True Beauty and Painted Faces

It is, as it appears, the greatest of all lessons to know yourself. For if a man knows himself, he will know God; and knowing God, he will be made like God — not by wearing gold or trailing robes, but by doing good and by needing as few things as possible. [a]

God alone needs nothing, and he is gladdest when he sees us bright with the ornament of the mind; and he is glad too at the man dressed in chastity, which is the sacred robe of the body. Now the soul falls into three parts. The intellect, which is called the reasoning faculty, is the inner man, the ruler of this outer man that can be seen; and that inner man, in his turn, is guided by God. The angry part is brutish and lives next door to madness. And craving, the third department, is more many-shaped than Proteus, the shifting sea god, who kept turning himself into one form and then another; craving lures a man into adulteries, into loose living, into seductions.

So long as he still had that ornament, the hair on his chin showed him to be a man.

Love of ornament has sunk into wantonness. The man no longer even looks like a strong wild animal.

Passions break out, pleasures overflow. Beauty runs off and falls to the ground faster than a leaf, when the lovesick gales of craving blow on it before autumn has even come, and it is withered away to nothing. For craving turns itself into anything and manufactures anything; it wants to cheat, so as to hide the man. But the man the Word lives in does not remake himself and does not dress himself up. He has the form that belongs to the Word. He is made like God. He is beautiful. He does not decorate himself: his is beauty, the true beauty, for it is God; and that man becomes God, because God wills it so. Heraclitus, then, was right to say, “Men are gods, and gods are men, for the Word is the same.” A mystery made plain: God in man, and man God. And the Mediator carries out the Father’s will; the Mediator is the Word, who belongs to both — the Son of God, the Savior of men; his Servant, our Instructor. And since the flesh is a slave, as Paul bears witness, how can anyone with any sense deck out the slave girl like a pimp? What is of the flesh has the form of a servant. Paul says of the Lord, “He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” — calling the outer man a servant even before the Lord became a servant and wore flesh. But God himself, in his pity, set the flesh free. He released it from ruin and from a bitter and deadly slavery and gave it incorruptibility, dressing the flesh in that, the holy adornment of eternity: immortality.

There is another beauty in people, too — love. “Love,” the apostle says, “is patient and kind; it is not envious; it does not brag, it is not puffed up.” Dressing yourself up has exactly the look of what is excessive and useless, and that is bragging. So he adds, “it does not behave indecently” — for a shape that is not your own and is against nature is indecent, and what is manufactured is not your own, as he goes on to make plain: “it does not seek,” he says, “what is not its own.” Truth calls a thing its own when it really belongs to it; but the love of finery goes after what is not its own, and so is far from God, and from the Word, and from love.

And the Spirit bears witness through Isaiah that the Lord himself was unattractive in appearance: “We saw him, and he had no form or beauty; his form was poor, less than other men’s.” Yet who was more worth admiring than the Lord? What he displayed was not the beauty of the flesh, which the eye can see, but the true beauty of soul and body alike — in the soul, doing good; in the body, that is, in the flesh, immortality.

So it is not the look of the outward man but the soul that is to be decorated, with the ornament of goodness — and the flesh too, we may say, with the adornment of self-control. But women who beautify the outside are, without knowing it, nothing but waste in the depths inside, exactly like the ornaments of the Egyptians. Among them the temples are built with great care, with porches and entrance halls, and groves and sacred fields next to them; the halls are ringed with rows of pillars; the walls shine with imported stone, and there is no shortage of fine painting; the temples gleam with gold and silver and amber, and glitter with many-colored gems from India and Ethiopia; and the inner shrines are curtained with gold-embroidered hangings. [h]

But go inside the innermost part of the enclosure, in a hurry to see something better, and look for the image that lives in the temple. Suppose one of the priests who sacrifice there, wearing a solemn face and chanting a hymn in Egyptian, draws the veil back a little to show you the god. He will give you a hearty laugh at the thing they worship. For the god you were looking for, the one you rushed in to see, will not be there. There will be a cat instead, or a crocodile, or a snake of the country, or some such animal, which has no business in a temple but is quite at home in a den, a hole, or the dirt. The god of the Egyptians turns out to be a beast rolling about on a purple couch.

