Paint, Dye, and False Hair

Handmaids of the living God, my fellow servants and sisters: the right I share with you — I, the very last of you in that right of shared servanthood and brotherhood — gives me the nerve to speak to you. Not, of course, a speech of affection; a speech that builds the road for affection, in the cause of your salvation. And that salvation — not women’s only, but men’s as well — consists chiefly in showing modesty. For since the Holy Spirit came into us and set us apart as holy, we are all “the temple of God”; and modesty is the keeper and priestess of that temple. She must let nothing unclean or unholy be carried inside, or the God who lives there will take offense and walk out of the defiled house for good. [a]

But this time I am not going to speak about modesty itself. The commands of God press in on every side, and they are enough to require it and to enforce it. I am going to speak about what belongs to it — that is, about how you ought to carry yourselves. For most women (and I trust God will let me censure this in all of them, with a view, of course, to censuring myself) are bold enough, out of plain ignorance or else out of pretense, to carry themselves as though modesty consisted only in the bare intactness of the flesh and in turning away from actual sexual sin — as though nothing more were needed on the outside, in the matter of dress and grooming, of studied elegance and glitter. They go about looking exactly like the women of the nations, in whom the sense of real modesty is missing; because in people who do not know God, the guardian and master of truth, nothing is true.

For if any modesty can be believed to exist among the nations, it is plainly so unfinished and so undisciplined that, while it does hold on to itself in the mind up to a point, it still lets itself slacken into extravagant license of dress — exactly as you would expect of the perversity of the nations, craving the very thing whose actual doing it carefully avoids. How few of them, in short, do not long to look pleasing to strangers? How few do not paint themselves up for that very reason, and then deny that they were ever an object of anyone’s appetite? And suppose this is all that modesty among the nations amounts to — not to commit the sin, but still to be willing to; or not even to be willing, and yet not quite to refuse — what is surprising about that? Everything that is not God’s is twisted. So let those women see to themselves: because they do not hold on to the whole of what is good, they easily mix evil into even the part they do hold. You must part company with them, in this as in all else, in the way you carry yourselves too, since you are to be “perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

You need to know this: in the eyes of perfect modesty — that is, Christian modesty — being desired by other people is not merely something you should not want. It is something you should loathe. First, because working at your own attractiveness in order to please does not come from a clean conscience, since we know that good looks naturally invite lust. Why stir up that evil toward yourself? Why invite the very thing you claim to be a stranger to? Second, because we ought not to open a road for temptations. By sheer persistence they sometimes bring off the wickedness God drives out of his own people; and at the very least they throw the spirit into an uproar by setting a stumbling block in front of it. [f]

We ought indeed to walk so holily, and with faith so completely solid underfoot, that we are confident and secure about our own conscience, wanting that gift to stay with us to the end and yet not taking it for granted. For the man who takes it for granted is less apprehensive; the man who is less apprehensive takes less precaution; the man who takes less precaution runs more risk. Fear is the foundation of salvation; taking things for granted is what gets in the way of fear. It is more useful, then, to expect that we may possibly fail than to assume that we cannot. Expecting it will lead us to fear, fear to caution, and caution to salvation; whereas if we assume, there will be neither fear nor caution to save us. A man who acts confidently without also acting warily has no safe or solid confidence; the man who is wary is the one who will really be able to be confident. As for God’s own servants — may the Lord in his mercy see to it that they are even allowed to presume on his goodness.

But why are we a danger to our neighbor? Why do we import craving into our neighbor? If God, in enlarging the law, does not separate that craving from the actual act of sexual sin when it comes to the penalty, I do not know whether he lets off unpunished the person who has been the cause of somebody else’s ruin. For that other person, the moment he has felt craving for your beauty and has already committed in his mind the deed his craving pointed at, is lost — and you have been made the sword that kills him. So even if you are clear of the crime, you are not clear of the disgrace. When a robbery is committed on a man’s estate, the crime itself is not charged to the owner, and yet the property is branded with the shame of it and the owner himself is spattered with the scandal.

Are we to paint ourselves up so that our neighbors may be ruined? Then where is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”? Where is “Do not look after your own interests only, but your neighbor’s”? No word spoken by the Holy Spirit ought to be shut up in the one subject immediately at hand and not applied and carried through to every situation where it is useful. And so, since both our own interest and other people’s are caught up in this careful pursuit of most dangerous good looks, it is high time you knew that you must not merely refuse the whole display of manufactured, elaborate beauty; even natural good looks must be blotted out by hiding and neglect, as being just as dangerous to the eyes that fall on them. Beauty is not to be blamed. It is a piece of bodily good fortune; it is an extra outlay of God’s own modeling hand; it is a kind of fine clothing for the soul. Still it is to be feared, precisely because of the harm and the violence of the men who chase after it — the harm and violence that even Abraham, the father of the faith, greatly feared on account of his own wife’s beauty, and that Isaac bought safety from by passing Rebekah off as his sister, at the price of insulting her.

