De Cultu Feminarum
De Cultu Feminarum Late Antiquity Tertullian LatinBOOK I
If as great a faith lingered upon earth as the reward of it which is awaited in the heavens, no one of you at all, dearest sisters, from the time she had come to know the living God and had learned concerning her own condition—that is, the condition of woman—would have desired a more cheerful, not to say a more glorious, garb; rather she would have gone about the more in mean attire, and would have affected squalor instead, carrying herself about as an Eve mourning and penitent, that she might the more fully expiate, by every garb of satisfaction, that which she derives from Eve—I mean the ignominy of the first transgression and the odium of the perdition of mankind. "In sorrows and anxieties you bring forth, woman, and toward your husband is your turning, and he lords it over you." And do you not know that you too are Eve? The sentence of God upon this sex lives on in this age; the guilt too, of necessity, lives on. You are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of that tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not strong enough to assail. You so easily shattered the image of God, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die: and is it in your mind to adorn yourself over and above your tunics of skins? Come now, if from the beginning of things the Milesians had shorn sheep, and the Seres had spun from trees, and the Tyrians had dyed, and the Phrygians had embroidered, and the Babylonians had woven in patterns, and pearls had shone, and carbuncles had flashed; if gold itself too had already come forth from the earth with men's greed; if it had already been lawful for the mirror also to lie so far—would Eve, expelled from paradise, already dead, in my opinion, have coveted these things? Therefore neither now ought she to desire or to know, if she longs to live again, the things which she had neither possessed nor known when she was alive. So all these things are the trappings of a woman condemned and dead, established as it were for the pomp of a funeral.
For those too who established them are reckoned as condemned to the penalty of death—those angels, namely, who rushed from heaven to the daughters of men, so that this ignominy too is added to woman. For when they had betrayed to the world, which was much more unskilled, both certain well-hidden materials and several not-well-revealed arts—since they had laid bare the works of metals, and had divulged the natures of herbs, and had published the powers of incantations, and had marked out every curiosity even to the interpretation of the stars—they conferred upon women, properly and as it were peculiarly, that instrument of womanly glory: the lights of little stones with which necklaces are variegated, and the circlets of gold with which the arms are constricted, and the dyed medicaments with which wools are coloured, and that very black powder with which the borders of the eyes are drawn out. What kind of things these are can in the meantime already be pronounced from the quality and condition of their teachers, in that sinners could neither show nor furnish anything toward integrity, lovers anything toward chastity, deserter-spirits anything toward the fear of God. If they are to be called teachings, evil masters must have taught evilly; if rewards for lust, the reward of no base thing is honourable. But what need was there of showing such things, as much as of conferring them? Was it that women could not please men without the materials of splendour and without the contrivances of comeliness—women who, while still unadorned and uncomposed and, so to say, raw and rude, had moved angels? Or would the lovers have seemed sordid and, through their gratuitous enjoyment, insulting, if they had conferred nothing on the women allured into wedlock? But this does not bear estimating. They could desire nothing more, who possessed angels: surely they had married greatly. But indeed those who at times were thinking whence they had fallen, and after the steamy moments of their lusts were sighing for heaven, recompensed that very good of women, their natural comeliness, as the cause of evil—so that their happiness should not have profited them, but that, carried down from simplicity and sincerity together with them, they might come into offence against God. They were certain that all glory and ambition and the affectation of pleasing through the flesh is displeasing to God. These are, forsooth, the angels whom we are to judge; these are the angels whom we renounce in the laver; these are, surely, the very things on account of which they deserved to be judged by man. What, then, do their wares do among their judges? What commerce is there between those about to condemn and those to be condemned? I suppose, what there is between Christ and Belial. With what assurance do we ascend that tribunal to decree against those whose gifts we covet? For to you too the same angelic substance is then promised again; the same sex which is in men too is promised the same dignity of judging. Unless, then, we have here already prejudged the case, by pre-condemning the things which we are to condemn in them, they rather will judge and condemn us.