And that is what women who wear gold are doing — busy curling their hair, rubbing salve on their cheeks, painting their eyes, dyeing their hair, and practicing the other ruinous arts of luxury, decorating the covering of flesh. They are imitating the Egyptians, so as to attract their superstitious lovers.

But draw back the temple’s veil — I mean the headdress, the dye, the clothes, the gold, the paint, the cosmetics, the whole web woven out of them, the veil — draw it back looking for the true beauty inside, and you will be disgusted; I know it well. You will not find the image of God living inside, as it ought to be. In its place a prostitute and an adulteress has taken over the shrine of the soul. And so the real animal is caught: an ape smeared with white paint. That lying serpent, eating up the understanding part of a person through vanity, has the soul for its hole, filling everything with deadly poison; and by injecting his own venom of deception this pimp of a dragon has turned women into prostitutes.

For loving display belongs not to a respectable woman but to a courtesan. Such women think little of staying at home with their husbands. They untie their husbands’ purse strings and spend what is in them on their own cravings, so as to have plenty of witnesses to their supposedly lovely looks; and, giving the whole day to getting themselves up, they pass their time with the slaves they have bought. They season their flesh like a ruinous sauce. The day they give to the dressing table shut up in their rooms, so as not to be caught in the act of decorating themselves; then in the evening this counterfeit beauty creeps out into the lamplight as out of a hole, since drunkenness and dim light help along what they have put on. The woman who dyes her hair yellow is thrown out of the house by Menander the comic poet:

and she ought not, I would add, to stain her cheeks or paint her eyes either. Without realizing it, the poor wretches destroy their own beauty by bringing in a counterfeit. At daybreak they maul and rack themselves and plaster themselves over with various preparations, which chill the skin and furrow the flesh with poisons and elaborately compounded washes, and so blight the beauty they had. That is why you can see they have turned sallow from their cosmetics and are open to disease, their flesh, shadowed over with poisons, now going soft in them. So they dishonor the Creator of humanity, as if the beauty he gave were worth nothing. Naturally they grow lazy about the house, sitting there like painted things to be looked at, not like people made for running a household. So in the comic poet the sensible woman says:

“What can we women do that is wise or brilliant, who sit there with our hair dyed yellow, insulting everything a respectable woman is — bringing houses down, wrecking marriages, and giving our children grounds to accuse us?” In the same way Antiphanes the comic poet, in his play Malthaca, mocks the way women make themselves up like courtesans. His words fit them all, and they are aimed at this rubbing of themselves with cosmetics:

Three times over, I say, and not just once, they deserve to die — women who use crocodile dung, and rub themselves with the scum of rotten matter, and stain their eyebrows with soot, and rub their cheeks with white lead.

If even the Greek poets find their fashions disgusting, how will the truth not reject them? Another comic poet, Alexis, takes them to task as well. I will bring in his words, which by their sheer extravagance shame these women out of their stubborn shamelessness; and he was not far wide of the mark. For my own part, I am ashamed that womankind is ridiculed in comedy to such a degree — she who was made to be a “helper,” and then goes on to ruin

her husband as well.

I set these quotations from the comic poets before you because the Word wants so badly to save us; and presently I will back them up with the divine Scriptures. A man who knows he is being watched usually keeps clear of sin, for shame of being caught out. And just as a hand smeared with ointment and an eye with salve on it look at once like the marks of a sick person, so cosmetics and dyes are a sign that the soul is badly diseased.

The divine Instructor tells us not to go near another man’s river, meaning by that figure another man’s wife — the loose woman who flows out to everyone and in her wantonness gives herself to all comers for hire. “Keep away from water that is another’s,” he says, “and do not drink from another’s well” — warning us to avoid the stream of pleasure, so that we may live long and have years of life added to us, both by not hunting after a pleasure that belongs to someone else and by turning aside from the sects.

A love of delicacies and a love of wine are great vices, but not on the scale of a fondness for finery. “A full table and cups filled again” are enough to satisfy greed. But for people fond of gold and purple and jewels, all the gold above the earth and below it is not enough, nor the Tyrian sea, nor the cargo that comes in from India and Ethiopia, nor even the Pactolus running with gold. If a man turned into a Midas he would still not be satisfied; he would still be poor, craving some other wealth. People like that are ready to die with their gold.

