is as old as the world, if it is true—as is claimed by some authors of the old and new law—that our first parents lost their innocence only by ceasing to preserve their celibacy and that they would never have been expelled from paradise if they had not eaten the forbidden fruit, an act that in the modest and metaphorical style of scripture indicates nothing else (they say) but a violation of celibacy. They derive the evidence for this grammatical interpretation from the feeling of nudity that immediately followed the sin of Eve and Adam; from the notion of irregularity attached to the carnal act virtually everywhere in the

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world; from the shame that accompanies it; from the remorse that it causes; from the original sin that is communicated in this way; finally, from the state to which we will return upon departing this life, in which it will not be a question of husbands and wives, and which will be an eternal celibacy.

It is not up to me, says M. Morin, to assign the appropriate qualifications to this opinion. The opinion is odd; it seems contrary to the letter of scripture; that’s enough to reject it. Scripture teaches us that Adam and Eve lived in paradise as brother and sister, as the angels live in heaven and as we will live there one day. That’s good enough; there you have the first and perfect celibacy. To know how long it lasted is a question of pure curiosity. Some say several hours; others several days. There are those who—on the basis of mystical reasons, on who knows what traditions from the Greek church, on the era of Cain’s birth—push this interval to thirty years.

The Jewish doctors would have another, even longer celibacy follow upon this original one. For they claim that Adam and Eve, ashamed of their crime, did penance for a hundred years without having any dealings together—a conjecture they base on the birth of Seth, their third son, whom Moses attributes to them only at the age of a hundred and thirty. But to be precise, it is only to Abel that one can assign the honor of having preserved his celibacy throughout his whole life.

To know whether his example was imitated in the following generations, whether the sons of God who allowed themselves to be corrupted by the daughters of men weren’t a religious sort who lapsed into disorder—that’s what we can’t know, although it’s not impossible. If it’s true, as appears to be the case from the supposed book of Enoch, that there were at that time women who made a practice of sterility, there may well have also been men who did so. But the likelihood here is not high. At that time it was a question of populating the world; God’s law and that of nature imposed on all kinds of persons a sort of necessity to work at the increase of the human race. It’s to be supposed that those who lived in that time made it an essential matter for themselves to obey that precept. M. Morin says that everything history teaches us about the Patriarchs of those times is that they took and gave away women; that they brought into the world sons and daughters, and then died as if they had had nothing more important to do.

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It was much the same thing in the first centuries that followed the flood. There was much clearing to do and few workers; it was up to whoever begot the most. At that time, men’s honor, nobility, and power consisted in the number of children. One was certain in that way of attracting great esteem, of making oneself respected by one’s neighbors, and of having a place in history. The Jews’ history has not forgotten the name of Jair, who had thirty sons in service;² nor has the Greeks’ history forgotten the names of Danaüs and Egyptus,³ of whom one had fifty sons and the other fifty daughters. Sterility passed in those days for a kind of infamy in the two sexes, and for an unequivocal sign of the curse of God. On the other hand, to have a great number of children around one’s table was regarded as an authentic mark of his benediction. Celibacy was a kind of sin against nature; today, it is no longer the same thing.

Moses hardly left men the freedom to marry or not. Lycurgus branded the celibate with infamy. There was even a special solemnity in Lacedemon, where the women brought them forth all naked to the foot of the altars, and had them make a full apology to nature, which they accompanied with very harsh punishment. Those republicans pushed the precautions further by publishing regulations against those who married too late, ὀψιγαμία, and against husbands who abused these precautions with their wives, κακογαμία.

In the course of time, men being less rare, these penal laws were mitigated. Plato tolerated celibacy up to thirty-five years in his republic; beyond that age, he prohibited only employment-related celibacy, and assigned them the last rank in public ceremonies.⁴ The Roman laws, which succeeded the Greek, were also less rigorous against celibacy; nonetheless, the censors were charged with preventing that sort of solitary life, harmful to the state, coelibes esse prohibento.⁵ To make it odious, they did not allow the celibate to either make a will or serve as witness. And here is the first question posed to those who presented themselves to swear an oath: ex

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animi tui sententiâ, tu equum habes, tu uxorem habes? “On your soul and conscience, do you have a horse, do you have a wife?” But the Romans were not content to afflict them in this world; their theologians also threatened them with extraordinary punishments in the underworld. Extrema omnium calamitas & impietas accidit illi qui absque filiis à vita discedit, & daemonibus maximas dat poenas post obitum. “It is the greatest of impieties and the utmost misfortune to depart the world without leaving children in it; the demons make those people suffer cruel pains after their death.”

