Gold, Gems, and Fallen Angels

If there were as much faith on earth as there is reward for faith waiting in heaven, not one of you, my dearest sisters, from the moment she first “came to know the Lord” and learned the truth about her own condition — the condition of a woman — would have wanted a style of dress that was too cheerful, not to say too showy. She would rather have gone about in plain clothes, and gone out of her way to look poor, walking as Eve walked, in mourning and repentance, so that by dressing at every point like a penitent she might more fully make amends for what she inherits from Eve — the disgrace, I mean, of the first sin, and the hatred that attaches to her as the cause of the human race’s ruin. “In pain and in anxiety you bear children, woman; and your desire is toward your husband, and he rules over you.” And do you not know that each of you is an Eve? God’s verdict on your sex lives on in this present age; the guilt must live on too. You are the devil’s doorway. You are the one who broke the seal of that forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of the divine law. You are the one who talked him into it, when the devil had not the nerve to attack him. You destroyed God’s image, man, so easily. Because of what you deserved — death, that is — even the Son of God had to die. And you think about decorating yourself over and above your tunics of skin? [a]

Come now: suppose that from the world’s first days the Milesians had been shearing sheep, and the Chinese spinning trees, and the Tyrians dyeing, and the Phrygians embroidering with the needle, and the Babylonians working figures on the loom; suppose pearls had been gleaming and onyx stones flashing; suppose gold too had already come up out of the ground, and the greed that comes with it; suppose the mirror had already been licensed to tell its enormous lies. Then Eve — thrown out of paradise, Eve already dead — would have wanted these things as well, I imagine. So neither should she want them now, or even know what they are, if she means to live again: things she neither had nor knew of while she was alive. All of it, then, is the luggage of a woman under sentence and dead, got up as though to swell the pomp of her own funeral.

For the ones who introduced these things are themselves under sentence, condemned to the penalty of death — those angels, that is, who rushed down from heaven onto the daughters of men. So this shame attaches to woman as well. To an age far more ignorant than ours they disclosed certain well-hidden materials and a number of sciences that were better left unrevealed. If it is true that they laid bare the working of metals, and made known the natural properties of herbs, and published the power of spells, and traced out every prying art right down to the reading of the stars, then they also handed over to women, as something proper and peculiar to them, that whole apparatus of female display: the flash of the jewels that make a necklace shift color, and the gold bands that clamp the arms, and the orchil dyes that wool is colored with, and that black powder itself that the eyelids and lashes are drawn out with. [h]

What sort of things these are can be stated right here, without going any further, from the sort of teachers they had and the state those teachers were in. Sinners could never have shown or supplied anything that makes for integrity, nor unlawful lovers anything that makes for chastity, nor deserter spirits anything that makes for the fear of God. If these things are to be called lessons, then bad masters must necessarily have taught badly; and if they were the wages of lust, there is nothing shameful whose wages are honorable.

But why was it so important to show these things as well as hand them over? Was it that women could not please men without material means of splendor and clever contrivances of charm — women who, while still unadorned and unpolished and, so to speak, raw and rough, had already moved angels? Or was it that the lovers would have looked shabby, and, taking their pleasure free of charge, insulting, if they had made no gift to the women they had lured into living with them? These questions admit of no reckoning. Women who had angels for husbands could want nothing more; they had made a splendid match, to be sure.

Certainly those angels, who of course did sometimes think about where they had fallen from, and after the hot rush of their lust looked up toward heaven, paid back that very excellence of women — natural beauty — as having proved a cause of evil. Their good luck was to profit them nothing; instead, turned aside from plainness and sincerity, the women were to become offensive to God along with the angels themselves. The angels knew perfectly well that all display, and ambition, and the desire to please by bodily means, was displeasing to God.

And these are the angels we are going to judge. These are the angels we renounce at baptism. These, of course, are the reasons why they have deserved to be judged by human beings. What business, then, have their goods with their judges? What trade have the people who are to condemn with the people who are to be condemned? The same, I take it, that Christ has with Belial. How can we be consistent and climb onto that judgment seat to pass sentence on the very people whose gifts we are chasing after now? For you too, women though you are, have the same angelic nature promised you as your reward, and the same sex as men; the Lord promises you the same promotion to the dignity of judging. So unless we begin to pre-judge here and now, by pre-condemning their goods, which we are afterward to condemn in them, they will judge and condemn us instead.