Now let it be granted that fine looks are not to be feared — not a nuisance to the woman who has them, not destructive to the men who want them, not dangerous to the people attached to her. Let them be reckoned safe from temptations, with no stumbling blocks around them. It is enough that God’s angels have no need of them. For where modesty is, beauty has nothing to do; because the proper use and fruit of beauty is sensual pleasure, unless someone thinks bodily attractiveness has some other harvest to bring in. Do women really suppose that in handing their neighbor the thing beauty is wanted for they are handing it to themselves as well, and that they should therefore build it up where nature gave it and hunt for it where nature did not? [j]

Someone will say, “Well then, if sensual pleasure is shut out and chastity let in, why may we not enjoy the praise of beauty by itself, and glory in a good thing of the body?”

Let whoever enjoys “glorying in the flesh” see to that. For us, in the first place, there is no chasing after glory, because glory is essentially a lifting of yourself up, and lifting yourself up does not fit people who profess humility under God’s commands. In the second place, if all glory is empty and senseless, how much more glory in the flesh — and for us above all? For even supposing that glorying is allowed, we ought to want the ground of our pleasing to lie in the good things of the Spirit, not of the flesh, since it is spiritual things we are chasing after. Let our joy lie where our work lies. Let us gather our glory from the place we hope for salvation from. Certainly a Christian will glory even in the flesh — but when it has been torn open for Christ’s sake, so that the spirit may be crowned in it; not so that it may draw the stares and the sighs of young men after it. So a thing which, look at it from where you like, is in your case unnecessary, you may rightly think nothing of if you do not have it, and neglect if you do. A holy woman, if she is beautiful by nature, should give nobody so large an opening. Even if she is beautiful, she ought not to set her beauty off, but actually to hide it.

Let me speak as though I were speaking to the nations, addressing you with a rule of theirs, the one everybody shares: you are bound to please your husbands and nobody else. And you will please them in exactly the measure that you take no trouble to please anyone else. Be free of anxiety, blessed sisters: no wife is ugly to her own husband. She pleased him well enough when he picked her out, whether it was her looks or her character that recommended her. Let none of you imagine that if she gives up the careful assembling of herself she will earn her husband’s hatred and disgust. Every husband demands chastity; but beauty a believing husband does not require, because we are not caught by the same good things the nations count as good — and an unbelieving husband actually views it with suspicion, precisely because of the disgraceful opinion the nations hold of us. So for whom is it that you keep up your beauty? If for a believer, he does not demand it. If for an unbeliever, he does not trust it unless it is plain and unworked. Why are you so eager to please a man who is suspicious of it, or a man who does not want it? [n]

None of this, of course, is put to you so that it can be worked up into total roughness and wildness of appearance. We are not trying to sell you the merits of being filthy and unkempt, but the limit, the standard, and the right measure in the care of the body. There must be no stepping over the line where plain and adequate care stops wanting more — the line that is pleasing to God. For the women who work cosmetic pastes into their skin, who stain their cheeks with rouge, who make their eyes stand out with soot, are sinning against him. His modeling hand, I suppose, does not please them. In their own bodies, I suppose, they are convicting and criticizing the Maker of all things. Criticize him they do, when they correct his work and add to it — taking what they add, naturally, from the rival craftsman. And the rival craftsman is the devil. Who else would show the way to alter the body, but the one who by wickedness altered the human spirit? It was certainly he who fitted out clever contrivances of this kind, so that in your own persons it would be plain that you are, in a manner of speaking, doing violence to God. [o]

Whatever is born is God’s work. Whatever is smeared on over it, then, is the devil’s work. To lay Satan’s contrivances over a work of God — how criminal that is! Our own slaves borrow nothing from our personal enemies. Soldiers want nothing from their own general’s foes. To ask, for your own use, anything at all from the enemy of the one in whose hand you are is a crime. Is a Christian to be helped in anything by that evil one? If he is, I do not know whether the name will go on belonging to him; because he will belong to the one whose lore he is so eager to be schooled in.

But how foreign all this is to your training and to what you profess! How unworthy of the Christian name — to wear a manufactured face, when plainness of every kind is laid on you; to lie with your appearance, when you are not permitted to lie with your tongue; to go after what belongs to somebody else, when the rule handed to you is to keep off what belongs to somebody else; to commit adultery in your looks, when modesty is your whole study! Believe me, blessed sisters: how will you keep God’s commands if you will not keep his own features on your own bodies?