Despite all these precautions—temporal and spiritual—the celibate did not stop making their way in the world; the laws themselves prove it. One doesn’t venture to pass laws against disorders that live on only notionally. To know how and where celibacy began, history says nothing about that. It’s to be supposed that simple moral reasons and individual tastes won out over so many penal laws, emergency fiscal laws, laws that brought infamy, and over the anxieties of conscience. In the beginning, there must surely have been more pressing motives and sound physical reasons. Such were those happy and wise constitutions that nature exempts from reducing the great rule of multiplication to practice; they have existed in all times. Our authors give them withering names; the Orientals, on the other hand, call them eunuchs of the sun, eunuchs of heaven, made by the hand of God—honorable titles that are supposed not only to console them for the misfortune of their condition but also to authorize them before God and men to pride themselves in it, as if because of a special grace that discharges them from a goodly portion of the solicitudes of life and transports them suddenly into the midst of the path of virtue.

But without seriously examining whether it is an advantage or disadvantage, it is quite apparent that these saints⁶ were the first to choose the celibacy option. That way of life is doubtless indebted to them for its origin, and perhaps its denomination. For the Greeks called the infirm in question κολοβοι, which is not far removed from coelibes. In fact, celibacy was the only option that the κολοβοι had to choose in order to obey the orders of nature—for their repose, their honor, and under the rules of good faith. If they did not make this determination themselves, the laws imposed it upon

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them by necessity; that of Moses was explicit. The laws of other nations were scarcely more propitious; if they allowed them to have wives, the wives were also permitted to abandon them.

The men of this condition—ambiguous and rare in the beginning, scorned equally by the two sexes—found themselves exposed to many mortifications, which reduced them to an obscure and secluded life. But necessity soon suggested to them different means of getting out of it and making themselves commendable. Detached from the anxious movements of alien love and self-love, they submitted to others’ wills with a strange devotion, and they were found so accommodating that everyone wanted to have some of them. Those who had none of them got some by one of the boldest and most inhumane of operations: fathers, masters, and sovereigns arrogated to themselves the right to reduce their children, their slaves, and their subjects to that ambiguous condition. And the whole world, which in the beginning knew only two sexes, was astonished to find itself imperceptibly divided into three fairly equal portions.

These scarcely voluntary celibates were followed by free ones, who substantially increased the number of the former. Men of letters and philosophers by taste; athletes, gladiators, and musicians by reason of status; countless others by libertinage; some by virtue—all chose the option that Diogenes found so sweet that he was surprised that his expedient did not become more fashionable. Some professions were obliged to do so, such as that of the scarlet dyers, baphiarii. Ambition and politics also enlarged the corps of the celibate. Those bizarre men were handled carefully even by the great, eager to have a place in their will. And contrariwise, the paternal heads of household of whom nothing was expected were forgotten, neglected, scorned.

Up to now, we have seen celibacy prohibited, then tolerated, then approved, and finally advocated. It took little time to become an essential condition in most of those who devoted themselves to altar service. Melchizideck was a man without family and without genealogy. Those who set their sights on temple service and on the rites of the law were dispensed from marriage. Girls had the same freedom. We are assured that Moses dismissed his wife when he had received the law from God’s hands. He ordered the priests whose turn to preside at the altar was approaching

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to sequester themselves from their wives for several days. After him, the prophets Elie, Elisha, Daniel and his three companions lived in continence. The Nazarenes, and the sounder part of the Essenes, are presented to us by Josephus as a marvelous nation, which had found the secret that Metellus Numidicus was striving for—to perpetuate themselves without marriage, without childbirth, and without any female company.

