The Instructor (Paedagogus) 1 part 12/15

Then is it not absurd that horses and birds and the other animals should spring up from the grass and the meadows and take flight, rejoicing in their proper adornment—the horse's mane, the natural color, the variegated plumage—while woman, as if more deficient even than the nature of beasts, thinks herself so unbeautiful as to need a borrowed, bought-up, painted-on beauty? Hair-nets, and differences of hair-nets, and elaborate braidings, but also the countless arrangements of the hair, and the costly furnishings of mirrors, with which they get themselves up to hunt those who, like foolish children, are infatuated with appearances—these belong to utterly shameless women, whom one would not be wrong to call courtesans, since they make their faces into masks.

But the Word counsels us not to look at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen;

for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal.

They have devised mirrors—the very thing upon which one ought rather to lay a veil over this deception;

for it did not turn out well even for the beautiful Narcissus, as the myth of the Greeks has it, to become a spectator of his own image.

And if Moses commands men to make no image as a rival craft to God, how could these women reasonably act in counterfeiting their own images by reflection unto the false-making of the face? Moreover, to the prophet Samuel, when he was sent to anoint one of the sons of Jesse as king, and when he saw the eldest of his sons as beautiful and tall, and was about to apply the anointing oil, Samuel being delighted with him, the Lord, it says, said to him:

'Do not look upon his appearance or the height of his stature, for I have rejected him.'

For 'man looks at the eyes, but the Lord at the heart;' and He did not anoint the one beautiful in body, but the one beautiful in soul.

If, then, the natural beauty of the body is reckoned by the Lord as less than that of the soul, what does He think of the counterfeit kind, having utterly cast out all falsehood? For we walk by faith, not by sight.

Most plainly, then, the Lord teaches through Abraham that the one who follows God should despise homeland and kindred and possessions and all wealth, having made him a sojourner, and for this reason also named him His friend, since he despised his substance at home;

for he was of noble birth and exceedingly wealthy.

With his own three hundred and eighteen servants, at any rate, he overpowered the four kings who had taken Lot captive.

We find Esther alone justly adorned.

The woman beautified herself in a mystical way for her own king, but that beauty of hers is found to be a ransom for a people about to be slaughtered.

That self-adornment makes women into courtesans, and men into effeminates and adulterers, the tragic poet bears witness for us, narrating somewhat thus:

'Coming from among the Phrygians, this judge of the goddesses—as the Argive myth has it—to Lacedaemon, blooming in his robe of garments and glittering with gold, in barbaric luxury, loving and beloved, he carried off Helen to the ox-stalls of Ida, having caught Menelaus away from home.'

Barbaric love of finery and effeminate luxury overturned Hellas;

Laconian self-control was destroyed by raiment and daintiness and seasonable beauty;

the barbaric loves of finery convicted the daughter of Zeus of being a courtesan.

They had no Pedagogue to check their lusts, nor indeed the one who says:

'You shall not commit adultery,' nor the one who says 'You shall not covet'—neither shall you make your way into adultery through desire, nor shall you kindle your appetites through love of finery.

What an end followed them as a result of these things, and how many evils they reaped, who were unwilling to check their self-love!

Two continents were set in motion by undisciplined pleasures, and all things are thrown into turmoil over a barbaric lad;

all Hellas takes to ship, and the sea is straitened, bearing whole continents upon it;

a long war is fanned into flame, and fierce battles burst forth, and the plains are filled with corpses;

the barbarian commits outrage upon the naval station;

injustice prevails, and the eye of that Zeus of the poets looks upon the Thracians;

noble blood the barbarian plains drink up, and the streams of rivers are dammed with the bodies of the dead;

breasts are beaten with lamentations, and mourning spreads over the land;

and all the feet of Ida of many fountains are shaken, and her peaks, and the city of the Trojans and the ships of the Achaeans.

Where shall we flee, Homer, and stand? Show us a land not shaken.

'Do not touch the reins, my child, being inexperienced, nor mount the chariot to drive it, not having learned;'

'in two charioteers heaven delights, by whom alone the fire is led and driven.'

For the understanding is led astray by pleasure, and the purity of reasoning, when not trained as a child by the Word, slides down into licentiousness, and receives as the wages of its trespass its own downfall.

...having abandoned heaven for a withering beauty, and having fallen so great a distance from the heavens down to the ground.

But the Shechemites also are punished for falling away, having outraged the holy virgin;

the punishment is a tomb to them, and the memorial of the penalty serves as a Pedagogue unto salvation.

To Men Who Beautify Themselves.

To such a pitch, then, has luxury driven things, that not only does the female sex sicken over this empty pursuit, but the men also emulate the disease.