I am aware that the writing of Enoch, which assigns this line of action to the angels, is not accepted by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either. I suppose they thought that a book published before the flood could not have survived that worldwide disaster, which abolished everything. If that is their reason for rejecting it, let them recall that Noah, who survived the flood, was Enoch’s own great-grandson. Of course Noah had heard and remembered, from the family’s own report and from what was handed down in the house, about his great-grandfather’s “favor in the sight of God” and about everything he preached — since Enoch had given Methuselah no other charge than to pass the knowledge of these things on to his descendants. So Noah could well have succeeded to the trusteeship of that preaching; and had the case been otherwise, he would not have kept silent about the arrangement God his Preserver had made, or about the particular glory of his own house. [m]

And if Noah did not have it by so short a route, there is still this to support our claim that the writing is genuine. He could equally well have renewed it by the Spirit after it had been destroyed by the violence of the flood — in the same way that, after Jerusalem was destroyed in the Babylonian assault, every document of Jewish literature is generally agreed to have been restored through Ezra.

But since Enoch in that same writing has preached about the Lord as well, nothing at all that has to do with us is to be rejected by us; and we read that “every writing useful for building up is inspired by God.” It may now seem to have been rejected by the Jews for that very reason, just like almost all the other passages that speak of Christ. And of course it is no wonder that they did not accept writings that spoke of the one whom they were not going to accept even in person, speaking in their presence. Add to all this the fact that Enoch has a witness in the apostle Jude.

Grant now that no mark of pre-condemnation has been branded on women’s finery by the fate of the ones who invented it. Let nothing be charged against those angels except their desertion of heaven and their marriage in the flesh. Let us examine the qualities of the things themselves, so that we may detect the purposes they are so eagerly wanted for. [q]

A woman’s outfit carries two ideas with it: dress and ornament. By “dress” we mean what they call a woman’s grooming; by “ornament,” what ought properly to be called a woman’s disgracing. The first is reckoned to consist in gold and silver and gems and clothes; the second in the care of the hair, and of the skin, and of those parts of the body that catch the eye. Against the one we bring the charge of ambition, against the other the charge of prostitution — so that even at this early stage you may look ahead and see which of all these suits your discipline, handmaid of God, since you are assessed on different principles from other women: on humility and chastity.

Gold and silver, the chief material causes of worldly splendor, must be identical in nature with what they come from — that is, earth; and earth is plainly the more glorious of them. For it is only after it has been worked over in tears, by convict labor, in the deadly workshops of cursed mines, and has left its name of “earth” behind it in the fire, that it passes, a fugitive from the mine, from torments to ornaments, from punishments to embellishments, from disgrace to honors. [s]

But iron and bronze and the other cheapest materials share exactly the same condition as silver and gold, both in their earthly origin and in the metalworking they go through — so that, by nature’s reckoning, the substance of gold and silver may be judged not a bit nobler than theirs. And if it is from usefulness that gold and silver get their glory, then iron and bronze beat them. Their usefulness is so arranged by the Creator that they not only perform functions of their own that are more numerous and more necessary to human affairs, but also, by their own strength, serve the turn of gold and silver as well, in the service of more just causes. Rings are not only made of iron; the memory of antiquity still preserves the fame of certain eating and drinking vessels made of bronze. Let the insane abundance of gold and silver see to it, if it is used for making utensils even for filthy purposes.

At any rate, no field is plowed by means of gold, and no ship is fastened together by the strength of silver. No mattock sinks a golden edge into the ground; no nail drives a silver point into planks. I pass over the fact that the needs of our whole life depend on iron and bronze, while those rich materials themselves, which have to be dug out of mines and need a forging process for every use they are put to, are helpless without the hard vigor of iron and bronze. So we have to judge, already at this point, where this high dignity comes from that gold and silver enjoy, when they take precedence over materials that are not only first cousins to them in origin but more powerful in usefulness.

But next: what am I to make of those jewels that rival gold in haughtiness, except little pebbles and stones and paltry grains of the same earth? And they are not even necessary for laying foundations, or raising partition walls, or holding up pediments, or making roofs solid. The only building they know how to raise is this silly pride of women — since they need slow rubbing before they will shine, and artful backing before they will show to advantage, and careful drilling before they will hang, and since they give gold a hand in return in the business of seductive display. [u]

But whatever it is that ambition fishes up out of the British or the Indian sea, it is a kind of conch, no more pleasant in flavor than — I will not say the oyster and the sea snail, but — even the giant mussel. For let me add that I know conchs that are sweet fruits of the sea. And if that foreign conch is suffering from some internal blister, that ought to be counted its defect rather than its glory; and though the thing is called a “pearl,” still something else must be meant than a hard round growth on a shellfish.