Among the Egyptians, the priests of Isis and most of those dedicated to the service of their divinities made a profession of chastity. And to be on the safe side, they were prepared for it from childhood by the surgeons. The gymnosophists, the Brahmins, the Athenian hierophants, a good portion of Pythagoras’s disciples, those of Diogenes, the true Cynics—and in general, all those, male or female, who devoted themselves to the service of the goddesses—engaged in the same practice. In Thrace, there was an important association of celibate religious called κτισαι, or creators, from the faculty of producing themselves without the assistance of women. Among the Persians, the obligation of celibacy was imposed on the girls designated for the service of the sun. The Athenians had a house of virgins. Everyone knows about the Roman vestals. Among our ancient Gauls, nine virgins, who passed for having received extraordinary light and grace from heaven, guarded a famous oracle in a little island called Sené, on the Armorican coasts. There are authors who even claim that the entire island was inhabited by only the girls, some of whom made occasional trips over neighboring coasts, whence they brought back little embryos to preserve the species. All of them didn’t go there; it is to be supposed, says M. Morin, that this was decided by lot, and that those who had the misfortune to draw a black ticket were forced to step into the fatal boat that exposed them throughout the continent. Those consecrated girls were highly venerated; their house had singular privileges, among which may be included the inability of being punished for a crime without having first lost the title of girl.

Celibacy has had its martyrs among the pagans, and their histories and myths are full of girls who have generously preferred death to loss of honor. The adventure of Hippolytus is well known, as well as his resurrection by Diana, protectress of the celibate. All these episodes, and countless others, were supported by principles of belief. The Greeks regarded chastity as a supernatural grace; the sacrifices were not thought to be complete

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without the intervention of a virgin. They might well be begun, libare, but they could not be consummated without her, litare. Regarding virginity, they had magnificent words, sublime ideas, speculations of great beauty. But digging deeper into the secret conduct of all those celibate people and all those virtuosi of paganism, one discovers (says M. Morin) only disorders, charlatanism, and hypocrisy. To begin with their goddesses, Vesta, the earliest, was represented with a child. Where did she get it? Minerva had before her Erichthonius, an adventure with Vulcan, and temples (as a mother). Diana had her knight Virbius and her Endymion; the pleasure she got in contemplating the latter sleeping says much about her, too much for a virgin. Myrtilus accused the muses of having strong predilections for a certain Megalion and gave these predilections to all the children that he named—name by name. It is perhaps for this reason that abbé Cartaud calls them the girls of Jupiter’s opera. The virgin gods were scarcely worth more than the goddesses, witness Apollo and Mercury.

The priests, not excepting those of Cybelus, did not pass in the world for being folks of particularly regular conduct. Not all the sinful vestals would have been buried alive. For the sake of their philosophers’ honor, M. Morin is silent, and concludes the history of celibacy in this way, such as it was in the cradle, in childhood, in nature’s arms—a condition quite different from the high degree of perfection in which we see it today. This change is not surprising: the latter is the work of grace and the Holy Spirit; the former was merely the imperfect runt of a disordered, depraved, debauched nature—sad castoff of marriage and virginity. See the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, vol. IV, page 308. Critical history of celibacy.

In absolute terms, all the preceding is merely an analysis of that memoir. We have cut some of its long passages but have scarcely allowed ourselves the liberty of changing a single expression in what we have employed. It will be likewise in what remains of this article: we take nothing upon ourselves, we are content solely to report faithfully not only the opinions but even the speech of the authors and to draw here only on sources approved by all honorable men.⁷ After having shown what history teaches us about

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celibacy, we are now going to think about that condition with the eyes of philosophy, and display what different writers have thought on the subject.

On celibacy considered in itself: (1) With regard to the human species: If a historian or some traveler gave us a description of a thinking being, perfectly isolated, without superior or equal or inferior, sheltered from everything that might move the passions—in a word, alone in his species—we would say without hesitating that this singular being must be plunged in melancholy; for what consolation could he find in a world that for him would be but a vast solitude? If it were added that despite appearances, he enjoys life, feels the happiness of existence, and finds some felicity within himself, we could then agree that he is not a complete monster, and that relative to himself his constitution is not entirely absurd, but we would never go so far as to say that he is good. Yet if one were insistent, and objected that he is perfect among his kind, and consequently that we are wrong to refuse him the epithet good (for what difference does it make whether he has something or nothing to sort out with others?), then we would have to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that this being is good—if, however, it is possible that he is perfect in himself, without having any relationship, any connection with the world in which he is placed.

