On the Dress of Women 2.1–2.13

Handmaids of the living God, my fellow servants and sisters, by the right by which I am reckoned with you, I, the very last in that right of fellow servanthood and brotherhood, dare to address a word to you, not indeed of affection, but caring for affection in the cause of your salvation. That salvation, not of women only but also of men, lies above all in the display of chastity. For since we are all the temple of God, the Holy Spirit having been brought into us and consecrated there, chastity is the sacristan and priestess of that temple, who must allow nothing unclean or profane to be brought in, lest the God who dwells there be offended and forsake a defiled abode. But now we are speaking not of chastity itself, for the enjoining and exacting of which the divine precepts, pressing everywhere, suffice, but of what pertains to it, that is, how you ought to walk abroad. For very many women (and may God permit me, who certainly reprove this in myself, to reprove it in all) either simply ignorant or boldly pretending, go about as if chastity consisted only in the integrity of the flesh and the shunning of sexual immorality, and nothing outward were needed as well, I mean in the arrangement of dress and adornment, the pursuit of beauty and elegance; carrying about in their walk the same surface as the women of the nations, who lack the consciousness of true chastity, because there is nothing true in those who do not know God, the ruler and teacher of truth. For even if any chastity can be believed to exist among the gentiles, it is agreed to be so imperfect and undisciplined that, though it keeps some hold on itself in the mind, it nevertheless dissolves into license in dress, in the perversity of the gentiles seeking that whose effect it avoids. How few there are who do not desire even to please strangers! Who do not take care to be painted for that very reason, and deny that they are sought after! Although this too is familiar to gentile chastity: not to sin, yet to wish to; or even to be unwilling, yet not to refuse. What wonder? All things are perverse that are not God's. Let them see to it, then, who, not holding the whole good, easily mix even what they hold with evil. You must turn away from them in your walk too, as in other things, since you ought to be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven.

Know that, for perfect chastity, that is, Christian chastity, being desired is not only not to be sought by you but is even to be abhorred. First, because the eagerness to please by beauty does not come from a sound conscience, since we know beauty is by nature an inviter of lust. Why then do you stir up that evil in yourself? Why do you invite that to which you profess yourself a stranger? Second, because we ought not to open the way to temptations, which by pressing sometimes accomplish what God drives away from his own, or at least disturb the spirit with a stumbling block. We ought indeed to walk so holily and with the whole substance of faith as to be confident and secure about our conscience, praying that this may persevere in us, yet not presuming it. For one who presumes fears less; one who fears less takes less care; one who takes less care is in more danger. Fear is the foundation of salvation; presumption is a hindrance to fear. It is more useful, then, to expect that we can sin than to presume that we cannot. For by expecting we will fear, by fearing we will be on guard, by being on guard we will be saved; on the contrary, if we presume, neither fearing nor taking care, we will not be saved. One who acts securely, and not also anxiously, does not possess a safe and firm security. But one who is anxious can truly be secure. And may the Lord in his mercy take care of his servants, so that they may even happily presume on his goodness. But why should we be a danger to another? Why do we bring desire upon another? If God, enlarging the law, does not distinguish that desire in punishment from the act of sexual immorality, I do not know whether one who has been the cause of another's ruin goes unpunished. For he perishes as soon as he has desired your beauty, and has already committed in his mind what he desired; and you have become a sword to him, so that, even if you are free of guilt, you are not free of odium. As when a robbery has been committed on someone's land, the crime does not touch the owner, yet while the estate is marked with disgrace, he himself too is spattered with infamy. Shall we paint ourselves so that another may perish? Where then is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”? “Do not care only for your own things, but for another's”? No saying of the Holy Spirit ought to be directed to and taken up for the present matter only, and not for every occasion of usefulness. Since, then, both our own cause and that of others is at stake in the pursuit of this most dangerous beauty, know that you must not only refuse the display of feigned and elaborated beauty, but must even obliterate natural comeliness by concealment and neglect, as being equally troublesome to the glances of the eyes. For although beauty is not to be accused, being a blessing of the body, an addition of the divine molding, a kind of good garment of the soul, yet it is to be feared, if only because of the injury and violence of its pursuers, which even Abraham, the father of faith, greatly feared on account of his wife's beauty; and Isaac, falsely calling Rebekah his sister, redeemed his safety with an insult.

