I, 18
Adversus Iovinianum
Origine: Just as divorce according to the Saviour's word was not permitted from the beginning, but on account of the hardness of our heart was a concession of Moses to the human race, so too the eating of flesh was unknown until the deluge. But after the deluge, like the quails given in the desert to the murmuring people, the poison of flesh-meat was offered to our teeth. [...] At the beginning of the human race we neither ate flesh, nor gave bills of divorce, nor suffered circumcision for a sign. Thus we reached the deluge. But after the deluge, together with the giving of the law which no one could fulfil, flesh was given for food, and divorce was allowed to hard-hearted men, and the knife of circumcision was applied, as though the hand of God had fashioned us with something superfluous. But once Christ has come in the end of time, and Omega passed into Alpha and turned the end into the beginning, we are no longer allowed divorce, nor are we circumcised, nor do we eat flesh [...]. (da Against Jovinianus http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3009.htm, traduzione inglese di W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis e W.G. Martley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6, Christian Literature Publishing, Buffalo, 1893; riveduto e trascritto a cura di Kevin Knight in NewAdvent.org)
