Wedded by Nature and Time

Nor is a bare head allowed on the strength of any distinction whatever. Otherwise it would be plainly rude that women, who are subject to men in everything, should carry an honorable badge of their virginity on the front of their heads, so that they can be looked up to and stared at from every side and made much of by the brothers, while so many male virgins, so many men who have made themselves eunuchs by choice, carry their glory in secret with no token to make them famous too. They too will have to claim some distinction of their own: the feathers of the Garamantes, perhaps, or the headbands of the barbarians, or the cicadas of the Athenians, or the long curls of the Germans, or the tattoo marks of the Britons. Or else let the opposite course be taken, and let them skulk in the churches with their heads veiled. [a]

We can be sure that the Holy Spirit would sooner have granted some concession of this kind to males, if he granted it to females. Quite apart from the authority that goes with their sex, it would have been more fitting for men to be honored on the score of abstinence itself. The more eager and hot a man’s sex is toward women, the more work the abstinence of that greater heat costs him; and so it deserves all the more showing off — if showing off virginity is dignity. And is abstinence not in fact higher than virginity, whether it is the abstinence of the widowed or of husbands and wives who by agreement have already renounced the disgrace they had in common? Virginity keeps its footing by grace; abstinence, by hard virtue. It is a great struggle to beat down a craving once you have grown used to that craving, whereas a craving whose enjoyment you have never known you will put down easily, since you have no adversary in the enjoyment you crave. So how could God have failed to grant a concession like this to men rather than women — whether on the ground of closer kinship, as being “his own image,” or on the ground of the harder work? But if nothing has been granted to the male, then much more certainly nothing to the female.

There is a point we passed over earlier, so as not to break the thread of the argument, and we will now settle it with an answer. When we pressed the apostle’s flat definition — that “every woman” has to be understood as meaning a woman of every age — the other side might reply that in that case a virgin ought to be veiled from her birth, from the first entry of her age upon the roll of time. [e]

It is not so. She is to be veiled from the time when she begins to be conscious of herself, and to wake to a sense of her own nature, and to come out of the virgin’s frame of mind, and to feel that new sensation which belongs to the age that follows. The founders of the race themselves, Adam and Eve, went “naked” as long as they were without understanding; but after they tasted the tree of recognition, the first thing they were aware of was that they had reason to be ashamed. So each of them marked their understanding of their own sex with a covering. But even if it is “on account of the angels” that she is to be veiled, then surely the age at which the law of the veil takes effect will be the age at which “the daughters of men” became able to draw craving toward their bodies and to know marriage. For a virgin stops being a virgin from the moment it becomes possible for her not to be one. And so among Israel it is unlawful to hand a girl over to a husband until blood has borne witness that she is ripe; before that sign, her nature is unripe. So if she is a virgin as long as she is unripe, she stops being a virgin when she is seen to be ripe, and, as a non-virgin, she is now under the law, just as she is under marriage.

The betrothed, for their part, have Rebecca’s example. She was being brought — herself still a stranger — to a betrothed she had never met; and the moment she learned that the man she had sighted at a distance was the one, she did not wait for a hand to take hers, or for a kiss to meet her, or for greetings to pass. She confessed what she had felt, that she had already been wedded in spirit, and denied that she was a virgin by veiling herself then and there. What a woman, belonging already to Christ’s training! For she showed that marriage, like fornication, is transacted by a look and by the mind. Only that a Rebecca, at any rate, some people do still veil. As for the rest — the ones who are not betrothed — let their parents’ delay answer for it, whether it comes from tight means or from scruple; let the vow of abstinence itself answer for it. Delay has nothing to do with an age that is already running its own appointed course and paying its own dues to maturity. There is another mother, a secret one, Nature; and another father, a hidden one, Time; and they have wedded their daughter to laws of their own. Look: that virgin daughter of yours is married already, her soul by expectation and her flesh by the change in it — and you are getting a second husband ready for her! Her voice has changed by now, her limbs are filled out, her shame is clothing itself all over, the months are paying their dues. And do you deny that she is a woman, when you say yourself that she is going through a woman’s experiences? If it takes a man’s touch to make a woman, then let there be no covering until marriage has actually been experienced.