But if some system in nature were eventually discovered to which the species of automaton in question could be thought to belong; if links were perceived in his configuration that attached him to beings similar to him; if his configuration indicated a chain of useful creatures that could grow and endure only by the use of faculties received from nature; he would immediately lose the name good with which we have dignified him. For how could this name fit an individual who, by his inaction and his solitude, would be tending so directly toward the ruin of his species? Isn’t the preservation of the species one of the essential duties of the individual? And doesn’t every well-formed, reasoning individual make himself guilty by failing in this duty, unless he is exempted from it by some authority superior to that of nature? See The Essay on merit and virtue.⁸

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I add, unless he is exempted from it by some authority superior to that of nature, so that it will be very clear that this in no way concerns celibacy consecrated by religion, but only that which imprudence, misanthropy, frivolity, or libertinage cause every day; that in which the two sexes, corrupting each other by means of natural sentiments themselves or needlessly smothering these sentiments within themselves, flee a union bound to make them better in order to live either in distant sterility or in unions that always make them worse. We are not unaware that the one who gave man all his members may dispense him from the use of some of them, or even prohibit this usage and attest that this sacrifice is agreeable to him. We are not denying that there is a certain corporal purity which nature, abandoned to itself, would never have thought of, but which God has judged necessary for a more dignified approach to the holy places that he inhabits and for a more spiritual manner of attending to the ministry of his altars. If we do not find within ourselves the seed of this purity, this is because it is, so to speak, a revealed virtue and one of faith.

On celibacy considered: (2) with regard to society. As we have just demonstrated, the celibacy that religion has not sanctified cannot be contrary to the propagation of the human species without being harmful to society. It harms society by impoverishing it and by corrupting it. By impoverishing it: if it is true, as can scarcely be doubted, that the lion’s share of a state’s wealth consists in the number of subjects;⁹ that in commerce, the multitude of hands must be counted among the objects of first necessity; and that new citizens—who can’t all be soldiers (because of Europe’s balance of peace) and who can’t wallow in idleness (because of good governance)—would work the land, populate manufactures, or become sailors. By corrupting it: Because it’s a rule drawn from nature, as the illustrious author of The Spirit of the Laws has well noted, that the more you reduce the number of possible marriages, the more you harm those marriages that have already taken place; and that the fewer married people there are, the less fidelity there is in marriage, just as when there are more robbers there are more robberies.¹⁰

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The ancients were so familiar with these advantages, and placed such a high price on the natural faculty of marrying and having children, that their laws had provided that this faculty not be taken away. They regarded that deprivation as a certain means of diminishing the resources of a people and increasing debauchery among them. Thus, when one received a bequest on condition of preserving celibacy, when a patron had his emancipated slave swear that he would not marry, the Papinian Law annulled both the condition and the oath among the Romans. They had understood that wherever celibacy had preeminence, there could scarcely be any honor for the married state. Consequently, one encounters among their laws none that contain an express abrogation of the privileges and honors they had accorded to marriage and to the number of children.

On celibacy considered: (3) with regard to Christian society. Since the worship of the gods demands constant attention and purity of body and of a singular soul, most peoples have been inclined to make of the clergy a separate corps. Thus, among the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Persians, there were families dedicated to the service of the divinity and the temples. But they thought not only of removing ecclesiastics from the business and company of the worldly; there were religions in which the decision was to spare them the trouble of a family. It is claimed that such was especially the spirit of Christianity, even at its origin. We are going to offer an abridged exposition of its regular discipline, so the reader can judge for himself.

It must be admitted that the law of celibacy for bishops, priests, and deacons is as old as the church. Nonetheless, there is no written divine law prohibiting the ordaining of married persons as priests, or priests from getting married. Jesus Christ had no precepts about it. In his epistles to Timothy and Titus, what St. Paul says on the continence of bishops and deacons aims solely to prohibit the bishop from having several wives at the same time or successively: oportet episcopum esse unius uxoris virum. Even the practice of the first centuries of the church is definite on this point: no difficulty was raised over ordaining married men as priests and bishops; it was only marrying after promotion to orders, or remarrying after the death of the first wife, that was prohibited. There was a special exception for widows. It cannot be denied that the church’s spirit and its devout wish

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have been for its leading ministers to live in great continence, and that it has always worked to establish the law of continence. Nonetheless, the practice of ordaining married persons as priests has existed and still exists in the Greek Church, and has never been explicitly disapproved of by the Latin church.

