Not Gold but Iron

So with clothing too, and with all the rest of the baggage that goes into putting yourself together, the same pruning and cutting back of overgrown splendor ought to be your concern. What good is it to show a face marked by restraint, free of all pretense, plain in a way entirely worthy of God’s discipline — and then to load every other part of the body with the luxurious absurdities of display and indulgence? How closely such display is bound up with the business of sensuality, and how it gets in modesty’s way, is easy enough to see: it is with the help of dress that these displays put natural good looks up for sale. Take the display away and they leave that beauty useless and unthanked, as though it had been disarmed and shipwrecked. And where natural beauty is missing, outward ornament props it up and supplies a charm out of its own resources. Even the years that have at last been granted quiet, and have pulled into the harbor of modesty, are lured back out again by fine and dignified clothes; splendor unsettles a woman’s seriousness with the promptings of appetite, and makes up for the chill of age with the provoking charms of what she wears. [a]

So first, blessed sisters: do not allow yourselves the clothes and the get-up of a prostitute. And second, if there are any of you whom the demands of wealth, or of birth, or of offices once held force to appear in public so grandly dressed that you do not look like women who have come to wisdom, take care to keep an evil of this kind within limits — in case, under cover of necessity, you give free rein to indulgence. For how will you be able to carry out the humility that we profess if you do not prune back the enjoyment of your wealth and your finery, which lean so hard toward “glory”? Glory has always been in the business of lifting people up, never of bringing them low.

“Well then — are we not to use what belongs to us?” Who forbids you to use it? But it must be as the apostle directs, who warns us to use this world as though we were not using it up, since the outward shape of this world is passing away; and that those who buy are to act as though they owned nothing. Why? Because he had already laid down the premise: “The time has been wound up.” If, then, he plainly shows that even wives are to be had as though they were not had, because the times are so tight, what would he have thought of these empty accessories of theirs? Are there not many, in fact, who do exactly that, and seal themselves up in eunuchhood for the sake of the kingdom of God, giving up of their own accord a pleasure so strong — and, as we all know, permitted? Are there not some who forbid themselves the very “creature of God,” keeping off wine and meat, though enjoying either one runs no risk and costs no anxiety? They sacrifice to God the humbling of their own soul even in their restrained use of food.

You too, then, have used your wealth and your luxuries long enough; you have picked the fruit of your dowries long enough — before you came to the knowledge of the disciplines that save. We are the people “on whom the ends of the ages have met, having run their course.” God marked us out beforehand, before the world existed, to come at the far edge of time. And so God is training us to chastise the age — to geld it, so to speak. We are the circumcision of all things, in spirit and in flesh alike; for in spirit and in flesh we cut away the principles of this age.

It was God, of course, who showed us how to dye wool with the juices of plants and the secretions of shellfish. It must have slipped his mind, while he was ordering the universe into being, to give the command for purple and scarlet sheep. It was God, too, who worked out with such care the manufacture of those garments that are light and thin in themselves and heavy in price alone; God who turned out those grand gold instruments for binding the hair up and parting it; God who brought in the fashion of neatly cut wounds in the ears, and set so high a value on the torture of his own handiwork and the agonies of innocent infancy, taught to suffer with its first breath — so that from those scars in the body, born for the iron, there could hang who knows what precious grains, the ones the Parthians, as anyone can see, stick onto their very shoes in place of studs. [h]

And even the gold itself, whose “glory” carries you away, serves a certain people — so the nations’ own books tell us — for chains. That is how true it is that these things are made good not by any real worth but by scarcity. Add to their scarcity the enormous labor of working them, by arts brought in through the sinning angels, who revealed the raw materials as well, and you have their high cost — and out of the high cost, a woman’s craving to own it. But if those same angels who disclosed both the materials of this kind and their attractions — gold, I mean, and glittering stones — and taught men how to work them, and in time taught them, among other things, the use of eye powder and the dyeing of fleeces, have been condemned by God, as Enoch tells us, then how are we to please God while we take delight in the property of angels who by these very things brought down God’s anger and his vengeance?

Now grant that God did foresee these things; grant that God allowed them; grant that Isaiah finds fault with no purple robe, clamps down on no hair-net, condemns no crescent pendants. Still, let us not flatter ourselves as the nations do and think that God is a Maker only, and not also a watcher over what he has made. How much more useful and careful it will be to venture the guess that all these things were indeed provided at the beginning and set in this age by God, so that there would be a means now of testing the discipline of his servants — so that the freedom to use them could be the way the trials of self-control are run. Do sensible heads of households not deliberately put certain things within their slaves’ reach, and allow it, to try whether and how they will use what they have been allowed — honestly, or with restraint? But how much more praise belongs to the slave who keeps off entirely, who is afraid even of his master’s indulgence. So the apostle too: “All things are lawful,” he says, “but not all things are good for us.” How much more easily will a man fear what is not allowed, when he holds in awe what is?

