Truth, Not Custom

I have already gone to the trouble of setting my view out once. Now I will show in Latin as well that our virgins ought to be veiled from the time they pass the turning point of their age. Truth requires this practice, and against truth no one can plead prescription — not length of time, not the standing of persons, not the privilege of a region. Those, for the most part, are the springs custom rises from: some piece of ignorance or of simple-mindedness, confirmed as one generation hands it on to the next until it hardens into settled usage, and then kept up in opposition to truth. But our Lord Christ gave himself the name Truth, not Custom. If Christ always is, and is before everything, then truth likewise is something everlasting and ancient. So let the people look to themselves who find new what is old in its own nature. It is not novelty so much as truth that convicts heresies. Whatever has the flavor of opposition to truth will be heresy — even if it is an ancient custom. And on the other hand, if a man is ignorant of something, the ignorance comes of a fault of his own. Whatever a man does not know he ought to have inquired into as carefully as whatever he has been taught and has accepted. [a]

The rule of faith is altogether one, alone unmovable and beyond revision: the rule of believing in one only God, the Almighty, the Creator of the universe; and in his Son Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised again the third day from the dead, received up into the heavens, seated now at the Father’s right hand, and destined to come to judge the living and the dead through the resurrection of the flesh as well as of the spirit. This law of faith stands fixed. Everything that follows after it — matters of discipline and of the way we live — admits the “novelty” of correction, since the grace of God is at work and pressing forward right to the end.

For what sort of arrangement would it be if the devil is always at work, adding daily to the ingenuities of wickedness, while the work of God has either stopped or given up going forward? The very reason the Lord sent the Paraclete was that human smallness could not take everything in at once: discipline was to be guided little by little, set in order, and carried through to completion by that deputy of the Lord, the Holy Spirit. “I still have many things to say to you,” he said, “but you are not yet able to bear them. When that Spirit of truth has come, he will lead you into all truth, and will report to you the things that are coming.” And earlier he had made a statement about this very work of his. What, then, is the Paraclete’s business of administration, if not this — the direction of discipline, the opening up of the Scriptures, the reshaping of the understanding, the advance toward “the better things”?

Nothing is without its stages of growth; everything waits for its season. As the Preacher puts it in a word, “A time for everything.” Look how creation itself moves up by little stages to bearing fruit. First comes the grain; out of the grain rises the shoot; out of the shoot the young plant struggles up; then boughs and leaves gather strength, and the whole thing we call a tree spreads out. Then the bud swells, and out of the bud the blossom breaks, and out of the blossom the fruit opens. The fruit itself is rough for a while, and shapeless; then, holding the straight line of its growth, it is trained little by little into the ripeness of its flavor. So too with righteousness — for the God of righteousness and the God of creation are the same. Righteousness was at first in a rough state, having no more than a natural fear of God. From there it went forward, through the Law and the Prophets, to childhood. From there it passed, through the Gospel, into the heat of youth. Now, through the Paraclete, it is settling into maturity.

He will be, after Christ, the only one to be called Teacher and held in awe, since he does not speak from himself but speaks what Christ commands. He is the only one set over us, because he alone succeeds Christ. Those who have received him put truth before custom. Those who have heard him prophesying — to this present hour, and not only long ago — give the order that virgins be covered completely.

For the moment, though, I will not credit this practice to Truth. Let it be custom for a while, so that I may set custom against custom too. [j]

All through Greece, and in certain provinces beyond it, most of the churches keep their virgins covered. There are places under this African sky of ours where the same practice holds, so that no one can put the custom down to Greek or foreign heathenism. But the churches I have put forward as models are the ones founded by apostles or by apostolic men — and founded, I think, before certain others. Those churches, then, have exactly the same appeal to custom that anyone else has, and they can draw up “dates” and “teachers” in battle order better than these later churches can. What are we to keep? What are we to choose? We cannot throw out a custom with contempt when we cannot condemn it, since it is not “foreign”: we do not find it among foreigners but among people we share the law of peace and the name of brotherhood with. They and we have one faith, one God, the same Christ, the same hope, the same baptismal rites. Let me say it once and for all — we are one church. So whatever belongs to our brothers belongs to us. Only our bodies keep us apart.

Still, at this point — as generally happens wherever practice varies and a thing is doubtful and unsettled — an examination ought to have been made of which of two such different customs fits the discipline of God better. And of course the one that ought to have been chosen is the one that keeps virgins veiled, known to God alone. Quite apart from the fact that glory is to be looked for from God and not from men, they ought to blush even at the honor that is theirs. You bring a virgin to the blush more by praising her than by blaming her, because sin has the harder face; it learns shamelessness from the sin itself and in it. That custom of showing virgins off, which gives the lie to them in the very act of displaying them, would never have won anyone’s approval except men whose character must have matched the virgins’ own. The kind of eyes that will want a virgin looked at are the same kind the virgin has who will want to be looked at. Eyes of the same sort crave each other back and forth. Seeing and being seen belong to one and the same lust. Blushing at the sight of a virgin marks a holy man as much as blushing at being seen by a man marks a holy virgin.

