The Instructor (Paedagogus)

The Instructor (Paedagogus)

continued

Book 2

2.arg. Chapter headings of the second book. 1. How we should behave about food. 2. How we should approach drink. 3. That we should not be eager for costly household vessels. 4. How we should relax at feasts. 5. On laughter. 6. On obscene talk. 7. What those who live decently together must guard against. 8. Whether perfumes and garlands may be used. 9. How we should approach sleep. 10. What we must understand about having children. 11. On footwear. 12. That we should not be excited over jewels and golden ornaments.

On Eating.

1a How we should behave about food. So let us hold to our aim and choose from the Scriptures what serves the practical purpose of our training. We must outline briefly what a person called a Christian ought to be throughout his whole life. We must begin with ourselves and with how we ought to conduct ourselves. So, keeping in view the proportion of the whole work, we must say how each of us should treat his own body, or rather how he should direct it. When someone is led by the Word away from outward things, and even from the mere management of the body, to the mind, and learns exactly how things happen in man according to nature, he will know not to be eager about outward things. He will know instead to cleanse what is truly man’s own, the eye of the soul, and to purify the flesh itself as well.

1b For if someone is cleanly freed from those things by which he is still dust, what could he have that is more useful than himself for going on the road to grasp God? Other people live in order to eat, just like the irrational animals, whose whole life is nothing but the belly. But the Instructor commands us to eat in order to live. Food is not our work, and pleasure is not our aim. Food is approved for the sake of our staying here, which the Word is training toward immortality. This food is simple and unfussy, fitting the truth and suiting simple, unfussy children. It is suited to living, not to luxury. And this living is made of two things, health and strength. For these the easiest food is most fitting. It helps digestion and keeps the body light, and from it come growth, health, and a right strength. It is not an unjust, risky and miserable strength like that of athletes produced by forced feeding.

1c So the many kinds of flavors must be spat out. They breed all sorts of harm: bad condition of the body and upset stomachs. The sense of taste is made to play the harlot by an evil-spirited art, the art of cookery, and by the empty craft of pastry-making. People dare to call food that cultivated pursuit of luxuries which slides into harmful pleasures. Antiphanes of Delos, a physician, said that this variety of dishes is one of the causes of disease. Such people are displeased with the truth. In their varied vanity they swear off a sober diet and go to great trouble over foods from overseas. I feel pity for their sickness, but they are not ashamed to sing the praises of their pleasures. They hunt out lampreys from the Strait of Sicily, eels from the Maeander, kids from Melos, mullets from Sciathos, mussels from Pelorus, and oysters from Abydos. They do not leave out the sardines of Lipara or the Mantinean turnip, nor even the beets of the Ascraeans. They search for scallops from Methymna, flatfish from Attica, thrushes of the laurel groves, and swallow figs. For the sake of such things the ill-starred Persian sent five hundred myriads of men into Greece at once.

1d On top of these they buy up birds from the river Phasis, Egyptian francolins, and the Median peacock. The gluttons vary all this with seasonings and stand gaping at the delicacies. They provide for their greed with whatever the earth, the depths of the sea and the measureless breadth of the air produce. These grasping, meddlesome people seem to be simply dragging the whole world with a net to feed their love of pleasure. The sound of “sizzling frying pans” rings around them. They wear out their whole lives at the mortar and the grinding stone, these eaters of everything, who cling to their fuel like fire. They even make bread, the plain and easy food, soft and effeminate by sifting out the nourishing part of the wheat. So the necessary part of food becomes a reproach to pleasure. Among men, daintiness knows no limit. It has run aground on cakes and honey-cakes, and on sweets as well, inventing a multitude of desserts and hunting out every kind of flavor.

1e Such a man seems to me to be nothing but a jaw. “Do not desire the rich man’s dainties,” says the Scripture, “for they belong to a life that is false and shameful.” Such people cling to rich dishes, which a little later end up in the latrine. But we are hunting for the heavenly food, so we must rule the belly, which belongs under heaven, and still more the things attached to it. “God will destroy” these, says the apostle, rightly pronouncing a curse on greedy appetites. “Foods are for the belly,” and on these hangs this truly fleshly, corrupting way of life. Some even dare to call by the name of “love” (agape) little suppers that reek of fat and gravy, and they use a tongue with no door on it. They insult the good and saving work of the Word, the sanctified love, with small pots and a flow of sauce. By drinking, luxury and smoke they slander the name. They are mistaken in their notion, for they expected to buy the promise of God with suppers.

1f For gatherings held for good cheer, we ourselves would count suppers, lunches and receptions among them. Following the Word, we may fittingly call such a gathering a “reception.” But the Lord has not called such feasts “love-feasts.” He says in one place, “When you are invited to a wedding, do not recline in the chief place, but when you are invited, lie down in the last place.” In another place he says, “When you give a lunch or a dinner.” And again, “But when you give a reception, invite the poor,” which is the very occasion for which a dinner should chiefly be given. And again, “A certain man gave a great dinner and invited many.” But I see where the respectable name for these dinners came from. It came from gullets and from a madness that haunts the dinner table, as the comic poet puts it: “For truly, most things for most people are for the sake of dinner.” They have not learned that God provided food and drink for his creature, man, for the sake of his being kept alive, not for pleasure. The body does not naturally benefit from costly foods. Quite the opposite: those who live on the cheapest food are stronger, healthier and nobler, as servants are than their masters and farmers than their landlords. They are not only more robust but also wiser, as philosophers are than rich men. For they have not buried the mind under food, nor deceived it with pleasures.

1g Love (agape) is truly heavenly food, a banquet of the mind and reason. “It bears all things, endures all things, hopes all things. Love never falls.” “Blessed is he who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It is the worst of all falls for love, which never falls, to be flung from heaven above down to the ground among the gravies. Do you suppose I count as a supper that which is to be done away with? “For if I give away all that I have,” he says, “and have not love, I am nothing.” The whole Law and the Word depend on this love. And if you love the Lord your God and your neighbor, this is the heavenly feast in the heavens. The earthly one is called a dinner, as has been shown from Scripture. A dinner is given out of love, but the dinner is not love. It is a token of a kindly, sharing and generous goodwill.

1h “So do not let our good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking,” says the apostle. He says this so that the meal he means will not be understood as one that lasts only a day. He goes on: “but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Whoever eats this best of meals will gain the best of all things that exist, the kingdom of God. He will have practiced here below for that holy gathering of love, the heavenly church. Love, then, is something pure and worthy of God, and its work is sharing. “The care of instruction is love,” says Wisdom, “and love is the keeping of her laws.” These feasts of joy have a spark of love in them, taken from the food common to all, and they train us in the habit of eternal food. So love is not a dinner, but let the feast depend on love. For it says, “Let your sons, whom you have loved, Lord, learn that it is not the produce of the crops that feeds a man, but your word that keeps safe those who believe in you.” For the righteous man will not live on bread alone.

1i But let our dinner be simple and light, suited to keeping us alert, not mixed with a variety of flavors. Even this is not left without instruction. For love is a good nurse for fellowship, and her rich provision is self-sufficiency. When self-sufficiency oversees the food, measured out in the right amount, it manages the body for its health, and it also gives some share out of its own store to our neighbors. But a diet that overflows what is sufficient harms a person. It makes the soul sluggish and the body liable to sickness. Moreover, pleasure in rich dishes brings on itself names of blame that are hard to bear: daintiness, greediness, gluttony, fondness for delicacies, insatiability, ravenous eating. Flies, weasels, flatterers, gladiators, and “the wild tribes of parasites” fit these names well. Some sell their reason, some their friendship, some their very life for the pleasure of the belly. They creep along on their bellies, beasts in the shape of men, made in the image of their father, the greedy beast.

1j Those who first called such people “asotoi” (dissolute) seem to me to have hinted well at their end. They understood the word as “asostoi” (unsaved), with the letter sigma squeezed out. Are these not the very people who busy themselves over casserole dishes and the silly fussiness of seasonings, low-minded and earth-born, chasing a life that lasts a day as if they were never going to live again? The Holy Spirit pronounces them wretched through Isaiah, quietly taking away from them the name of love, since their feasting was not according to reason: “But they made merry, slaughtering calves and sacrificing sheep, and saying, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” And to show that he counts such luxury as sin, he adds: “And this sin of yours will not be forgiven until you die.” He does not mean that a death without feeling is forgiveness of sin. He means that death, the loss of salvation, is the repayment for sin.

1k “Do not rejoice in a little luxury,” says Wisdom. Here we should also recall the so-called idol sacrifices, and why we are told to abstain from them. Those things seem to me foul and loathsome, and over their blood hover “souls from Erebus of the dead who have died.” “For I do not want you to become partners with demons,” says the apostle, since the food of those who are being saved and of those who are perishing is separate. So we must abstain from them. We do not do so out of fear, for there is no power in these foods. We do so for the sake of our conscience, which is holy. We do so because we loathe the demons, whose names the foods carry, for their foulness. And we do so also because of those who are watery-minded and take many things in a slippery way, “whose conscience, being weak, is defiled. For food will not bring us before God.” And he says, “It is not what goes in that defiles a man, but what comes out of his mouth.” So the natural use of food makes no difference. “For if we eat, we gain nothing extra,” he says, “and if we do not eat, we lack nothing.” But it is not reasonable for people who have been counted worthy to share in divine and spiritual food to take part in “the table of demons.”

1l The apostle says, “Do we not have the right to eat and drink, and to take a wife about with us?” But we hold our pleasures in check and so restrain our desires. “Take care, then, that this right of yours never becomes a stumbling block to the weak.” We must not squander the Father’s gifts like the rich man’s son in the Gospel story, living wastefully. We should use them as rulers do, with no leaning toward them. For we were appointed to reign and to rule, not to be slaves to our food. It is admirable, then, to look up to the truth and cling to the divine food from above. We should be filled with the insatiable vision of him who truly is, and taste a pleasure that is steady, lasting and pure. For the food of Christ shows that we must receive this love. But it is utterly senseless, useless and inhuman to be fed for death, fattened like livestock. Such people look down at the ground, always creatures of earth, bent over their tables. They chase a greedy life and bury the good here, in a life that will not last. They flatter only the act of swallowing, and because of it cooks have become more highly valued than farmers.

1m We are not doing away with companionship. We only regard the slippery slope of habit as a disaster. So we must refuse greediness and take only a few necessary things. If one of the unbelievers invites us and we decide to go (for it is good not to mix with the disorderly), Paul tells us to eat whatever is set before us, “asking no questions for conscience’ sake.” In the same way he told us to buy from the meat market without fussy inquiry. So we are not to abstain completely from varied dishes; we are only not to make them our concern. We should take what is set before us as befits a Christian. We honor the one who invited us by sharing in the company in a way that does no harm and does not wear anyone out. We treat the costliness of what is brought in as a matter of indifference, and we despise the delicacies, since in a little while they will be gone. “Let the one who eats not despise the one who does not eat, and let the one who does not eat not judge the one who eats.” A little further on he explains the reason for this instruction, saying, “The one who eats, eats to the Lord and gives thanks to God; and the one who does not eat, does not eat to the Lord and gives thanks to God.” So the right food is thanksgiving, and the one who always gives thanks is not preoccupied with pleasures.

1n And if we are urging any of our fellow guests toward virtue, that is all the more reason to keep away from these greedy dishes. We show ourselves as a clear example of virtue, just as we ourselves have Christ. Paul says, “If any such food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat it, so that I do not make my brother stumble.” By a little self-restraint he wins the man. “Do we not have the right to eat and drink?” And he says, “We have come to know the truth, that there is no idol in the world, but there is truly one God for us, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus.” But, he says, “the weak brother is destroyed by your knowledge, the brother for whom Christ died. And those who wound the conscience of weak brothers sin against Christ.” This is why the apostle, taking care for us, distinguishes between dinners. He says we are “not to associate with anyone called a brother who is found to be sexually immoral, or an adulterer, or an idolater, and not even to eat with such a person.” We are to avoid it whether it be the conversation or the dish, suspecting the defilement that comes from it, just as from the tables of demons.

1o “It is good, then, not to eat meat or to drink wine.” Paul himself says this, and so do the followers of Pythagoras. For eating flesh is more the way of wild animals, and the vapor that rises from it is thick and clouds the soul. Yet if someone does take these things, he does not sin, provided he takes them with self-control, without clinging to them, being dependent on them, or gorging on the delicacies. A voice will speak within him, saying, “Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food.” It is very foolish to marvel and gape at what is served at ordinary banquets, after the luxury we have in the Word. It is far more foolish to have made one’s eyes slaves to the side dishes, as though the servants carried one’s lack of self-control around along with them. How useless it is to raise oneself up on the couches, almost throwing one’s face into the dishes, and to peer out from the couch as from a nest, as the common saying goes, just to catch the wandering vapor with one’s breath!

1p And is it not senseless to smear the hands with sauces, or to keep reaching out to the dishes? These people do not taste; they snatch. They stuff themselves without measure and without decency. You can see such people, in their greed to be filled, looking more like pigs or dogs than human beings. Both jaws bulge at once, and the veins in the face swell. Sweat pours over them, gripped as they are by insatiable appetite, and they pant from lack of self-control. The food is shoved in with frantic haste, with no thought for anyone else, down into the belly. They stow away the dishes as if packing provisions for a journey, not as food to be digested. Excess is an evil everywhere, but it is most plainly exposed in the matter of food. Thus “dainty-gluttony” (opsophagia) is nothing other than excess in the use of delicacies. “Throat-gluttony” (laimargia) is madness about the throat. “Belly-gluttony” (gastrimargia) is lack of self-control about food, and, as the very name implies, madness about the belly, since a margos is a madman.

1q The apostle rebukes those who practice such habits at feasts, and says: “For each one takes his own supper ahead of others as he eats, and one is hungry while another is drunk. Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?” Among those who do have, the people who eat without restraint, the insatiable, bring shame on themselves. Both groups do wrong. The one burdens those who have nothing, and the other exposes its own lack of self-control in front of those who have. So the apostle, of necessity, turns to those who have lost all shame and who abuse their meals without restraint, the insatiable, for whom nothing is enough. A second time he raises his voice in indignation: “So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another.

1r If anyone is hungry, let him eat at home, so that you do not come together for judgment.” So we must keep away from all servile behavior and lack of self-control. We should take what is set before us in an orderly way, keeping the hand, the couch and the chin unsoiled, keeping the face’s good appearance undistorted, and behaving decently even in swallowing. The hand should be stretched out in order, at intervals. * * We must also take care not to say anything while eating. The voice becomes unseemly and indistinct when it is cramped by full jaws. The tongue, pressed by the food and hindered in its natural working, gives out a squeezed sound. Nor is it fitting to eat and drink at the same time. It is the greatest intemperance to confuse times whose uses do not go together. And “whether you eat or drink,” he says, “do everything for the glory of God.” We should aim at true simplicity of living. I think the Lord hinted at it when he blessed the loaves and the broiled fish with which he feasted his disciples, giving us a fine example of plain, unfussy food.

1s The fish that Peter caught at the Lord’s command also hints at food that is easy to come by, given by God, and moderate. For he suggests that, among those who come up out of the water to the bait of righteousness, we should remove extravagance and love of money, like the coin from the fish’s mouth. In this way he would drive out vainglory, and by giving the stater to the tax collectors, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s, he would keep for God what is God’s. The stater could have other explanations, which are not unknown to us, but the present moment is not suitable for working them out. It is enough to mention it, since we are using it for our subject and it does not clash with the flowers of the Word. We have often done this, drawing the many-benefiting spring to the pressing point of the question, to water what the Word has planted.

1t For even if “it is lawful for me to partake of everything, not everything is beneficial.” Those who do everything that is lawful quickly fall into doing what is not lawful. Righteousness is not gained through greed, nor self-control through licentiousness. In the same way, the Christian’s way of life is not acquired through pleasure-seeking. The table of truth is far from “dishes that crave indulgence.” Even if everything was made chiefly for the sake of human beings, it is not good to use everything, nor to use it at all times. For the occasion, the time, the manner, and the purpose all make no small difference, for the person being trained, in leading to what is profitable. Fitness for the occasion has the strength to put an end to the life lived for the belly. Riches invite such a life, though not riches that see sharply, but an abundance that is blind to gluttony.