Suppose now that the dignity of beauty is not to be feared, so that it is thought neither burdensome to those who have it, nor fatal to those who desire it, nor dangerous to their partners, not exposed to temptations, not surrounded by stumbling blocks: it is enough that it is not necessary to the angels of God. For where there is chastity, there beauty is idle, since the proper use and fruit of beauty is wantonness, unless someone thinks there is another harvest for the body's comeliness. Should those women extend the beauty they have been given and seek what they have not been given, who think that what is demanded of it they supply to themselves too when they supply it to another? Someone will say: “Why then, with wantonness excluded and chastity admitted, may one not enjoy the praise of beauty alone and glory in the good of the body?” Let whoever likes to glory in the flesh see to that. For us, first, there is no pursuit of glory, since glory is the nature of exaltation. And exaltation does not befit those who profess humility by God's precepts. Next, if all glory is vain and senseless, how much more that in the flesh, for us at least? For even if we must glory, we ought to wish to please in the goods of the spirit, not in the flesh, because we are followers of spiritual things. In what we work for, let us rejoice. Let us gather glory from those things from which we hope for salvation. Certainly a Christian will glory even in the flesh, but when it has endured being torn for Christ's sake, so that the spirit may be crowned in it, not so that it may draw after itself the eyes and sighs of young men. So what is in every respect idle in you, you may rightly both disdain if you do not have it and neglect if you do. Let a holy woman, if naturally beautiful, not give occasion to it. Certainly, if it exists, she ought not to promote it, but even to impede it.

As if speaking to gentiles, addressing you with a gentile precept common to all, I say: you ought to please your husbands only. And you will please them the more, the less you care to please others. Be secure, blessed ones: no wife is ugly to her own husband. She pleased enough when she was chosen, whether recommended by beauty or by character. Let none of you think that if she refrains from making herself up she will meet with her husband's hatred and aversion. Every husband demands chastity; beauty, however, a believing husband does not require, because we are not captivated by the same goods that gentiles think good; while an unbelieving husband even holds it suspect, if only from that wicked opinion of the gentiles about us. For whom, then, do you cultivate your beauty? If for a believer, he does not demand it; if for an unbeliever, he does not believe it unless it is simple. Why are you eager to please one who suspects it or one who does not want it?

These things are not suggested to you so as to press you into an altogether crude and wild appearance, nor are we urging the good of squalor and filth, but a measure, a limit, and a justice in the care of the body. One must not go beyond what simple and sufficient neatness desires, beyond what pleases God. For those women sin against him who torment their skin with ointments, stain their cheeks with rouge, and lengthen their eyes with soot. Evidently God's molding displeases them; evidently they convict themselves in their own persons and find fault with the Maker of all. For they find fault when they amend, when they add, taking these additions, of course, from the rival maker. That is the devil. For who would teach how to change the body but he who transfigured the spirit of man with malice? Without doubt he devised such contrivances, so that in you his hand might appear to be laid, in a way, on God. What is born is the work of God. So what is painted on is the business of the devil. How wicked to lay the contrivances of Satan over a divine work! Our slaves borrow nothing from our enemies; soldiers covet nothing from their emperor's foes. For to ask for anything to 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 do not know whether this name will remain to her. For she will belong to him from whose teachings she desires to be instructed. And how foreign to your disciplines and professions, how unworthy of the Christian name, to wear a feigned face, you on whom all simplicity is enjoined! To lie in your appearance, you to whom lying with the tongue is not permitted! To seek what is not yours, you who are taught to abstain from what is another's! To practice adultery in your looks, you whose pursuit is chastity! Believe me, blessed ones, how will you keep the precepts of God if you do not keep his features in yourselves?