I know that the Scripture of Enoch, which has given this order to the angels, is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish chest either. I suppose they did not think that, published before the cataclysm, it could have survived safe after that disaster of the world which abolished all things. If that is the reason, let them recall that Noah, the great-grandson of Enoch himself, survived the cataclysm—who surely, by domestic name and hereditary tradition, had heard and remembered concerning the grace of his great-grandfather with God and concerning all his preachings, since Enoch had enjoined nothing else upon his son Methuselah than that he should hand down the knowledge of these things to his posterity. Therefore, without doubt, Noah could have succeeded in the commission of the preaching, or because also otherwise he would not have kept silence, both concerning the disposition of God his preserver and concerning the very glory of his own house. If this did not hold so readily, that too would defend the assertion of that Scripture: namely, that, after it was abolished by the violence of the cataclysm, he could have reformed it again in the spirit—just as it is established that, after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian storming, all the equipment of Jewish literature was restored through Ezra. But since Enoch in that same Scripture has preached also concerning the Lord, nothing at all is to be rejected by us which pertains to us. And we read that "all Scripture suitable for edification is divinely inspired." By the Jews it may now seem to have been rejected for this reason, just as nearly all the other things too which sound of Christ. Nor indeed is it any wonder, if they did not receive certain Scriptures speaking of Him whom, even when present and speaking, they were not going to receive. To this it is added, that Enoch possesses a testimony in the apostle Jude.
Let no mark of pre-condemnation, from the issue of its authors, now be branded upon womanly pomp. Let nothing be imputed to those angels except the repudiation of heaven and the marriage of the flesh. Let us examine the qualities of the things themselves, that we may detect also the designs of their concupiscence. The dress of a woman carries about a twofold aspect: the apparel and the adornment. We call "apparel" what they call the "womanly world," and "adornment" what it is fitting to call the "womanly un-world." The former is reckoned in gold and silver and gems and garments; the latter in the care of the hair and the skin and of those parts of the body which draw the eyes. Against the one we level the charge of ambition; against the other, of prostitution—so that from this very point you may foresee, handmaid of God, what of these things suits your discipline, seeing that you are reckoned from different institutions, namely, of humility and of chastity.
Gold and silver, the chief materials of worldly apparel, must of necessity be that whence they are—earth, namely; plainly the more glorious for this, that, in the deadly workshops of the cursed metals, its toil bewailed in penal labour, it has left the name of "earth" in the fire, and thereafter is changed, a fugitive of the metal, from torments into ornaments, from punishments into delights, from ignominies into honours. But the condition of iron too, and of bronze, and of the other most worthless materials, is equal both in earthly kind and in metallic working; whereby the substance of gold and silver can be judged in no way nobler in the sight of nature. But if the glory of gold and silver is from the quality of their use, then surely more so that of iron and bronze, whose usefulness is so disposed that they both exhibit more proper services, and more necessary ones, to human affairs, and nonetheless lend out of their own the office of gold and silver for juster causes. For rings too are made of iron, and antiquity's memory still preserves certain vessels for eating and drinking made of bronze. Let it look to it, if even to filthy uses a mad abundance of gold and silver makes itself a servant. Certainly neither is a field prepared by the working of gold, nor a ship fitted together by the strength of silver. No mattock buries gold in the earth; no nail drives silver into boards. I say nothing of the necessities of all life, leaning upon iron and bronze, since those very rich materials themselves, both to be dug up again from the mines and to be wrought into whatever use, cannot exist without the laboring strength of iron and bronze. Now therefore it is to be estimated whence so great a dignity comes to gold and silver, since they are preferred to materials both consanguineous as to kind and superior as to usefulness.
But those little stones too, which join their pride to gold—what else should I interpret them to be than little stones and pebbles and small things of the same earth, yet not necessary either for laying foundations, or for building walls, or for sustaining gables, or for thickening roofs? This one stupefaction of women they have learned to build up—because they are slowly ground that they may glisten, and craftily set that they may bloom, and anxiously bored through that they may hang, and lend mutual procurement to gold. But if ambition fishes for anything out of the British or the Indian sea, it is a kind of shell, not more pleasant—I do not say than the mussel or the oyster—but not even than the giant clam in flavour. For I have come to know shells for this, as the fruits of the sea. But if that shell pustulates something within, it ought to be its blemish rather than its glory. And though it be called a "pearl," yet it is to be understood as nothing else than some hard and round wart of that shell. They say too that gems are dug out of the foreheads of dragons, just as in the brains of fishes there is a certain stoniness. This too was lacking to the Christian woman, that she should be made the more cultivated by the serpent. So will she trample the head of the devil, while out of his head she builds ornaments for her own neck, or for her very head?
