It remains for us to look at remedies. It is clear from what has been said that antidotes against philters are useless, as are those remedies of the gentiles which were made through incantations or certain lustrations; these are also wholly unlawful for Christians. Virgil says in Aeneid 4:
She promises by charms to free the minds she wishes, And to send harsh cares into others.
He truly says that she promises it, for she did not in fact provide it. Tibullus says in book 1:
What should I believe? Surely she said that these same loves of mine Could be released by songs or herbs. She purified me with torches, and on a clear night A dark victim fell for the magical gods. I prayed not that love should be wholly absent, But that it should be mutual; nor would I wish to be unable to lack you.
They thought that one of two things happened by these lustrations: either they were freed from love, or they obtained their desires. Nemesianus introduces a shepherd complaining that all these things had fallen out vainly for him:
What advantage is it that the mother of foreign Amyntas Purified me three times with fillets, three times with sacred foliage, Three times with smoking incense, And, turned away, poured ashes into the stream, Burning crackling laurels with living sulfur, When in this way I, wretched, burn wholly with fires for Meroe?
[margin: a: Pliny, book 28, chapters 32 and 39; Pomponazzi, On Incantations; Laertius, book 6]
By the fillets, understand those of a dead man, as was said above. He omitted also the sprinkling of water, about which Propertius speaks in book 3, concerning love:
What my friends of my fatherland could not turn away from me, Nor a Thessalian witch wash away in the vast sea.
This opinion of the gentiles seems to have been followed not only by Eunapius, in the Life of Aedesius, concerning the woman whom the magician Philometor had enticed into love, but the magician Maximus freed from love, and by Pliny, but also by Pomponazzi, a badly Christian man.
A distinction is needed concerning antidotes. First, if they are only natural medicines, purging madness and moderating the heat of lust, such as chaste-tree and similar things, provided that they are not harmful to health, it will be lawful to use them.
Second, if there is doubt whether a natural force is present, or whether the remedies are merely superstitious, then one must abstain from them. Such is what Propertius reports concerning the Scythian or Promethean herb; and what Pliny and Pomponazzi handed down concerning powder sprinkled on the body, in which a she-mule has rolled herself, or the drinking of a goat’s urine, or a toad tied in the hide of a freshly killed animal, or the genital member of a wolf.
Third, if the remedies are morally base, they are plainly to be avoided and forbidden. Such is the remedy of Crates in Laertius, namely, hanging himself. Such too are the licentious baths, dances, banquets, and the worse things that tend to follow, in Rhazes and Paul of Aegina. Such too was that remedy of Faustina, which Marcus Antoninus the philosopher used: he ordered her gladiator lover to be killed, and ordered her to walk between the head and the neck.
Fourth, if superstition is mixed in, then these things belong to vain observance, which must be treated in the second part of this book; but if a pact with a demon intervenes, they belong to demonic magic, about which we have spoken in book 2.
Fifth, the best remedies are Christian ones: both ecclesiastical remedies, which have force against all harmful magics and which must be treated in the last book, and also certain moral remedies, by which the flesh is worn down and concupiscence subdued, such as works of penance, sleeping on the ground, hair shirts, scourges, and fasts. At times, even under mortal obligation, if the need is great, people are bound to use these, and also other remedies, which are placed partly in omitting and partly in doing.
[margin: a: Capitolinus and Suidas. (b) St. Antoninus, book 6 of the historical summary, title 13, chapter 6, section 4]
In omitting, they consist in avoiding the sight of the beloved object, idleness, and the other irritants of lust, about which Helinand has spoken very well. “Do you wish to extinguish lust?” he says. “Remove the wood from the fire if the blaze crackles. The pieces of wood are innumerable, but the chief ones are:
Idleness, sluggishness, sleep, meat, woman, wine, Prosperity, play, songs, beauty, boy.”
Concerning the first, there is that saying: “Every idle person is in desires.” And Ovid says:
If you take away idleness, the bows of Cupid have perished; His torches lie extinguished and without light.
Concerning the second, Martial says:
Why, it is asked, did Aegisthus become an adulterer? The reason is ready: he was idle.
Concerning the third, Dionysius Cato sings in the Moral Distichs:
Always keep more watch, and do not be given to sleep. For long rest supplies nourishment to vices.
Concerning the fourth, the Apostle says: “It is good not to eat meats.”
Concerning the fifth, Helinand says: “Woman is said from softening, as is hammer, because just as a craftsman softens iron by a hammer, so the devil, through woman, softens and hammers the whole earth.” St. Jerome says, “Lust subdues iron minds.” Claudian says:
Iron hearts grow soft with wanton arrows.