For not being clean of self-adornment, they are not in health, but inclining to the more effeminate, they play the woman—cropping their hair in ignoble and harlot-like cuts, wrapping themselves in bright mantles, chewing mastic, reeking of perfume.

What would one say on seeing these men? Simply, as a physiognomist, one divines them from their bearing to be adulterers and effeminates, hunting after both kinds of love—haters of body-hair, hairless, loathing the manly bloom, but arranging their tresses like the women.

'Living in unholy deeds of daring, these shifty ones do reckless and evil works,' says the Sibyl.

On account of these men, then, the cities are full of those who use pitch-plasters, and shave, and pluck the hairs from these effeminates;

workshops are fitted out and stand open everywhere, and craftsmen of this harlot-like fornication openly traffic in abundant money;

to whom these men offer themselves to be pitch-plastered and to have their hairs pulled out in every way, ashamed neither before the onlookers nor before the passersby, nor even before themselves, that they are men;

for such are the zealots of the more ignoble passions, having their whole body planed smooth by the violent tuggings of the pitch.

And they care not at all to go any further into such shamelessness.

For if nothing is left undone by them, neither shall anything be left unspoken by me.

Diogenes, rebuking one of these ignoble fellows in pedagogic fashion, when the man was being put up for sale, said very manfully: 'Come, lad, buy yourself a man,' chastening that man's harlotry with an ambiguous saying.

For how is it not ignoble that men should shave themselves and make themselves smooth? And certain dyeings of the hair, and anointings of grey locks, and yellowings—the practices of utterly abominable effeminates—and their womanish combings-through must be put away.

For they think that, like a serpent shedding the old age of its head, they renew themselves by re-inscribing and making themselves young again;

but even if they outwit their hairs, yet they shall not escape the wrinkles, nor shall they elude death by outwitting time.

For it is not dreadful—no, not dreadful—for an old man to seem what he is, being unable to escape notice.

The more, then, a man hastens toward his end, the more honorable he is in respect of truth, having God alone as more aged than himself, since He too is the eternal Elder, the most aged of all that exist;

prophecy has called Him 'Ancient of Days,' and 'the hair of His head is like pure wool,' says the prophet.

'And no one else,' says the Lord, 'is able to make one hair white or black.'

How, then, do they set up a rival creation against God—or rather, how do the godless force themselves to oppose Him—by counterfeiting the hair that He has made grey? 'But a crown of old men is much experience,' says the Scripture, 'and the grey hair of their face is the flower of much experience';

but these men dishonor the dignity of age, the grey-haired one.

But it is not, no it is not, possible for a man to display a true soul who has a counterfeit head.

'But you,' He says, 'did not so learn Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off, according to your former manner of life, the old man'—not the grey-haired man, but the one corrupted according to the lusts of deceit—

'created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.'

But for a man to comb himself and to shave himself with a razor for the sake of good looks, and to arrange his hair before a mirror, and to shave and pluck and smooth his cheeks—how is this not womanish? And if one were to see them stripped, he would take them for women.

For even if it is not permitted them to wear gold, yet on account of their effeminate desire, wrapping straps and fringes of gold around them in thin plates, or fashioning certain spherical shapes of the same material, they hang them from their ankles and dangle them from their necks.

This is the artifice of broken-down men dragged off into the women's quarters—amphibious and lecherous beasts;

the manner of this ambush is harlot-like and godless.

For God willed the woman to be smooth, priding herself on her natural hair alone, like a horse on its mane; but the man He adorned, like the lions, with a beard, and made him manly with hairy breasts;

this is a token of strength and of rule.

In this way too He beautified the cocks, those champions among birds, with combs as with helmets.

And so highly does God esteem these hairs that He commands them to come to men together with wisdom, and indeed, admiring the dignity, has honored the awesomeness of the sight with venerable grey hair.

Wisdom and exact reasonings, the grey hairs, come to their full flower together with understanding through time, and they strengthen old age with the firmness of much experience, holding forth grey hair as a lovely flower of grave wisdom, an inducement to reasonable faith.

This, then, is man's badge—the beard, by which the man is made manifest—is older than Eve, and a symbol of the stronger nature;

to this God judged the hairy quality to be fitting, and scattered the hairs over the whole body of the man, but as for whatever was smooth and soft in him, He took it from the rib, fashioning the soft-to-the-touch Eve for the reception of seed, a woman who is a helper for procreation and housekeeping.

But the man—since he gave up the smooth part—remained a man and displays the man;

and to him acting has been granted, as to her, being acted upon.

For the hairy parts are by nature drier and warmer than the smooth.

Wherefore the male sex is hairier and warmer than the female, and the uncastrated than the castrated, and the mature than the immature.

