The Mark of a Man

Luxury has gone so far that it is no longer only women who are unhinged by this frivolous business; men have caught the disease too. They are not in good health, because they are not free of the love of finery; leaning toward soft living, they turn womanish. They cut their hair in a way no free man would — the cut of a prostitute. They wear fine, see-through clothes. They chew mastic. They go about smelling of perfume. What is there to say when you see them? Anyone who tells a man’s character from his forehead would divine them at a glance to be adulterers and men playing the woman, given to sexual indulgence both ways, hair-haters stripped of hair, loathing the bloom of manhood and dressing their curls like women. As the Sibyl says, “living for unholy acts of daring, these shifty wretches do reckless and criminal deeds.” [a]

To serve them, the towns are full of men who strip hair off with pitch plasters, who shave, and who pluck. Shops for the work are put up and opened everywhere, and the experts in this whore’s trade make good money in the open from men who plaster themselves and hand their hair over to be pulled out every way by the professionals — feeling no shame in front of the onlookers, or of the men who come near them, or of themselves, being men. That is what men enslaved to degrading appetites are like: the whole body rubbed smooth by the savage tearing of pitch plasters. Shamelessness can go no further than this. If they leave nothing undone, I will leave nothing unsaid.

When Diogenes was being sold as a slave, he scolded one of these degenerates like a schoolmaster and said, very much like a man, “Come, boy, buy yourself a man.” He corrected the man’s whorishness with a phrase that cut two ways. For men to shave and smooth themselves — how ignoble. As for dyeing the hair, oiling gray locks and turning them yellow, these are the practices of ruined, womanish men, and they must be given up, along with their womanish combing. They imagine that, like snakes, they are shedding the old age of their head by painting and refurbishing it. But however cleverly they doctor their hair, they will not get away from wrinkles, and they will not dodge death by cheating time. It is not a dreadful thing — it is not — to look old, when you cannot hide that you are.

So the further along a man is toward the end, the more truly worthy of respect he is, since he has only God as his senior; for God is the eternal Ancient, older than everything there is. Prophecy has called him the Ancient of Days, and “the hair of his head was like pure wool,” says the prophet. And the Lord says, “No one else can make a hair white or black.” How, then, do these godless men set themselves up as God’s rivals — or rather, fight him outright — when they change the color of the hair he has made white? “Wide experience is the crown of old men,” says Scripture; and the gray on a man’s face is the flower of that long experience. But these men dishonor what is owed to age, the head covered with gray. It is not possible — it is not — for a man to show a true soul when the head he has is a counterfeit.

“But that is not how you learned Christ — if in fact you heard him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, as regards your former way of life, the old man (not the man gone gray, but the one) corrupted by deceitful cravings; and that you be made new (not by dyes and ornaments) in the spirit of your mind; and that you put on the new man, the one created after God in righteousness and true holiness.”

But for a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor for the sake of a fine effect, to arrange his hair at the mirror, to shave his cheeks, pluck the hairs out of them and rub them smooth — how womanly! And truly, unless you saw them naked you would take them for women. They are not allowed to wear gold, and yet out of a womanish craving they wrap gold leaf around their straps and the fringes of their clothes; or they have little balls made of the same metal, fasten them to their ankles and hang them from their necks. This is the contrivance of unstrung men who get themselves dragged into the women’s quarters — amphibious animals, and lecherous. It is a whore’s trap and an offense against God.

For God wanted women smooth, taking pleasure only in their own hair as it grows of itself, the way a horse takes pleasure in its mane; but he furnished the man with a beard, as he did the lions, and gave him a shaggy chest as an attribute of manhood — a sign of strength and of rule. So too with roosters, which fight in defense of the hens: he decked them with combs, like helmets. God sets such value on this hair that he orders it to appear on men at the same moment as good sense; and, delighting in a look worthy of respect, he has honored a grave face with gray. Wisdom, and the judgments that have gone gray along with it, ripen with time; the vigor of long experience gives old age its strength, and produces gray hair, that admirable flower of a venerable wisdom, which wins trust.

So the beard — the mark of the man, the thing by which he is seen to be a man — is older than Eve, and is the token of the superior nature. God judged hairiness fitting for the man, and spread hair over his whole body. Whatever smoothness and softness was in him, God drew out of his side when he formed the woman Eve soft to the touch, to receive the seed — a helper in having children and in keeping the house — while he, having parted with all his smoothness, stayed a man and shows himself a man. To him has been assigned acting, and to her being acted upon; for what is shaggy is drier and warmer than what is smooth. That is why males have both more hair and more heat than females, whole animals more than castrated ones, the complete more than the incomplete. So it is an offense against God to violate the symbol of manhood, which is hairiness.

As for the ornament of smoothness — the Word sets me burning here — if it is meant to attract men, it is the act of a man playing the woman; if to attract women, the act of an adulterer. Both are to be driven as far as possible from our company. The Lord says, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Those on the chin are numbered too, and those on the whole body. So there must be no plucking out, against God’s arrangement, which has counted them in as he willed. The apostle says, “Do you not know yourselves, that Christ Jesus is in you?” If we had known him living in us, I do not see how we could have dared to dishonor him.

As for using pitch to pull hair out — I shrink from even naming the shamelessness that goes with the process — the turning around and the bending over, the stripping of nature’s secret parts bare to full view, the writhing and arching back in shameful postures, and the men who do it not ashamed of themselves but carrying on shamelessly in the middle of the young men, and in the gymnasium, where a man’s prowess is tested: is this practice against nature not licentiousness at its furthest reach? Men who do such things in public will hardly behave decently toward anyone at home. Their want of shame in the open is evidence of their unbridled license in private. A man who denies his manhood in broad daylight will plainly prove himself a woman by night. The Word said through Moses, “There shall be no prostitute among the daughters of Israel; there shall be no man among the sons of Israel who prostitutes himself.”