1u No one is poor when it comes to the necessities of life, and no human being is ever overlooked. There is one God who feeds the birds, the fish, and, in a word, all the creatures without reason. They lack nothing at all, though they take no anxious thought for food. We are better than they, since we are their masters, and closer to God, since we are wiser. We were made, not to eat and drink, but to come to the knowledge of God. “For the righteous man,” it says, “eats and is satisfied in his soul, but the bellies of the ungodly are in want,” because they crave a gluttony that never rests. Lavish expense is suited not to solitary enjoyment but to sharing with others. So we must be on guard against foods that bewitch our appetites and persuade us to eat when we are not hungry. For surely a wholesome variety of dishes is possible even within a temperate simplicity?

1v Bulbs, olives, certain vegetables, milk, cheese, fruits in season, and all kinds of cooked dishes without rich sauces. If roast or boiled meat is needed, it should be served. After the resurrection the Lord said to the disciples, “Do you have anything to eat here?” And they, as men taught by him to practise simple living, “gave him a piece of roasted fish. And when he had eaten in front of them, he said to them” what he said, as Luke records. Besides these, we must not overlook that those who dine according to the Word are not to be left without nuts and honeycombs. Of all foods, the most suitable are those we can use straight away without fire, since they are the most readily available. Next come the plainest, as we said before. But those who hunch over inflamed tables, nursing their own passions, are led by a most gluttonous demon. I would not be ashamed to call him the “belly-demon,” the worst and most ruinous of demons.

1w This demon is just like the so-called ventriloquist spirit. But it is far better to become blessed (“well-spirited”) than to have a demon living with you. Happiness is tested by the practice of virtue. The apostle Matthew, then, ate seeds, nuts and vegetables, without meat. John carried self-control to the extreme: “he ate locusts and wild honey.” Peter also abstained from pork. But “a trance fell upon him,” as it is written in the Acts of the Apostles, “and he saw heaven opened and a vessel tied at four corners resting on the earth. In it were all the four-footed animals and reptiles of the earth and the birds of heaven. And a voice came to him: ‘Get up, kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘Certainly not, Lord, for I have never eaten anything common and unclean.’” 1x “And the voice came to him again a second time: ‘What God has cleansed, do not you call common.’” So for us, too, the use of foods is a matter of indifference. “For it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person.” What is empty is the notion about self-indulgence. For God, when he formed man, said, “All things shall be yours for food.” But “a dish of vegetables with love” (or “a calf with deceit”) is a good reminder of what was said before: it is not that vegetables are love, but that meals are to be taken with love. The middle state is good in everything, and not least in the preparation for a feast, since extremes are slippery and the middle is good. The middle is whatever lacks none of the necessities. For natural appetites are bounded by what is sufficient.

1y To the Jews, frugality was proclaimed through the law in a very well-ordered way. For through Moses the Instructor took away from them the use of countless things, attaching reasons: the spiritual ones hidden, the fleshly ones plain, and these latter they believed. Some animals were forbidden because they do not have a divided hoof, some because they do not chew the cud, and some fish because they alone of water creatures lack scales. So very few were left that were suitable for their food. Even among the things he allowed them to touch, he forbade animals that died of themselves, food offered to idols, and animals that had been strangled, for it was not right to touch these either. Since it is impossible for someone who enjoys pleasant things to give up approving of them, he set against them the opposite discipline, until he could break the habit’s rush toward self-indulgence.

1z For human beings, pleasure has mostly brought harm and grief. Overeating breeds in the soul dullness, forgetfulness and folly. They also say that children’s bodies grow well in height when they are given somewhat less food. The breath that runs up through the body to make it grow is then not hindered, because plenty of food does not block the free flow of its course. So Plato, the philosopher who most zealously sought the truth, condemned the life of luxury and fanned the spark of Hebrew philosophy back into flame. He says: “When I came there, the life they call happy, full of Italian and Syracusan tables, did not please me at all. It means living stuffed twice a day, never sleeping alone at night, and all the habits that go with that kind of life. No human being under heaven could ever become wise if he practiced such things from his youth, nor would he ever be so wonderfully balanced in character.” For Plato was not unaware of David. David set up the holy ark in his own city, in the middle of the tent, and made all the people under his rule glad. “Before the Lord he distributed to the whole host of Israel, from man to woman, a loaf of bread to each, a baked cake, and a cake from the frying pan.”

2.1aa This food was enough for the Israelites, but the food of the Gentiles is excessive. A man who lives on it “would never even intend to become temperate.” He has buried his mind in his belly. He is very like the fish called the “ass,” which Aristotle says is the only creature with its heart in its stomach. The comic poet Epicharmus calls this fish “monster-belly.” Such are those who put their trust in the belly: “whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.” The apostle foretold nothing good for them, for he said, “Their end is destruction.”

On Drinking.

2a On Drinking. How we should approach drink. The apostle tells Timothy, who drank only water, “Use a little wine, for your stomach’s sake.” This was an excellent way to treat an ailing, flabby body, for he gave it a fitting, strengthening remedy. He approved only a little, so that the remedy would not, through its quantity, quietly become something that itself needed another treatment. The natural and sober drink that the thirsty need is water. The Lord supplied this to the ancient Hebrews as the one drink of self-control, pouring it from the sheer rock. Those who were still wandering most needed to be sober. Afterward the holy vine put forth the prophetic cluster of grapes. This was a sign for those who had been trained out of wandering into rest. The great cluster is the Word, crushed for our sake. The Word wished the blood of the grape to be mixed with water, just as his own blood is mixed with salvation. The Lord’s blood is twofold. One is fleshly, by which we have been redeemed from corruption. The other is spiritual, and by it we have been anointed.

2b To drink the blood of Jesus is to share in the Lord’s incorruption. The Spirit is the power of the Word, as blood is of flesh. In the same proportion, then, wine is mixed with water, and the Spirit with the human being. The mixture of wine and water feeds us toward faith, and the Spirit leads us on to incorruption. The mixture of both, the drink and the Word, is called the Eucharist, a grace that is praised and beautiful. Those who share in it by faith are made holy in body and soul. The Father’s will mystically mixes the human being, this divine mixture, with the Spirit and the Word. For the Spirit is truly joined to the soul that it carries, and the flesh is joined to the Word, the flesh for whose sake “the Word became flesh.” 2c I admire, then, those who have chosen a strict way of life. They long for water, the medicine of self-control, and flee as far as they can from wine, as from the threat of fire. So it seems good to me that boys and girls, for the most part, should keep away from this drug. It is not suitable to pour the hottest of liquids, wine, onto an age that is already boiling. That is like channeling fire onto fire. From it wild impulses, inflamed desires and a fiery temper are kindled. Young people, heated from within, become hasty toward their appetites. The harm is then plain to see in their bodies, since the organs of desire ripen sooner than they should. They are aroused more shamelessly, as if from boiling wine. Their breasts and private parts swell, and already announce a picture of fornication. The wound of the soul forces the body to inflame, and shameless throbbings drive them on to excess, calling the well-ordered character out into lawlessness.

2d From this point the “new wine” of youth passes beyond the limits of modesty. So as far as possible we must try to quench the urges of the young. We should take away the fuel, the Bacchic frenzy that threatens them, and pour on the remedy for the boiling over. This will hold back the soul that is already smoldering, check the swelling members, and put to sleep the agitation of desire that is already stirring. As for those in the prime of life, let them take a midday meal, since a midday meal suits them. Let them taste bread only and abstain entirely from drink, so that their excess moisture may be soaked up and drunk in by the dry food. For constant spitting and blowing the nose and hurrying to relieve oneself are signs of intemperance, caused by immoderate intake that floods the body with fluids. If thirst does come, let them cure the discomfort with a little water. It is not right to drink water freely either, lest the food be washed out. The food should be broken down for digestion, with the solid food settling into a mass and only a very little passing off in the excretions.

2e Besides, it is not fitting to be heavy with wine when we are occupied with thoughts of God. For, as the comic poet says, “unmixed wine compels a man to think few thoughts,” let alone to be self-controlled. Wine should be used toward evening, around supper time, when we are no longer busy with the more sober readings. At that hour the surrounding air is cooler than in the daytime, so the natural warmth that is failing needs to be fed with warmth brought in from outside. Even then the wine should be little, for we must not go on to the bowls of insolence. Those who are already past their prime may be allowed to take the drink more freely. With the vine’s remedy they can safely rekindle the chill of age, which seems to wither under time. For the appetites of older men, for the most part, no longer swell toward the shipwrecks of drunkenness. Moored, as it were, by reason and by time as by anchors, they bear more easily the gale of desires that blows up from drink. They may perhaps even allow themselves a little pleasantry at feasts.

2f But even for these let the limit of drinking be the point at which they keep their reasoning steady, their memory active, and their body unmoved and unshaken by wine. Those who are skilled in these matters call this state “top of the breastplate.” It is good, then, to stop beforehand because of the risk of slipping. A certain Artorius, in his book On Long Life (so I remember), thinks we should go only as far as is needed to moisten the food, so that we may gain a longer life. It is fitting, then, that some take wine as part of a treatment, for health alone, and others for rest and relaxation. For wine first makes the drinker kinder to himself than before, gentler to his fellow drinkers, milder to his servants, and more pleasant to his friends. But if he is made drunk, it repays him with insolence. For wine is warm and has sweet juices. When mixed in due measure, it dissolves the sticky waste matter by its warmth, and blends the sharp and bad humors with its pleasant aromas.

2g Rightly, then, it has been said: “Wine was created from the beginning as a gladness of soul and heart, when drunk in sufficient measure.” It is best to mix the wine with as much water as possible and to dull its force against drunkenness. It should not be poured in like water out of a love of wine. Both are works of God, and so the mixture of both, water and wine, contributes to health, because life consists of what is necessary and what is useful. So the necessary, water, should be mixed in as abundantly as possible with the useful. But when wine is taken without measure, the tongue stumbles, the lips go slack, and the eyes turn aside, as if the sight were swimming in the quantity of liquid. Forced to deceive, the eyes think everything is spinning around, and they cannot count distant objects as single. “Indeed, I seem to see two suns,” said the old Theban man in his drunkenness. The sight, stirred by the heat of the wine, often pictures one thing as many. It makes no difference whether the eye is moved or the thing seen, for the sight suffers the same either way: because of the tossing, it cannot accurately grasp the object before it.

2h Their steps are swept away from under them as by a current. Hiccups, vomiting and madness crash in on the revel. For, as the tragedy says, every man drunk with wine is overcome by anger and empty of sense. He loves to pour out a flood of idle talk, and then unwillingly hears the evil things he said willingly. Even before the tragedy, Wisdom cried out: “Wine drunk in quantity increases irritation and every kind of fall.” Therefore most people say that we should unbend at drinking parties and put serious matters off until dawn. I hold the opposite. That is exactly the time to bring in the Word to share the feast and to act as instructor over the drinking, so that the feast does not slip unnoticed into drunkenness. No sensible person would think of closing his eyes before he goes to sleep. In the same way no one could rightly want the Word absent from the banquet, or do well to put him to sleep before the day’s business is done.

2i Indeed the Word can never withdraw from what is his own, not even when we sleep, for we must call on him even for our sleep. Wisdom is perfect: it is knowledge of divine and human affairs and embraces the whole. In so far as it oversees the flock of men, it becomes an art of living. So it is present with us everywhere, as long as we live, always completing its own work, which is the good life. But the wretched men who drive self-control out of the feast think that the disorder of their drinking parties is the happy life. Their living is nothing but revelling, hangovers, baths, unmixed wine, chamber pots, idleness and drink. You can see some of them half-drunk and staggering, with garlands around their necks like wine jars, forcing the unmixed wine down one another’s throats in the name of a toast to friendship. Others are sodden from their hangover, unwashed and pale, with livid faces. Yet on top of yesterday’s drunkenness they pump up another drunkenness at dawn.

2j It is good, my friends, very good, to study this picture, at once ridiculous and pitiable, from as far away as possible. Then we may shape ourselves toward something better, fearing that we too might become a similar sight and a laughingstock to others. It was well said: “As the furnace tests the temper of steel in the dipping, so wine tests the heart of the proud in drunkenness.” Now drunkenness is the more violent use of unmixed wine. Drunken misbehavior is the disorder that comes from that use. A hangover (kraipalē) is the discomfort and distaste that follow drunkenness. It is named from the head throbbing (kara pallein). This kind of life, if it should be called life, is lazy, restless after pleasures, and frantic over wine. Divine Wisdom looks on it with suspicion and commands her children: “Do not be a wine-drinker, and do not stretch yourself out in contracts and purchases of meat. For every drunkard and every frequenter of prostitutes will become poor, and every drowsy person will wear torn clothes.” For the drowsy person is anyone who is not awake to wisdom but is plunged into sleep by drunkenness.

2k “And the drunkard,” it says, “will wear torn clothes.” He will be ashamed of his drunkenness because of those who look on. The tears in the garment are the holes that the sinner’s love of pleasure has made in the fabric of the flesh. Through them the shame of the soul within is seen, which is sin. Because of sin the fabric will not easily be saved. It has been torn away on every side and is rotting in many desires, cut off from salvation. So Scripture adds this very instructive warning: “Who has woe? Who has uproar? Who has judgment? Who has unpleasant chatter? Who has bruises for nothing?” See the wine-lover, torn to pieces. He pays no heed to the Word himself, and he has handed himself over to drunkenness. See everything Scripture has threatened against him. Again it adds to the threat: “Whose eyes are livid? Is it not those who linger over wine? Those who track down where the drinking parties are?” Here the Word already shows the lover of drink to be dead. It points to the livid eyes, which is a mark that appears on corpses, and so announces to him a death “in the Lord.” For forgetfulness of the things that lead to true life tilts toward destruction.

2l It is only natural, then, that the Instructor, who cares for our salvation, forbids this most firmly: “Do not drink wine to drunkenness.” Why, you ask? “Because,” he says, “your mouth will then speak twisted things, and you will lie down as in the heart of the sea, like a ship’s pilot in a heavy swell.” Poetry has learned from this too, and says: “Wine, whose force is like fire when it comes among men, and which heaves like the Libyan sea under the north wind or the south; it reveals everything that is hidden, and makes men speak wrongly. Wine is a slippery slope to the drunk; wine deceives the soul,” and so on. Do you see the danger of shipwreck? The heart is swamped by heavy drinking. The Scripture compares the flood of drunkenness to the threat of the sea. In that sea the body is sunk like a ship; it goes down into the depths of disorder, buried under the triple waves of wine. The pilot, the human mind, is swept about in the surge while drunkenness towers over it. Out at sea it reels in the murk of the storm, having missed the harbor of truth. In the end it strikes hidden rocks, runs itself aground on pleasures, and destroys itself.

2m It is only natural, then, that the apostle also commands: “Do not get drunk with wine, in which there is much dissipation.” By the word “dissipation” (asotia) he hints that drunkenness cannot be saved (asoston). For although the Lord made water into wine at the wedding, he did not give permission to get drunk. Rather he brought to life the watery quality of our thinking. [The Greek text is damaged here.] He filled the whole world with the blood of the vine, which is the drink of truth. He gave to godliness the mixture of the old law and the new Word, for the fulfilment of the time already set in reconciliation. So Scripture has called wine a mystical symbol of holy blood. But when it exposes the hangover that comes from wine, it says: “Wine is undisciplined, and drunkenness is insolent.” Right reason therefore approves drinking in winter, because of the cold, up to the point of not shivering, for those who are easily chilled. At other times it approves it as a remedy for the inner organs.