Some say, too, that gems are picked out of the foreheads of dragons, just as there is a certain stony substance in the brains of fish. This too was all the Christian woman needed — to add a charm to herself out of the serpent! Is this how she will set her heel on the devil’s head, while she heaps ornaments taken from his head onto her own neck, or onto her very head?

It is only from being rare and foreign that all these things have their charm; within their own native borders, in short, they are not held to be worth so much. Abundance is always contemptuous of itself. There are some barbarians among whom, because gold is native and plentiful, it is the custom to keep the criminals in their prison houses chained with gold, and to load the wicked with riches — the guiltier, the wealthier. At last a way has really been found to keep even gold from being loved. [x]

We have also seen at Rome the nobility of gems blush in the presence of our married ladies at the contemptuous use the Parthians and the Medes and the rest of their own countrymen make of them — only, their gems are generally not worn for show. Emeralds lurk inside their belts; the sword that hangs below the breast is the only witness to the cylinder stones that decorate its hilt; and the massive single pearls on their boots are longing to be lifted out of the mud. In short, the things they carry most richly jeweled are exactly the things that ought not to be jeweled at all — either the stones are not on show, or they are on show only to prove that they are also being treated as nothing.

In the same way, too, the very slaves of those barbarians make the colors of our clothes lose their glory, by wearing the same colors themselves. Their partition walls even use casually, in place of paint, the Tyrian and violet and grand royal hangings that you take apart and make over with so much labor. Purple among them is cheaper than red ocher — and rightly so; for what lawful honor can clothes get from being adulterated with unlawful colors? [z]

What God has not produced himself does not please him — unless he was unable to order sheep to be born with purple and sky-blue fleeces. If he was able, then plainly he was unwilling; and what God did not will, of course, ought not to be manufactured. So those things are not the best by nature which are not from God, the author of nature. And so they are understood to be from the devil, the corrupter of nature; for there is nobody else they can belong to, if they are not God’s, since what is not God’s must necessarily be his rival’s. And apart from the devil and his angels, God has no other rival.

Again, if the materials are God’s, it does not follow at once that the ways men enjoy them are his too. The question is not only where conchs come from, but what sphere of decoration is assigned to them, and where it is that they display their beauty. For all those profane pleasures of worldly shows — and I have already published a volume of their own about them — and idolatry itself as well, derive their material causes from God’s creatures. Yet a Christian ought not to attach himself to the frenzies of the racecourse, or the atrocities of the arena, or the filth of the stage, simply because God has given man the horse, and the panther, and the power of speech. In just the same way a Christian cannot commit idolatry and get away with it because the incense, and the wine, and the fire that feeds on them, and the animals made into victims, are God’s workmanship — since even the material thing that is worshiped is God’s creature. So in this case too, when it comes to the actual use of them, does the origin of the materials, which comes down from God, excuse a use that is foreign to God and guilty, no less, of worldly glory?

For since some particular things are distributed by God over certain individual lands, and over one particular stretch of sea, and are foreign to one another, they are correspondingly either ignored or wanted — wanted among foreigners, as rarities, and ignored, rightly enough if anywhere, among their own countrymen, because among them there is no such burning desire for a glory that is cold at home. [ac]

But the rareness and foreignness that arise out of that distribution of property which God has ordered as he willed always find favor in strangers’ eyes, and stir up, out of the simple fact of not having what God has made native to somewhere else, the craving to have it. Out of that another vice is drawn: having too much. For although having may perhaps be allowable, a limit is still bound to be kept. This second vice will be ambition; and that is how the very name is to be interpreted, since it is born from a craving that goes round and round in the mind, with a view to the desire for glory — a grand desire, no doubt, which, as we have said, is recommended neither by nature nor by truth, but by a vicious passion of the mind: craving.

And there are other vices bound up with ambition and glory. So they have gone on to run up the prices of things as well, in order to add fuel to themselves; for craving grows greater in proportion as it has set a higher value on the thing it has eagerly wanted. Out of the smallest jewel boxes a whole inheritance is produced. On a single thread a million sesterces hangs. One delicate neck carries woods and islands about on it. The slender lobes of the ears use up a fortune, and the left hand plays with a separate money bag on every finger. Such is the strength of ambition: it can bear on one small body, and that a woman’s, the produce of so much wealth.