All these things possess their charm from rarity and foreignness alone. In short, within their own native bounds they are not held of so much account. Abundance is always insulting toward itself. Among certain barbarians, because gold is homegrown and copious, they keep men bound with gold in the workhouses, and load the wicked with riches, the more wealthy the more guilty. At last, indeed, a way has been found how even gold should not be loved. The nobility of gems too we have seen at Rome blushing, out of the disdain of the Parthians and Medes and the rest of their countrymen, in the presence of the matrons—except that they are scarcely even held for display. Emeralds lie hidden in girdles, and the sword alone, under the bosom, knows the cylinders of its scabbard, and in their boots pearls long to emerge from the mud. In short, they have nothing so begemmed as that which ought not to be begemmed, unless it appears, or appears for this reason, that it may be shown even when neglected.
Likewise the honour of garments from their colours is worn out even by their slaves. But walls too they abuse for painting with Tyrian and hyacinthine and those royal hangings, which you laboriously unravel and transform. Cheaper among them is purple than red ochre. For what just honour of garments is there from the adulteration of unjust colours? That does not please God which He Himself did not produce. Unless it was that He could not bid purple and azure sheep to be born. If He could, then He did not will it; and what God did not will, surely it is not lawful to feign. Therefore those things are not by nature the best which are not from God, the Author of nature. So they are understood to be from the devil, the falsifier of nature. For they cannot be another's, if they are not God's, since the things which are not God's must of necessity be His rivals. But there is no rival of God except the devil and his angels. For the rest, if the materials are from God, not therefore are fruits of this kind from them in men. It is asked too whence shells come, and by what disposition they adorn, and where they place their beauty. For all those profane pleasures too of worldly spectacles, as we have published our own volume concerning them, even idolatry itself, consist of the things of God. Yet a Christian ought not therefore to be affected by the frenzies of the circus, or the atrocities of the arena, or the basenesses of the stage, because God gave both the horse and the panther and the voice to man; just as a Christian may not therefore commit idolatry with impunity, because the creation of God is both incense and wine and the fire that feeds, and the animals that become victims, since the very material that is adored is God's. So then, does the wealth descending from God in the working of materials excuse them on this account—as a thing alien to God, as guilty, namely, of worldly glory?
For as certain things have been distributed by God throughout each several land and each region of the sea, foreign to one another, among strangers reciprocally rare, among their own by right—if at all—either neglected or coveted, because there is not so great a fervor of glory in them, cold among those of the household: but indeed from the distribution of possessions, which God ordered as He willed, rarity and foreignness, always finding favor among strangers, from the simple cause of not having what God has placed elsewhere, kindle the concupiscence of having. From this another vice is extended, that of having immoderately. And even if perchance it must be had, yet a measure is owed. This will be "ambition"—whence too its name is to be interpreted, because it is born from concupiscence going about (ambiente) in the mind toward the votive desire of glory: a great vow, surely, which, as we have said, not nature, nor truth, but the vicious passion of the mind, concupiscence, has commended. And there are other vices of ambition and glory. So too it has inflamed the prices of things, that it might also inflame itself. For concupiscence becomes so much the greater, the more greatly it has prized what it coveted. Out of the tiniest little caskets a great patrimony is produced. In a single thread a million sesterces are strung. Forests and islands a tender neck carries about. The slender lobes of the ears expend a whole ledger, and the left hand sports with a separate moneybag on each of its fingers. Such are the powers of ambition—to carry the value of so great substances upon one and a womanly little body.
