Marriage and Virginity
of action, then I would not dare to call her an adulteress, easy enough though it might be to do so. Yet who would say that she does not sin, since she knows she is involved with a man who is not her husband? Just the same, if for her part all she wants from that union is to have children, and whatever she puts up with over and above what serves the purpose of having children she puts up with unwillingly, she is certainly to be preferred to many married women. Although these are not adulteresses, they often constrain their husbands to perform their marital duty, even when they wish to abstain, not out of desire to have children but making unreasonable use of their rights because of passion. In their marriages, just the same, there is at least the good feature that they are married. It was for this reason that they married, so that by being confined to the lawful bond sensuality might not wander around ugly and degenerate.†11 In itself sensuality has the unbridled weakness of the flesh, but from marriage it has the permanent union of fidelity; in itself it leads to uncontrolled intercourse, but from marriage it has the restraint of chaste child-bearing. Although it is a shameful thing to intend to make use of one's husband for passion, it is proper nevertheless to want to have union only with one's husband and to have children only by one's husband.
Marriage as a Remedy for Sensuality
6. In the same way there are men who are so lacking in self-control that they do not spare their wives even when they are pregnant. Whatever married people do between themselves that is impure or shameful or sordid, therefore, is a sin of the persons, not the fault of marriage.
6. When the performance of the marriage duty is insisted on unreasonably, so that they have intercourse even when it is not for the purpose of having children, the apostle allows this as something that can be excused, though it is not something he lays down as a command.†12
So, even if a perverted morality motivates them to have intercourse like that, marriage still saves them from adultery or fornication. It is not that conduct of that kind is accepted because of marriage, but it is forgiven because of marriage. Married people, therefore, not only owe each other fidelity in relation to sexual union for the sake of having children, which in this mortal state is the human race's first social union, but also in a certain way they owe each