Besides, what reasons do you have for appearing in public in excessive grandeur, when you have been taken out of the situations that call for such a show? You do not make the round of the temples, you do not demand to be at the public games, you have nothing to do with the nations’ festival days. It is for the sake of all those gatherings, and of much seeing and being seen, that every kind of display is paraded before the public eye — either to carry on the trade in sensuality or to puff up “glory.” You, though, have no reason to appear in public except a serious one. Either a brother is sick and is being visited, or the sacrifice is being offered, or the word of God is being handed out. Whichever of these you name is a matter of gravity and holiness, and none of them calls for special clothes — neither the carefully arranged kind nor the studiedly careless kind. [n]

And if the claims of friendship among the nations, or some act of kindness, call you out — why not go in your own armor? All the more so, since you are going to people who are strangers to the faith. Then there will be a difference between the maidservants of God and the maidservants of the devil; then you will be an example to them, and they will be built up by what they see in you; then, as the apostle says, “God may be made great in your body.” And he is made great in the body through modesty — and so, of course, through clothing that suits modesty.

Ah, but some people press this on us: “Let the Name not be spoken against because of us, if we make any change downward from our old style and dress.” Then let us not get rid of our old vices either! Let us keep the same character, if we have to keep the same appearance — and then, truly, the nations will not speak against us. Here is a grand blasphemy for you: “Ever since she became a Christian, she goes about in poorer clothes.” Will you be afraid to look poorer from the moment you were made richer, and shabbier from the moment you were made clean? Is it by the ruling of the nations, or by the ruling of God, that Christians are to conduct themselves?

Let us only hope that we give no cause for blasphemy that is deserved. But how much more provoking of blasphemy is it that you, who are called the priestesses of modesty, should appear in public got up and painted like women who have none? If you do, what would be left to mark the poor wretches who are the prey of the public’s lusts as anything beneath you? There were once laws to keep them from the ornaments of a wife and a matron; now, at any rate, the daily-growing rottenness of the age has raised them so nearly level with all the most respectable women that the difficulty is telling them apart. [r]

And even the Scriptures suggest that a whore’s attractions of appearance always go with prostitution of the body, and are owed to it. That powerful city which presides over the seven hills and over very many waters has earned from the Lord the name of prostitute. And what sort of dress is the instrument by which she is likened to that name? She sits, sure enough, “in purple, and scarlet, and gold, and precious stone.” How accursed those things are, when without their help an accursed prostitute could not even have been described! It was because Tamar “had painted and adorned herself” that Judah took her for a whore: hidden under her veil, with the quality of her dress lying about her as if she were one, she was judged to be one, and he spoke to her and struck a bargain with her on those terms. From this we take one more confirmation of the lesson: guard in every way against every immodest meeting and every immodest suspicion. Why should the integrity of a chaste mind be dirtied by a neighbor’s suspicion? Why should a thing I want nothing to do with be hoped for in me? Why does my dress not announce my character in advance, so that my spirit is not wounded through my ears by some piece of shamelessness? Grant that it is allowed to look like a modest woman: to look like an immodest one is certainly not allowed.

Perhaps some woman will say: “I have no need to be approved by men, for I do not want the testimony of men. God is the inspector of the heart.” We all know that — provided we also remember what the same God has said through the apostle: “Let your uprightness be seen by all men.” For what purpose, except that malice may find no way into you at all, and that you may be an example and a testimony to the wicked? Otherwise, what does “Let your works shine” mean? And why does the Lord call us the light of the world; why has he compared us to a city built on a mountain — if we do not shine in the middle of the darkness and stand out above the people who have sunk down? If you hide your lamp under the grain basket, you will necessarily be left in the dark yourself, and a good many people will run into you. The things that make us lights of the world are these: our good works. And what is good, provided it is genuine and complete, does not love the dark. It is glad to be seen; it delights in the very fingers that are pointed at it. [t]

For Christian modesty it is not enough to be modest; it must look modest too. Its fullness ought to be such that it flows out of the mind into the clothing and breaks out of the conscience into the outward appearance — so that even from outside it can look over its own furnishings, furnishings fit to keep faith on as a lodger for good. Luxuries whose softness and effeminacy unman the strength of faith have to be thrown out. Otherwise I do not know whether the wrist that has been used to a palm-leaf bracelet will hold out until it hardens into the numbness of its own chain. I do not know whether the leg that has enjoyed its anklet will let itself be squeezed into the shackle. I am afraid the neck, hung about with nooses of pearl and emerald, will leave no room for the sword.

So, blessed sisters, let us think hard about hardship, and we will not feel it; let us give up luxuries, and we will not miss them. Let us stand ready to endure every violence, having nothing we would be afraid to leave behind. It is these things that are the ropes holding our hope back. Let us throw away earthly ornaments if we want heavenly ones. Do not love gold — the one substance on which all the sins of the people of Israel are branded. You ought to hate what ruined your fathers, what was worshiped by men who were deserting God. Even then we find that gold is food for the fire.

But Christians, always and now more than ever, spend their time not in gold but in iron. The robes of martyrdom are being got ready; the angels who are to carry us are being waited for. Go out to meet them already dressed in the cosmetics and ornaments of the prophets and the apostles: take your whiteness from simplicity, your blush from modesty; paint your eyes with shame and your mouth with silence; set the words of God in your ears, and fit the yoke of Christ on your necks. Submit your head to your husbands, and that will be adornment enough. Keep your hands busy with wool, keep your feet at home, and you will “please” better than in gold. Dress yourselves in the silk of honesty, the fine linen of holiness, the purple of modesty. Painted like that, you will have God for a lover.