Tractates on the Gospel of John (continued)
184 ST. AUGUSTINE whereby the chastity of the virgin bride may be corrupted, that is, whereby the faith of the Church may be defiled.
(3) For in truth, brothers, their faith is corrupted who prefer a lie to the truth. For those fellows who seem to honor
Christ by denying that he had flesh declare him to be nothing other than a liar. Now those who build a lie in men, what do they drive out of them except the truth? They admit the devil; they shut out Christ. They admit the adulterer; they shut out the bridegroom. [They are] groomsmen, sure, or rather pimps of the serpent. For they speak of this purpose, that the serpent may possess and Christ be shut out. How does the serpent possess? When a lie possesses. When falsehood possesses, the serpent possesses; when truth possesses, Christ possesses. For he himself said, 'T am the truth." But about the devil he said, "And he stood not in the truth because truth is not in him."
(4) Now, Christ is the truth in such a way that in Christ you receive the whole truth: true Word, God equal to the Father, true soul, true flesh, true man, true God, true birth, true suffering, true death, true resurrection. If you say that any of these is false, decay sets in, the worms of lies are born from the serpent's poison, and nothing will remain whole.
6. What is it, then, someone says, that the Lord is saying when he says, "What is it to me and to you, woman?" Perhaps in what follows the Lord shows why he said this. "My hour," he says, "has not yet come." For so he says, "What is it to me and to you, woman? My hour has not yet come." And why this was said must be investigated.
(2) First, then, let us resist the heretics. What does the ancient serpent say, who from of old has breathed forth his poi-
12. The Latin word is paranymphi, a loan word from Greek that occurs only in the Late Latin period. The paranymphus performed functions for the bridegroom similar to those performed by the classical pronuba for the bride; but the practice of having attendants for the groom does not seem original to the Romans. See Ch. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques et romaines (Paris, 1904) 3.1655, note 20; and J. Marquardt, Das Privatleben der Rdnier in Handbuch der Romischen Altertiimer, ed. J. Marquardt and Th. Mommsen (Leipzig, 1879) 7.1.48, note 1.