To transgress, then, against the symbol of the manly nature—the hairiness—is unholy;

but the adornment of smoothing—for I grow heated by the Word—is, if it be directed at men, the mark of a catamite; if at women, the mark of an adulterer;

and both must be banished as far as possible from our commonwealth.

'But even the hairs of your head are all numbered,' says the Lord;

and numbered too are those upon the chin, and indeed those over the whole body.

By no means, then, must anything be plucked out contrary to God's purpose, which has been numbered into His will;

'Unless you do not recognize yourselves,' says the Apostle, 'that Christ Jesus is in you;' and if we knew Him to be dwelling within, I do not know how we should have dared to maltreat Him.

And to be depilated with pitch—I shrink even from speaking of the indecency of the act—turning themselves backward and stooping, and exposing to plain view the secret parts of nature, dancing it out and bending themselves over in shameless postures while not blushing for themselves, even in the very midst of the youths' company and the gymnasium, where men's virtue is put to the test, behaving indecently, pursuing this practice contrary to nature—how is this not the utmost licentiousness? For those who do such things in the open would scarcely feel shame even at home before anyone.

Their shamelessness in public bears witness against their unchecked wantonness in secret;

for he who by day denies that he is a man is plainly convicted by night of being a woman.

'There shall not be,' the Word said through Moses, 'a harlot from among the daughters of Israel, nor shall there be a fornicator from among the sons of Israel.'

'But pitch is useful,' someone says.

Yet no one in his right mind would wish to seem a fornicator when he is not diseased, nor would anyone willingly take pains to slander the fair image.

For if those called according to purpose God foreknew to be conformed to the image of His Son, on whose account, according to the blessed Apostle, He ordained that He should be the firstborn among many brethren, how are not those who maltreat the body that is conformed to the Lord godless? But for a man who wishes to be beautiful, the noblest thing in a human being—the mind—must be adorned, which is to be displayed more comely day by day;

but it is the lusts, not the hairs, that must be plucked out.

I pity even the slave-boys of the slave-dealers, decked out for outrage; yet these have not been maltreated by themselves, but the wretches are beautified at command for the sake of shameful gain.

But those who of their own will choose to do these things—which, if commanded, they would have valued at the price of death, had they been men—how are they not contemptible? And now to such a pitch of licentiousness has life been driven, while injustice runs riot, and all lewdness is poured out upon the cities, having become law;

on the rooftops among them stand women selling their own flesh for the outrage of pleasure, and boys taught to deny their nature pretend to be women.

Luxury has displaced everything;

the meddlesomeness of soft living has put humanity to shame;

it seeks everything, attempts everything, forces everything, confounds nature: men have suffered the things of women, and women play the man, being given in marriage and taking wives contrary to nature.

No passage is impassable to licentiousness;

among them love is made common property, and luxury sits at their common table.

O the pitiable spectacle! O the unspeakable practice!

These are shown to be the trophies of your civic incontinence—the proofs of the deeds, those women who lie in the gutters.

But the wretches do not even understand that the uncertainty of such intercourse works out many tragedies.

Fathers, forgetting the children they exposed, often unknowingly lie with a son who has turned prostitute and with daughters who have become wanton; and the license of incontinence shows those who begot them to be their own paramours.

These things the wise among the lawgivers permit;

it is permitted them to sin according to law, and the secrecy of pleasure they call 'easygoingness.'

Those who commit adultery against nature suppose they have escaped adultery, but Justice follows them as the avenger of their reckless deeds;

and drawing down upon themselves an inexorable calamity, they purchase death for a little coin.

Merchants of these wares, the wretches sail about, carrying fornication as their freight, like grain, like wine;

but others, far more miserable, buy pleasures like bread, like a relish, not having taken to heart that saying of Moses:

'You shall not profane your daughter by making her a harlot, and the land shall not commit fornication, and the land shall be filled with iniquity.'

These things were prophesied of old, and the outcome is manifest;

the whole earth is now already filled both with fornication and with lawlessness.

I admire the ancient lawgivers of the Romans;

these men hated the effeminate practice, and judged the bodily union with the male, contrary to the law of nature, to be worthy of the pit, according to the law of righteousness.

For it is not lawful ever to pluck out the beard, the connatural beauty, the noble beauty first appearing on the youth whose bloom is most graceful.

And advancing in age, he is now anointed, rejoicing in his beard, upon which descended the prophetic ointment of the honored Aaron.

And the one rightly trained, upon whom peace has come to dwell, ought to bring peace even to his own hairs.

What, then, would women bent on lewdness not contrive, when they see such things done by men, looking at them as in a mirror? Rather, one ought not to call these men, but cinaedi and womanish creatures, whose very voices are broken and whose raiment is effeminate in touch and in dye;

such men are convicted in their character from without, by their cloak, their footwear, their figure, their gait, their haircut, their glance;

'for a man shall be known by his look,' the Scripture says, 'and a man shall be recognized from the way he meets one';

'a man's clothing, the step of his foot, and the laughter of his teeth declare the things concerning him.'