BOOK II
Handmaids of the living God, my fellow-servants and sisters—by what right I am reckoned among you, the most lowly indeed by that right of fellow-servitude and brotherhood—I venture to make a discourse to you: not, surely, of affection, but providing for your affection in the cause of your salvation. That salvation—not of women only, but also of men—consists chiefly in the exhibition of modesty. For since we are all the temple of God, the Holy Spirit having been brought into us and consecrated, the sacristan and priestess of that temple is modesty, which suffers nothing unclean nor profane to be brought in, lest that God who inhabits should, offended, forsake the defiled seat. But now we speak not concerning modesty—for the enjoining and exacting of which the urgent divine precepts everywhere suffice—but concerning the things pertaining to it, that is, how it behooves you to walk. For very many—and may God permit me, by reproving in all, to reprove this very thing in myself—either ignorantly through simplicity, or boldly through dissimulation, so go about as though modesty consisted in the integrity of the flesh alone and the aversion of ravishment, and there were no need of anything from without too—I speak of the disposition of apparel and adornment, the studies of beauty and elegance—carrying about in their gait the same surface as the women of the nations, from whom the consciousness of true modesty is absent, because there is nothing true in those who do not know God the Ruler and Master of truth. For even if any modesty can be believed in among the heathen, it is so far established imperfect and uncomposed, that, although in mind it acts to some extent tenacious of itself, yet in the licenses of dress it dissolves itself, after the perversity of the heathen, coveting that whose effect it shuns. In short, how rare is she who does not even covet to please strangers?—who does not take care to be painted up for that very purpose, and deny that she is sought? Although this too is familiar to heathen modesty—not to transgress, yet to wish to; or even, not to wish, yet not to refuse. What wonder? All things are perverse which are not of God. Let those, then, look to it who, by not obtaining the whole good, easily mingle even what they obtain with evil. For you it is necessary to differ from them, as in other things, so also in gait, since you ought to be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven.
Of perfect, that is, Christian modesty, know that the longing for itself is not only not to be longed after, but even to be execrated. First, because the eagerness of pleasing through comeliness, which we know to be by nature the inviter of lust, does not come from an unblemished conscience. Why, then, do you excite this evil in yourself? Why do you invite that of which you profess yourself a stranger? Then, because we ought not to open the way to temptations, which sometimes accomplish by their urging that which God drives away from His own, or certainly at least move the spirit by scandal. We ought indeed so to walk, holily and with the whole substance of faith, that we may be confident and secure concerning our conscience, desiring that this should persevere in us, yet not presuming it. For he who presumes, fears the less; he who fears the less, takes the less precaution; he who takes the less precaution, is the more imperilled. Fear is the foundation of salvation; presumption is the hindrance of fear. It is therefore more useful if we hope that we can transgress, than if we presume that we cannot. For by hoping we shall fear; by fearing we shall be cautious; by being cautious we shall be saved. On the contrary, if we presume, we shall be saved neither by fearing nor by taking precaution. He who acts secure, and not also anxious, does not possess a safe and firm security. But he who is anxious, he will truly be able to be secure. And for His own servants indeed let the Lord, of His mercy, take care, that it may even be happily permitted them to presume concerning His good. But why are we a peril to another? Why do we import concupiscence to another? Which if God, by not enlarging the law, does not distinguish from the fact of ravishment in the penalty of concupiscence, I know not whether He holds him guiltless who has been to anyone the cause of perdition. For that man perishes, as soon as he has coveted in your form, and has already admitted in his mind what he coveted; and you have become a sword to him, so that, even if you are free from the fault, you are not freed from the odium. Just as, when a robbery has been committed in someone's field, the crime indeed does not touch the owner, yet while the estate is branded with ignominy, he himself too is sprinkled with infamy. Shall we paint ourselves up, that others may perish? Where, then, is "You shall love your neighbour as yourself"? "Care not for your own things only, but also for another's"? No utterance of the Holy Spirit ought to be directed and received toward the present matter only, and not toward every occasion of usefulness. Since, then, both our own cause and others' is engaged in the eagerness for a most perilous comeliness, know now that not only the suggestion of feigned and elaborated beauty is to be refused by you, but even that natural comeliness is to be obliterated by dissimulation and neglect, as likewise troublesome to the assaults of the eyes. For although comeliness is not to be accused, as the felicity of the body, as an accession of the divine modelling, as some good garment of the soul, yet it is to be feared, even on account of the injury and violence of its pursuers—which even Abraham, the father of faith, dreaded in the beauty of his wife, and Isaac, falsely calling Rebecca his sister, redeemed his safety by a humiliation.