I see some women turn their hair with saffron. They are even ashamed of their own nation, that they were not born in Germany and Gaul; so they transfer their hair there! They give themselves an ill, a very ill omen with their flame-colored heads, and think that beautiful which they defile. Indeed the force of the dyes burns damage into the hair, and the constant use of any moisture, however pure, stores up harm for the brain; then the heat of the sun, so much desired for enlivening and drying the hair at once, does injury. What beauty is there with injury? What loveliness with filth? Shall a Christian woman heap saffron on her head as on an altar? For whatever is customarily burned to an unclean spirit, unless it is applied to honest, necessary, and wholesome uses, for which God's creature was provided, can seem a sacrifice. But God says: “Which of you can make a white hair black, or a black one white?” So they refute the Lord! “See,” they say, “instead of white or black we make it yellow, more pleasing in grace.” Though they also try to make it black from white, women who regret having lived to old age. O rashness! The age longed for in prayers is blushed at; a theft is carried out; youth, in which we sinned, is sighed for; the occasion for gravity is spoiled. Far from the daughters of wisdom be such folly! The more old age tries to be hidden, the more it will be exposed. This is the true eternity, from the youth of the hair! This is the incorruptibility we are to put on for the new house of the Lord, which the divine monarchy promises! You hasten well to the Lord, you hurry well to depart from this most wicked age, to whom it is unsightly to draw near the end!

And what does so much labor in arranging the hair contribute to salvation? Why is your hair not allowed to rest, now bound up, now loosened, now raised, now flattened? Some are eager to confine it in curls, others to let it slip away loose and flying, not with a good simplicity. You fasten on besides I know not what enormities of fine, woven wigs, now like a helmet, as a sheath for the head and a lid for the crown, now as a platform at the back of the neck. It is a wonder that there is no contest against the Lord's precepts! It has been declared that no one can add to his stature. But you add to your weight certain rolls, or bosses like shields, to be piled on your necks. If you are not ashamed of the enormity, be ashamed of the defilement, lest you fit onto a holy and Christian head the spoils of another's head, perhaps unclean, perhaps guilty and destined for Gehenna. Rather drive all this slavery of adornment from your free head. In vain do you labor to seem adorned, in vain do you employ the most skilled builders of hair. God commands you to be veiled. I believe it is so that the heads of some women may not be seen! And would that I, most wretched as I am, might on that day of Christian exultation lift my head even beneath your heels! I shall see whether you will rise with white lead and rouge and saffron and in that round of the head; whether angels will carry you, so painted, up into the clouds to meet Christ in the air. If these things are good now and of God, then too they will meet the rising bodies and recognize their places. But nothing can rise except flesh and spirit, alone and pure. What does not rise in spirit and flesh, then, is condemned, because it is not of God. Abstain today from what is condemned. Let God see you today as he will see you then.

No doubt I, a man, jealous as a rival of your sex, am now driving women away from their own things! Are there not things that are taken from us men too, out of regard for maintaining gravity, because of the fear owed to God? For men too, for the sake of women, as women for the sake of men, have an inborn wish to please, by a fault of nature; and this sex also recognizes its own tricks of beauty: to cut the beard too sharply, to pluck it here and there, to shave round it, to arrange the hair and dye out the gray, to remove all the first down of the whole body, to touch it up with women's pigment, to smooth the rest with the roughness of some powder, then to consult the mirror on every occasion and gaze anxiously; whereas, once God is known and the wish to please through the occasion of wantonness is taken away, all these things are rejected as idle, as hostile to chastity. For where God is, there is chastity, and there is gravity, its helper and companion. How then shall we practice chastity without its instrument, that is, without gravity? And how shall we apply gravity to maintaining chastity unless severity is carried about in the face, in dress, and in the look of the whole person?