And if Wealth is blind, are not the women who are crazy about him, and feel with him, blind as well? Since their craving has no limit, they push on into shamelessness. They must have the theater, and processions, and crowds of spectators, and strolls through the temples, and loitering in the streets, so that everyone can get a good look at them. People who take pride in their looks and not in the heart dress to please others. Just as the brand marks out the runaway slave, so gaudy colors mark out the adulteress. “Though you clothe yourself in scarlet, and deck yourself with ornaments of gold, and paint your eyes with antimony, your beauty is wasted,” says the Word through Jeremiah. Is it not monstrous that horses and birds and the rest of the animals leap and bound out of the grass and the meadows delighting in the ornament that is their own — a mane, a natural color, patterned feathers — while a woman, as if she were lower than the animals, thinks herself so unlovely that she needs an imported, purchased, painted beauty?

Headdresses and all their varieties, elaborate braiding, endless ways of arranging the hair, expensive mirrors to set their costume by — all of it hunting for men who, like silly children, go crazy over a figure — belong to women who have lost every sense of shame. Anyone who called such women courtesans would not be making a mistake, for they turn their faces into masks. But the Word tells us “to look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal.”

But what goes clean past the limits of absurdity is that they have invented mirrors for this artificial shape of theirs, as if it were some excellent work, a masterpiece. What that deception needs is a veil thrown over it. As the Greek story has it, it did the beautiful Narcissus no good to be the spectator of his own image. And if Moses commanded that no image be made by art to represent God, how can these women be in the right, who by their own reflection produce an imitation of their own likeness in order to falsify their faces?

In the same way, when Samuel the prophet was sent to anoint one of Jesse’s sons as king, and saw that the eldest was handsome and tall, and brought out the anointing oil, delighted with him, the Lord said to him: “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his build, for I have rejected him. Man looks at the eyes, but the Lord looks into the heart.” And he anointed not the son who was handsome in body but the one who was handsome in soul. If, then, the Lord ranks the body’s natural beauty below the soul’s, what does he think of a counterfeit beauty, when he rejects every kind of falsehood outright? “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” By Abraham the Lord teaches plainly that whoever follows God has to think little of his country, his relatives, his property, and all his wealth: he made Abraham a stranger. And that is why he also called him his friend, a man who had thought nothing of the estate he owned at home. For Abraham came of good family and was very rich, and with three hundred and eighteen servants of his own he put down the four kings who had carried Lot off.

Esther alone we find rightly adorned. The bride adorned herself, in a hidden sense, for her royal husband; and her beauty turned out to be the ransom price of a people who were about to be massacred. But that finery makes women courtesans, and men unmanly and adulterous, the tragic poet bears witness, speaking this way:

What an adulterous beauty! Foreign finery and unmanly luxury brought Greece down. Spartan chastity was corrupted by clothes and luxury and elegant good looks; foreign display turned the daughter of Zeus into a courtesan. They had no Instructor to hold their cravings back, no one to say, “Do not commit adultery,” or “Do not crave,” or “Do not travel by way of craving into adultery,” or again, “Do not work on your passions by wanting to be adorned.”

And what an end came to them, what miseries they had to bear, because they would not hold their own wills in! Two continents were convulsed by unrestrained pleasures, and everything was thrown into confusion by one foreign boy. The whole of Greece puts to sea; the ocean is loaded with the weight of continents; a long war breaks out, savage battles are fought, and the plains are crowded with the dead. The foreigner assaults the fleet with outrage, wickedness has its way, and the eye of the poet’s Zeus looks away to the Thracians:

Breasts are beaten in mourning, and grief lays the land waste; and all the feet of Ida of the many springs, and her peaks, and the cities of the Trojans, and the ships of the Achaeans, shake. Where, Homer, are we to run and stand? Show us one piece of ground that is not shaking!

Heaven is pleased with two charioteers, and by them alone the chariot of fire is driven. For the mind is carried off by pleasure, and the unstained principle of reason, when the Word has not trained it, slides down into loose living and takes the fall its offense has earned. The angels are an example of this: they gave up the beauty of God for a beauty that fades, and so fell from heaven to earth. The Shechemites too were punished with an overthrow for dishonoring the holy virgin. The grave was their punishment, and the monument of their disgrace leads toward salvation.