Granting now that dignity of form need not be feared, as neither grievous to those who possess it, nor ruinous to those who covet it, nor perilous to those joined to it; granting that it be deemed not exposed to temptations, not surrounded by scandals: it suffices that it is not necessary to the angels of God. For where there is modesty, there beauty is idle, because properly the use and fruit of beauty is luxury—unless someone supposes another harvest of bodily comeliness. Let those extend to themselves a beauty both given and not given—seek out the not-given—who think that they furnish to themselves what is demanded of beauty, when they furnish it to another. Someone will say: "Why then, when luxury is excluded and chastity admitted, is it not lawful to enjoy alone the praise of beauty and to glory in the good of the body?" Let him look to it, whom it delights to glory in the flesh. But to us, first indeed, there is no eagerness for glory, because glory is the disposition of self-exaltation. And further, exaltation does not suit the professors of humility according to the precepts of God. Then, if all glory is vain and stupefying, how much more that which is in the flesh—to us, at least? For even if there is glorying to be done, we ought to wish to please in the goods of the spirit, not in the flesh, because we are followers of spiritual things. In the things in which we labour, in those let us rejoice. From those let us pluck glory, from which we hope for salvation. Plainly the Christian will glory even in the flesh—but when it has endured, lacerated for Christ's sake, that the spirit may be crowned in it, not that it may draw after itself the eyes and sighs of young men. So, since on every side that is idle in you, deservedly both disdain it when you do not have it, and neglect it when you do. Holy women, if naturally beautiful, let it not be so far an occasion. Certainly, if it shall even have been so, it ought not to help, but rather to hinder.
As though I were speaking to heathen, addressing you with a heathen and common precept of all: you ought to please your own husbands only. But you will please them in so far as you take no care to please others. Be secure, blessed ones: no wife is ugly to her own husband. She pleased enough when she was chosen—commended whether by form or by character. Let none of you think that, if she abstains from the composing of herself, hatred and aversion of her husband will follow. Every husband is an exactor of chastity; but as for form, the believing husband indeed does not demand it, because we are not captivated by the same goods which the heathen think goods; but the unbelieving one, on the contrary, even holds it suspect, out of that wicked opinion of the heathen concerning us. For whom, then, do you nourish your beauty? If for a believer, he does not demand it; if for an unbeliever, he does not believe it save when it is plain. Why are you eager to please either a suspicious or a not-desiring husband?
These things, surely, are suggested to you not to be insinuated into a wholly raw and beastly condition, nor do we persuade concerning the good of squalor and filth, but concerning the measure and pivot and justice of cultivating the body. One must not go beyond what simple and sufficient cleanlinesses covet—beyond what is pleasing to God. For they transgress against Him who press their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, draw out their eyes with soot. Forsooth, the modelling of God displeases them; in themselves, forsooth, they convict themselves; they reprehend the Artificer of all. For they reprehend, when they amend, when they add—taking, surely, these additions from the adversary artificer. He is the devil. For who would show how to change the body, save he who by malice transfigured the spirit of man too? He, without doubt, contrived devices of this kind, that in you it might appear that you in a manner do violence to God. What is born is the work of God. Therefore what is feigned on is the devil's business. To superinduce the devices of Satan upon the divine work—how criminal it is! Our slaves borrow nothing from our enemies; soldiers covet nothing from the enemies of their commander. For to demand anything for use from the adversary of him in whose hand you are is transgression. Shall a Christian be helped in anything by that evil one? I know not whether this name will persist for him. For he will be his by whose teachings he covets to be instructed. But how alien from your disciplines and professions, how unworthy of the Christian name, to wear a feigned face—you to whom all simplicity is enjoined; to lie in your effigy—you to whom it is not lawful to lie with your tongue; to seek what is not your own—you to whom abstinence from another's goods is delivered; to practise adultery in your appearance—you whose study is modesty! Believe, blessed ones, how will you keep the precepts of God, not keeping His lineaments in yourselves?
I see some turning their hair with saffron. They are ashamed even of their own nation, that they were not procreated in Germany and in Gaul—and so they transfer their hair thither. Ill and most evilly do they augur for themselves with a flame-coloured head, and think comely that which they befoul. But the force of the medicaments both burns detriment into the locks, and the assiduity of even any pure humour stores up ruin for the brain; and then, the hair being at once animated and dried by the sun, a longed-for heat does harm. What comeliness is there with injury? What beauty with uncleanness? Shall a Christian woman heap saffron upon her own head as upon an altar? For whatever is wont to be burned to honour the unclean spirit—that, unless it is applied to honest and necessary and salutary uses, for which the creature of God was provided, may seem a sacrifice. But indeed God says, "Which of you can make a white hair black, or a black one from white?" And so they convict the Lord. "Behold," they say, "instead of white or black, we make it yellow—the more pleasing by grace." Although they try black too out of white—those whom it repents to have lived even to old age. O rashness! Age, longed for by vows, blushes; theft is committed; youth, in which we transgressed, is sighed after; the occasion of gravity is falsified. Let so great folly be far from the daughters of wisdom. Old age, the more it shall have studied to be hidden, the more will it be detected. This is true eternity—from the youth of the hair! This incorruptibility we have to put on over us, unto the new house of the Lord which the Sovereignty promises. Well do you hasten to the Lord; well do you make haste to depart from this most iniquitous age—you for whom it is unseemly to draw near to the end!