2n We should use drink to stop thirst just as we use food to stop hunger, carefully guarding against slipping, for wine’s creeping in is treacherous. In this way our soul will be pure, dry and full of light, “for a dry soul is a radiance, the wisest and best.” So it can also look on divine things, and is not waterlogged and turned into a cloud-like body by the vapors that rise from wine. We should not fuss about Dian wine if it is not to be had, or Ariusian wine when it is not at hand. Thirst is the feeling of some lack, and it looks for the fitting remedy to fill it, not a swollen, showy drink. Importing wines from overseas is for an appetite that has gone soft through lack of self-control, a soul that is already out of its mind with desires before it gets drunk. There is fragrant Thasian, sweet-breathing Lesbian, a sweet Cretan, a pleasant Syracusan, an Egyptian Mendesian, island Naxian, and another flowery-scented wine from the land of Italy. Those are many names. For the self-controlled drinking companion there is one wine, the farm-produce of the one God.

2o Why should the local wine not be enough to satisfy the desire? Unless, of course, they will also bring in water, like the foolish kings who brought along Choaspes water as they brought their friends. The Holy Spirit pronounces the rich wretched for their luxury here too, speaking through Amos: “Those who drink strained wine,” he says, “and lie on ivory couches,” and he adds the rest that follows in the way of reproach. We should take special care for decency. (The story says that Athena, whoever she was, looked after her own appearance and threw away the pleasure of the flutes because of the ugliness it gave her face.) So we should drink without distorting the face. We should not gulp until we are full, or force our eyes into unseemly looks over the cup, or pull at it in one breath through lack of self-control. We should not pour the drink over the chin or soak our clothes when the drink rushes in all at once. That would be almost washing and rinsing our own faces in the cups.

2p Think of the gurgling noise as the drink comes pouring down, drawn in with a great gasp of breath as if it were being poured into a clay jar, while the throat echoes with the rushing gulps. That is ugly, and the sight of such self-indulgence is unseemly. A love of drinking is also a harmful habit for the one who gives in to it. Don’t rush into harm, my friend. Your drink is not being snatched away. It has been given to you and is waiting for you. Don’t be so eager to gulp it down with open mouth that you burst. Your thirst will be filled even if you drink more slowly, and you will have gained good order, if the drink is taken in measured portions. What self-indulgence grabs in haste is not taken from you by waiting. Scripture says, “Do not play the strong man with wine, for wine has ruined many.” “Drunkenness is practiced above all by the Scythians, Celts, Iberians and Thracians. These are all warlike peoples, and they consider it a fine and happy custom.” But we are a peaceful people. We feast for enjoyment, not for insolence, so let us drink our friendship cups sober, so that they may truly be shown to be friendly pledges, as the name says.

2q How do you think the Lord drank when he became man for our sake? As shamelessly as we do? Was it not with refinement? With decorum? With careful thought? You may be sure that he too took wine, for he too was man. And he blessed the wine, saying, “Take, drink; this is my blood.” The blood of the vine is his figure for the Word, “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” the holy stream of gladness. He showed clearly, by what he taught at feasts, that the one who drinks must be self-controlled, for he did not teach while drunk. And that what he blessed was wine, he showed again when he said to his disciples, “I will not drink of this fruit of the vine until I drink it with you in the kingdom of my Father.” That it was wine the Lord drank, he also says of himself, when he rebukes the hard-heartedness of the Jews: “For the Son of Man came, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a wine-drinker, a friend of tax collectors.’” Let this be thrown in, as a playful aside, against those who call themselves Encratites.

2r Women, supposedly to keep up a graceful appearance, avoid wide cups so that their lips will not be stretched and split by opening the mouth wide. Instead they drink indecently from narrow-necked alabaster flasks. They tilt their heads back and bare their necks, which is not decent, in my opinion. They stretch the throat and gulp as they swallow, as though they were exposing to their fellow drinkers all they could. They draw up belches like a man’s, or rather like a slave’s, and carry on in wanton luxury. For no such noise is fitting for a reasoning man, and still less for a woman, for whom the mere awareness of what she is brings nothing but shame. Scripture says, “A drunken woman is great wrath.” It is as if a wine-soaked woman were the anger of God. Why? Because “she does not cover up her disgrace.” A woman is quickly dragged into disorder if she only gives her will over to pleasures.

2s We have not forbidden drinking from alabaster flasks. What we cut off is the habit of drinking only from them, as a piece of showiness. We advise women to use whatever happens to be at hand without fuss, and so to check their appetites while they are still far from slipping. The swelling of air that rises toward a belch should be let out quietly. In no way should women be allowed to let any part of the body be seen uncovered, so that both do not fall: the men, provoked to look, and the women, drawing the men’s eyes to themselves. We must always behave decently, as though the Lord were present. Otherwise the apostle may say to us in anger, as he did to the Corinthians, “When you come together, it is not possible to eat the Lord’s supper.” It seems to me that the star the astronomers call “the Headless,” which is counted before the “wandering” star, with its head sunk into its chest, hints at gluttons, lovers of pleasure and those ready for drunkenness.

2t For in such people the reasoning faculty is seated not in the head but in the bowels, enslaved to the passions of desire and anger. Elpenor broke his neck when he fell down drunk. In the same way the brain of these people, made dizzy from above by drunkenness, falls down to the liver and the heart, that is, to the love of pleasure and to anger. It is a greater fall than the one the poets’ children say Hephaestus took when Zeus threw him from heaven to the ground. Scripture says, “Sleeplessness brings pain, and bile and colic, with an insatiable man.” This is also why Noah’s drunkenness was written down. We are to guard against drunkenness as much as we can, having the failure set plainly before us in writing. For this reason those who covered the shame of his drunkenness are blessed by the Lord. So Scripture gathers it all up very briefly and says it in one sentence: “Wine is enough for an instructed man, and he will rest on his bed.”

On Costly Vessels.

3a That we should not be eager for costly furnishings. The use of drinking cups made of silver and gold, or others set with jewels, is to be rejected. They are only a deception of the eye. If you pour a hot drink into them, the vessels become scorching, and taking hold of them hurts. If you pour in something cold, the material passes on its quality and spoils the mixture, so the rich man’s drink is harmful. Away, then, with Thericlean cups, Antigonid cups, cantharoi, labronioi, lepastai, the endless kinds of drinking vessels, and the wine-coolers and wine-pourers besides. For gold and silver, in private and in public alike, are a possession that provokes envy when they go beyond what we need. They are rare to get, hard to keep, and not suitable for use. The over-elaborate vanity of engraved glass is also to be kept out of our well-ordered life. Because of its craftsmanship it breaks all the more easily, and it teaches us to be afraid and to drink at the same time. Then there are silver couches, basins, vinegar-dishes, small plates and bowls. There are further vessels of silver and gold, some for serving food and some for other uses that I am ashamed even to mention. There are tripods finely worked in easily split cedar, in thyine wood, in ebony and in ivory. There are couches with silver feet, inlaid with ivory and dotted with gold, and bed-screens decorated with tortoise-shell. There are purple bedcovers and others in colours hard to come by. All these are proofs of tasteless luxury, advantages that scheme to bring envy and laziness. All of them are to be set aside, for none of them deserves any serious effort.

3b “For the time is short,” as the apostle says. [The Greek text has a gap here.] What remains is that we not make ourselves look ridiculous. Some people are seen in processions smeared on the outside to impressive effect and made to look dignified, but they are wretched within. To make this clearer, the apostle added, “What remains is that those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who buy as though they did not possess.” If this applies to marriage, about which God says, “Multiply,” how, do you think, must tasteless display be driven out by the Lord’s authority? This is also why the Lord says, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor, and come, follow me.” Follow God stripped of arrogance, stripped of perishable show. Keep only what is truly yours, the good that cannot be taken away. That is faith in God, confession of the One who suffered, and kindness to people, the most precious possession of all.

3c I also approve of Plato, who lays it down outright that one should have no wealth of silver or gold. He says one should not even have a useless vessel, one that is not moderate as well as serving a necessary use. The same thing should be suitable for many purposes, and owning many things should be done away with. The divine Scripture speaks admirably somewhere to the self-loving and the boastful: “Where are the rulers of the nations, and those who lord it over the wild beasts on the earth, who make sport of the birds of the sky, who store up silver and gold, in which people trusted, and there is no end to their possessions, who work silver and gold and worry over it? There is no tracing their works. They have vanished and gone down to Hades.” This is the reward of tasteless extravagance. 3d We farm the land, and for that we need a hoe and a plough. Yet no one would forge a hoe of silver or a sickle of gold. For farming we use the material that works well, not the one that is rich. So what is to stop those who can see the same principle from thinking the same way about household utensils? Let use be their measure, not expense. Tell me, then: does the table knife not cut unless it is studded with silver or has an ivory handle? Or must we forge Indian steel to carve a portion of meat, as if we were calling in an ally for battle? And what if the washbasin is earthenware? Will it not take the water from washing hands? Will the footbath not take the water from washing feet? Will a table with ivory legs feel insulted at carrying a loaf worth a penny? Will the lamp refuse to give light because it is the potter’s work and not the goldsmith’s?

3e I say further that a plain cot gives a rest no worse than an ivory couch. A coat of goatskin is quite enough to spread over the bed, so there is no need for purple or scarlet covers. Yet people condemn such simplicity because of the foolishness of luxury, the origin of all evil. See how great the error is, how great the love of empty show! The Lord ate from a cheap dish. He had his disciples recline on the grass on the ground. He washed their feet with a linen towel tied around him. He is the God without pride, the Lord of all, and he did not bring a silver footbath down from heaven. He asked the Samaritan woman for a drink, as she drew water from the well in an earthenware jar. He did not look for royal gold, but taught us to quench thirst without trouble. He made need his aim, not unlimited abundance. At feasts he ate and drank, but he did not dig metals out of the earth. He did not use little vessels of silver and gold, which is to say, of rust, giving off the smell of that puffed-up material.

3f In general, then, I say that food, clothing, utensils and everything else in the household must fit the settled purpose of a Christian. Each should suit the person, age, occupation and time. We are servants of one God, so our possessions and the furniture that goes with them should show the marks of one good life. Each individual, with a faith that makes no distinctions, with this single settled purpose, should be seen doing whatever follows from it, in agreement with that one disposition. Whatever we acquire without hardship, use without difficulty, and so can praise, keep easily and share readily, is better. Useful things are better, and certainly the cheaper things are better than those of the rich. 3g In sum, wealth that is not rightly managed is a fortress of evil. Many people have their eyes fixed on it, and they will never enter the kingdom of heaven. They are sick with worldly things and live arrogantly because of their luxuries. But those who hurry toward salvation must grasp this first: all creation exists for us to use, and possessions exist for the sake of self-sufficiency, which one can attain with few things. People are foolish who, out of insatiable greed, take delight in their stored-up treasures. Scripture says, “He who gathers wages has gathered them into a bag with holes.” This is the man who gathers and locks up his seed and ends up with less, the man who shares with no one. It is a joke and a big laugh that men carry silver chamber pots and glass urinals around with them, as they take their advisers along with them. Rich women, without any sense, have gold made as containers for their excretions. So even to relieve themselves, the rich cannot do it unless they do so with pomp. I would pray that for their whole lives they would judge gold to be fit for dung.

3h But as things are, the fortress of evil has been found: the love of money. The apostle says it is the root of all evils: “Some, reaching for it, have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” The best wealth is to be poor in desires, and true greatness of mind does not mean being proud of wealth but despising it. To boast about one’s household utensils is utterly shameful. It is hardly right to take pains over things that anyone who wishes can buy in the market. Wisdom, however, cannot be bought with earthly coin or in a market. It is sold in heaven, and it is sold for honest coin: the incorruptible Word, the royal gold.

How to Conduct Ourselves at Feasts.

4a Heading: How we should relax at feasts. Let revelry be kept far from our rational feasting. So too the empty all-night parties that run wild in drunken excess. Revelry is a drunken restlessness, an improvised outburst of lovesick distress. Love and drunkenness, those irrational passions, are banished far from our company. An all-night party over drink is a kind of drunken carousing: it calls out for drunkenness and stirs up lust, a daring that does shameful things. People who give themselves to flutes, harps, choruses, dances, Egyptian castanets and such idle amusements become unruly, indecent and wholly uninstructed, deafened by cymbals and drums and surrounded by the noise of instruments of deceit. To my mind, a drinking party like that is simply a theatre of drunkenness. The apostle calls on us to put off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, “walking decently as in the day,” not devoting ourselves to “revelries and drunkenness, to beds and licentiousness.”

4b Let the shepherd’s pipe be left to shepherds, and the flute to superstitious people hurrying off to idol worship. In truth these instruments should be sent away from a sober banquet, for they suit wild animals better than human beings, and the more irrational kind of human beings at that. We are told that deer are charmed by pipes and led by the tune into the snares when hunters are chasing them. And when mares are being mated, a flute-tune is played over them like a wedding song; the musicians call it the “horse-mounting song.” In short, every sight and sound that is unworthy of a free person, and every shameful sensation that comes from lack of self-control (which is truly a lack of feeling), must be cut out completely. We must guard against the pleasure that tickles the eyes and ears and makes us soft and unmanly. For the varied spells of limp, broken melodies and mournful rhythms of the Carian muse corrupt character, and with their undisciplined and wicked art drag people down into passion.

4c In contrast to such revelry, the Spirit sings of the divine service: “Praise him with the sound of the trumpet.” For at the sound of a trumpet he will raise the dead. “Praise him with the psaltery,” because the tongue is the Lord’s psaltery. “And praise him with the harp”: let the harp be understood as the mouth, struck by the Spirit as though with a plectrum. “Praise him with drum and dance”: he means the Church, rehearsing the resurrection of the flesh in the sounding of the skin. “Praise him with strings and organ”: he calls our body the organ and its sinews the strings, through which it has received its harmonious tension, and when it is struck by the Spirit it gives out human voices. “Praise him with cymbals of shouting”: he calls the tongue the cymbal of the mouth, which sounds along with the lips as they are struck.

4d For this reason he called out to humanity, “Let every breath praise the Lord,” because he has watched over every breath he has made. For man is truly an instrument of peace. If you investigate the other instruments, you will find them to be instruments of war, which either inflame desires, or kindle passions, or work up rage. In their wars, for example, the Etruscans use the trumpet, the Arcadians the pipe, the Sicilians the pektis, the Cretans the lyre, the Spartans the flute, the Thracians the horn, the Egyptians the drum, and the Arabs the cymbal. But we use only one instrument, the peaceful Word alone, with which we honor God. We no longer use the old psaltery, trumpet, drum and flute. Men trained for war, who despised the fear of God, were accustomed to use these at their festivals, so that through such rhythms their slackened spirit might be roused up again.

4e Let our friendly cheer at the drink be twofold, as the law teaches. For if the command is “You shall love the Lord your God,” and then “your neighbor,” then the first kind of goodwill should be toward God, in thanksgiving and the singing of psalms. The second should be toward our neighbor, in dignified conversation. For the apostle says, “Let the word of the Lord dwell in you richly.” This Word fits itself to times, persons and places, and here it is a Word for the banquet. For the apostle adds again: “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, singing to God in your hearts with grace; and whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God his Father.” This is our revel of thanksgiving. And if you want to sing and play to the harp or the lyre, there is no fault in it. You will be imitating the righteous Hebrew king who gave thanks to God.

4f “Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous; praise is fitting for the upright,” says the prophecy. “Give thanks to the Lord on the harp; sing to him on the ten-stringed psaltery; sing him a new song.” Does not the ten-stringed psaltery point to the Word, Jesus, who is shown forth by the letter standing for ten? Just as it is fitting to bless the Maker of all things before we share in food, so at the drinking it is right to sing to him as we share in his creatures. For a psalm is a tuneful and sober blessing; the apostle calls the psalm “a spiritual song.” Above all, before we fall asleep, it is holy to give thanks to God, having enjoyed his grace and kindness, so that we go to sleep in godly fashion. “And give thanks to him in songs of the lips,” it says, “for all good pleasure comes by his command, and there is no lack in his salvation.” Even among the ancient Greeks, at drinking feasts and over the cups being poured, a song called the skolion was sung, after the pattern of the Hebrew psalms. Sometimes all sang the paean together with one voice, and sometimes they took turns passing the toasts of the song around. The more musical among them sang to the lyre.

