What Does the Bible Say About Singleness? — Augustine and de Sales
⏱ 12 min read
You have probably asked the question into the kitchen at one in the morning, or into the windscreen on the long drive home from another wedding, or into the ceiling above your bed after a Sunday in which the sermon was — again — about marriage. What does the Bible say about singleness? The question is rarely asked in a calm voice. It is asked because the season has stretched longer than you thought it would, because the church culture around you keeps treating your life as the lobby before the real building, and because somewhere underneath the polite Christian language about trusting God’s timing there is a quieter, more honest ache — that you were not built to be a holding pattern, and you have started to suspect the framing is wrong.
The framing is wrong. Not the longing — the longing is honest, and we will not be dismissing it here. The framing. The Christian tradition before the last hundred years did not treat the devout single life as a delay. It treated it as a vocation in itself — a life with its own architecture, its own particular nearness to God, its own dignity that did not depend on a future ceremony to make it count. The Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries a version of this slow vocational reading into a 140-day companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — let the framing be re-set.
The article that follows is a slow read of two passages from Francis de Sales, the seventeenth-century bishop who wrote the Introduction to the Devout Life for unmarried laywomen in his diocese — women whose singleness was not a problem to be managed but a life to be furnished. He was writing to a particular kind of woman, and you are her descendant. Read slowly.
What the older Christian view actually said
The modern Christian woman has inherited a strange combination of two cultural pressures that do not belong to the older tradition. The first is the broader secular pressure that treats unmarriedness past a certain age as personal failure — the romantic-comedy framing in which the woman without a husband is the protagonist still in act one. The second, more painful, is the contemporary evangelical pressure that treats marriage as the ordinary Christian destination and singleness as the meanwhile — the airport between the gate and the flight. Both framings agree that the single life is provisional. Both are recent. Both are wrong.
The Christian tradition before about 1900 said something stranger and more dignified. It said that the single woman who had given her interior life to God was not in a waiting room. She was in a particular and honoured form of devotion — a life with its own daily rhythms, its own kind of nearness, its own freedom for prayer and service that the married life, by its own legitimate constraints, did not have. Augustine called the unmarried Christian consecrated. Aquinas called the vocation eminent. De Sales, three centuries later, addressed the unmarried Christian woman as someone whose life had as much weight, and as full a calling, as her married sister.
So when you ask what does the Bible say about singleness, the older Christian answer is not wait patiently and your real life will start. The older answer is your life has already started; here is how to furnish it. That is the framing the rest of this article will sit inside.
(If the season has felt like the long flat afternoon of a faith you are still figuring out, a journal book for the young woman figuring out her faith walks the slower companion to this reading. If the church culture’s framing of singleness has been part of what is making the year heavy, Christian self-care — twenty ideas that aren’t bubble baths sits as the gentler everyday companion. If you are reading this from the younger end of the wait — twenty-three, twenty-five — Christian journal prompts for teen girls is the cousin article for the women still figuring out the first version of the question.)
The first passage: the Bridegroom address
“O God of Mercy, most Loving Lord, Sweet Saviour, Lord of my heart, my Joy, my Hope, my Beloved, my Bridegroom. Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy, and although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in.”
— Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the address. My Beloved, my Bridegroom. De Sales is writing to women — many of them unmarried, many of them widowed, some of them simply in seasons of waiting — and he is teaching them a form of prayer in which the Lord Himself is addressed as the husband of the soul. This was not de Sales’s invention. The Song of Songs had taught the Church to read God as the Beloved for fifteen hundred years before him. The medieval mystics had written some of the most piercing devotional poetry in the language out of this same vocabulary. De Sales, gently, was handing this older vocabulary to the laywomen of his diocese.
What this means for the question of singleness is more substantial than it first sounds. The Christian woman has not been asked to manufacture her own emotional sufficiency. She has been given an address — my Beloved, my Bridegroom — through which the longing of her heart can find an actual recipient. The longing for a husband is not, in this framing, a defect to be quieted by self-talk. It is a longing that points past itself, that finds its truest object in the One who has been the Beloved of every devout soul since before there were such things as Christian dating books. The longing is real. The redirection of it is also real. De Sales is not saying stop longing. He is saying here is who the longing is for, underneath the person you have been picturing it for.
This is the part that the modern evangelical conversation about singleness usually misses. The conversation tends to oscillate between two impossible positions — either trust God and your husband will come or be content with Jesus and stop wanting one. De Sales offers a third. The longing is given an address. The Lord Himself receives it. The future husband, if he comes, will inherit a love that has already been schooled in being addressed to God; if he never comes, the love will not have been wasted, because the address it was practising on was the truest one all along.
Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy. Notice that de Sales does not pretend the melancholy will not come. He assumes it will. The single Christian woman of his diocese — like the single Christian woman of yours — would face long stretches in which the address felt cold, in which prayer felt wearily indifferent, in which the small daily turning toward God produced no perceptible warmth. De Sales does not promise the warmth back. He commands the resistance — not because melancholy is sinful, but because giving in to it interrupts the slow building of the devout life. Although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in. The not-giving-in is the practice. The warmth is His to send.
For the modern single woman, this is the part that quiets a particular shame. You have been blaming yourself for the months of dryness — the weeks of feeling nothing in prayer, the small voice that says your faith must not be real if it does not feel like much. De Sales would tell you the dryness is ordinary, the indifference is expected, the cold prayers count anyway, and the soul’s job is not to manufacture the feeling but to keep showing up for the address.
