The Monk’s Belt

Since we are going to speak of the customs and rules of the monasteries, how, by God’s grace, can we better begin than with the actual dress of the monks? Once we have set their outward man before your eyes, we will be able to explain their inner life in due course. A monk, then, as a soldier of Christ always ready for battle, ought always to go about with his belt fastened around his waist. For the authority of Holy Scripture shows that this is how those walked who began this way of life in the Old Testament, I mean Elijah and Elisha. And we know, moreover, that the leaders and founders of the New Testament, namely John, Peter and Paul, and the others of the same rank, went about in the same way. [a]

The first of these, Elijah, showed the flower of a virgin life and an example of chastity and self-control even in the Old Testament. Ahaziah, the wicked king of Israel, lay confined by sickness and meant to consult Beelzebub, the god of Ekron, about his health. The Lord sent Elijah to rebuke the king’s messengers, and the prophet met them and said that the king would not come down from the bed on which he lay. This man was then made known to the bedridden king by a description of his clothing. For when the messengers returned and brought back the prophet’s message, the king asked what the man who had met them and spoken such words was like, and how he was dressed. “A hairy man,” they said, “with a leather belt around his waist.” By this dress the king at once saw that it was the man of God, and said, “It is Elijah the Tishbite.” That is, by the evidence of the belt and the look of the hairy, unkempt body, he recognized the man of God without the slightest doubt. For this had always marked Elijah as he lived among so many thousands of Israelites, as though it were stamped on him as the special sign of his own way of life.

John too came as a kind of sacred boundary between the Old and the New Testament, being both a beginning and an end. Of him we know by the testimony of the Gospel writer that “this John had his clothing of camel’s hair and a belt of skin around his waist.” Peter also had been put in prison by Herod and was to be brought out and put to death the next day. When the angel stood beside him, he was told, “Put on your belt, and put on your shoes.” The angel of the Lord would certainly not have told him to do this unless he had seen that Peter, for the sake of his night’s rest, had freed his weary limbs for a while from the belt usually tied around them. Paul also, on his way up to Jerusalem, where he was soon to be put in chains by the Jews, was met at Caesarea by the prophet Agabus. Agabus took his belt and bound his hands and feet with it, to show by these bodily actions the harm Paul was going to suffer, and he said, “This is how the Jews in Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt, and hand him over into the hands of the Gentiles.” Surely the prophet would never have done this, or said “the man who owns this belt,” unless Paul had always been in the habit of fastening it around his waist.