Likewise, what does so great laboriousness of arranging the hair contribute to salvation? Why is your hair not permitted to rest—now drawn tight, now loosened, now raised up, now beaten down? Some are eager to constrain it into ringlets, some that it may slip loose, wandering and flying—not with good simplicity. Besides, you fasten on I know not what enormities of subtle and woven hair-pieces—now in the fashion of a cap, as a sheath of the head and a covering of the crown; now a structure piled up backward toward the neck. It is a wonder that there is no striving against the Lord's prescripts. It has been pronounced that no one can add to his stature. But you add to your weight certain rolls, or shield-bosses, to be built up against your necks. If you are not ashamed of the enormity, be ashamed of the defilement—lest you fit, upon a holy and Christian head, the spoils of another's head, perhaps unclean, perhaps guilty and destined for hell. Nay, drive away all this servitude of adornment from a head that is free. In vain you labour to seem adorned; in vain you employ the most skilled builders of hair. God bids you be veiled. I believe, lest the heads of certain women be seen. And would that I, most wretched, on that day of Christian exultation, might raise my head even from below your heels! I shall see whether you rise again with your ceruse and rouge and saffron and in all that array of the head; whether the angels lift up such painted ones into the clouds to meet Christ in the air. If these things are now good and of God, then too they will run to meet the rising bodies and will recognize their own places. But nothing can rise again save the flesh and the spirit alone and pure. Condemned, therefore, is that which does not rise again in spirit and flesh, because it is not of God. From things condemned today abstain. Today let God see you such as He will then see you.
Forsooth, now, as a man who is a rival in sex, I drive women away from their own goods. Are certain things withdrawn even from us, out of regard for the gravity to be undertaken on account of the fear owed to God? Since to men too, on account of women—as to women on account of men—the will of pleasing is inborn by a vice of nature, and this sex too recognizes for itself its own deceits of form: to cut the beard more sharply, to pluck it out, to shave around it, to arrange the hair, and to decolour grey; to remove the whole first down of the whole body; to scrape it too with the womanly pigment; to smooth the rest with the roughness of some powder; then to consult the mirror on every occasion, anxiously to inspect oneself—whereas, God being known, the will of pleasing being taken away through the occasion of luxury, all those things are refused as idle, as hostile to modesty. For where God is, there is modesty, there gravity, its helper and companion. By what compact, then, shall we handle modesty without its instrument, that is, without gravity? But how shall we apply gravity to the administering of modesty, unless a severity be carried about both in the face and in the dress and in the contemplation of the whole man?