Some believe that the third canon of the first Council of Nicaea imposes on major clerics—that is, on bishops, priests, and deacons—the obligation of celibacy.¹¹ But Fr. Alexander¹² proves in a special dissertation that the council did not mean to prevent clerics from the company of women that they had wedded before their ordination; that what the canon put forth concerns only wives called subintroductae & agapetae,¹³ not legitimate wives; and that it is not only major clerics but also inferior clerics that the council prohibits from cohabiting with agapetes. Whence that learned theologian concludes that it was concubinage that the council was prohibiting, not the practice of marriage legitimately contracted before ordination. He also draws advantage from the well-known story of Paphnutius, which other authors seem to have rejected as a myth only because it is in no way favorable to clerical celibacy.¹⁴

Thus, by all appearances, the Council of Nicaea spoke only of marriages contracted since ordination, and of concubinage. But the Council of Ancyra expressly permits those ordained as deacons, and unmarried, to contract marriage afterward, provided they had protested against the obligation of celibacy during the time of ordination. It is true that this indulgence was not extended to either bishops or priests, and that the Council of Neocaesarea, held shortly after that of Ancyra, pronounced explicitly: presbyterum, si uxorem acceperit, ab ordine deponendum,¹⁵ although the

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marriage was not null, according to the remark by Fr. Thomassin.¹⁶ The Council in Trullo, held in the year 692, confirmed the practice of the Greek church in its 13th canon, and the Latin church did not demand at the Council of Florence that it renounce this. Nonetheless, it must not be concealed that many of the Greek priests are monks and observe celibacy, and that the patriarchs and bishops are normally obliged to make a public commitment to the monastic life before being ordained. It is also germane to say that in the Occident, celibacy was prescribed to clerics by the decrees of popes Siricius and Innocent; that the first is from the year 385; that St. Leo extended this law to subdeacons; that St. Gregory had imposed it on the deacons of Sicily; and that it was confirmed by: the Councils of Elvira toward the end of the third century; canon XXXIII of Toledo in the year 400, of Carthage in 419; canon III and IV of Orange in 441, canon XXII and XXIII of Arles in 452; of Tours in 461; of Agde in 506; of Orleans in 538; by our kings’ capitularies and various councils held in the Occident, but mainly by the Council of Trent—although via the respectful remonstrances¹⁷ of the emperor, the Duke of Bavaria, the Germans, and even the king of France, people didn’t stop proposing the marriage of priests, and urging this on the pope after the holding of the council. Clerical celibacy had had adversaries for a long time beforehand: Vigilantius and Jovinian rose up in opposition under St. Jerome; Wycliff, the Hussites, the Bohemians, Luther, Calvin, and the Anglicans threw off its yoke; and in the period of our wars of religion, Cardinal Chatillon, Spifame the Bishop of Nevers, and some ecclesiastics of the second order dared to marry publicly. But these examples had no sequel.

When the obligation of celibacy was general in the Catholic church, those among the ecclesiastics who violated it were immediately banned for life from the functions of their order and placed in the ranks of the laity. Justinian, leg. 45. cod. de episcop. & cler.¹⁸ then made their children illegitimate and incapable of succeeding and of receiving bequests. Finally, it was

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ordained that those marriages would be annulled and the parties subjected to punishment, whence it is seen how the infraction became more serious as the law became more deeply rooted. In the beginning, if a priest happened to get married, he was deposed and the marriage remained. Over time, orders were considered as a nullifying obstacle¹⁹ to marriage. Today, a simple tonsured cleric who marries no longer enjoys the ecclesiastical privileges concerning jurisdiction and exemption from public burdens.²⁰ By his marriage, he is considered to have renounced the clerical estate and its rights. Fleury, Institutes of Ecclesiastical Law. Tom. I. Anc. & nouv. Discipline of the Church by Fr. Thomassin.