But no — even among the pagans a betrothed girl is led to her husband veiled. And if they are veiled at betrothal, because at that point they have mingled with a male in body and in spirit, through the kiss and the joined right hands, by which they first unsealed their modesty in spirit, through the shared pledge of conscience by which they made over to each other all their shame — how much more will time veil them? Betrothal is impossible without time; and time, with no betrothal at all, presses on and makes them cease to be virgins. Even the pagans keep an eye on time, so as to give each age its own rights in obedience to the law of nature. They send their girls off to their business from the age of twelve, and their boys two years later, ruling that puberty is a matter of years, not of betrothals or weddings. A girl is called “mother of the household” though she is a virgin, and a boy “father of the household” though he is a stripling. Among us not even the laws of nature are kept — as though the God of nature were somebody other than ours!

Recognize the woman — yes, recognize the married woman — by the evidence of body and of spirit alike, which she feels in her conscience and in her flesh. These are the earlier tablets of nature’s own betrothal and wedding. Put a veil on the outside of the woman who has a covering inside already. Let the one whose lower parts are not bare have her upper parts covered as well. [l]

Would you like to know what authority age carries? Set two of them in front of you: one squeezed prematurely into a woman’s clothes, and one who, though well advanced in maturity, keeps up virginity in the dress that belongs to it. It will be easier to deny that the first is a woman than to believe that the second is a virgin. Such is the honesty of age: not even clothing can overpower it. And what about the fact that these virgins of ours confess their change of age by their very clothes? As soon as they have understood that they are women, they withdraw from the virgins and lay their old selves aside, beginning with the head itself. They dye their hair; they fasten it with a more suggestive pin; they announce plain womanhood by parting their hair at the front. The next thing is the mirror, called in to help their looks, and the too-demanding face thinned down with washing — touched up with cosmetics as well, perhaps. The mantle is thrown around them with an air; the many-strapped shoe is fitted tight; a larger kit is carried down to the baths. Why go through the details? Their unmistakable equipment, all by itself, puts a finished womanhood on display. And still they want to play the virgin by the one fact of leaving their heads bare — denying with a single feature what they profess by their whole bearing.

If it is on account of men that they put on a false dress, let them carry that dress through to the end for that same purpose. As they veil their heads in front of pagans, let them at least conceal their virginity in church, since they do veil it outside the church. They are afraid of strangers: let them stand in awe of the brothers too. Or else let them be consistent and have the nerve to appear as virgins in the streets, as they have the nerve to do in the churches. I will praise their vigor if they manage to sell any virginity among the pagans as well. [o]

Being the same in nature abroad as at home, and keeping the same custom before men as before the Lord, consists in having the same liberty in both. So why do they thrust their glory out of sight abroad and put it on show in the church? I want a reason. Is it to please the brothers, or God himself? If God himself, he is as able to see whatever is done in secret as he is just to repay what is done for his honor alone. In fact he tells us not to sound a trumpet over any of the things that will earn a reward in his sight, and not to take our pay for them from men. But if we are forbidden to let “our left hand know” when we hand over a single small coin, or any gift to the poor at all, how deep should the darkness be that we wrap ourselves in when we are offering God so great an offering as our own body and our own spirit — when we are consecrating our very nature to him?

It follows, then, that what cannot look as though it were done for God’s sake — because God does not want it done that way — is done for the sake of men. And that is out of bounds in the first place, since it gives away an appetite for glory; and glory is out of bounds for people whose testing consists in humiliation of every kind. If it is God who confers the strength to abstain, “why do you boast, as if you had not received it?” And if you have not received it, “what do you have that has not been given to you?” The very fact that you offer it to somebody besides God makes it plain that God did not give it to you. So let us see whether the human motive is solid and true.

They report something said once by somebody when this question was first raised: “And how are we to invite the other virgins to do the same?” [s]

As if it were their numbers that would make us happy, and not the grace of God and the merits of each one! Is it virgins who adorn and commend the church in God’s sight, or the church that adorns and commends virgins? So our objector has confessed that glory lies at the root of the matter. Well: where there is glory there is soliciting; where there is soliciting, pressure; where pressure, necessity; where necessity, weakness. So it is only right that while they do not cover their heads, in order to be solicited for glory’s sake, they are forced to cover their bellies by the ruin that weakness brings on. It is rivalry that drives them, not religion. Sometimes it is that god of theirs, the belly, himself — since the brotherhood readily takes on the support of virgins. And it is not only that they are ruined; they drag “a long rope of sins” behind them. Once they have been brought out into the middle of the congregation, puffed up by having their good publicly proclaimed, and loaded by the brothers with every honor and every act of love — so long as they do not fall — then, when a sin has been committed, they plan a deed as disgraceful as the honor was high. Here it is. If a bare head is the recognized mark of virginity, then when a virgin falls from the grace of virginity she stays bare-headed permanently for fear of being found out, and walks about in a costume that by then belongs to somebody else. Knowing perfectly well that they are women now, they have the audacity to come near God with their heads bare.