4g But let love songs be gone far away, and let our songs be hymns to God. “Let them praise his name in the dance,” it says; “let them sing to him with timbrel and psaltery.” And who is the choir that sings? The Spirit himself will tell you: “His praise is in the assembly of the holy ones; let them rejoice in their King.” And again he adds: “For the Lord takes pleasure in his people.” We should accept only sober harmonies. We must drive as far as possible from our vigorous minds those truly soft and slack harmonies, which use corrupt skill in the bending of the notes and slide into softness and vulgar buffoonery. But stern and sober melodies reject the arrogance of drunkenness. So we should leave the chromatic harmonies to drunken, unrestrained revels and to flowery, harlot-like music.

On Laughter.

5a On Laughter. People who imitate ridiculous, or rather laughable, passions must be driven out of our way of life. All speech flows from the mind and character, so ridiculous words cannot be uttered unless they come from a ridiculous character. The saying “There is no good tree that bears rotten fruit, nor again a rotten tree that bears good fruit” fits here too, for speech is the fruit of the mind. So if buffoons are to be banished from our community, we must be far from allowing ourselves to play the buffoon. It is out of place to be found imitating what we are forbidden to listen to. It is much more out of place to work at becoming ridiculous oneself, that is, abusive and laughable. If we would not put up with being dressed in a ridiculous way, as some are seen in processions, how could we reasonably tolerate the inner man being shaped into something still more ridiculous?

5b And if we would not willingly twist our faces into something more ridiculous, how could we deliberately try to be, and to look, ridiculous in our speech, mocking the most precious of all human possessions, the word? To practice this is mere buffoonery, since talk that is merely comic is not worth hearing. By its very words it trains us toward shameful deeds. We should be witty and charming, but not clowns. Even laughter itself must be kept under control. When it comes out in the right way, it shows good order; when it goes the wrong way, it reveals a lack of self-control. In short, we must not remove from people whatever is natural to them, but set a fitting measure and a proper time for it. Man is a creature that can laugh, but that does not mean we should laugh at everything, just as a horse, which can neigh, does not neigh at everything. As reasoning creatures, we should keep ourselves in good balance. We should ease the strictness and over-tension of our earnestness in tune, not let it go slack out of tune.

5c The proper relaxing of the face in harmony, as of an instrument, is called a smile. This is the laughter of self-controlled people (the cheerfulness is, so to speak, reflected in the face). But when the face goes slack out of tune, it is called, in women, a giggle, which is the laughter of a prostitute. In men it is called a guffaw, which is the laughter of a suitor and of an insolent man. “A fool raises his voice when he laughs,” says the Scripture, “but a shrewd man will hardly smile quietly.” Here he uses “shrewd” to mean sensible, the opposite of the fool. But we must not on the other hand be sullen; we should be thoughtful. I quite approve of the man who was seen “smiling with a grim face,” for then his laughter “would be less open to ridicule.” Even the smile needs to be trained. If something is shameful, we should be seen to blush rather than smile, so that we do not seem to share in the pleasure out of fellow-feeling. If something is sad, it is fitting to look downcast rather than seem to enjoy it. The one is a sign of human reasoning; the other suggests a reputation for cruelty.

5d We should not laugh all the time, for that is without measure. We should not laugh in the presence of older people or others who deserve respect, unless they themselves make a pleasant joke to cheer us. We should not laugh at just anyone, or in every place, or with everyone, or about everything. Laughter is especially a slippery slope into slander for young people and women. Looking dignified, even from a distance, drives off those who would tempt us. Dignity alone, just by its appearance, can beat back the assaults of licentiousness. As for the senseless, one might say all of them, wine “bids them laugh softly and dance,” turning their effeminate character toward softness. And we should notice how, from this, loose freedom of speech increases disorder into foul talk: “and he let slip a word that had better been left unsaid.” Indeed, it happens that in wine the characters of the deceitful are most clearly seen, stripped of their pretense by the shameless frankness of drunkenness. Because of it reason, heavy-headed with drink, is put to sleep within the soul itself, and the unruly passions are roused and overpower the weakness of reasoning.

On Filthy Speaking.

6a On Filthy Speaking. We must keep entirely away from filthy talk ourselves, and we must shut the mouths of those who use it. We can do this with a sharper look, by turning the face away, by what is called a sneer, and often also with a rather harsh word. “For what comes out of the mouth,” he says, “defiles a man.” It shows him to be common, pagan, uneducated and licentious, not a person of his own mind, well-ordered and self-controlled. As for hearing and seeing shameful things, the divine Instructor acts like the trainers of boys who wrestle. To keep their ears from being injured, he puts self-controlled words around us like ear-guards, so that the blow of fornication cannot reach far enough to break the soul. And he directs our eyes to the sight of what is good, saying that it is better to slip with the feet than with the eyes.

6b The apostle drives off this filthy speaking when he says, “Let no rotten word come out of your mouth, but only what is good.” And again: “As is fitting for saints, let shamefulness not be named among you, nor foolish talk, nor coarse joking, which are not fitting, but rather thanksgiving.” If the person who calls his brother a fool is liable to judgment, what shall we say of the one who talks foolishly? About this too it is written: “Whoever speaks an idle word will give account of it to the Lord on the day of judgment.” And again He says, “By your word you will be justified, and by your word you will be condemned.” What, then, are the ear-guards that save us? And what is the training for eyes that slip? They are time spent with the righteous. Such company takes hold of the ears beforehand and blocks them against those who want to draw us away from the truth.

6c “Bad company corrupts good character,” says the poet. The apostle puts it more nobly: “Be those who hate what is evil and cling to what is good.” For the one who lives among the holy will be made holy. We must therefore keep away completely from shameful things heard, said or seen. Much more must we keep clear of shameful deeds. These include displaying or uncovering parts of the body that should not be shown, and gazing at the more private parts. The modest son could not bear to look at the righteous man’s nakedness, which was shameful. Self-control covered what drunkenness had uncovered, the glaring fault of ignorance. We must be no less pure in the words we utter, and the ears of those who believe in Christ must be closed to such words. For this reason, it seems to me, the Instructor does not allow us even to say anything indecent. He attacks licentiousness from far off.

6d For He is always skilled at cutting out the roots of sins. He turns “You shall not commit adultery” into “You shall not desire,” since adultery is the fruit of desire, the evil root. In the same way here, the Instructor condemns the careless use of words, cutting off the careless mixing with licentiousness. Disorder in words builds the habit of disorder in deeds, and practising self-control in speech is training to resist lust. We have explained in a deeper discussion that the label “truly shameful” does not belong to the names (the unusual names, not used in everyday speech) for the organs of intercourse, nor to those organs, nor to the union of marriage. Knee and shin are not shameful members, nor are their names, nor what they do. The private parts are also members of the human body, and they are counted worthy of reverence, not shame. What is shameful is their unlawful use, and that is why it deserves disgrace, reproach and punishment. For the only thing that is truly shameful is vice and what is done through it.

6e By the same reasoning, “shameful speaking” is properly the name for talk about the deeds of vice, such as discussing adultery or the love of boys and the like. Idle, foolish chatter must also be silenced. “For in much talking,” it says, “you will not escape sin.” So the lazy tongue will pay a penalty. “There is one who is found wise by keeping silent, and one who is hated for his many words.” The chatterer is already sick of himself: “For the one who multiplies words makes his own soul loathe him.”

Directions for Those Who Live Together.

7a What those who live together in a refined way must guard against. Let mockery stay far from us, for it starts insult, and from insult come quarrels, fights and hatreds, which swell up. We said that insult is the servant of drunkenness. A person is judged not only by his deeds but also by his words. “At a banquet,” it says, “do not rebuke your neighbour, and do not speak a word of reproach to him.” For even if we are told above all to keep company with the saints, mocking a holy person is a sin. “From the mouth of fools,” Scripture says, “comes a rod of insult.” By “rod” it means the support of insult, the thing on which insult leans and rests. So I admire the apostle, who here too urges us not to let slip coarse jokes or unfitting words. For if gatherings at feasts are held out of love, and the aim of a banquet is friendly kindness toward those who are together, and eating and drinking only go along with love, how should we not behave reasonably?

7b We must not be puzzling one another with riddles, either, for the sake of love. If we gather to deepen our goodwill toward one another, how can we stir up hatred by mocking? It is better to keep silent than to argue back, adding sin to ignorance. “Blessed,” truly, “is the man who has not slipped with his mouth and has not been pierced with grief for sin.” That is, he has either repented of the sin he committed by speaking, or he has spoken in such a way as to grieve no one. In general, then, young men and young women should for the most part keep away from such feasts, so that they do not stumble where they should not. Unaccustomed things heard and indecent things seen stir up the mind while their faith is still tossed by waves. The instability of their age also helps push them toward desire, to which they are already inclined. Sometimes, too, they cause others to stumble, by showing off the dangers of their youthful beauty.

7c Wisdom, it seems, gives good instruction: “Do not sit at all with a married woman, and do not recline with her on your elbow.” That is, do not dine with her often or eat with her. So the text goes on: “And do not argue with her over wine, lest your heart turn aside toward her, and in your blood you slide into destruction.” For the freedom that comes with wine is treacherous, and it can lead to a fall. He says “married” because the danger is greater for the man who tries to break the bond of a marriage. But if some necessity arises that requires women to be present, let them be well covered, outwardly with clothing and inwardly with modesty. As for women who are not married, it is the worst scandal for them to be present at a banquet of men, especially men who have been drinking. The men, for their part, should keep their eyes fixed on the couch, lean steadily on their elbows without moving, and be present with their ears alone. If they sit, they must not cross their legs, or lay one thigh over the other, or prop the chin on the hand. It is ill-bred not to hold oneself up, and in a young man it is a fault to be blamed.

7d Constantly shifting about and changing position is also a sign of lightness. It belongs to the self-controlled man, right from the start, to choose the smaller portion and the slower pace in eating and drinking, not the more hasty, both at the beginning and in the pauses between courses. He also stops early and is not attached to the food. “Eat,” it says, “what is set before you, as a man should. Be the first to stop, for the sake of good manners. If you are seated among many, do not reach out your hand before them.” So we must never leap ahead because greed persuades us. Nor should we strain to stretch the meal out for a long time, since by lagging behind we confess our lack of self-control. Nor should we be seen in the middle of the meal clinging to the food like wild animals, or taking a large helping of savory dishes. For man is by nature not a relish-eater but a grain-eater. It is also fitting for a self-controlled man to rise before the crowd and quietly slip away from the banquet. “For at the time for getting up,” it says, “do not be last; hurry off home.” The Twelve called together the multitude of the disciples and said, “It is not right for us to leave the word of God and serve tables.” If they guarded against this, much more did they flee gluttony.

7e These same apostles, writing “to the brothers in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia,” said: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these necessary things: to abstain from things sacrificed to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.” We must guard against drunken excess just as we guard against hemlock, for both drag us down to death. “We must also keep away from extreme laughter and from excessive tears.” Often drunken men laugh loudly for a long time, and then, I do not know how, are led by some drunken impulse into tears. Both effeminate behavior and insolence are out of harmony with the Word. Older men, looking on the young as their children, will very seldom, but perhaps sometimes, play with them, joking in a way that will train them in good behavior.

7f For example, to a shy and silent young man one may say playfully something like this: “This son of mine—I mean the one who says nothing—never stops talking.” A joke like this deepens the young man’s modesty. In a playful way it brings out the good qualities he has by accusing him of the bad ones he does not have. It is a teacher’s device, confirming what is present by what is not. The same kind of judgment lies behind the saying that a water-drinker, a sober man, is behaving drunkenly and is drunk. But if there are people who love to mock, we must keep silent and pass their idle words along, as we pass on the full cups. Such sport is risky. “The mouth of the reckless is near to ruin.” “You shall not accept an empty report, nor agree to join an unjust man as an unjust witness,” whether in slanders, in abusive speech, or even in malicious talk.

7g I think I should also set a limit on the voice of self-controlled people, at least those who are permitted to speak, namely the one who is answering in conversation. Silence is the virtue of women and the safe honor of the young, but good speech belongs to a tested age. “Speak, elder, at a banquet, for it becomes you. But speak without hindrance and with exact knowledge.” “Young man,” wisdom allows you also: “Speak, if you must. When you have barely been asked twice, sum up your words briefly.” Both speakers should keep their voices in due proportion. A loud delivery is utterly mad, and speaking so that those nearby cannot hear is the mark of a senseless person, since they will not hear him. The first is a sign of low breeding, the second of arrogance. Let there also be no quarrelsomeness, no striving for an empty victory in words, since our goal is freedom from disturbance, and this is what “Peace to you” means. “Before you have heard, do not answer a word.” A soft, broken voice belongs to an effeminate man, but a measured voice belongs to the self-controlled man, who keeps his speech in check in loudness, length, speed and amount.

7h We must never talk at great length, or too much, or idly, nor must we speak in a hurried, tumbling rush. The voice itself, so to speak, must be given its due of justice, and those who shout at the wrong moments and bawl must be silenced. This is why the self-controlled Odysseus beat Thersites with blows. He was the only one who was punished, because he was a man of measureless words, who knew in his mind many words that were disorderly, uttered idly and not in good order. “A talkative man is dreadful in his own destruction.” With babblers it is like old shoes: everything else is worn out by wickedness, and only the tongue is left over, to do harm. So Wisdom gives the most practical advice for life: “Do not chatter in the company of elders.” She cuts off foolish talk at the top and begins from God, laying down the rule of moderation like this: “Do not repeat your words in your prayer.” Clicking noises, whistles, and snapping of the fingers, which people use to call their servants, are signals without words, and rational people should avoid them. We should also give up constant spitting and violent throat-clearing.

7i Do not blow your nose at the drinking either. We must have some regard for our fellow guests, so that they do not turn away in nausea from this kind of disorderly conduct, which accuses a person of lack of self-control. The manger and the dung-heap are not in the same place for oxen and donkeys. Yet many people blow their nose and spit while they are dining in the same place. If someone happens to sneeze, or likewise belch, he must not make a noise that rings in the ears of those nearby and testifies to his own lack of training. The belch must be let pass quietly with the breath as it goes out, the mouth shaped decently, not stretched and gaping like a tragic mask. The disturbance of a sneeze should be removed by checking the breathing gently. In this way, by managing the passage of the breath, we can quietly put out the sudden threat of the wind in the most seemly manner, and even try to conceal anything superfluous that the air may force out with it.

7j To want to add to such noises instead of reducing them is a sign of arrogance and disorder. People who pick at their teeth until their gums bleed are unpleasant to themselves and offensive to their neighbors. Tickling the ears and provoking sneezes are also pig-like itches, which practice unrestrained fornication. We must also avoid shameful sights and shameful talk about them. Let the gaze be steady, the turning of the neck and the movement of the body composed, and the gestures of the hands in conversation restrained. In short, the Christian belongs to stillness, quietness, calm and peace.

On the Use of Ointments and Crowns.

8a Question: should we use perfumed oils and wreaths? We have no need to use wreaths and perfumed oils. They run aground on pleasures and laziness, especially when night is near. I know that the woman brought an “alabaster jar of ointment” to the holy supper, anointed the Lord’s feet, and sang his praise. I also know that the ancient kings of the Hebrews were crowned with gold and precious stones. But the woman had not yet shared in the Word (for she was still a sinner). She honored the Master with the thing she thought finest among her possessions, the ointment. With the adornment of her body, her own hair, she wiped away the excess ointment, and she poured out on the Lord tears of repentance. For this reason “her sins have been forgiven.” This can also be a symbol of the Lord’s teaching and his suffering. Feet anointed with fragrant ointment hint at divine teaching traveling with good repute to the ends of the earth: “Their voice has gone out to the ends of the earth.” And if I do not seem tiresome, the Lord’s perfumed feet are the apostles. In keeping with prophecy, they received a share of the Holy Spirit, the fragrance of the anointing.