It follows from this review, says the late abbé St. Pierre (speaking not as a religious polemicist, but as a simple Christian man of politics and a simple citizen of a Christian society), that priestly celibacy is merely a point of discipline; that it is not essential to the Christian religion; that it has never been regarded as one of the foundations of the schism we have with the Greeks and the Protestants; that it has been voluntary in the Latin church; that since the church has the power to change all points of discipline that are of human origin, then if the estates of the Catholic church got big benefits from returning to that ancient liberty, without undergoing any real harm, it would be desirable for that to happen; and that the question of these benefits is less theological than political, and concerns more the sovereigns than the church, which would have nothing more to do than pronounce upon it.²¹

But are there benefits in restoring²² ecclesiastics to the ancient liberty of marriage? This is a phenomenon that the czar found so striking when he traveled throughout France incognito²³ that he couldn’t understand how, in a state where he encountered such good laws and such wise establishments, a practice had been allowed to last for so many centuries which, on the one hand, was of no importance to religion, and on the other hand, was so

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harmful to Christian society. We will not render a verdict on whether the czar’s astonishment was well-founded, but it is not useless to summarize abbé St. Pierre’s memoir, and that is what we are going to do.

Benefits of priestly marriage: (1) If forty thousand parish priests in France had eighty thousand children, since those children would unquestionably be better raised, the state would gain subjects and good people, and the church would gain faithful. (2) Ecclesiastics being by their status better husbands than other men, there would be forty thousand women happier and more virtuous. (3) There are few men for whom celibacy is not difficult to observe, which is how it can happen that the church suffers a great scandal from a priest who falls short of continence, whereas no utility redounds to other Christians from the man who lives continently. (4) A priest would scarcely be less meritorious before God in putting up with the shortcomings of his wife and children than in resisting the temptations of the flesh. (5) The problems of marriage are useful to the man who puts up with them; the difficulties of celibacy are useful to no one. (6) The parish priest who is a virtuous head of household would be useful to more people than the one who practices celibacy. (7) Some ecclesiastics for whom the observation of celibacy is very difficult would believe they had not fully met its conditions, when they have nothing to blame themselves for in this regard. (8) A hundred thousand married priests would form a hundred thousand families, which would provide more than ten thousand inhabitants per year; even if you counted only five thousand, this reckoning would still produce a million Frenchmen in two hundred years. Whence it follows that without priestly celibacy, we would have today four million more Catholics (counting only since Francis I), which would form a substantial sum of money if it is true, as an Englishman has calculated, that one man is worth nine pounds sterling to the state. (9) Noble houses would find in the bishops’ families offshoots to prolong their existence, &c. See the polit. works of abbé St. Pierre, vol. II, p. 146.

Means of returning freedom of marriage to ecclesiastics. We must: (1) form a body to meditate on the obstacles and to work on removing them; (2) negotiate with the princes of the Roman communion and form a confederation with them; (3) negotiate with the court of Rome. For abbé St. Pierre claims it is better to use the pope’s intervention than the authority of a national

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council—even though, according to him, the national council no doubt shortens the proceedings, and even though, according to many theologians, that tribunal is adequate for an affair of this nature. Here now are the objections that abbé St. Pierre himself put forth against his scheme, along with his responses to them.

First objection: The Italian bishops could thus be married, like St. Ambrose, and the cardinals and the pope, like St. Peter.

RESPONSE: Most certainly. Abbé St. Pierre sees no problem in following these examples, nor disadvantage in the pope and cardinals having good wives, virtuous children, and a well-ordered family.

Second objection: The people have a habitual veneration for those who maintain celibacy, which it is appropriate to preserve.

RESPONSE: Among the Dutch and English pastors, those who are virtuous are no less respected by the people for being married.

Third objection: In celibacy, priests have more time to give to the functions of their estate than they would if married.

RESPONSE: The Protestant ministers find plenty of time to have children, to raise them, to be governors of their families, and to watch over their parishes. It would be an insult to our churchmen not to assume as much from them.

Fourth objection: Young parish priests of thirty years would have five or six children—sometimes little payback for their estate, little fortune, and consequently a lot of trouble.

RESPONSE: Whoever is put forward for orders is acknowledged as a wise and able man; he is obliged to have a patrimony; he will have his benefice; his wife’s dowry may be respectable. Experience shows that those parish priests descended from poor parents are not, for all that, more of a burden to the church or to their parish. Moreover, why is it necessary that one portion of churchmen live in opulence while the other languishes in poverty? Wouldn’t it be possible to imagine a better distribution of ecclesiastical revenues?

