On the Dress of Women 1.1–1.9

If there dwelt on earth a faith as great as the reward of faith that is expected in heaven, not one of you, dearest sisters, from the time she came to know the living God and learned of her own condition, that is, the condition of woman, would have sought a more cheerful dress, not to say a more glorious one; rather she would go about in mean attire and affect squalor, carrying herself about as Eve mourning and repenting, so as to expiate more fully, by every garb of penitence, what she derives from Eve: I mean the disgrace of the first sin and the odium of human ruin. “In pains and anxieties you bear children, woman; and your turning is to your husband, and he rules over you.” And do you not know that you are Eve? The sentence of God on this sex lives on in this age; the guilt must live on too. 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 attack. You so easily crushed the image of God, man. Because of your desert, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die; and it is in your mind to adorn yourself over your tunics of skins? Come now: if from the beginning of things the Milesians had been shearing sheep, and the Seres spinning trees, and the Tyrians dyeing, and the Phrygians embroidering, and the Babylonians weaving, and pearls gleaming, and onyx-stones flashing; if gold itself had already come forth from the earth with covetousness; if the mirror too had already been allowed to lie so much: would Eve, expelled from paradise and already dead, have coveted these things, I suppose? So neither ought she now to seek or know, if she wishes to live again, what she neither had nor knew when she was alive. Therefore all these things are the trappings of a condemned and dead woman, arranged as if for the pomp of a funeral.

For those too who introduced these things are condemned and consigned to the penalty of death, namely those angels who rushed down from heaven to the daughters of men, so that this disgrace too might attach to woman. For when they had disclosed to an age far more ignorant certain materials that were well hidden and many arts not well revealed (for they had laid bare the workings of metals, had passed on the properties of herbs, had spread abroad the powers of incantations, and had pointed out every curious art down to the interpretation of the stars), properly and as a special gift they conferred on women this equipment of womanly glory: the lights of the little stones with which necklaces are varied, the bracelets of gold with which arms are clasped, the dyes of the orchil with which wool is colored, and that very black powder with which the lines of the eyes are lengthened. What sort these things are can be declared already from the quality and condition of their teachers: that sinners could show or supply nothing for integrity, lovers nothing for chastity, deserters of the spirit nothing for the fear of God. If they are to be called teachings, bad masters must have taught badly; if payment for lust, the payment for no base thing is seemly. But what was so important to show these things as to bestow them? Could women not please men without the materials of splendor and the devices of beauty, women who, still unadorned and unarranged and, so to speak, raw and crude, had moved angels? Or would the lovers have seemed mean and insulting in taking their pleasure free, if they had given nothing to the women drawn into union with them? But this is not for us to reckon. Those who possessed angels could desire nothing more; they had married grandly, of course! But those angels, who at times surely thought of where they had fallen from and, after the heated moments of their lusts, sighed for heaven, repaid that very good of women's natural beauty, as the cause of their evil, in such a way that their good fortune should not profit them, but that, led away from simplicity and sincerity, they should arrive together with the angels at the offense of God. They were sure that all glory, ambition, and desire to please by the flesh displeases God. These, surely, are the angels whom we are to judge; these are the angels whom we renounce in the washing; these are the very things through which they deserved to be judged by man. What then are their goods doing with their judges? What commerce have those who will condemn with those who are to be condemned? The same, I think, as Christ with Belial. With what consistency shall we mount that tribunal to pass sentence against those whose gifts we covet? For to you too the same angelic substance is promised then, the same sex as to men, and the same dignity of judging is pledged. Unless, then, we prejudge here and now their goods, condemning beforehand what we are to condemn in them, they will rather 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 canon either. They did not think, I suppose, that a book published before the flood could have survived safe after that disaster of the world, which abolished all things. If that is the reason, let them remember that Noah, who survived the flood, was the great-grandson of Enoch himself, and had surely heard and remembered, by family name and hereditary tradition, about his great-grandfather's grace with God and all his preaching, since Enoch charged his son Methuselah with nothing else than to hand on knowledge of these things to his descendants. So without doubt Noah could have succeeded to the trust of the preaching, or at any rate would not have kept silent about the dispensation of God his preserver, nor about the glory of his own house. Even if he did not have this so readily, there is another thing that would defend the claim of that scripture: he could have formed it anew in the Spirit after it had been destroyed by the violence of the flood, just as, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian conquest, it is agreed that every document of Jewish literature was restored through Ezra. But since Enoch in the same scripture preached also about the Lord, nothing at all that concerns us is to be rejected by us. And we read that every scripture fit for edification is divinely inspired. By the Jews it may now seem to have been rejected for that very reason, like almost everything else that speaks of Christ. Nor is this surprising, if they did not receive some scriptures that spoke of him whom they were not going to receive even when he spoke in their presence. Add to this that Enoch has a testimony in the apostle Jude.

Let no mark of prior condemnation, derived from the fate of its authors, now be branded on women's finery. Let nothing be charged to those angels except their repudiation of heaven and their marriage of flesh: let us examine the qualities of the things themselves, so that we may detect also the purposes of the desire for them. A woman's appearance involves two kinds: dress and adornment. By dress we mean what they call “womanly finery”; by adornment what it is fitting to call “womanly unfinery.” The one is reckoned in gold and silver and gems and clothes; the other in the care of the hair and skin and of those parts of the body that attract the eyes. Against the one we bring the charge of ambition, against the other that of prostitution; so that already from this you may see, handmaid of God, which of these suits your discipline, since you are rated by different principles, namely those of humility and chastity.

