Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Euripides, giving counsel, describes the husband-loving wife with dignity: "She must seem to speak well whenever she says anything, and even when she says nothing, she must labor to do what will please the one she lives with, as though she were about to say it." And again elsewhere he says things like these: "It is sweet, if her husband fares badly in something, for the wife to share his gloom, and to have a common portion of both grief and pleasure." And showing her gentleness and affection in this way, he adds, even concerning misfortunes: "For you, even when you are sick, I will endure being sick with you, and I will bear the burden of your troubles, and no part of it feels harsh to me; for among those we love, both fortune and misfortune ought to be held in common; for what else, indeed, is love but this?"
Marriage, then, is sanctified when it is brought to completion according to reason, if the union submits itself to God and is governed with a true heart in the full assurance of faith, the hearts sprinkled clean from a guilty conscience and the flesh rinsed in unsullied water, while holding without wavering to the hope we profess; for the one who made the promise can be trusted. A happy marriage must be judged neither by wealth nor ever by beauty, but by virtue. "Beauty," says tragedy, "has profited no wife in her union with her husband, but virtue has profited many; for every good woman who is joined to a husband knows how to be self-controlled." Then, as though giving counsel, it says: "This holds true above all: even if her husband is ill-formed, he must seem to be well-formed to a woman who possesses understanding. For it is not the eye that judges, but the mind that sees" — and so on in that vein. For Scripture very properly said that the woman was given to the man by God as a helper.
It is clear, then, I think, that she will choose to remedy by reason, with persuasion, each of the painful things that befall her from her husband in the management of the household; but if he will not listen, then she will already try, so far as is possible for human nature, to keep her conduct free of sin, no matter whether reason demands death or permits life, regarding God as her helper and partner in such conduct — him who is truly her champion and savior, now and in the age to come, having made him the general and leader of every action, considering self-control and righteousness her task, and making what is pleasing to God her end.
Gracefully, then, in the letter to Titus the apostle says that the older women must be reverent in bearing, not slanderers, not enslaved to much wine, so that they may train the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be self-controlled, chaste, keepers of the household, good, submissive to their own husbands, so that the word of God may not be blasphemed. Rather, he says, pursue peace with all, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord, watching that no one be a fornicator or profane like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal, and that no root of bitterness springing up cause trouble, and through it the many be defiled.
Then, placing as it were a capstone on the question of marriage, he adds: "Marriage is honorable among all, and the marriage bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge." Since, then, one aim and one end has been shown for husband and wife alike, as to what is the perfect thing, Peter says in his letter: "Though now for a little while, if it must be, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the proven genuineness of your faith, much more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to bring praise and splendor when Jesus Christ is revealed; him you love though you have not seen him, and in him, though you do not now behold him, you believe and exult with a joy beyond words and full of splendor, carrying off as the reward of that faith the rescue of your souls." Therefore Paul too boasts that for the sake of Christ he has come to be in labors more abundantly, in beatings exceedingly, in near-deaths often.
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