Therefore with regard to clothing too, and the other encumbrances of your toilet, you must likewise take care to cut off and shake off excessive elegance. For what does it profit to show a face that is frugal and plain and a simplicity worthy of divine discipline, while occupying the rest of the body with the frilly absurdities of pomp and luxury? How closely these pomps attend to the business of wantonness and clash with the disciplines of chastity is easy to see, since they prostitute the charm of beauty by the partnership of dress: so much so that, if they are absent, they leave it ineffective and unattractive, as if disarmed and shipwrecked. On the other hand, if beauty is lacking, the support of elegance supplies charm as if from its own. Indeed ages already at rest and drawn up into the harbor of modesty are called away by the splendor and dignity of dress, and their severity is unsettled by desires, the incitements of dress compensating, of course, for the coldness of age. So, blessed ones, first, do not admit into your lives the procurers and pimps of clothing and dress; then, if the demands of wealth, or birth, or former rank compel some of you to go out so pompously as not to seem to have attained wisdom, take care to temper an evil of this kind, lest under the pretext of necessity you seize license with the reins let go altogether. For how will you be able to fulfill the humility which our people profess, if you do not prune back the use of your riches and elegances, which serve only for vainglory? And vainglory is accustomed to exalt, not to humble. “Shall we not use what is ours?” Who forbids you to use it? Yet according to the apostle, who warns us to use this world as if not abusing it. “For the form of this world is passing away.” “And let those who buy act as though they did not possess.” Why so? Because he had said beforehand: “The time is short.” If, then, he shows that even wives themselves are to be had as if they were not had, because of the straits of the times, what would he think of these empty accessories of theirs? Do not many act so, and seal themselves to eunuchhood for the sake of the kingdom of God, laying aside of their own will so strong and certainly permitted a pleasure? Do not some forbid themselves God's very creation, abstaining from wine and meats, whose enjoyment involves no danger or anxiety, but sacrificing to God the humility of their soul in the chastening of their food too? You have used riches and delights enough, then; you have plucked the fruits of your dowries enough, before you knew the saving disciplines. We are those on whom the ends of the ages have come. We were destined by God before the world, in the reckoning of time. So we are trained by God by chastening and, so to speak, castrating the world. We are the circumcision of all things, spiritual and fleshly. For in both spirit and flesh we circumcise worldly things.

No doubt God showed how to boil wool in the juices of herbs and the slime of shellfish! It had slipped his mind, when he commanded all things to be born, to order purple and scarlet sheep! God devised the workshops of those very garments which, light and thin, are heavy only in price; God produced such great works of gold for clasping and setting little stones; God inflicted painstaking wounds on the ears, and thought so much of tormenting his own work and the torture of innocent infancy, then first feeling pain, that from those scars of a body born for the steel certain grains should hang, which the Parthians, indeed, set even in their boots in place of studs! And yet even gold itself, whose glory possesses you, serves one nation for chains, as the gentiles' writings report. So they are good not in truth but in rarity; and the labor brought in by the arts through the sinful angels, who also disclosed the materials themselves, joined to rarity, has excited costliness, and from it the lust of women to possess costliness. But if the same angels who disclosed both such materials and their allurements, I mean of gold and brilliant stones, and handed on the work on them, and taught among other things even eye-paint and the dyeing of fleeces, were condemned by God, as Enoch relates, how shall we please God rejoicing in the things of those who for this reason provoked God's wrath and punishment? Now, granting that God foresaw these things, that God permitted them, that Isaiah finds fault with no purple garment, crushes no cluster-shaped ornament, rejects no little crescents, still we must not, like the gentiles, flatter ourselves, thinking God only the establisher of things and not also the one who looks down on how they are used. For how much more usefully and cautiously we shall act if we presume that all things were indeed provided by God and placed in the world then, so that there might now be things in which the discipline of his servants is tested, so that through the license to use them trials of continence might go forward. Do not wise heads of households deliberately offer and permit certain things to their slaves, to test whether and how they use what is permitted, whether honestly, whether moderately? And how much more praiseworthy is the one who abstains entirely, who fears even his master's indulgence! So, then, the apostle too says: “All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient.” How much more easily will one fear unlawful things who stands in awe of lawful ones?

And what reasons have you for going out more elaborately dressed, since you are removed from the occasions that need such things? For you neither go round the temples, nor ask for spectacles, nor know the festival days of the gentiles. It is for these gatherings, and for much seeing and being seen, that all pomps are brought out in public, either so that wantonness may do business or vainglory grow insolent. But you have no reason for going out that is not grave. Either some sick one among the brothers is visited, or the sacrifice is offered, or the word of God is ministered. Any of these is a business of gravity and holiness, for which there is no need of extraordinary dress, whether studied or loose. And if the necessity of friendships and duties toward gentiles calls you, why not go out clothed in your own arms, all the more so because you go to those who are strangers to the faith? So that there may be a distinction between the handmaids of God and of the devil, so that you may be an example to them, so that they may be edified in you, so that, as the apostle says, God may be magnified in your body. And he is magnified in the body through chastity, and surely also through dress befitting chastity. But some say: “Lest the name be blasphemed in us, if we take away anything from our former dress and finery.” Let us not remove our former vices, then! Let us keep the same morals too, if the same surface, and then truly the nations will not blaspheme! It is a great blasphemy when it is said: “Since she became a Christian, she goes about more poorly.” Will you fear to seem poorer since you have become richer, and dirtier since you have become cleaner? Ought Christians to walk according to the gentiles' pleasure or according to God's?