Concerning the sixth, the Apostle says, “Do not be drunk with wine, in which is luxury.” Virgil says:
And Venus in wine, fire rages in fire.
Concerning the seventh, Ovid says:
Minds very often grow wanton in favorable circumstances.
Solomon says in Proverbs, “The prosperity of fools will destroy them.” St. Augustine says, “Prosperous circumstances weary the minds of the wise; they harmed Solomon more than wisdom itself helped him.” Adversity, by contrast, sometimes draws one back from sins. Therefore the Lord says in Hosea 2: “I have hedged your ways with thorns, so that you would not find your paths and would not run after your lovers.” The thorns are adversities.
Concerning the eighth, by the name of play he understands every amusement. For sadness is opposed to lust, as the poet witnesses:
She is not accustomed to come to sorrowful beds.
Concerning the ninth, by the name of song every melody is included, whether made by voice or instruments. Isaiah says: “The cithara and lyre and tambourine, flute and wine, are in your feasts; and you do not regard the work of God.” Helinand adds: “It is difficult to find anyone of gentle voice and grave life, since gentleness of voice desires song, while gravity of life desires lamentation.”
Concerning the tenth, there is this:
Rare is the concord of beauty and chastity.
And this:
There is a great quarrel between beauty and chastity.
Concerning the eleventh, Helinand says: “As much danger as sex brings in woman, so much does age bring in a boy. A boy’s age is dangerous; society with him is more dangerous; familiarity with him is most dangerous. Hence we read in the Lives of the Fathers: ‘Familiarity is not to be had with woman, boy, or heretic.’” Thus far Antoninus from Helinand.
The remedies that consist in doing are these: the occupation of the mind with more serious cares, the thought of death and hell, the reading of good books, prayers poured out to God, the aid of the Blessed and of the angels implored, and especially that of the Most Blessed Mother of God Mary, who, as the greatest lover of chastity, most greatly desires to free human beings from this plague of filthy love.
It is also useful to meditate frequently not on that external and soon-perishing appearance, which is fragile, fleeting, often defective and painted, and shadowed over only by false enticements, but to search out in thought the internal and deeper composition of the body. What was she before she was born? A drop of filthy and stinking seed. What is she now? A sack of dung. Remove the little covering of skin: what is more foul or more horrible than she? What is nearer to a corpse? A dungheap covered with snow is white; let the snow be dissolved, and “peace, peace” to noses and eyes, all will cry, and they will flee. Beauty is more fleeting than snow; it is not liquefied, but vanishes. Water receives snow; what receives this beauty except deformity and dread, like that of a mormolycium? When the soul has fled, what will this one be, whether Lais or Helen? Food for worms, a putrid corpse, stinking, to be dissolved by corruption, from whose spinal marrow a terrible serpent will be born. “Should I love this? Should I die for this?”
Suidas narrates concerning Hypatia the Alexandrian that when she could not by counsel break off the importunate solicitation of a pupil who was in love with her, she threw before him her own little cloths, stained with menstrual fluid. “This,” she said, “young man, is what you love; but there is nothing beautiful in it.”
Appa and Gela, daughters of Gisulf, duke of Forum Julii, defended their chastity by the smell of putrid flesh placed under their breasts. For the barbarians, thinking that Lombard women naturally stank in that way, left them untouched. See the Annals of the Bavarians, book 3, and Antonio Bonfini, book 8 of the first decade of Hungarian Matters. Thomas of Cantimpre also narrates that a certain pious man, when he could not drive from his mind importunate thoughts of a certain little woman who had been beautiful while she lived, opened her tomb, embraced the decomposing corpse, placed his face against her face, contaminated with decay and worms, and rolled about in this foul-smelling stench until the stench and horror overcame every memory of lust.
How much more effective is this than that ridiculous thing, which cannot be reported without the reader’s pardon, prescribed by Jerome Cardano: “Let the man who is to be freed from love place the fresh excrement of his girlfriend in his shoe, and let him immediately put on the shoe.” Let him use his own remedy. Away with these filths. Indeed I would believe that love is changed by a foul odor into disgust for as long as the stench lasts; afterward, I do not know, unless one fortifies and arms the mind with similar thoughts, as I have said.
[margin: a: Cardano, book 2, On Variety. (b) Nider, last book of the Formicarius]
Under these remedies are contained those which Nider set down from Avicenna, except the sixth, which he himself admits often does not succeed.