Gold and silver, the chief materials of worldly dress, must be the same as that from which they come, namely earth; plainly more glorious earth, since, wept over with penal labor in the deadly workshops of accursed mines, it has left the name of earth in the fire, and thereafter the fugitive metal is changed from torments into ornaments, from punishments into delights, from disgraces into honors. But iron and bronze and other the cheapest materials have an equal condition, being of earthly kind and the work of mines, so that the substance of gold and silver can be judged no nobler in nature. But if gold and silver have glory from the quality of their use, iron and bronze have more, whose usefulness is so arranged that they both render more and more necessary services of their own to human affairs and nonetheless supply, on their own, the place of gold and silver for juster causes. For rings are made of iron, and the memory of antiquity still preserves certain small vessels of bronze for eating and drinking. Let it see to it if a mad abundance of gold and silver serves even filthy uses with its vessels. Certainly no field is prepared by the work of gold, nor is a ship put together by the strength of silver. No mattock sinks gold into the earth, no nail drives silver into planks. I say nothing of the necessities of all life resting on iron and bronze, when those rich materials themselves, both to be dug out of the mines and to be forged for any use, cannot do without the working strength of iron and bronze. We must now reckon, then, where such dignity comes to gold and silver, when they are preferred to materials both akin to them in kind and more powerful in usefulness.

And these little stones too, which join their pride with gold, what else shall I call them but pebbles and stones and fragments of the same earth, yet not necessary for laying foundations or building walls or supporting gables or thickening roofs? The only thing they know how to build is this stupidity of women, since they are slowly rubbed to make them shine, cunningly set to make them bloom, anxiously bored to make them hang, and they lend gold a mutual allurement. But if ambition fishes anything from the British or Indian sea, it is a kind of shellfish, not, I say, pleasanter in taste than the purple-fish or the oyster, nor even than the giant mussel. For I know shellfish as fruits of the sea for this purpose. But if that shell pushes out a pimple inside, that ought to be its defect rather than its glory. And though it be called a pearl, it must be understood as nothing other than some hard, round wart of that shell. They say too that gems are dug from the foreheads of dragons, just as there is a certain stoniness in the brains of fish. This too the Christian woman lacked, to be made more elegant by a serpent! Is this how she will tread on the devil's head, while she builds ornaments from his head for her neck or for her very head?

All these things have their charm only from rarity and foreignness. Indeed within their native borders they are not held in such esteem. Abundance is always insulting to itself. Among certain barbarians, because gold is native and plentiful, they keep men bound with gold in their workhouses, and load criminals with riches, the richer the guiltier. At last a way has really been found for gold not to be loved! We have also seen the nobility of gems at Rome blushing before the matrons at the disdain of the Parthians and Medes and the rest of their countrymen, except that they hardly wear them even for display. Emeralds lie hidden in their belts, and only the sword under the cloak knows the cylinders of its scabbard, and pearls on their boots long to emerge from the mud. In short, they have nothing so jeweled as what ought not to be jeweled, since it either does not show, or shows only so that it may be seen to be despised.

In the same way, even their slaves wear out the honor of colored garments. Even walls are misused for painting with Tyrian and violet and those royal hangings which you laboriously unravel and transform. Among them purple is cheaper than red ochre. For what just honor is there in garments from the adultery of unjust colors? What God did not himself produce does not please him. Unless he could not order sheep to be born purple and sky-blue! If he could, then he did not will it; what God did not will surely must not be fashioned. So these things are not best by nature, since they are not from God, the author of nature. Thus they are understood to be from the devil, the corrupter of nature. For they cannot belong to another if they are not God's, since what is not God's must be a rival's. And there is no other rival of God except the devil and his angels. For the rest, if the materials are from God, it does not at once follow that such uses of them among men are too. One asks also where the shellfish come from, in what arrangement they adorn, and where they place their beauty. For all those profane pleasures of worldly spectacles too, as we have published a volume on them, and even idolatry itself, consist of things of God. Yet a Christian ought not on that account to be affected by the frenzies of the circus or the atrocities of the arena or the obscenities of the stage, because God gave the horse and the panther and the voice to man; just as a Christian may not commit idolatry with impunity because incense and wine and the fire that feeds on them, and the animals that become victims, are God's creation, since even the very material that is worshiped is God's. So then, in the use of materials, does their origin, coming down from God, excuse it, as if it were not foreign to God, that is, not guilty of worldly vainglory?

For as certain things have been distributed by God through the various lands and each region of the sea, foreign to one another, rare to outsiders in turn, while among their own people they are rightly either neglected or sought, if at all, because there is no such heat of vainglory for them among those at home, for whom they are cold: so, from the distribution of possessions which God has ordered as he willed, rarity and foreignness, always finding favor among outsiders, stir up, from the simple cause of not having what God placed elsewhere, the desire of having. From this another vice spreads, that of having immoderately. Even if something must perhaps be had, yet a measure is due. This will be ambition, from which its very name is to be interpreted, because desire is born in a mind that goes round about (ambiens) toward the wish for glory; a great wish, of course, which, as we have said, not nature nor truth but desire, a vicious passion of the mind, has commended. And there are other vices of ambition and vainglory. So it has inflamed the prices of things, so as to set itself on fire as well. For desire grows greater the more it has made great what it desires. A great patrimony is brought out of the tiniest little box. A million sesterces is strung on a single thread. A tender neck carries round forests and islands. The thin lobes of the ears spend a ledger of loans, and the left hand plays away a sack of money on each finger. These are the strengths of ambition: to carry on one small woman's body the use of such great fortunes.