Wherefore, as regards your dress too and the rest of the hindrances of your composition, the amputation and shaking-off of the more redundant elegance must likewise be your care. For what does it profit to exhibit a face indeed frugal and unencumbered, and a simplicity worthy of the divine discipline, but to occupy the rest of the body with the fringed fooleries of pomps and delights? How nearly these pomps minister to the business of luxury and clash with the disciplines of modesty is easy to discern, in that they prostitute the charm of beauty by the partnership of apparel: so much so, that if they should cease, they render it ineffectual and ungracious, as it were disarmed and shipwrecked. On the contrary, if form is lacking, the support of elegance supplies, as it were out of its own, a charm. In short, ages now at rest and drawn up into the harbour of modesty are called away by the splendor and dignity of apparel, and their severity is disquieted by appetites, the incitements of dress compensating, namely, for the coldness of age. Therefore, blessed ones, first indeed admit not into yourselves the pimps and prostitutors of dress and apparel; then, if any of you are compelled by the reckoning of riches or birth or former dignities to go forth so pompously that they may not seem to have attained wisdom, take care to temper such an evil, lest you usurp license with full reins under the pretext of necessity. For how will you be able to fulfil the humility which our people profess, if you do not dig up afresh the use of your riches or elegancies, which make only for glory? But glory is wont to exalt, not to humble. "Shall we not, then, use what is ours, when sought?" But who forbids the use? Yet according to the Apostle, who admonishes us to use this world "as though we abused it not. For the fashion of this world passes away. And they who buy, let them act as though not possessing." Why so? Because he had premised, saying, "The time is gathered up." If, then, he shows that even wives themselves are so to be had as though not had, on account of the straits of the times, what does he feel concerning these vain instruments of theirs? For do not many too act thus, and seal themselves to eunuchhood on account of the kingdom of God, of their own accord laying aside so strong and surely permitted a pleasure? Do not some interdict themselves the very creature of God, abstaining from wine and from animal foods, whose fruits lie open to no peril or solicitude, but who sacrifice to God the humility of their soul in the chastening of their diet too? You too, then, have used riches and delights enough; you have plucked the fruits of your dowries enough, before the knowledge of the saving disciplines. We are they upon whom "the ends of the ages have run." We are destined by God before the world, in His temporal reckoning. And so, by chastening and, so to say, castrating the world, we are schooled by God. We are the spiritual and carnal circumcision of all things. For both in spirit and in flesh we circumcise worldly things.
Forsooth, God demonstrated how to steep wools with the juices of herbs and the salivas of shells! It had escaped Him, when He bade all things be born, to command purple and scarlet sheep! God too contrived the very workshops of those garments, which, light and slight, should be heavy by their price alone! God too produced such great works of gold, for the encompassing and setting of little stones! God too inflicted scrupulous wounds upon the ears, and held of so much account the vexation of His own work and the torment of innocent infancy, then for the first time feeling pain, that out of those scars of the body, born to the iron, there should hang I know not what grains—which, indeed, the Parthians too insert in place of bullae even upon their shoes! Although gold itself too, whose glory occupies you, serves a certain nation for fetters, the heathen literature reports. So far are these things good not in truth, but in rarity; but by arts introduced through the sinning angels, who betrayed the very materials too, laboriousness joined with rarity has produced preciousness, and from it the lust of women for possessing the precious thing has been excited. But if those same angels who uncovered both materials of this kind and their allurements—of gold, I mean, and of illustrious stones—and handed down the workings of them, and already taught among the rest the very art of the eye-paint and the dyeings of fleeces, were condemned by God, as Enoch relates—how shall we please God, rejoicing in the things of those who provoked the wrath and the animadversion of God thereby? Now, granting that God foresaw these things, that God permitted them; granting that Isaiah inveighs against no garment of purple, beats down no curled coiffure, reprobates no little crescents—yet let us not, like the heathen, so kindle these things upon ourselves, reckoning God only the Instituter, and not also the Despiser of His own institutions. For how much more usefully and cautiously shall we have acted, if we presume that all things indeed were provided by God then and placed in the world, that they might now be the things in which the discipline of His servants should be proved—so that through the license of using, the experiments of continence might go forward? Do not wise heads of households of set purpose offer and permit certain things to their slaves, that they may test whether and how they use what is permitted—whether honestly, whether moderately? But how much more praiseworthy is he who has abstained wholly, who has feared even the indulgence of his master? So therefore the Apostle too says, "All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient." How much more easily will he fear unlawful things who reveres lawful ones?
But what causes have you for going forth more built-up, since you are removed from those things which need such adornments? For you neither go about the temples, nor demand the spectacles, nor know the festal days of the nations. For it is on account of those assemblies and the much seeing and being seen that all pomps are brought forth into public—either that luxury may do its business, or that glory may grow insolent. But to you no cause of going forth is other than serious. Either some infirm one among the brethren is visited, or the sacrifice is offered, or the word of God is administered. Any one of these is a business of gravity and sanctity, for which there is no need of extraordinary dress, both composed and loose. And if the necessity of friendships and of duties toward the heathen calls you, why do you not go forth clad in your own arms—so much the more, the more it is among strangers to the faith?—that there may be a distinction between the handmaids of God and of the devil; that you may be an example to them; that they may be edified in you; that, as the Apostle says, "God may be magnified in your body." But He is magnified in the body through modesty—surely also through a dress befitting modesty. But it is said by some, "Let not the Name be blasphemed in us, if we detract anything from our former dress and apparel." Let us not take away, then, our former vices: let us be the same in character too, if also the same in surface; and then truly the nations will not blaspheme. But it is a grand blasphemy from which it is said: "Ever since she became a Christian, she goes about the poorer." Will you fear to seem poorer, ever since you have become richer, and meaner, ever since you have become cleaner? Ought Christians to walk according to the pleasure of the nations, or according to the pleasure of God?