I see some women change the color of their hair with saffron. They are ashamed even of their own nation — ashamed that being born did not assign them to Germany and to Gaul. So, as things stand, they move their hair there instead. It is a bad omen they read for themselves, a very bad one, with a head the color of flame; and they think a thing lovely that they are in fact defiling. What is more, the strength of the preparations burns ruin into the hair, and constant soaking with even an undrugged liquid stores up damage for the head, while the sun’s warmth — so much wanted, since it gives hair both growth and dryness — does harm here as well. What loveliness goes with damage? What beauty goes with filth? Is a Christian woman to heap saffron on her head as though it were an altar? For anything that is regularly burned in honor of the unclean spirit — unless it is being used for honest, necessary, wholesome purposes, the purposes God’s creature was provided for — may fairly look like a sacrifice. [q]

All the same, God says, “Which of you can make a white hair black, or a black one white?” And so they refute the Lord! “Look,” they say, “instead of white or black we make it yellow — which is more winning.”

And yet the women who regret having lived into old age try to change it the other way, from white to black. What recklessness! The age that is the object of all our wishes and prayers is ashamed of itself; a theft is carried out; youth, the time when we sinned, is sighed after; the chance to be sober is spoiled. May folly this great stay far away from Wisdom’s daughters. The harder old age works to hide itself, the more it will be found out. Here is a real eternity for you — in the everlasting youth of your head! Here is the imperishable you have to put on, with a view to the new house of the Lord that God’s sole rule promises! You are certainly making good speed toward the Lord; you are certainly in a hurry to be quit of this thoroughly wicked age — you, who find it unsightly to be getting near your own end.

And what service does all the labor spent on arranging hair render to salvation? Why is your hair never allowed any rest — now bound up, now let down, now built up, now thinned out? Some are anxious to force their hair into curls, some to let it hang loose and flying, and not out of honest plainness. Besides that, you fasten on I do not know what monstrosities of finely woven false hair: now in the shape of a helmet of untanned hide, a sheath for the head and a lid for the crown; now a mass dragged backward toward the neck. The wonder is that there is no open contest against the Lord’s rules. It has been declared that nobody can add to his own measure of height. You, however, do add to your weight — some sort of pads, or shield-bosses, to be piled up on your necks. [t]

If the sheer size of it gives you no shame, let the uncleanness. You may be fitting onto a holy and Christian head the cast-off hair of somebody else’s head — unclean, perhaps; guilty, perhaps, and bound for hell. No: drive all this slavery of ornament right away from a head that is free. You work for nothing when you labor to look adorned; you call in every most skillful maker of false hair for nothing. God tells you to be veiled. I suppose he does it in case anybody’s head should be seen.

And oh, that on that day of Christian rejoicing I, miserable as I am, may lift up my head — even if it is below the level of your heels. I shall see then whether you rise with your white lead and your rouge and your saffron and in all that parade of headgear; whether it is women got up like this that the angels carry up to meet Christ in the air. If these decorations are good now, and from God, then they will present themselves to the rising bodies too, and will find their several places. But nothing can rise except flesh and spirit, by themselves and unmixed. So whatever does not rise as flesh and spirit is condemned, because it is not from God. Keep away from things that are condemned — keep away from them today. Today let God see you as he will see you then.

Naturally, now: I am a man, and out of rivalry with women I am banishing them altogether from their own territory. Are there, then, in our case too, things that are taken away from us for the sake of the dignity we must keep up because of the fear we owe to God? For if it is true — as it is — that in men, for the sake of women, just as in women for the sake of men, the will to please is planted by a flaw of nature; and if our own sex admits to deceiving tricks of appearance that belong peculiarly to it — trimming the beard too sharply; plucking it out here and there; shaving around the mouth; arranging the hair, and disguising its gray with dyes; taking off all the first down over the whole body; fixing each hair in its place with some womanish paste; smoothing the rest of the body with some coarse powder or other; and then seizing every opportunity to consult the mirror, and staring anxiously into it — then, once the knowledge of God has put an end to every wish to please by sensual attraction, all these things are thrown out as frivolous, as enemies of modesty. [y]

For where God is, there modesty is; and there is dignity, her assistant and ally. How then shall we practice modesty without her instrument — that is, without dignity? And how shall we bring dignity to bear on the work of modesty, unless seriousness in dress and in face, and in the whole look of the entire person, marks the way we carry ourselves?