On the Dress of Women

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.

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.