Let us only desire that we be not the cause of a just blasphemy. But how much more blasphemable is it, if you who are called priestesses of modesty go forth, after the manner of the immodest, painted and bedecked? Or what less have those most unhappy victims of public lusts? Whom, even if certain laws used to restrain from matronly and matronal decorations, now certainly the wickedness of the age, daily rising up, has equalled to all the most honourable women, even to the error of distinguishing them. Although the seductions of beauty, never not joined to a prostituted body and due to it, the Scriptures too suggest. That mighty city, which presides over the seven mountains and the many waters, deserved from the Lord the appellation of a harlot. But in what garb was she compared to her appellation? She sits, certainly, in purple and scarlet and gold and precious stone. How accursed are the things without which the accursed and prostituted one could not be described! That Tamar, because she had painted and adorned herself, was for that reason seen by Judah's suspicion to be sitting—and so far did she lie hidden under a veil, the quality of her dress belying a harlot, that he both wished her and accosted her as a harlot and bargained with her. Whence we learn that against immodest meetings and suspicions provision must be made in every way. For why is the integrity of a chaste mind stained by another's suspicion? Why is anything hoped in me which I abhor? Why does my dress not foreannounce my own character, lest the spirit be wounded through the ears by immodesty? Let it be permitted to seem modest; certainly to be immodest is not permitted.
Some woman perhaps will say: "It is not necessary for me to be approved by men; for I do not require the testimony of men: God is the beholder of the heart." We all know it—provided, however, we recall what the same God has said through the Apostle: "Let your probity appear before men." To what end, unless that malice may have no access at all to you, or that you may be by example and testimony to the evil? Or what is, "Let your works shine"? But why does the Lord call us "the light of the world"? Why has He compared us to a city set upon a mountain, if we do not shine in the darkness and stand out among the submerged? If you hide your lamp under a bushel, you must of necessity, left in the darkness, be run into by many. These are the things that make us the luminaries of the world—our good things, namely. But the good thing—at least the true and full—does not love darkness; it rejoices to be seen and exults even in the very marking-out. To Christian modesty it is not enough to be, but also to seem. For so great ought to be its fullness, that it may flow out from the mind to the dress, and burst forth from the conscience to the surface, that it may look even from without upon its own furniture, as it were—furniture such as may suit the keeping of faith perpetually. For delicacies are to be shaken off, by whose softness and flux the virtue of faith can be effeminated. For the rest, I know not whether a hand wont to be encircled with a bracelet will endure to be benumbed into the hardness of a chain. I know not whether a leg that has rejoiced in an anklet will suffer itself to be straitened in the stocks. I fear for the neck, lest, occupied with snares of pearls and emeralds, it give no place to the sword. Wherefore, blessed ones, let us meditate on the harder things, and we shall not feel them; let us leave the more cheerful things, and we shall not desire them. Let us stand unencumbered against every violence, having nothing which we may fear to leave behind. These things are the cables of our hope. Let us cast off earthly ornaments, if we desire heavenly ones. Love not gold, in which all the transgressions of the people of Israel are marked. You ought to hate what ruined the fathers, what was adored by those who forsook God. Even then gold is the fuel of the fire. For the rest, for Christians the times are always—and now most of all—transacted not with gold, but with iron: the stoles of martyrdoms are being prepared; the angels who bear us up are awaited. Go forth now, built up with the medicaments and ornaments of the prophets and apostles, taking your whiteness from simplicity, your ruddiness from modesty, painting your eyes with bashfulness and your mouth with silence, inserting into your ears the words of God, fastening to your necks the yoke of Christ. Subject your head to your husbands, and you will be adorned enough. Occupy your hands with wool, fix your feet at home, and you will please more than in gold. Clothe yourselves with the silk of probity, the fine linen of sanctity, the purple of modesty. Painted in such a way, you will have God for a lover.