On Monogamy
For For students of Montanism and early teaching on remarriage; the severest of three statements of the case, not a first choice.
Length About 12,000 words, about an hour.
De Monogamia is a short Latin treatise written by Tertullian around 213, during the period in which he had aligned himself with the New Prophecy associated with Montanus. It belongs to a cluster of writings on marriage and sexual discipline that Tertullian produced over the course of his career, but it marks a hardening of his earlier position. In his earlier work to his wife, Ad Uxorem, he had counseled widows not to remarry while leaving the matter one of preference. Here he goes further, arguing that a second marriage after the death of a spouse is forbidden to Christians outright, and he directs the treatise against the wider church, whom he calls the psychici, for permitting it.
The argument rests on several moves. Tertullian reads the creation of Eve from Adam's single rib as establishing monogamy as the pattern built into human nature from the beginning, prior to and underlying the Mosaic concessions that Christ's teaching supersedes. He draws an analogy between the oneness of God and the oneness owed in marriage, and extends Paul's requirement that a bishop be "the husband of one wife" into a universal norm rather than a clerical qualification. Central to the treatise is his appeal to the Paraclete: the New Prophecy, he insists, has not introduced novel doctrine but has disciplined the church into a stricter obedience already implicit in scripture, exposing second marriage as a form of fornication tolerated only through ecclesiastical laxity. The tone throughout is polemical, aimed less at persuading the uncommitted than at indicting a church he regards as having compromised apostolic rigor for the sake of accommodating the many.
Who should read this: historians of early Christian ethics, scholars of Montanism, and readers tracing the development of Tertullian's thought from measured exhortation toward sectarian rigorism will find it indispensable. It is not a pastoral or balanced treatment of remarriage and will frustrate anyone looking for even-handed guidance; its value lies in what it reveals about a specific theological controversy and about Tertullian's late polemical method, not in any lasting ethical authority it carries for the wider church that rejected its conclusions.
Editions
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- OTHER De Monogamia (CCEL) PDTrans. S. Thelwall · 1885De Monogamia in the same Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 4, 1885) by S. Thelwall, hosted by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library with chapter-by-chapter navigation and downloadable as EPUB or PDF. Choose this over the single-page copies if you want to move around the text or take it offline.
- OTHER De Monogamia (The Latin Library (Latin)) LatinDe Monogamia in Tertullian's Latin, unaccompanied: no translation, no introduction and no notes — just the text, section-numbered, on one page at The Latin Library. For readers working with the original, or checking an English rendering against it.Much harder than the work: Original Latin, no translation — read alongside an English edition unless you have the language.
- OTHER De Monogamia (New Advent) PDTrans. S. Thelwall · 1885De Monogamia in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 4, 1885), translated by S. Thelwall, on New Advent as a single continuous page with the chapter divisions kept and the editors' notes gathered at the foot. No introduction and no apparatus — the plainest way to read it straight through. A manageable single sitting for most readers.