But our most holy teachers have not even chosen to examine the two customs. Until very recently, among us, either one was admitted to communion with more or less indifference. The matter had been left to each virgin’s own choice, to veil herself or to expose herself as she pleased — just as she was equally free about marrying, which is itself neither forced on her nor forbidden her. Truth had been content to come to terms with custom, so that under custom’s name it might at least enjoy itself in part. But when the power of discernment began to move forward, and the freedom granted to either fashion was becoming the very means by which the better of the two showed itself, then at once the great enemy of good things — and much more of good institutions — set to work on his own account. [n]

The virgins of men go about with their faces quite bare, against the virgins of God, whipped up to a reckless boldness; and the look of virgins is put on by women who have husbands to ask things of — not to say a request like this, that their rivals, all the freer for being the slave girls of Christ alone, should be handed over to them. “We are made to stumble,” they say, “because other women walk differently from us” — and they would rather be made to stumble than be shamed into modesty. A stumbling block, unless I am mistaken, is an example not of something good but of something bad, and it builds a person up toward sin. Good things put no one in the way of stumbling except a bad mind. If modesty, if reserve, if a contempt for glory that is anxious to please God alone are good things, then let the women who are “made to stumble” by such goodness learn to recognize their own badness.

After all, what if the incontinent said they were “made to stumble” by the self-controlled? Is self-control to be called back in? And, for fear the many-times-married should be “made to stumble,” is marrying only once to be thrown out? Why should these last not rather complain that the petulance and the shamelessness of virginity on display is a stumbling block to them? Are chaste virgins, then, for the sake of these women who are on the market, to be dragged into the church, blushing at being recognized in public, shaking at being unveiled, as if they had been invited to be raped? For they are just as unwilling to suffer the one as the other. Every public exposure of an honorable virgin is a rape suffered — and to suffer violence in the body is the lesser evil, because it comes by way of a natural function. But when the spirit itself is violated in a virgin by the stripping away of her covering, she has learned to lose what she used to keep.

Sacrilegious hands, that have had the nerve to tear off a dress dedicated to God! What worse could any persecutor have done, if he had known that this was the clothing a virgin had chosen? You have stripped a girl bare as far as her head goes, and at once she stops being a virgin to herself altogether: she has been changed. So rise up, Truth. Rise up, and burst out, as it were, from your own patience. It is no custom I want you to defend, for by now even the custom under which you enjoyed your own liberty is being stormed. Show that it is you yourself who are the coverer of virgins. Interpret in person your own Scriptures, which Custom does not understand — for if she did understand them, she would never have come into existence at all.

But it is the custom to argue even from the Scriptures against the truth, and so an objection is thrown at us straight away: “The apostle makes no mention of virgins where he is laying down the rule about the veil; only ‘women’ are named. If he had wanted virgins covered as well, he would have made a pronouncement about ‘virgins’ too, alongside the ‘women’ he names — just as, in the passage where he is dealing with marriage, he states what practice is to be followed for ‘virgins’ as well. And so they are not taken in under the law of veiling the head, since they are not named in that law. On the contrary, this is the very source of their going unveiled: those who are not named are not commanded.” [u]

But we turn the same line of reasoning back on him. The man who knew, elsewhere, how to make mention of each kind — virgin, I mean, and woman, that is, not-virgin — for the sake of the distinction, in these passages, where he does not name a virgin, points out by not making the distinction that their condition is shared. Otherwise he could have marked the difference between virgin and woman here as well, just as elsewhere he says, “The woman and the virgin are divided.” So the ones he has not divided off, by passing them over in silence, he has included in the other kind.

Nor, because in that case “both the woman and the virgin are divided,” will that division extend its patronage over the present case too, as some will have it. For how many things said on one occasion carry no weight in cases where they are not said — unless the subject matter is the same as it was there, so that the one statement covers both! But that earlier case of virgin and woman is widely “divided” from the question before us. “The woman and the virgin are divided,” he says. Why? Because “the unmarried woman” — that is, the virgin — “is anxious about the things that belong to the Lord, so that she may be holy in body and in spirit; but the married woman” — that is, the not-virgin — “is anxious how she may please her husband.” That will be the meaning of that “division,” and it has no place in the passage now under discussion, where the pronouncement is not about marriage, nor about the mind and thought of woman and of virgin, but about the veiling of the head. And about that veiling the Holy Spirit, wanting no distinction made, wanted the virgin to be understood under the one name of woman. By not naming her separately he has not separated her from the woman; and by not separating her he has joined her to the one he has not separated her from.

Is it a “novelty,” then, to use the primary word and still have the subordinate divisions understood inside it, where there is no need to distinguish the parts of a whole one by one? Naturally a compressed way of speaking is both agreeable and necessary, since a spread-out one is both tiring and pointless. So we are content with general words, which take in the understanding of the particulars. Let us go on to the word itself. The word for the natural distinction is “female.” Under the natural word, the general word is “woman.” Under the general word again, the special ones are “virgin,” or “wife,” or “widow,” or whatever other names, including the names of the successive stages of life, get added on. The special, then, is subject to the general, because the general comes first; and the term that follows is subject to the term before it, and the part to the whole. Each is implied in the very word it is subject to, and is signified in it because it is contained in it.

So neither hand nor foot nor any one of the limbs needs to be mentioned when the body is named. And if you say “the universe,” the heaven will be in it and the things that are in the heaven — sun and moon, constellations and stars — and the earth and the seas, and everything that goes to make up the list of the elements. You will have named them all when you have named the thing that is made up of them all. In the same way, by naming woman, he has named whatever is woman’s.