Mid-page: a small note
The Devotional for Women in Their 40s was built around this kind of slow daily showing-up — one short passage each evening, a verse, room for one honest sentence, no demand to perform. It is the daily form of the practice de Sales is teaching above. The 140 days do not promise the husband. They promise — and they deliver — the slow re-tuning of the heart toward the One whose address has been there the whole time.
The somatic that goes with the long single season
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Notice where the longing is sitting today. Most single women who have been waiting a long time carry the longing in the chest — a low constant tightness across the sternum, a held-breath quality through the upper ribs that has been there so long the body has forgotten it is there. Put one hand lightly on the sternum, where the tightness lives. Take one slow inhale, not deep, just slow. On the exhale, let the chest soften by half an inch. Not by relaxing it — by stopping the small ongoing effort to brace against the longing. Let the exhale go all the way out. Let the next inhale arrive on its own.
The longing has been asking the body to brace against it for a long time. The body learning to stop bracing is not the same as the longing going away. The longing remains. The bracing softens. The body learns it can hold the longing without being held by it. That is the bodily equivalent of vigorously resist the melancholy — not a tightening against, but a slow open holding of the ache that does not collapse the chest around it.
Take the hand away. Continue reading.
The second passage: the address that becomes a life
“As for example, the soul having long dwelt in the feeling of the union whereby she sweetly tastes how happy she is to belong to God, in fine, augmenting this union by an amorous pressing and moving forwards: Yea, Lord, will she say, I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve; or: Ah Lord! I am so indeed, and will be daily ever more; or, by way of prayer: O sweet Jesus! Ah! draw me still more deeply into thy heart, that thy love may devour me, and that I may be swallowed up in its sweetness.”
— Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
Read it twice. The grammar will run away from you the first time. Read it slowly.
What de Sales is describing is the long second movement of the devout single life — the part that does not arrive in the first months, but accumulates over years of small daily turning. The soul that has long dwelt in the feeling of belonging to God begins, over time, to taste a particular sweetness — a settled, slow, gathered sense of belonging that does not depend on circumstance. The phrase augmenting this union by an amorous pressing and moving forwards is unusual to the modern ear. It means: the soul, having tasted the belonging, presses further in, the way one presses further into a love affair that has become the centre of a life.
The single woman in the older tradition was given access to this amorous pressing and moving forwards in a way the married tradition, with its legitimate distractions of household and children, was given less time for. This is the older Christian view that has gone almost entirely missing from contemporary evangelical writing on singleness. The single life is not the lobby. It is a particular interior architecture in which the love of God can be pressed into more directly, with fewer competing claims, over more uninterrupted hours, than is available to the married vocation. De Sales is not saying singleness is better than marriage. He is saying singleness has its own particular gift — and the gift is direct, sustained, undistracted access to the amorous pressing forward toward the One who has been the Beloved all along.
Yea, Lord, I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve. The repetition is doing real work. The single soul, over years, learns to say this in a way that the legitimately divided heart of the married soul cannot say in quite the same form. The reservation that marriage rightly requires — the love and time owed to a husband, to children, to the household — is not a flaw of the married vocation; it is part of its goodness. But the single soul has a kind of all, all, all available to her that is not available elsewhere, and the older tradition treated this as one of the great gifts of the single life rather than as evidence of its incompleteness.
For the single Christian woman of your generation, this is the line worth keeping near the page. I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve. Not because the wait is glamorous. Not because you have to perform contentment. Because the address has a particular fullness when the heart that addresses it has no other primary claim on it. The all is yours to give now, in a way that may not be yours to give later. That is not a consolation prize. That is the older Christian view of singleness — full vocation, real address, particular nearness — that you have been entitled to all along.
What the practice will actually feel like over a year
The slow daily turning de Sales is teaching will not, in the first weeks, feel like much. The address will feel formal. The prayers will feel cold. The longing will still surface in the evenings, especially the long evenings of the weekends. You will read the Bridegroom line and feel, some days, that it is a beautiful sentence happening to someone else.
What will change, over a year of small daily practice, is the centre of gravity. The longing will still come — the older tradition never pretended it would not — but the soul that has spent a year practising the address will start to find that the longing lands inside a wider container. The chest will not brace as hard. The Sunday sermons about marriage will not knock the wind out as completely. The wedding invitations will still be hard, but the harder days will be followed by a quieter return to the address that has become, over months, a home.
This is what de Sales meant by the devout single life. Not a holding pattern. A particular architecture in which the love of God is pressed into with the all, all, all that the season makes uniquely available. The framing the church has handed you — that your life starts when the husband arrives — is recent. The framing de Sales handed his diocese — that your life is already a full vocation, and the Beloved who addresses you is the One the longing has been for all along — is older, and truer, and the one worth keeping.
(The sibling articles in this series sit at what does the Bible say about waiting — Murray on Waiting on God and how to be content in singleness — Hannah More on the single life.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries de Sales’s slow vocabulary — Beloved, Bridegroom, the soul that has long dwelt in the feeling of belonging — into a daily companion built for the woman whose single life is, at last, ready to be named as the full vocation the older tradition always said it was.