8b So the apostles, who went around the whole world and proclaimed the gospel, are allegorically called the Lord’s feet. The Spirit foretells this about them through the psalmist: “Let us worship at the place where his feet stood.” That is, let us worship where his feet, the apostles, arrived, since by their preaching he came to the ends of the earth. The tears are repentance. The loosened hair announced release from love of adornment. It also announced the affliction, borne with endurance, that goes with preaching for the Lord’s sake, since the old vainglory has been loosed for the sake of the new faith. But it also reveals the Lord’s passion, for those who understand it mystically in this way. The oil is the Lord himself, from whom comes the mercy shown to us. The ointment, which is oil that has been tampered with, is Judas the betrayer. Through him the Lord was anointed on the feet as he was departing from his life in the world, for the dead are anointed with perfume. We are the tears: sinners who have repented, who have believed in him, and whose sins he has forgiven. The loosened hair is Jerusalem, deserted and in mourning, for whose sake the prophets’ laments were made.

8c The Lord himself teaches us that Judas is the one who is tampered with, when he says, “Whoever dips with me in the dish, this one will betray me.” Do you see the deceitful table companion? This same Judas betrayed the Teacher with a kiss. He became a hypocrite with a deceitful kiss, imitating another hypocrite of old, and exposing that people of whom it was said: “This people love me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” So it is not unlikely that Judas himself stands for both kinds of oil. As a disciple who had been shown mercy, he is oil. As a betrayer, he is deceitful, drugged oil. This, then, is what the perfumed feet were prophesying: the betrayal by Judas, as the Lord went on toward his passion. And the Savior himself, when he washed the disciples’ feet and sent them out to good works, hinted at their journey for the benefit of the nations. By his own power he had made that journey ready beforehand, fair and clean.

8d In these events the ointment gave off its fragrance, and the work of that fragrance, which reaches everyone, has been made known. For the Lord’s passion has filled us with fragrance, but the Hebrews with sin. The apostle showed this most clearly when he said: “Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ and makes known through us the fragrance of the knowledge of him in every place. For we are the Lord’s fragrance to God, among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To some it is a fragrance from death to death, and to others a fragrance from life to life.” As for the kings of the Jews, they wore a composite, varied crown of gold and precious stones. They were the “anointed ones” (the christs), and they carried Christ symbolically on their heads without knowing it. They were adorned with the head of the Lord.

8e A precious stone, a pearl or an emerald, is a hidden picture of the Word himself. Gold, in turn, is the incorruptible Word, who does not admit the rust (or poison) of decay. When he was born, the Magi brought him gold as a symbol of kingship. This crown, made in the likeness of the Lord, stays immortal, for it does not wither like a flower. I also know what Aristippus the Cyrenian said. Aristippus lived a soft and luxurious life. He put a sophistical argument like this: “A horse anointed with perfume is not harmed in its excellence as a horse, nor is a dog perfumed in its excellence as a dog. So neither is a man.” That was how he drew his conclusion. But the horse and the dog take no notice of the perfume. Those whose sense of smell is more rational are more to be blamed for enjoying it when they put on girlish scents. These perfumes come in endless varieties: the Brenthian, the Metallian, the Royal, the Plangonian, and the Egyptian Psagdas.

8f Simonides is not ashamed to say in his iambic verses: “I was anointed with perfumes and incense and bacchar, for a merchant happened to be there.” People also make perfume from lilies and from henna. Nard is highly valued among them, as are ointment of roses and the others that women still use: liquid and dry perfumes, scented powders, and perfumes burned as incense. Every day they invent some new way to match their insatiable desire with an insatiable supply of fragrance. So they reek of a great lack of taste. These women also perfume their clothes, bedding and houses with incense and sprinkle them with scent. Luxury all but forces even their chamber pots to smell of perfume. Some people are indignant at this enthusiasm. They think perfumes make the men’s quarters effeminate, and they seem to me right to be so hostile to them. They even drive the makers of perfume, the perfumers, out of well-governed cities, and the dyers of flower-colored wools as well. For deceitful garments and ointments have no right to enter the city of truth.

8g It is especially fitting that the men among us should smell not of perfumes but of nobility and goodness. Let the woman breathe out Christ, the royal ointment, and not scented powders and perfumes. Let her always be anointed with the heavenly oil of self-control, taking delight in the holy ointment, the Spirit. Christ prepares this for people who know him: an ointment of fragrance, made up from heavenly spices. The Lord himself is anointed with this ointment, as David shows: “Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions. Myrrh, stacte and cassia come from your garments.” But let us not, without noticing it, come to loathe perfumes the way vultures do, or beetles (they say beetles die when anointed with rose perfume). Women should be permitted a few of these perfumes, those that do not overwhelm their husbands. For excessive anointing with perfume smells of a funeral, not of life together.

8h Yet oil itself is hostile to bees and to insects. Among people, it has helped some and stirred others to fight. Those who were cowardly before, once anointed with it, it turns in the stadiums into thorough fighters in the contest. But perfume is a soft oil. Do you not think it can make noble character effeminate? Certainly. Just as we have shut out luxury from taste, so we also banish the pursuit of pleasure in what we see and smell. Otherwise we may unknowingly give a way back into the soul, through the senses (like unguarded doors), to the self-indulgence we drove out. Suppose they say that the Lord, the great High Priest, offers the incense of fragrance to God. Let them not take this to mean a sacrifice and the fragrance of burning incense. Let them accept instead that the Lord offers on the altar what love has made acceptable, the spiritual fragrance.

8i Oil by itself is enough to make the skin glossy, to relax the sinews, and to check any heavy smell of the body. For that purpose we may well need oil. But the cultivation of fragrance is a bait of idle self-indulgence, drawing a person from far off into greedy desire. The undisciplined man is led on from every side: by food, by bedding, by company, by his eyes, his ears and his jaws, and by his nostrils too. As oxen are pulled by rings and ropes, so the undisciplined man is dragged about by incense, perfumes and the scents of garlands. We give no place to any pleasure that is tied to no useful service in life. So let us make a distinction here too, and choose what is useful. 8j There are some fragrances that do not dull the head or stir up desire. They do not smell of sexual embrace or loose company. Used with moderation they are healthy, feeding the brain when it is in poor condition and strengthening the stomach. We should not throw out their use altogether. Ointment should be used like a medicine or a remedy: to revive failing strength, and against catarrh, chills and low spirits. The comic poet says somewhere: “He anoints his nostrils with perfumes; it is a very great part of health to give the brain good smells.” The rubbing of the feet with the oil of warming or cooling ointments is also practised for the sake of benefit. In those who are congested, it draws the fluid from the head and lets it drain down to the less important parts of the body.

8k But pleasure that has no usefulness joined to it is a mark of a courtesan’s character and a drug that provokes desire. There is a real difference between bathing oneself in perfume and being anointed with ointment. The first is womanish; the second is sometimes even profitable. The philosopher Aristippus, for example, once anointed himself with ointment and said that the wretched effeminate men deserved to perish miserably for bringing the benefit of ointment into disrepute. “Honour the physician for the use you have of him,” says the Scripture, “for the Most High created him, and healing comes from the Lord.” Then it goes on: “And the perfumer will make a mixture.” Clearly, ointments are given for benefit and not for self-indulgence. We must never take pains over the provocative side of ointments, but choose what is helpful. After all, God granted people the making of oil to help them in their labours.

8l Foolish women dye their grey hairs and perfume their locks, yet they go grey sooner, because spices are drying. This is why those who use perfume look more unkempt, and dryness makes the hair greyer. (Whether grey hair is a withering of the hair or a lack of heat, the dryness drinks up the moist nourishment proper to the hair and turns it grey.) How can people who run from grey hair reasonably go on loving perfumes, when perfumes cause it? Just as dogs track wild animals by the scent, so the self-controlled hunt down the licentious by their overdone perfume. The use of garlands is much the same, fit for revelry and drunkenness: “Away! Do not put a garland around my head.” In spring it is good to spend time in dewy, soft meadows, green with flowers of every colour, and to feed, like the bees, on their natural, pure fragrance. But to weave a garland from an untouched meadow and wear it about at home is not for people of self-control. It is not fitting for revelling hair to be covered with rosebuds, violets, lilies or other such flowers, as though dressing oneself in the greenery.

8m A garland set around the head chills the hair in any case, both by its moisture and by its coldness. For this reason physicians, explaining by natural science that the brain is cold, think it right to anoint the chest and the tips of the nostrils with ointment. Then the warm vapour, passing gently upward, can strongly warm the chill. So a man is far from right to cool the head with flowers when the sinewy part wants to be warmed. Besides, those who wear garlands lose the delight of the blossoms. People who bind a garland above their eyes do not enjoy the sight, and those who drive the flowers up above their breathing do not enjoy the fragrance. Fragrance naturally rises and evaporates upward above the head, so the breath is left without enjoyment, since the fragrance is snatched away. A flower, like any beauty, gives pleasure when it is looked at, and in enjoying beautiful things through the eye we should glorify the Creator.

8n Wearing them is harmful, and the pleasure soon passes, punished by regret. Their short life is quickly exposed, for both of them fade, the flower and the beauty. And of those who touch them, the one cools them and the other sets them on fire. In a word, enjoying them by any means other than the eye is an outrage, not a delight. We should take our delight as in a paradise, with self-control, since we truly follow the Scripture. We should think of a woman’s crown as her husband, and of a husband’s crown as his marriage. The flowers of the marriage are the children of both, which the divine farmer gathers from the meadows of the flesh. “The crown of old men is their children’s children, and the glory of children is their fathers,” it says. For us the glory is the Father of all, and the crown of the whole church is Christ.

8o Flowers, like roots and herbs, have their own properties. Some are beneficial, some harmful, and some risky. Ivy, for example, is cooling. The walnut tree gives off a drugging vapor, as its name, when traced to its origin, shows. The narcissus is a flower with a heavy scent, and its name exposes it, since it produces numbness in the nerves. The scents of roses and violets, which are mildly cool, relieve and check heaviness of the head. But we are not permitted to join others in drinking at all, and not even to get drunk on wine. Saffron and the cyprus flower lead to painless sleep. Many flowers, though, warm the brain, which is naturally cold, by their scents, thinning out the excess matter in the head. 8p They say the rose also gets its name from this, because it sends out a great stream of fragrance, and so it fades quickly. But the ancient Greeks did not yet use crowns at all. Neither the suitors nor the luxury-loving Phaeacians wore them. At the games, first came the giving of the prizes, second the circling round to be acclaimed, third the showering of leaves, and last the crown, after Greece, once the Persian wars were over, had grown in luxury. Those trained by the Word, then, are kept from crowns. It is not that they think this would bind the Word, who has his seat in the brain, and not that the crown might be a symbol of revelry and arrogance. It is because crowns are named after the idols. Sophocles, for example, called the narcissus “the ancient garland of the great gods,” meaning the gods of the underworld. Sappho crowns the Muses with the rose, for “you have no share in the roses of Pieria.” They say that Hera delights in the lily and Artemis in the myrtle.

8q Even if flowers were made above all for the sake of man, foolish people have taken them and used them wrongly. They have not used them in thankful use of their own, but in the ungrateful service of demons. So we must abstain from them “for conscience’ sake.” The crown is a symbol of carefree ease, free from trouble. For this reason people crown the dead, and for the same reason the idols, bearing witness by the act itself that the idols are dead. Revelers do not celebrate their rites without crowns, and once they have put on the flowers, they are inflamed for the ceremony. We must have no fellowship at all with demons. Nor should we crown the living image of God, as dead idols are crowned. The fair crown of what does not fade is laid up for the one who has lived well. The earth has no room to bear this flower. Heaven alone knows how to bring it to fruit.

8r Besides, it is senseless for us who have heard that the Lord was crowned with thorns to put on flowers, making light of the Lord’s solemn suffering. The Lord’s crown spoke prophetically in riddle of us, who were once fruitless, and who are placed around him through the church, of which he is the head. It is also a figure of faith: of life, because of the substance of the wood; of joy, because of the name of a crown; and of danger, because of the thorn. For it is not possible to approach the Word without blood. But this woven crown of flowers fades. The braid of crookedness comes undone, and the flower withers. For the glory of those who have not believed in the Lord fades. They crowned Jesus when he was lifted up, bearing witness to their own ignorance. The hard-hearted do not understand that this very thing, which they call an insult to the Lord, was a prophecy, wisely framed.

8s “The people who went astray did not know the Lord. They are not circumcised in their reasoning, and their darkness has not been enlightened. They did not see God. They denied the Lord, and they have lost the name of Israel. They persecuted God and hoped to insult the Word. The one they crucified as a criminal, they crowned as a king. For this reason they will come to know, as Lord and righteous, the loving God in the man they did not believe in. They provoked him to show himself as Lord, and by that very act they bore witness to him when he was lifted up. They fastened the diadem of righteousness on the one exalted above every name, by means of the ever-flowering thorn. To those who plot against him, this diadem is an enemy and holds them back. To those who gather together in the church, it is a friend and fences them round. This crown is the flower of those who have believed in the glorified One, but it draws blood from the unbelieving and punishes them.”

8t Yes, and the crown is also a symbol of the Lord’s triumph. On his head, the ruling part of his body, he bore all our evils, by which we were being pricked. By his own suffering he rescued us from stumbling-blocks, sins and thorns of that kind. He brought the devil to nothing, and so he rightly said in triumph, “Death, where is your sting?” And we gather grapes from thorns and figs from brambles, while those toward whom he stretched out his hands, a disobedient and fruitless people, are torn into wounds. I can tell you another hidden meaning here as well. When the almighty Lord of all began to give the law through the Word, he wanted his power to be made plain to Moses. A vision of God’s form appeared to him, light shaped upon a burning bush. (The bush is a thorny plant.) When the Word had finished giving the law and his visit among men, the Lord was again crowned with thorn, in a hidden sense. He was going from here to the place from which he had come down, and he recapitulated the beginning of his old descent. The Word first seen in the bush, and afterward taken up through the thorn, would show that everything is the work of one power. He is one, from the one Father, who is the beginning and end of the age.

8u But I have strayed from the instructor’s manner by bringing in the style of a teacher, so I now return to the subject before us. We have shown that the delight of flowers, and the benefit of perfumes and incense, are not to be rejected. They serve as a medicine for healing, and sometimes also for moderate relaxation. Some may ask, “What then is the use of flowers to those who do not wear them?” Let them know that perfumed oils are made from flowers, and that these have many uses. Susinon oil is made from lilies and is warming, opening, drawing, moistening, cleansing, fine in texture, stimulating to the bile and softening. Narcissus oil, made from the narcissus, helps just as much as the Susinon. Myrtle oil, made from myrtle and myrtle berries, is astringent and holds back discharges from the body. The oil from roses is cooling. 8v In general, these things too were made for our good use. Scripture says, “Listen to me, and blossom like a rose planted by streams of water. Give off a sweet smell like frankincense, and bless the Lord for his works.” There would be much to say on this subject, since we hold that flowers and spices were made for necessary benefits, not for the excesses of luxury. If some allowance must be made, it is enough for people to enjoy the scent of flowers. Let them not wear them as crowns. For the Father cares greatly for man, and gives his own craftsmanship to him alone. So Scripture says, “Water and fire and iron and milk, fine wheat flour and honey, the blood of the grape and oil and clothing: all these are for good to the godly.”

On Sleep.

9a How We Should Approach Sleep Next we must say how to go to sleep, keeping in mind the rules of self-control. After the meal we bless God for sharing these enjoyments with us and for the day that has run its course. Then our talk should turn to sleep, and we should dismiss costly bedding: rugs sprinkled with gold, smooth coverlets embroidered in gold, purple robes, expensive shaggy cloaks, fancy purple blankets, thick woolen covers laid on top, and beds “softer than sleep.” Besides the shame of such self-indulgence, sleeping in downy feathers is harmful. The bodies of those who lie in them sink as into a chasm because the bedding is so soft. † It is not suitable for those who turn over in it, because the bed rises like a hill on either side of the body. It allows food to be digested, but it overheats it all the more, and that ruins the nourishment.