Let us only wish that we may not be the cause of just blasphemy. And how much more deserving of blasphemy is it if you, who are called priestesses of chastity, go out dressed and painted in the manner of the unchaste? Or what do those most unhappy victims of public lust have less? Even if some laws once kept them from the ornaments of wives and matrons, now at any rate the wickedness of the age, rising daily, has made them equal to all the most honorable women, to the point of confusing them. Yet the allurements of beauty, always joined to and due to the prostituted body, are suggested even by the Scriptures. That mighty city which presides over seven mountains and very many waters has earned from the Lord the name of prostitute. But in what dress has she been matched to her name? She sits, certainly, in purple and scarlet and gold and precious stone. How accursed are the things without which she could not be described as accursed and a prostitute! That Tamar, because she had painted and adorned herself, was taken by Judah on suspicion for one who sat for hire; and so hidden was she under her veil, the character of her dress falsely proclaiming a harlot, that he both wanted her as a harlot, and addressed her, and made a bargain. From this we learn that we must provide in every way against unchaste encounters and suspicions. For why should the integrity of a chaste mind be stained by another's suspicion? Why should something be hoped for in me that I abhor? Why should my dress not announce my morals, so that my spirit may not be wounded through my ears by shamelessness? It may be allowed to seem chaste; to seem unchaste certainly is not.

Perhaps someone will say: “It is not necessary for me to be approved by people; for I do not seek the testimony of people; God is the observer of the heart.” We all know it; provided, however, that we remember what the same God said through the apostle: “Let your uprightness appear before men.” For what purpose, except that malice may have no access to you at all, or that you may be an example and a testimony to the wicked? Or what is “Let your works shine”? Why does the Lord call us the light of the world? Why did he compare us to a city set on a mountain, if we do not shine in the darkness and stand out among those sunk down? If you hide your lamp under a bushel, left in darkness you must be run into by many. These are what make us luminaries of the world, namely our good deeds. And good, at least true and full good, does not love darkness; it rejoices to be seen and exults even at being pointed out. For Christian chastity it is not enough to be; it must also be seen. For its fullness ought to be so great that it flows out from the mind to the dress and bursts out from the conscience onto the surface, so that from outside too it may look upon, as it were, its own furniture, fit for keeping the faith forever. For those luxuries must be shaken off by whose softness and looseness the strength of faith can be made effeminate. Besides, I do not know whether the hand accustomed to be encircled with a bracelet will endure to grow numb in the hardness of a chain. I do not know whether the leg that has delighted in an anklet will let itself be squeezed into the stocks. I fear for the neck, lest, taken up with nooses of pearls and emeralds, it give no room to the sword. So, blessed ones, let us meditate on harder things, and we shall not feel them; let us give up the more pleasant things, and we shall not miss them. Let us stand ready for any violence, having nothing we fear to leave behind. These things are the fetters of our hope. Let us cast away earthly ornaments if we desire heavenly ones. Do not love gold, in which all the sins of the people of Israel are branded. You ought to hate what ruined the fathers, what was worshiped by those who forsook God. Even then gold was food for fire. For the rest, the times for Christians are always, and now more than ever, passed not in gold but in iron: the robes of martyrdom are being prepared, the angels who are to carry us are waiting. Go forth now, made up with the cosmetics and ornaments of the prophets and apostles, taking whiteness from simplicity, blush from chastity, your eyes painted with modesty and your mouth with silence, hanging in your ears the words of God, fastening on your necks the yoke of Christ. Submit your head to your husbands, and you will be adorned enough. Busy your hands with wool, fix your feet at home, and you will please more than in gold. Clothe yourselves with the silk of uprightness, the fine linen of holiness, the purple of chastity. So painted, you will have God as your lover.