But the “jealous God and Lord,” who said, “Nothing is covered that will not be uncovered,” generally brings such women out in front of everybody; for confess they will not, unless they are betrayed by the cries of their own infants. And the more of them there are, will you not have all the more crimes to suspect? I will say it, though I would rather not: it is a hard thing for a woman to turn woman once for all when she is afraid to, and when, having turned already in secret, she has it in her power to keep up the pretense of being a virgin under the eye of God. And what will such a woman dare with regard to her own womb, for fear of being caught being a mother as well? God knows how many infants he has helped through to full term and brought sound and whole to birth, after being fought off a long while by their mothers. Virgins like these always conceive with the readiest ease, and have the happiest deliveries, and children that look exactly like their fathers!

These are the crimes that a forced and unwilling virginity runs into. The very craving not to be covered up is immodest. It feels something that is no mark of a virgin — the study of pleasing, of course, and of pleasing men. Let her fight it with as honest a mind as you like; she is bound to be put in danger by the public display of herself, pierced through by the gaze of untrustworthy eyes and plenty of them, tickled by pointing fingers, loved a little too well, warmed all over by a steady stream of embraces and kisses. That is how a forehead grows hard. That is how the sense of shame wears away. That is how it slackens; that is how the appetite for pleasing is learned in another way.

But true virginity, absolute and pure, fears nothing more than itself. It shrinks even from meeting a woman’s eyes. It has eyes of its own. It runs for refuge to the veil on its head as to a helmet, as to a shield, to protect its glory against the blows of temptation, against the breeding-place of scandals, against suspicions and whispers and rivalry — and against envy itself. [x]

For there is a thing to be reckoned with even among the pagans, which they call Fascination: the all too unhappy result of too much praise and glory. Sometimes we read it as the devil’s doing, since hatred of the good comes from him; sometimes we put it down to God, since judgment on arrogance comes from him, who lifts up the humble and pushes down the elated. So the holier virgin will be afraid, even under the name of fascination — afraid of the adversary on one side and of God on the other, of the envious temper of the one and of the censor’s eye of the other; and she will be glad to be known to herself and to God alone. And even if somebody else has recognized her, she is wise to have blocked the pathway against temptations. For who will have the audacity to force his eyes upon a shrouded face? A face with no feeling in it? A face that is, so to speak, sullen? Any evil thought at all will be broken by the sheer severity of it. The woman who conceals her virginity denies, by that very fact, even her womanhood.

This is where the defense of our opinion rests: on Scripture, on Nature, on Discipline. Scripture lays down the law; Nature comes in to bear witness to it; Discipline demands it. Which of the three does a custom founded on nothing but opinion speak for? What color has the opposite view got? Scripture is God’s; Nature is God’s; Discipline is God’s. Whatever is against these is not God’s. If Scripture is uncertain, Nature is plain; and about Nature’s testimony Scripture cannot be uncertain. If there is a doubt about Nature, Discipline points out which course God approves more. For nothing is dearer to him than humility; nothing more acceptable than modesty; nothing more offensive than “glory” and the study of pleasing men. So let whatever you find has God’s approval be Scripture and Nature and Discipline to you — just as you are told to “examine everything, and carefully follow whatever is better.” [z]

It remains for us to turn to the virgins themselves, to get them to accept these suggestions more willingly. I beg you — whether you are a mother, or a sister, or a virgin daughter, and let me address you by the names that suit your years — veil your head. If you are a mother, do it for your sons’ sake; if a sister, for your brothers’ sake; if a daughter, for your fathers’ sake. Every age is put at risk in your person. Put on the full armor of modesty; build a stockade of shyness around you; raise a rampart for your sex, which must let neither your own eyes out nor other people’s in. Wear a woman’s full dress, so as to keep a virgin’s standing. Tell somewhat less than you know inside, so that the truth may be on show to God alone. And even so, you are not lying when you appear as a bride. For you are wedded to Christ. To him you have handed over your flesh; to him you have promised your grown womanhood. Walk according to the will of the one you are promised to. Christ is the one who tells other men’s brides and wives to veil themselves — and, of course, much more his own.