His Treatise on Virginity Slanders Every Order of Christians

When he was living at Rome he wrote a treatise on keeping one’s virginity. All the pagans and enemies of God, all apostates and persecutors, and everyone else who hates the Christian name, competed with one another in copying it out. They did so because of the shameful charges and foul reproaches it contained against every order and rank among us, against all who profess and call themselves Christians, in a word, against the whole church. They did so also because this man declared that the crimes the pagans had laid to our charge, which had been thought false until then, were really true, and indeed that our people did much worse things than they were accused of. First he slanders the very virgins whose virtue he claimed to be writing about, speaking of them in these words: [a] “Some of them change their dress and put on men’s clothing, and are ashamed of the sex they were born with. They cut their hair short and lift up their faces with the shameless stare of eunuchs. There are some who put on Cilician jackets, and with hoods made up into a shape, make themselves look like horned owls and night birds, as though they were turning back into babies.” [b]

There are a thousand slanders like these in the book, and worse ones. He does not spare even widows, for he says of them, “They care for nothing but the belly and what lies next to it,” and he adds many other obscene remarks of the same kind. As for the whole race of solitaries, it would take too long to give the passages in which he attacks them with the foulest abuse. It would be shameful even to repeat the indecent attacks he makes on the presbyters and the deacons. I will, however, give the beginning of this violent tirade, from which you can easily imagine what lengths he goes to in the later parts. [c] “There are some,” he says, “of my own order, who seek the office of presbyter or deacon only so that they may have more freedom to visit women. All they care about is being well dressed and well scented, and keeping their feet from looking loose and baggy. Their curly hair bears the mark of the curling iron; their fingers sparkle with rings; and they walk on tiptoe, for fear a fleck of mud from the road should touch their feet. When you see them, you would take them for bridegrooms rather than clergymen.” [d] Then he goes on to hurl his reproaches at our priests and ministers, listing their faults, or rather their crimes. He presents the access they are allowed to married women of rank not only in a disgraceful light, but so as to make it seem downright detestable. And after he has cut the whole race of Christians to pieces with his satire and slander, he does not spare even himself, as you will hear in a moment.