Annotatio XCIV

”She took Hagar the Egyptian, her handmaid, and gave her to her husband.” — Genesis 16:3

Ambrose, in book 1 On Abraham the Patriarch, chapter 4, excusing Abraham’s intercourse with the handmaid Hagar, seems to hint at two things beyond the common opinion of the theologians:¹ first, that that intercourse was adultery; second, that adultery in Abraham’s times was not illicit, because the Law had not yet forbidden and condemned it. His words are these: “But perhaps someone will say: How does Abraham propose himself to us for imitation, since he took a son from a handmaid? Or, what is the meaning of this, that so great a man was liable to this error? But let us first consider that Abraham was before the Law of Moses and before the Gospel, when adultery did not yet seem forbidden. The penalty of a crime is from the time of the law which prohibited the crime, nor before the law is there any condemnation of the matter. Therefore Abraham did not offend against the Law, but anticipated the Law. God, though in paradise he praised marriage, did not [there] condemn adultery.”² Chrysostom, Augustine, and the rest of the theologians think otherwise, and assert in the first place that Abraham’s intercourse was neither adultery nor fornication, but legitimate matrimony, free from all suspicion of baseness: because Abraham did not sleep with the handmaid except after he had received her from Sarah as a wife — as Moses too openly manifests, saying, “And Sarah gave her to her husband as a wife.” They add, then, that adultery and fornication were licit at no times;³ whence St. Thomas too, from their general assent — rejecting the opinion of Rabbi Moses the Egyptian [Maimonides], who says that fornications and adulteries before the promulgation of the Law were not sins — decrees that both fornication and adultery are against the law of nature, and at no time, neither of themselves nor by dispensation, were licit: because both are contrary to the first precepts of the law of nature, which do not admit dispensation. These things being considered, there are those who think that Ambrose brought forward the solution of the aforesaid doubt not from his own mind, but from the mind of others, and that on this account he at once subjoined the second and third solution of his question as though from his own opinion.