9b Those who can roll over on level beds have, in this, a kind of natural exercise for sleep. They digest their food more easily and make themselves readier for emergencies. Furthermore, silver-footed couches condemn their owners as very showy. And ivory on little beds, “from a body that has left its soul, is not pure.” For holy people it is a lazy contrivance for rest. So we should not be eager about such things. Those who own them are not forbidden to use them, but fussing over them is forbidden, for happiness does not lie in them. On the other hand, it is Cynic vainglory to make a practice of sleeping like Diomedes, “and under him was spread the hide of an ox of the fields,” unless circumstances force it. Odysseus set right the lame leg of his wedding bed with a stone. Such plain living and doing for oneself was practiced not only by ordinary people but also by the leaders of the ancient Greeks.

9c But why do I speak of these? Jacob slept on the ground with a stone for his pillow, and then he was counted worthy to see the sight that is beyond man. For us, following reason, the bed should be plain and simple, with a moderate comfort: in summer something to cover us, in cold weather something to keep us warm. The bedstead should not be fussy, and its legs should be smooth. Elaborate carvings sometimes become highways for crawling creatures, which wind around the cuts of the craftsman’s work and do not slip off. Above all, the softness of the bedding should be moderate and manly. Sleep should not be a total loosening of the body, but a relaxing of it. So I say we should take sleep not for laziness, but as a rest from our work. 9d So we should doze off in such a way that we wake easily. For he says, “Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning. Be like people waiting for their master to return from the wedding, so that when he comes and knocks they may open to him at once. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes.” A sleeping man is of no more use than a dead one. So we should often rise from bed in the night and bless God. Blessed are those who stay awake for him, making themselves like the angels, whom we call “watchers.” “A man asleep is worth nothing, no more than one who is not alive.” But the one who has the light is awake, and the darkness does not overtake him, nor does sleep, since there is no darkness. So the enlightened person is awake toward God, and such a person lives: “What came to be in him was life.” “Blessed is the man,” says Wisdom, “who will listen to me, and the man who keeps my ways, watching daily at my doors, guarding the posts of my entrances.” “So let us not sleep like the rest,” says the Scripture, “but let us stay awake and be sober.

9e For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night.” That is, in the darkness of ignorance. “But let us, who belong to the day, be sober. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day. We do not belong to night or to darkness.” “But whoever among us is most of all a guardian of true life and of genuine understanding stays awake as long as possible. He keeps only as much sleep as is useful for his health, and that is not much, once it has become a good habit.” Training in self-discipline, born of hard work, produces a lasting wakefulness. So let our food not weigh us down but lighten us, so that sleep harms us as little as possible. Weighed-down food is like the weights hung on swimmers. Instead, let sobriety lift us up, as if from the deep below, to the surface of wakefulness.

9f The pull of sleep is like death. Through lack of awareness it carries us down into insensibility, and it cuts off the light by the closing of the eyelids. So let us, who are sons of the true light, not shut this light outside. Let us turn it inward on ourselves and light up the eyes of the hidden man. Let us look upon the truth itself and share in its streams, so that true dreams may be clearly and wisely revealed to us. But the belching of those heavy with wine, the rattling breath of those stuffed with food, the snoring wrapped up in bedclothes, and the rumbling of cramped stomachs bury the seeing eye of the soul, because the mind is filled with countless fantasies. The cause is excess food, which drags the reasoning part down into insensibility. “For much sleep brings no benefit to our bodies or our souls, and even though it is natural, it is not altogether suited to the pursuit of truth.” The righteous Lot (I leave aside for now the interpretation of the economy of regeneration) would not have been led into that unlawful union if he had not been made drunk by his daughters and stupefied by sleep.

9g If, then, we cut away the causes of heavy drowsiness, we shall sleep more soberly. For those who have the wakeful Word living in them “ought not to sleep the whole night through.” We should rise in the night, especially when the days are growing short. One should pursue learning, another begin his own craft, and the women take up their wool-working. All of us, so to speak, should fight against sleep, accustoming ourselves to it gently and by degrees, so that through wakefulness we may gain more time for living. (For sleep, like a tax collector, takes half of our lifetime.) Much less should we allow sleep in the daytime to those who cut off most of the night for staying awake. Restlessness, drowsy nodding, stretching and yawning are signs of discontent in an unsteady soul. Above all we must know this: it is not the soul that needs sleep, for the soul is always in motion. It is the body that is eased and let go by rest, while the soul no longer works through the body but thinks by itself. So true dreams, for anyone who reasons rightly, are the thoughts of a sober soul. At that time it is undistracted by the body’s sympathies and gives itself the best counsel. For the soul, to be still is destruction. Therefore, by thinking always of God and keeping constant company with him, the soul enrolls wakefulness in the body, makes the person equal to the angels in grace, and takes hold of the eternity of life from the practice of staying awake.

-Quaenam de Procreatione Liberorum Tractanda Sint.

10a What should be said about the begetting of children. The time for intercourse is left for married people alone to consider. For the married, the purpose is the begetting of children, and the end is good children. It is like the farmer: the reason he scatters seed is to provide food, and the end of his farming is gathering in the crops. But far better is the farmer who sows a living field. The one farms because he wants food for the season. The other farms because he cares for the continuance of the whole race. The one plants for himself, the other for God. For God said, “Multiply,” and we must obey. In this respect man becomes an image of God, that a man works together with God in the birth of a man. Not every soil is fit to receive seed. Even if every soil were, it would not be so for the same farmer. Nor should anyone sow on rocks, or outrage the seed. The seed is the substance that begins generation, and it has the principles of nature sown together within it. To shame those natural principles senselessly, by sending them into unnatural channels, is utterly godless.

10b See, then, how the all-wise Moses figuratively rejects fruitless sowing when he says, “You shall not eat the hare or the hyena.” He does not want a man to share their nature or to taste the same licentiousness, for these animals are driven to excess in mating. They say the hare gains an extra opening each year, having as many openings as the years he has lived. So the ban on eating hare shows, they say, a turning away from the love of boys. The hyena, they say, changes in turn from male to female every year, and abstaining from the hyena hints that one must not rush into adultery. I too agree that the all-wise Moses, by this prohibition, hints that we must not be made like these animals. But I do not agree with this way of explaining what he said symbolically. 10c Nature can never be forced into change. What has once been formed in it may not be remade into its opposite by passion. For passion is not nature. Passion tends to debase the stamp of creation, not to rearrange it. Many birds are said to change both color and voice with the seasons. The blackbird, for example, turns yellow from black and becomes a chatterer instead of a singer. The nightingale likewise changes both its color and its song as the seasons turn. But they do not change their nature itself, so as to become female from male by a change of form. Instead, the new growth of feathers blossoms like fresh clothing, a kind of dye on the plumage. A little later, at winter’s threat, it fades like a flower whose color withers. The voice, worn down by the cold, withers in the same way. The surface of the body is thickened by the surrounding air, and the passages in the neck are squeezed and thickened and press upon the breath. The breath is badly confined and chokes, and so it gives out its sound.

10d Then, once the breath is again made like the surrounding air and relaxes with the spring, it is freed from its confinement. It travels through wide passages that until then had been shut. The withered song no longer twitters faintly. It blossoms now, clear and shrill, and the sound of the birds pours out more broadly. The song becomes the spring of the birds’ voice. So we must never believe that the hyena changes its nature. The same animal does not have both organs at once, male and female, as some have supposed. They tell marvelous tales of hermaphrodites and invent a new third nature between female and male, the androgyne. They are badly deceived, because they have not understood the artistry of nature, the mother of all and maker of generation. The hyena is an extremely lustful animal. Under its tail, before the passage for waste, there grows a fleshy protrusion, similar in shape to the female organ. But this fleshy formation has no passage leading to any useful end, that is, neither to a womb nor to the rectum. It has only a large cavity, which receives empty lust when the passages occupied with bearing young are turned away.

10e This same feature grows on both the male and the female hyena, because of their excessive passive lust. The male also takes the passive part with other males. This is why it is very rare to find a female hyena. Pregnancies are not frequent in this animal, since unnatural sowing is so common among them, unchecked. For this reason, it seems to me, Plato in the Phaedrus rejects pederasty and calls it a beastly thing. He says that lustful men, handed over to pleasures, “take the bit between their teeth, mount in the manner of four-footed animals, and try to beget children.” The godless, as the apostle says, “God handed over to passions of dishonor. For their females exchanged natural use for what is against nature. In the same way their males also left natural use and burned in their desire for one another, males working shameful things with males and receiving in themselves the repayment that was due for their error.” Yet nature has not allowed even the most lustful animals to leap upon the passage of waste. Urine is separated off into the bladder, and moistened food into the stomach. Tears go to the eye, blood to the veins, wax to the ears, and mucus to the nostrils. The seat lies next to the end of the rectum, and through it the waste is expelled.

10f Only in hyenas, then, has nature in her variety devised this extra organ for their excessive mating. So it is hollow to a certain depth, to serve the itching parts, but beyond that the cavity is blind, because it was not made for generation. From this it is plain, and generally agreed, that we must refuse sex between males, barren sowing, intercourse from behind, and unnatural unions of the androgynous kind. We are to follow nature herself, who forbids them by the construction of the bodily parts. She made the male virile not to receive seed but to send it forth. When Jeremiah says, that is, when the Spirit says through him, “My house has become a hyena’s den,” he shows his loathing for food taken from dead bodies. By this wise allegory he condemns idolatry. For the house of the living God must truly be pure of idols. 10g Again, Moses forbids eating the hare. The hare mates in every season. The male mounts the female while she sits, coming at her from behind, for the hare is a rear-mounting animal. She conceives every month and conceives again while already pregnant. She mates and gives birth, and right after giving birth she is mated by whatever hare happens to come along, since she is not content with one partner. She conceives again while still nursing, because her womb is divided in two. The empty space of the womb is not the only thing that drives her to intercourse, for everything empty longs to be filled. When hares are pregnant, the other half of the womb is gripped by desire and is in heat. That is why they conceive again on top of a pregnancy. So the prohibition in this riddle urged us to keep away from violent appetites and from repeated acts of intercourse. It urged us to avoid relations with pregnant women, males mounting one another, the corruption of boys, adultery and lust.

10h So the same Moses forbade these things openly, no longer in riddles, with uncovered head, saying: “You shall not commit fornication, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not corrupt boys.” We must keep the Word’s command with all our strength. We must never break it in any way or make the commandments void. For the name of evil desire is “hubris” (outrage). Plato called the horse of desire “outrageous,” having read the words “You have become to me horses mad for women.” The punishment for such outrage will be shown to you by the angels who came to Sodom. They burned up, together with the city itself, those who wanted to violate them. By this clear example they sketched out fire as the fruit of lust. For the misfortunes of the ancients, as we said before, were written down to warn us. They were written so that we would not be caught in the same sins, but would guard against falling into the same penalties.

10i We should regard boys as our sons, and look on other men’s wives as our own daughters. It is a most masterful thing to rule over pleasures, to hold the belly in check, and to be lord over what lies below the belly. The Stoics agree that reason does not allow even the wise man to move his finger carelessly. How much more, then, must those who pursue wisdom master the organ of intercourse! For this reason, I think, it is called the “aidoion” (part of shame), because we must use this part of the body, above all others, with modesty. Nature has allowed us what is fitting, useful and decent, both in food and in lawful marriage. She has also allowed us to desire to have children. Those who chase after excess go wrong against what is natural, and harm themselves through unlawful intercourse. 10j For it is right above all never to have sexual relations with young men as one does with women. So the philosopher who learned from Moses says we must not “sow on rocks and stones,” because what is sown there will never take root and receive its fertile nature. And the Word, through Moses, commanded very plainly: “And you shall not lie with a male as with a woman, for it is an abomination.” Besides this, the noble Plato took his advice from the divine Scriptures and gave it as a law received from there. He said to keep away from “every female field” except one’s own. The Scripture says: “And you shall not give your bed of seed to your neighbor’s wife, to be defiled with her.” And Plato says: “The seeds of concubines are unconsecrated and illegitimate.” Do not sow where you would not want what is sown to grow. Do not touch anyone at all except your own wedded wife. It is right to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh with her alone, for the sake of legitimate offspring.

10k For these are the only things the Word counts as lawful. Since we share in the divine creative power, we must not throw seed away, or abuse it, or sow it in ground that cannot receive it. This same Moses forbids approaching even our wives when they are in their monthly cleansing. It is not reasonable to defile the most fertile part of the seed, which will soon be a human being, with the body’s waste. Nor is it reasonable to wash away the seed of a well-formed offspring in the filthy flow and discharge of that matter, cut off from the furrows of the womb. Nor has Moses presented any of the ancient Hebrews as having intercourse with his pregnant wife. For mere pleasure, even when taken within marriage, is unlawful, unjust and irrational. Moses, on the contrary, keeps husbands away from pregnant women until they have given birth. In fact, the womb lies beneath the bladder and above the intestine called the rectum. It extends its neck “between the shoulders” in the bladder. The opening of the neck, which receives the seed, closes when the womb is full. It is emptied again when it is cleansed by childbirth. Once it has laid down its fruit, it then receives seed again.

10l It is not shameful for us to name the organs of conception, for the benefit of those who hear. God was not ashamed to create them. So the womb, thirsting for children, receives the seed. It refuses the blameworthy side of intercourse, and once the seed is sown it shuts its mouth and bars wantonness completely. Its desires had until then been stirred toward loving embraces. Now they turn inward and are busy with bearing a child, and so they work together with the Creator. It is not right, then, to trouble nature while it is already at work, by going on to excess and outrage. Outrage has many names and many forms. When it turns aside into that part of disorder which concerns sexual pleasure, it is called lust (lagneia). The name itself shows what it is: the common, vulgar, unclean urge toward mating. When these appetites grow, a great crowd of diseases follows: love of fine food, love of wine, love of women, and also profligacy and every kind of love of pleasure. Desire is the tyrant over all of them.

10m Countless sister passions grow alongside these, and from them the undisciplined character reaches its peak. Scripture says, “Whips and punishments are prepared for the undisciplined, on the shoulders of fools.” It calls the strength of undiscipline, and its stubborn endurance, “the shoulders of fools.” For this reason it says, “Remove from your servants empty hopes, and turn away from me unseemly desires. Let the appetite of the belly and sexual intercourse not overtake me.” So we must keep the great mischief of those who plot against us far away. For not only into the knapsack of Crates, but into our city too, “there sails no foolish parasite, no greedy fornicator exulting in his backside, no deceitful harlot,” and no other such beast of pleasure. Let us then sow much dignity of conduct in ourselves throughout our whole life. Whether one should marry at all, or keep entirely clear of marriage (for this too is open to inquiry), I have explained in my work On Continence.

10n But if the very question whether one should marry needed examination, how could anyone be allowed to use intercourse without restraint, as if it were necessary every time, like food? One can see that the nerves, like threads on a loom, are pulled apart and torn by the strain of the union. It also spreads a mist over the senses and cuts down the body’s strength. This is plain among animals without reason and among trained bodies. Athletes who abstain overcome their opponents in contests. Animals are led away from mating, dragged around, almost hauled along, completely drained of all strength and spring. The sophist from Abdera called intercourse “a small epilepsy,” and thought it an incurable disease. Do not faint spells and weakness follow, and are they not put down to the greatness of what is lost? “For a human being grows out of a human being and is torn away from him.” See how great the harm is.

10o A whole man is torn away through the loss that comes with intercourse. For Scripture says, “This now is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh.” A man is emptied by the seed to the full extent of what is seen in his body, because what leaves him is the beginning of generation. The seething of the matter also stirs up the body and shakes its harmony. How witty, then, was the man who was asked how he stood toward sexual pleasures. He said, “Hush, man! I was most glad to escape them, as from a raging and savage master.” But let marriage be approved and given its place. The Lord wants humanity to “multiply.” He does not say, “Be licentious,” and he did not want people to give themselves up to pleasures as if they had been made for mating. Let the Instructor put us to shame, crying through Ezekiel, “Circumcise your fornication.”