But the pitch does some good, it is said. No — it defames, I say. No one whose judgment is sound would want to look like a man who sells his body, unless he were already sick with that vice; and no one would willingly choose to make a practice of defaming the beautiful image. For if God knew beforehand those who are called according to his purpose, that they should be shaped to the image of his Son — the Son whom, as the blessed apostle says, he appointed to be the firstborn among many brothers — then are they not godless who treat with contempt a body that has the same form as the Lord’s?

The man who wants to be beautiful must beautify the most beautiful thing in a man, his mind, and must show it more comely every day; and he should pluck out cravings, not hairs. I pity the boys the slave dealers own, dressed up for dishonor. But the shame is not brought on them by themselves: the poor wretches are decked out on orders, for filthy profit. How disgusting, then, are the men who willingly practice the very things that, if they were forced to them, they would — if they were men — die rather than do.

Life has reached this pitch of license through the recklessness of wickedness, and lewdness is spread through the cities, having become law. Beside these men, women stand in the brothels, offering their own flesh for hire for lewd pleasure; and boys, taught to deny their sex, play the woman’s part.

Luxury has deranged everything; it has disgraced the human being. A fastidious taste for luxury goes after everything, tries everything, forces everything, does violence to nature. Men take the woman’s part and women the man’s, against nature; women are wives and husbands at once; no opening is closed to lust; their promiscuous lechery is a public institution, and luxury is at home in the house. What a miserable sight! What horrible conduct! These are the trophies of your civic license, put on display, and the proof of these deeds is the prostitutes. What wickedness!

Besides, the wretches have no idea how many tragedies come out of not knowing who it is they lie with. Fathers who have forgotten children of their own that were left out to die often sleep, without knowing it, with a son who has sold himself and with daughters who are prostitutes; and the license of their lust turns the men who fathered them into their lovers. This is what your wise laws allow: a man may sin legally, and this detestable indulgence in pleasure they call a matter of no consequence. Men who commit adultery against nature think they are clear of adultery. But justice follows their reckless deeds to punish them, and by dragging inescapable ruin down on themselves they buy death for a little money. The wretched dealers in this merchandise sail with a cargo of sexual immorality, as if it were grain or wine; and others, far more wretched, buy pleasures the way they buy bread and relish — paying no attention to the words of Moses: “Do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute, so that the land does not turn to prostitution and the land be filled with wickedness.”

That was foretold long ago, and the result is notorious: the whole earth is now full of sexual immorality and wickedness. I admire the old lawgivers of the Romans. They loathed this womanish conduct, and they judged that giving the body over to a woman’s uses, against the law of nature, deserved the heaviest penalty, as the righteousness of the law required.

For it is not lawful to pluck out the beard, man’s natural and noble ornament.

In time he is anointed, and takes pleasure in the beard on which, in the prophet’s words, the oil ran down — the oil with which Aaron was honored. And it suits a man who has been rightly trained, a man on whom peace has pitched its tent, to keep peace with his hair as well.

What will women with strong leanings toward lust not practice, when they look at men committing such outrages? We ought not to call creatures like these men at all, but wantons and womanish men, with feeble voices and clothes that are womanish both in feel and in dye. What they are is plainly shown by the outside of them: their clothes, their shoes, their build, their walk, the cut of their hair, their look. Scripture says, “For a man will be known by his look; a man is known from meeting him. A man’s dress, the step of his foot, the laugh of his teeth tell tales about him.”

Most of these men pluck out the rest of their hair and dress only what is on the head, all but binding their locks with ribbons, like women. Lions glory in their shaggy hair, but their hair also arms them in a fight; and even boars are made imposing by their mane — hunters are afraid of them when they see the bristles rise.

And their wool the loving Father has made plentiful for your use, man, having taught you to shear their fleeces. Among the nations, the Celts and the Scythians wear their hair long, but they do not primp. There is something frightening about a barbarian’s bushy hair, and its tawny color threatens war, the shade being close to blood. Both these barbarian peoples hate luxury. As clear witnesses, the German will produce the Rhine, and the Scythian his wagon. Sometimes the Scythian even despises the wagon: its size looks like extravagance to the barbarian, and leaving that comfortable ease behind, he lives a frugal life. For a house — enough of one, and less of an encumbrance than a wagon — he takes his horse, and mounting it he is carried wherever he wants to go. And when he is faint with hunger, he asks his horse for food; and the horse offers his veins and supplies his master with everything he has, his blood. To the nomad the horse is transport and food at once.

And the warlike young men of the Arabians — these are other nomads — are mounted on camels. They sit on breeding camels, and the camels feed and run at the same time, carrying their masters and carrying the house along with them. If the barbarians run short of drink, they milk them; and when their food is spent, they do not spare even the blood, as ravenous wolves are said to do. And the camels, gentler than the barbarians, remember no wrong when they are injured, but sweep bravely over the desert, carrying and feeding their masters at once.

Then let them perish, the savage beasts whose food is blood! For it is not lawful for men, whose body is nothing but flesh worked up out of blood, to touch blood. Human blood has come to share in the Word: it has a share in grace through the Spirit, and if anyone injures it, he will not escape notice. Even stripped of the body’s form, it may speak to the Lord. But I approve the plainness of the barbarians: loving a life without encumbrance, they have abandoned luxury. This is what the Lord calls us to be — naked of finery, naked of vanity, torn away from our sins, carrying only the wood of life, aiming only at salvation.