Fifth objection: The Council of Trent regards celibacy as a state more perfect than marriage.

RESPONSE: There are ambiguities to avoid in the words state, perfect, obligation. Why claim that a priest is more perfect than St. Peter? The

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objection proves too much, and therefore it proves nothing. My thesis, says abbé St. Pierre, is purely political, and consists in three propositions: (1) Celibacy is a matter of pure ecclesiastical discipline, which the church can change; (2) it would be advantageous to Roman Catholic states for this discipline to be changed; (3) while waiting for a national or general council, it is appropriate for the court of Rome to receive a specified sum to expedite exemptions from celibacy—payable by those requesting the exemption.

Such is the system of abbé St. Pierre, which we present because the design of our work demands it, and on which we leave the verdict to those whose place it is to judge these important matters. But we cannot refrain from remarking in passing that it was only in a Dutch edition based on a faulty copy that this philosopher-citizen put forth an objection that presents itself quite naturally, and that is not one of the least important ones: namely, the disadvantage of benefices rendered hereditary, a disadvantage that is only too strongly felt and that would become even more widespread. What then, are all resignations of benefices and all coadjutories to be extinguished, and the conferment of all benefices referred to superiors? Perhaps that would not be worse; a bishop who knows his diocese and its good subjects is certainly as well situated to name someone to a vacant position as a half-dead churchman pestered by a crowd of relations and friends with vested interests—how many simonies and scandalous trials prevented!

To complete this article, it would remain for us to speak of monastic celibacy. But we will content ourselves with observing, along with the celebrated M. Melon,²⁴ (1) that it would be enormously advantageous for society and individuals for the prince to use strictly the power that he has to enforce the law that prohibits the monastic state before the age of twenty-five; or, to use the idea and the expression of M. Melon, that doesn’t permit the alienation of one’s liberty before the age when one can alienate one’s estate. See the rest in the articles MARIAGE, MOINE [Monk], VIRGINITÉ, VOEUX [Vows], &c. (2) We will add with a modern author, whom one cannot either read too much or praise too highly,²⁵ that celibacy can become

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harmful in proportion as the corps of the celibate is too extensive, and thus the corps of the laity is not extensive enough; (3) that human laws, made to speak to the mind, must give precepts but not counsel; and that religion, made to speak to the heart, must give much counsel but few precepts. That when, for example, religion offers rules not for the proper but for the best, not for what is good but for what is perfect, it is fitting that these rules be counsel and not laws. For perfection does not concern the universality of men or of things. That what’s more, if they are laws, then countless others will be needed to enforce the first ones; that experience has confirmed these principles; that when celibacy, which used to be only counsel in Christianity, became an explicit law within it for a certain order of citizens, new ones were needed every day to reduce men to the observation of the latter; and consequently, that the legislator wore himself out and wore out society making men perform by precept what those who love perfection would have performed themselves as counsel. (4) That by the nature of the human understanding, in religious affairs we like everything that presupposes an effort, just as in moral matters we have a speculative liking for everything that bears the imprint of severity; and so celibacy was bound to be, as has in fact happened, more agreeable to those peoples for whom it seemed least suitable, and for whom it could have the most deplorable effects; to be retained in Europe’s southern countries, where by the nature of the climate it was more difficult to practice; to be proscribed in the countries of the north, where the passions are less lively; to be accepted where there are few inhabitants and rejected in areas where there are many.

These observations are so fine and so true that they cannot be repeated in too many places. I have drawn them from the excellent work of Président de M …; What preceded is either from M. Fleury, or from Fr. Alexandre, or from Fr. Thomassin. Add to that what the Memoirs of the academy of Inscriptions & the political works of abbé de St. Pierre and M. Melon have furnished me, and a scant few sentences are left to me in this article, and even those are drawn from a work that one can find praised in the Journal de Trevoux, Feb. 1746.²⁶ Despite these authorities, I would not be surprised

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if it were to find critics and opponents. But it might also happen that, just as at the Council of Trent, it was (it is said) the young ecclesiastics who most doggedly rejected the proposal for priestly marriage, it may be those among the celibate who most need women, and who have least read the authors I have just cited, who will criticize their principles most openly.