10p Even the animals without reason have a fitting season for sowing. To come together for any purpose other than the begetting of children is to outrage nature. We should take nature as our teacher and observe the wise lessons of the proper time. I mean old age and childhood, which nature brings in: for the one she has not yet permitted marriage, and the other she no longer wishes to marry. But even otherwise, she does not mean us to be married at all times. Marriage is the desire for children, not the disorderly discharge of seed, which is lawless and against reason. Our whole life would run according to nature if we mastered our desires from the start. We must not destroy, by wicked contrivances, the human race that grows by God’s providence. People use these devices to cover up fornication. They take drugs that bring complete destruction, and so they abort human kindness along with the unborn child.

10q For those who are allowed to marry, though, an instructor was needed. The secret rites of nature must not be carried out by day. A man must not come home from church or the marketplace in the early morning and mount his wife like a rooster, when it is the time for prayer, for reading, and for the good works of the day. The evening is the right time to rest, after the meal and after giving thanks for the good things enjoyed. Nature does not always allow the time for marital union to be fulfilled, and a union that is delayed longer is more longed for. Nor should anyone give way to wantonness at night, as if in the dark. Instead, modesty should be kept shut up in the soul like the light of reason. Otherwise we will be no different from Penelope at her loom: by day we weave the teachings of self-control, and at night, when we go to bed, we unravel them. If we must practice dignity, as indeed we must, then much more must a man show dignity to his own wife by refusing shameful embraces. And let reliable proof of his dignity toward his neighbors come from his own home.

10r For it cannot be, it cannot be, that a man is thought dignified by a wife in whose experience his dignity is not borne out in those very keen pleasures. Goodwill that admits it slips easily into intercourse blooms only briefly and grows old along with the body. Sometimes it grows old before the body, when desire has withered, as happens whenever the pleasures of a prostitute have insulted the self-control of marriage. For the hearts of lovers are fickle, and love charms are quenched by regret. Love often turns to hatred, when satiety senses it has been condemned. As for unrestrained words, indecent postures, kisses like a prostitute’s, and lewd acts of that kind, we should not even mention them. We are obeying the blessed apostle, who says plainly: “Fornication and every kind of uncleanness or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper for saints.” Someone seems to have put it well: “Intercourse has never done anyone good; we should be glad if it has not done harm.” For even lawful intercourse is hazardous, except as far as it serves the begetting of children. About unlawful intercourse Scripture says: “A woman for hire will be reckoned a fattened pig, but a married woman is a tower of death to those who use her.” It compared the passion for a prostitute to a boar or a sow. And it called adultery “death that is sought,” when it is committed with a prostitute who is kept under guard.

10s As for a house and a city where people live in wantonness, your own poetry somewhere reproaches them, writing: “Adulteries are found with you, and unlawful mingling of men, womanish and unjust, wicked city, wholly unclean.” On the other hand, it admires the self-controlled: those who do not feel shameful desire for another man’s bed, and do not rush to the hateful and loathsome outrage against a male, because it is against nature. Most people think of these things as luxuries, though they are their own sins. Those who are a little more decent know that they are sins, but they are overcome by pleasures. And darkness is their cover for their passions. For a man who treats his own marriage like a relationship with a prostitute commits adultery against it, and he does not hear the Instructor crying out: “The man who goes up onto his bed, who says in his soul: Who sees me?

10t Darkness is all around me, and the walls cover me, and no one sees my sins. Why should I be afraid? The Most High will not remember.” This man is utterly wretched. He fears only human eyes, and he supposes that he will escape God’s notice. “For he does not know,” says Scripture, “that the eyes of the Lord Most High are ten thousand times brighter than the sun. They look upon all the ways of men and see into hidden places.” Again the Instructor threatens such people through Isaiah, saying: “Woe to those who make their plans in secret, and will say: Who sees us?” One might perhaps escape the light that we perceive with the senses, but the light of the mind cannot be escaped. As Heraclitus says: “How could anyone hide from what never sets?” So let us never cover ourselves with darkness, for the light lives in us. “And the darkness,” it says, “did not overcome it.” The night is lit up by self-controlled reasoning, and Scripture calls the thoughts of good men lamps that never sleep.

10u Yet to try to hide what one is doing is itself an admission of sinning. Everyone who sins does wrong at once. If he commits adultery, he wrongs his neighbor less than he wrongs himself, because he is the one who has committed adultery. In every case he shows himself to be worse and less honorable. For the sinner, to the extent that he sins, is worse and less honorable than he was himself before. And surely a man who is mastered by a shameful pleasure already has licentiousness added to him. For this reason the fornicator has altogether died to God. The Word has left him, as the spirit leaves a corpse. For what is holy shrinks from being defiled, as one would expect. It is always right for the pure to touch what is pure. So let us never strip off modesty at the same moment that we take off a garment, since it is never right for the righteous man to strip off self-control. “For behold, this corruptible will put on incorruption.” That happens when the insatiable appetite, which flows toward licentiousness, has been trained by self-control and has ceased to love corruption. It then yields the man to an everlasting self-control. “For in this age they marry and are given in marriage.” But when we have put away the works of the flesh, and have put on incorruption in the flesh itself, now pure, we pursue the measure of the angels.

10v For this reason Plato in the Philebus, a disciple of the barbarian philosophy, mystically called “godless” those who ruin and defile, as far as they can, the God who dwells in them, the Word, by making themselves at home with the passions. So those who are made holy to God must never live in a merely mortal way. Nor, as Paul says, may we make the members of Christ members of a prostitute. Nor may we make the temple of God a temple of shameful passions. Remember the twenty-four thousand who were cast off because of fornication. The sufferings of those who committed fornication, as I have already said, are “types” that train our desires. And the Instructor advises us most plainly: “Do not go after your desires, and keep yourself back from your appetites.” “For wine and women will lead the wise astray, and he who joins himself to prostitutes will become more reckless. Rot and the worm will inherit him, and he will be taken away as a greater public example.” And again, for he never tires of doing us good: “He who stands face to face against pleasure crowns his life.” So it is not right to be mastered by sexual pleasures, nor to gape after desires, nor to be driven wild by irrational appetites, nor to wish to be defiled.

10w The married man, like a farmer, is permitted only to sow, and only at the time when the season receives the seed. Against other kinds of intemperance the Word is the best medicine. It also helps to go without being stuffed, since fullness inflames the desires and makes them leap about after pleasures. So we should not strive after expensive clothing, any more than after elaborate food. The Lord himself divides his counsel into three parts: soul, body, and, third, external things. He advises us to get external things for the sake of the body, to govern the body by the soul, and he trains the soul, saying, “Do not worry for your soul about what you will eat, or for your body about what you will wear. For the soul is more than food, and the body more than clothing.” And he adds a clear example for his teaching: “Consider the ravens. They do not sow or reap. They have no storeroom or barn, and God feeds them.

10x Are you not worth more than the birds?” That is what he says about food. He gives the same instruction about clothing, which belongs to the third division, external things, saying, “Consider the lilies, how they neither spin nor weave. But I tell you, not even Solomon was dressed like one of these.” King Solomon prided himself greatly on his wealth. What, then, is more beautiful or more colorful than flowers? What is more delightful than lilies or roses? “And if God clothes in this way the grass that is in the field today and thrown into the oven tomorrow, how much more will he clothe you, you of little faith! You also, do not seek what you will eat or what you will drink.” Here the word “what” rules out variety in food. The Scripture means this: do not worry about what sorts of things you will eat or drink. To worry about such things is greed and luxury. Eating, understood simply by itself, is a sign of need, since it is, as we said, the filling of a want. But the “what” goes beyond that, and Scripture has shown that whatever goes beyond what is needed comes from the devil.

10y The words that follow make his meaning clear. After saying, “Do not seek what you will eat or what you will drink,” he added, “and do not be lifted up.” Pride and luxury lift people up and away from the truth. The pleasure-seeking that busies itself with superfluous things also leads away from the truth. That is why he says, very rightly, “All these things the nations of the world seek.” The “nations” are the disorderly and senseless. And what does he mean by “these things”? Luxury, self-indulgence, rich seasoning, dainty eating, gluttony. These are the “what.” But about plain food, dry and liquid, which is necessary, he says, “Your Father knows that you need it.” If we have become seekers at all, let us not waste our seeking on luxury. Let us fan it into flame to find the truth. 10z “Seek the kingdom of God,” he says, “and what you need for food will be added to you.” If he removes anxiety about clothing, food and all superfluous things, as unnecessary, what must we think he would say about love of finery? What about the dyeing of wool, the variety of colours, the fussiness over gems, the elaborate working of gold, artificial hairpieces and twisted curls? What about painting the eyes, plucking hairs, rouge, white lead, hair dye, and all the evil tricks used in these deceptions? Should we not strongly suspect that what was said a little earlier about the grass was said also about these “unadorned” lovers of adornment? For the field is the world, and we are the plants of the field, refreshed with dew by the grace of God. When we are cut down, we spring up again, as will be shown at greater length in the book On the Resurrection. But the common crowd is pictured by the “hay.” It belongs to a passing merriment and blooms only briefly. It loves the world and loves glory, and loves anything more than truth. It is good for nothing except to feed a fire.

2.10aa “There was a man,” says the Lord in his account, “very rich, who dressed in purple and fine linen and made merry splendidly every day.” This man was the hay. “And a poor man named Lazarus had been thrown at the rich man’s gate, covered with sores, longing to be filled with what fell from the rich man’s table.” This man is the grass. But the rich man was being punished in Hades, sharing in the fire, while the other flourished again in the bosom of the Father. I admire the old city of the Spartans. It allowed only courtesans to wear flowered clothing and gold ornaments. By permitting only women of that kind to adorn themselves, it took the love of finery away from respectable women. The Athenian magistrates were the opposite. They were keen on the refined life of the city, and they forgot what befits men. They wore gold and put on tunics down to their feet. They tied up the *krobylos*, a kind of braided knot of hair, adorned with golden cicadas fastened into it. So they displayed their “earth-born” origin, in the tasteless vulgarity of their effeminate decadence.

2.10ab The zeal of these magistrates spread to the other Ionians as well. Homer mocks them as effeminate and calls them “trailing their robes.” So there are people who turn to love of finery, which is only an image of the beautiful, and not to the beautiful itself. Under a fair-sounding name they practise idolatry again. They must be sent far away from the truth, because they dream of the nature of the beautiful by opinion, not by knowledge. Life here is for them a deep sleep of ignorance. We must wake from it and hurry toward what is truly beautiful and orderly. We must long to lay hold of that alone, and leave the ornaments of this life to delight in the world itself, before we fall fast asleep for good. I say, then, that people needed woven cloth for one reason only: to cover the body, to protect against extreme cold and fierce heat, so that the excesses of the air around us do not harm us.

2.10ac If this is the purpose of clothing, consider whether one kind of clothing should be assigned to men and another to women. Being covered is common to both, just as eating and drinking are. Since the need is common, we approve a similar provision. As both need coverings, so the coverings should be alike. [The Greek text is damaged at this point.] If so, we must also adopt that covering by which women are to hide their eyes. Even if the female sex claims more for itself because of its weakness, we should blame the habit of a bad upbringing. Through it, men raised on poor ways of living have often become more effeminate than women. We must not slacken our firmness. But if some allowance must be made, we should give women a little room to use softer fabrics. We should remove only the foolish fineness and the elaborate patterns in the weaving. We should bid farewell to gold thread, Indian silks and the fussy products of silkworms.

2.10ad Then the creature changes again into a third form, which some call the “chrysalis” (others call it “nekydallos”). From this a long thread is produced, as the spider’s thread comes from the spider. These excessive, see-through fabrics are the proof of a weak mind. They cover the shame of the body with a slight veil, and so serve as a go-between for it. For luxurious clothing is no longer a covering at all, since it cannot hide the shape of the nakedness. Such clothing falls against the body and takes its impression more easily. It clings to the figure like flesh and moulds itself to it. It stamps the outline of the woman, so that anyone looking sees the whole form of the body, even though he is not actually looking at the body itself. Dyes in clothing must also be refused. They are far from what is needed and far from the truth, and they also break out into a slander on one’s character. Their use is not helpful, for they are not good against cold. They provide nothing for covering beyond what other clothing gives, except the blame. The pleasing effect of the colour troubles the greedy and provokes them to foolish ogling. But for those who are white inside and not counterfeit, it is most fitting to wear white and simple clothes.

2.10ae Daniel the prophet says clearly and plainly: “Thrones were set, and one like an Ancient of days sat on them, and his garment was white as snow.” He sees the Lord in a vision wearing such a robe. The Revelation also says: “I saw the souls of those who had borne witness, under the altar, and a white robe was given to each.” But if some other colour must be sought, the natural dye of truth is enough. Garments that look like flowers should be left to Bacchic nonsense and the mystery rites. So should “the purple and the silver plate,” as the comic poet says, “which are useful for tragic actors and not for life.” Our life ought to be anything but a parade. Yet Sardian dye, another the colour of unripe grapes, another green, another rose-mixed, another scarlet, and countless other dyes have been devised, with great effort, for ruinous self-indulgence.

2.10af This kind of clothing is for the eye, not for covering. We must also bid farewell, along with the art itself, to garments embroidered with gold, to the purple-dyed and those woven with figures (a luxury that is merely a show in the wind), to that saffron robe dyed with perfume, and to the costly, many-coloured cloaks of fine membrane that people stare at, with little figures in the purple. “What sensible or splendid thing could we women do,” says the comedy, “when we sit about decked in flowers, wearing saffron robes and made up with cosmetics?” The Instructor, however, gives plain advice: “Do not boast about the clothing you wear, and do not be lifted up by any glory, since it does not last.” So in the Gospel he mocks those dressed in soft clothing: “Look, those who live in splendid clothing and luxury are in kings’ palaces.” He means the earthly palaces, the perishable ones, where there is love of reputation, hunting for fame, flattery and deceit. But those who serve in the heavenly court around the King of all are made holy in the unstained garment of the soul, the flesh, and over it they put on incorruption.

2.10ag So the unmarried woman gives her time to God alone, and her concern is not divided. The self-controlled married woman divides her life between God and her husband. But the woman who is carried off in another direction gives herself wholly to marriage, which means to passion. In the same way, I think, the self-controlled wife who devotes herself to her husband worships God without hypocrisy. But if she loves finery, she falls away both from God and from chaste marriage. She trades her husband for adornment, just like the Argive courtesan, I mean Eriphyle, who “accepted precious gold in place of a dear husband.” For this reason I also approve of the sophist of Ceos, who drew matching and corresponding pictures of virtue and vice. He made one of them, Virtue, stand simply, in white, clean, adorned with modesty alone. (Faith ought to be like that: virtuous, with modesty.) The other, Vice, he presented in the opposite way: dressed in excessive clothing and made radiant with borrowed colour. Her movement and her bearing are practised for pleasing effect, and she is displayed as a sketch for loose women.

2.10ah The one who follows the Word will not attach himself to any shameful pleasure. So in clothing, too, what is useful should be chosen first. The Word sings through David about the Lord: “The daughters of kings made you glad in your honor; the queen stood at your right hand, in a robe woven with gold, clothed in golden fringes.” Here he does not mean luxurious clothing. He means the unspoiled adornment of the Church, woven together out of faith, made up of those who have received mercy. In her the guileless Jesus “shines like gold,” and the fringes are the elect, the golden ones. If we must relax our strictness a little for the sake of the women, let the cloth be woven smooth and soft to the touch. It should not be decked with flowers like paintings, to please the eye. A painting fades with time. The washing and soaking in the drug-like juices of the dye eat away the wool and leave the fabric of the garments weak. That is not good household management either.

