Tertullian
Marriage

Tertullian's later view of marriage, such as in his book Exhortation to Chastity, may have been heavily influenced by Montanism. He had previously held marriage to be fundamentally good, but after his conversion he denied its goodness. He argues that marriage is considered to be good "when it is compared with the greatest of all evils". He argued that before the coming of Christ, the command to reproduce was a prophetic sign pointing to the coming of the Church; after it came, the command was superseded. He also believed lust for one's wife and for another woman were essentially the same, so that marital desire was similar to adulterous desire. He believed that sex even in marriage would disrupt the Christian life and that abstinence was the best way to achieve the clarity of the soul. Tertullian's views would later influence much of the western church.

Tertullian was the first to introduce a view of "sexual hierarchy": he believed that those who abstain from sexual relations should have a higher hierarchy in the church than those who do not, because he saw sexual relations as a barrier that stopped one from a close relationship with God.
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