2.10ai It is the greatest tastelessness to be so excited about robes, long gowns, wraps, cloaks and tunics, “which cover the private parts,” as Homer says. I am truly ashamed to see so much wealth poured out on covering the parts we are ashamed of. The first man in paradise measured out his covering for shame with branches and leaves. Now that sheep have been made for us, let us not be as foolish as sheep. Trained by the Word, let us expose the costliness of clothing by saying: “You are sheep’s hair. Though Miletus boasts of you and Italy praises you, and though the hair that so many go mad over is kept safe under skin covers, we ought not to take it seriously.” The blessed John looked down even on sheep’s hair, since it smells of luxury. He chose camel’s hair and wore it, setting before us an example of a plain and honest life.

2.10aj John also ate honey and locusts, a sweet and spiritual food, preparing the Lord’s ways to be free of pride and self-controlled. Would a man who had turned away from the showiness of city life wear a purple cloak? He went into the desert, living for God in the stillness of the wilderness, far from all empty busyness, from clumsy display and from pettiness. Elijah wore a sheepskin cloak and fastened it with a belt made of hair. Isaiah, another prophet, was “naked and barefoot,” and often wore sackcloth as a garment of humility. If you mention Jeremiah, he had only a linen loincloth. Well-fed bodies show their vigor more plainly when stripped. In the same way the beauty of character shows its greatness when it is not wrapped up in tasteless nonsense. 2.10ak It is also thoroughly showy to let clothes hang down to the tips of the toes and drag along. It gets in the way of walking. The garment sweeps the loose rubbish on the ground like a broom. Not even those degenerate dancers on the stage, who act out a silent shamelessness, overlook a robe that falls to such a disgrace. Their careful draping, their dangling hems and the elaborate rhythms of their poses show the dragging of petty-minded softness. Someone may point to the Lord’s robe that reached to the feet. But that tunic, with its many flowers, shows the flowers of wisdom: the varied Scriptures that never fade, the oracles of the Lord flashing with the rays of truth. The Spirit clothed the Lord in another such robe through David, singing something like this: “You have put on praise and splendor, wrapping yourself in light like a garment.” So, just as we must keep clear of everything improper in making our clothes, we must also guard against excess in using them.

2.10al It is not fitting either for a woman’s dress to be above the knee, as they say the Spartan girls dressed. No part of a woman should be bared. A modest woman can answer very properly, with that witty remark, someone who says, “Your arm is beautiful.” She can reply, “But not for the public.” When he says, “Your legs are beautiful,” she can say, “But only for my husband.” And “Your face is lovely”: “But only for the man who married me.” Still, I do not want chaste women even to give occasion for such praises to men who use praise to hunt for something to blame. And it is not only forbidden to show the ankle. The head is also commanded to be covered and the face shaded. It is not holy for the beauty of the body to become a trap for men. Nor is it reasonable for a woman to use a purple veil to make herself the center of attention.

2.10am If only it were possible to remove purple from clothing altogether, so that spectators would not be drawn to look at the faces of those who wear it! But these women weave only a very small part of their garment in other colors and make the whole thing purple, and so they inflame their own careless indulgence. Those who are besotted with these foolish, dainty purples fall under the poet’s saying, “purple death took hold of them.” Because of this purple, Tyre and Sidon, and the seacoast neighboring Laconia, are most longed for. Their dyers and purple-fishers are held in high esteem, and so are the shellfish themselves, because the purple blooms from their blood. Deceitful women, and effeminate men too, mix these deceitful dyes into their greedy fabrics and rave on without any limit. They no longer get their linens from Egypt, but obtain other kinds from the land of the Hebrews and the land of the Cilicians.

2.10an I say nothing of the Amorgian and fine linen garments; luxury has gone beyond even the names for things. A covering, I think, should show that what it covers is better than itself: as the statue is better than the temple, the soul than the body, and the body than its clothing. But now it is the complete opposite. If the body of these women were put up for sale, it would never fetch a thousand Attic drachmas, yet they will pay ten thousand talents for a single garment, and so they prove themselves more worthless and less valuable than the fabrics. Why then do you chase after what is rare and costly rather than what is common and cheap? Because you do not know what is truly beautiful and truly good. Foolish people pursue what only seems so in place of what really is, and like madmen they imagine white things to be black.

-On Clothes.

11a On Shoes. Showy women behave much the same way with their footwear, and here too they display great softness of living. Those sandals with gold ornaments on them are truly shameful. They even insist on having the nails driven into the soles in spiral patterns. Many of them engrave love-greetings on the soles, so that as they walk they set the ground to a rhythm, and stamp the harlot’s attitude of mind into it by their stride. So we must say goodbye to the pointless craftsmanship of gold-covered and jeweled sandals, to Attic and Sicyonian half-boots, and to Persian and Tyrrhenian buskins. Setting before ourselves, as our truth is accustomed to do, the right aim, we should choose what is natural. For shoes are used partly to cover the feet, and partly to guard the sole of the foot against stumbling and against the roughness of mountain paths. 11b Women may be allowed white shoes, except when they are traveling; then they should use greased leather. Women who travel need shoes with nailed soles. Still, they should wear shoes most of the time, for it is not fitting to show a bare foot; besides, a woman is easily led into harm. For a man, going barefoot is entirely suitable, unless he is serving as a soldier, for being shod is somehow close to being bound. Going barefoot is best for training, and it suits health and ease, wherever no necessity prevents it. But if we are not traveling and cannot bear to go barefoot, we should use slippers or white shoes. The Athenians called these “dust-feet,” I think because they keep the feet close to the dust. John is sufficient witness for simple footwear, since he declared that he was not worthy to untie the strap of the Lord’s sandals. The man who was showing the Hebrews the pattern of true philosophy wore nothing elaborate on his feet. If this also hints at something further, it will be explained elsewhere.

On Shoes.

12a That we should not be wild about jewels and gold ornaments. It is childish to gape at dark blue or green stones, at what a distant sea throws up, and at the nuggets of the earth. To rush after little transparent stones, stones of unusual color, and varicolored glass is nothing but the mark of foolish people who are drawn by whatever has a striking appearance. In the same way, children who see a fire run to it, led on by its brightness, and in their foolishness do not understand how dangerous it is to touch. Such are the stones that silly women hang on their chains and fasten into their necklaces: amethysts, thunderstones, jaspers, topaz, and the Milesian emerald, a most costly piece of merchandise. The very expensive pearl has also burst into the women’s quarters in an extravagant way. It is formed in a kind of oyster like the pinna-shell, and is about the size of a large fish’s eye.

12b These wretched women are not ashamed to have put all their effort into this little oyster. They could be adorned with a holy stone, the Word of God, whom Scripture somewhere calls a pearl: the clear and pure Jesus, the eye that watches over us in the flesh, the transparent Word, through whom the flesh is made precious when it is born again by water. For that oyster, which comes to be in water, covers the flesh around it, and the pearl is conceived from that flesh. We have received the teaching that the Jerusalem above is walled with holy stones. We understand that the twelve gates of the heavenly city are likened to precious stones, and that this hints at the conspicuous grace of the apostles. For in costly stones the colors are what is prized, and these are the valuable part, while the rest is left over as earthy matter. It is fitting, then, that the city of the saints, built spiritually, is walled with these stones as symbols.

12c In contrast to the inimitable bloom of the stones, they have understood the bloom of the Spirit, the pure and holy bloom of its being. But these women do not grasp the symbolic language of the Scriptures. They stand gaping at the stones, offering that marvelous excuse: “Why should we not use what God has shown us?” “I have it at hand; why should I not enjoy it?” “For whom, then, did these things come to be, if not for us?” Such talk comes from people who are completely ignorant of God’s will. First, God supplies the necessities, such as water and air, openly to all. But everything that is not necessary he hid in earth and water. This is why ants mine gold, griffins guard it, and the sea hides the pearl, that stone. But you are meddlesome about what you should leave alone. 12d Look, the whole heaven is spread open, and you do not seek God. But the gold and stones that lie hidden are dug out of the earth, among us, by those condemned to death. You even sing against Scripture, which cries out plainly: “Seek first the kingdom of heaven, and all these things will be added to you.” But suppose all things have been given to you and all things allowed to you. The apostle says, “All things are lawful for us, but not all things are beneficial.” God himself brought our race into being for fellowship. He was first to share what was his own, and he offered his own Word as a help common to all people, making all things for the sake of all. So all things are common, and the rich should not grab more than their share. Therefore the saying “I have it, and I have more than enough; why should I not enjoy it?”

12e is neither human nor sociable. This one is much more loving: “I have it; why should I not share it with those in need?” The person who says this is perfect, having fulfilled “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” For this is true luxury, wealth that is stored up as treasure. But spending on empty desires should be counted as destruction, not as expense. I know that God has given us the freedom to use things, but only up to what is necessary, and he has willed that the use be shared. It is out of place for one person to live in luxury while many are poor. How much more glorious it is to do good to many than to live in costly splendor! How much wiser to spend on people than on stones and gold! How much more useful to gain well-ordered friends than lifeless ornaments! What have fields ever profited anyone as much as giving generously does?

12f So we still have to answer this objection that follows: “For whom, then, are the more costly things, if everyone chooses the cheaper?” I would say: for people, if we use them without attachment and without favoritism. But if it is impossible for everyone to be self-controlled, we should still pursue what is easy to obtain, for the sake of what we need, and bid a long farewell to these superfluities. In general, then, women must drive away their “ornaments” like girls’ trinkets, and refuse adornment itself altogether. For they ought to be well-ordered within and show the woman inside to be beautiful. Beauty and ugliness show themselves only in the soul. So only the earnest person is truly beautiful and good, and the teaching holds that only the beautiful is good. Virtue alone shines through a beautiful body and blooms in the flesh. It shows the lovely bloom of self-control as worthy of love, when character shines on the appearance like a ray of light.

12g The beauty of every plant and every animal lies in the particular excellence of each. The excellence of a human being is justice, self-control, courage and godliness. So the beautiful person is the just and self-controlled person, in short the good person, not the rich one. Yet even soldiers now want to be decked out with gold. They have not read the poet’s line about the man who “went to war wearing gold, like a silly young girl.” The love of finery cares nothing for virtue and lays claim only to the body. Here the love of what is beautiful has turned aside into vainglory, and it must be thrown out completely. It attaches to the body things that do not belong to it, as though they did. In this way it trains people in lying and breeds a habit of deceit. It shows not what is dignified, unaffected and truly childlike, but what is haughty, soft and pampered.

12h Some women dim true beauty by overshadowing it with gold. They do not realize how great their fault is, since they have put countless rich bonds around themselves. They say that among the barbarians criminals are bound with gold, and these women seem to me to be imitating those rich prisoners. Is the golden necklace not a collar, and the twisted neck-rings too? The so-called “catheters” work like chains, and Attic writers call them by that very name, “chains.” Philemon, in his play *The Fellow-Cadet*, called the women’s unseemly adornment of the feet “ankle-fetters”: “transparent garments and a golden fetter.” What else, then, is this envied beautifying, women, but a wish to be seen in fetters? If the material takes the edge off the shame, the condition is still the same. 12i To me, then, women who fall into bonds of their own free will seem to be boasting about rich misfortunes. Perhaps the poet’s myth also says that such bonds were thrown around Aphrodite when she was caught in adultery. If so, it hints that these ornaments are nothing but a sign of adultery, for Homer called those bonds golden too. Yet women are not ashamed to wear the plainest emblems of the evil one. The serpent deceived Eve, and in the same way golden ornament has driven other women wild into licentiousness. It uses the serpent’s shape as bait, and they have moray eels and snakes molded into jewelry to look attractive. The comic poet Nicostratus says: “chains, catheters, rings, bracelets, snakes, anklets, hellebore.” Aristophanes, in the *Thesmophoriazusae*, lists the whole array of women’s finery in a very reproachful way. I will set down the comic poet’s own words, which expose exactly how vulgar your ignorance of what is good really is. Speaker A:

12j “Headbands, hair-bands, soda, pumice, breast-band, back-sling, veil, rouge, necklaces, eye-liner, soft shawl, hellebore, hair-net, girdle, wrap, luxury gown, border, long robe, tunic, *barathron*, round cloak, little tunic. And I have not mentioned the biggest items.” B: “What else, then?” A: “Ear-pendants, gem-set pieces, plasters, mallow-colored dye, cluster earrings, bracelets, brooches, armlets, necklaces, anklets, seal rings, chains, finger rings, poultices, bubbles, ties, *olisboi*, carnelians, *hypoderides*, spiral ornaments.” I am tired and annoyed at listing so many ornaments. I am amazed that these women are not worn out carrying such a load. What empty fussing! What vain craze for glory! Like prostitutes they pour out their wealth to their own shame. In their lack of taste they counterfeit God’s gifts and imitate the craft of the evil one. The Lord in the Gospel plainly called the rich man a fool. He stored up his goods in barns and said to himself, “You have many good things laid up for many years; eat, drink, be merry.” But the Lord said, “This very night they are taking your soul from you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” The painter Apelles once saw one of his pupils who had painted Helen loaded with gold. “Young man,” he said, “since you could not paint her beautiful, you have made her rich.”

12k Such Helens are the women of today: not genuinely beautiful, but richly made up. To them the Spirit prophesies through Zephaniah: “Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to rescue them in the day of the Lord’s wrath.” Women who are being trained by Christ should be adorned not with gold but with the Word, through whom alone gold shows itself for what it is. The ancient Hebrews would have been blessed if they had simply taken off their women’s ornaments and thrown them away or melted them down. Instead they cast the gold into a calf and worshiped it as an idol. They gained nothing from their craft or their scheme. Yet they taught our women, in a most striking pattern, to keep away from ornaments. That part of desire which prostitutes itself to gold becomes an idol, and it is put to the test by fire. Luxury is kept for fire alone, as an idol is, and not truth.

12l Here the Word, rebuking the Hebrews through the prophet, says, “They made silver and gold things for Baal.” He means ornaments. And in a most vivid threat he says, “I will take vengeance on her for the days of the Baalim, on which she offered sacrifice to it, and put on her earrings and her necklaces.” Then he adds the reason for her adornment: “And she went after her lovers, but me she forgot, says the Lord.” So let women lay aside these trifles to the evil sophist himself. Let them take no part in this harlot-like beautifying, and let them not practice idolatry behind a respectable screen. The blessed Peter speaks very admirably here: “Women likewise, not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly clothing, but with what is fitting for women who profess reverence for God, adorning themselves through good works.” He is right to command that their beautifying be absent. If they are beautiful, nature is enough. Let art not compete with nature. That is, let deceit not quarrel with truth. But if they are ugly by nature, what they put on to cover what they lack exposes them.

12m It is fitting, then, for women who serve Christ to embrace simplicity. For simplicity really does provide for holiness. It evens out excess and obtains the use we seek from superfluities by means of ordinary things. For what is simple, as the very name suggests, does not stick out or swell or puff itself up at any point. It is wholly level, smooth, even and free of excess, and for that reason it is sufficient. Sufficiency is a settled state that reaches its proper end without lack and without excess. The mother of these is righteousness, and their nurse is self-sufficiency. This is a settled state that is content with what is needed and by itself provides what contributes to the blessed life. Then let your adornment be in the fruits of your hands: holy, generous sharing and works of homemaking. “For he who gives to the poor lends to God,” and “the hands of the courageous enrich.” By “courageous” he means those who despise money and are ready to share it.

12n On your feet, let there appear a tireless readiness to do good and a walking in the way of righteousness. Modesty and self-control are your chains and necklaces. These are the kind of necklaces God makes of gold. “Blessed is the man who has found wisdom, and the mortal who has seen understanding,” says the Spirit through Solomon, “for it is better to trade for her than for treasures of gold and silver, and she is more precious than costly stones.” This is true adornment. Their ears should not be pierced, against nature, to hang pendants and earrings from them. It is not right to force nature against what it intends. Nor could there be a better ornament for the ears than true instruction, which goes down by the natural passages of hearing. Eyes anointed with the Word, and ears pierced for perception, make a person a hearer of divine things and a beholder of holy things. The Word truly shows the true beauty, “which eye has not seen, nor ear heard” before.