For those men who are most of all at war with their other hairs tend only the hair upon the head, all but binding up their tresses in hair-nets like the women.

Lions, then, glory in their shagginess, but for strength they arm themselves with their hair; and boars too pride themselves on their bristly ridge, yet hunters dread them when their hair bristles up; and woolly-fleeced sheep are weighed down with their fleeces, yet for these too the loving Father has multiplied their hair for your service, O man, having taught you to shear the fleeces.

And among the nations the Celts and the Scythians wear their hair long, but they do not primp it;

there is something fearsome about the barbarian's fine head of hair, and its tawny color threatens war;

the color is somehow akin to blood.

Both these barbarian peoples have hated luxury;

they will set forth clear witnesses to their simple way of life—the German, the Scythian his wagon.

And sometimes even the Scythian thinks little of the wagon—its size seems wealth to the barbarian—and forsaking luxury he lives a frugal civic life;

a self-sufficient home, more lightly-girt than the wagon—the horse—the Scythian man takes, and mounting it he is carried wherever he wishes;

and when worn down by hunger, he asks the horse for food, and it offers its veins, and supplies to its master the blood, the only thing it possesses; and to the nomad the horse becomes both vehicle and food.

And of the Arabians—these are another nomadic people—the men of fighting age are camel-riders;

these men ride the pregnant camels;

and the camels graze and run at the same time, bearing up their masters, and carry their household along with them.

And if drink should fail the barbarians, they milk the camels; and when the supply of food is already exhausted, they do not even spare the blood, just as they say the wolves do in their frenzy.

But these camels, gentler than the barbarians, bear no grudge though wronged, but even race across the desert with good courage, both carrying and nourishing their masters at once.

Perish, then, the savage beasts of prey, whose food is blood;

for it is not lawful for human beings even to touch blood, whose body is nothing but flesh tilled by blood.

Human blood has partaken of the Word, and shares in grace through the Spirit; and if anyone wrongs it, he will not go unnoticed.

It is permitted to him to speak to the Lord even stripped of outward show.

And I accept the simplicity of the barbarians.

Loving a frugal way of life, the barbarians abandoned luxury.

Such are we whom the Lord calls—stripped of vulgar ostentation, stripped of vainglory, drawn away from sins, carrying only the wood of life, holding fast to salvation alone.

But unawares I have sailed past, in spirit, the sequence of my argument, to which I must now run back again, and rebuke the multitude of servants kept by the wealthy.

For shunning work and service done with their own hands, they take refuge in attendants, buying up a great crowd of cooks, table-servants, and those who skilfully carve the meats into portions.

Their service is divided among them in manifold ways:

some labour over their gluttony—carvers, sauce-makers, makers of pastries, of honey-cakes, of broths, both preparers and creators of dishes; others busy themselves about superfluous clothing; some guard gold like griffins; others keep the silver, polish the goblets, and arrange the preparations for the banquets; others curry the beasts of burden; and a throng of cup-bearers is trained among them, and herds of beautiful youths like cattle, from whom their beauty is milked.

Attending the women, some hold the mirrors, others the hair-nets, others the combs; and many eunuchs, who are themselves go-betweens, serving without suspicion those who wish to indulge in pleasures unhindered, by reason of the trustworthiness of their inability to feel sexual desire.

But a true eunuch is not one who cannot indulge in pleasure, but one who does not wish to.

And so the Word, testifying through the prophet Samuel against the transgressors among the Jews, when the people asked for a king, does not promise them a humane lord, but threatens them with a certain self-willed and luxurious tyrant, who, He says, will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers—prevailing by the law of war, not zealous for a peaceful administration.

And many Celts are those who lift up the women's litters on high and carry them about.

But spinners, wool-workers, weavers at the loom, the industrious women's quarters, and the keeping of the home are nowhere to be found; instead, those who falsely make up the women spend whole days with them, prattling amorous tales and wasting away both their bodies and souls with idle work and idle talk.

"You shall not be with the many in evildoing," it says, "nor shall you side with the multitude"; for wisdom is seen among the few, but disorder among the multitude.

These women buy themselves litter-bearers not out of modesty—because they do not wish to be stared at (for it would be desirable if they were prompted to seek concealment by such a disposition)—but out of self-indulgence, riding upon their servants, eager to make a grand display.

For with the curtain thrown open, glancing about more keenly at those who look at them, they expose their character; and often they even lean out, shaming their superficial dignity by their slippery officiousness.

"Do not look about," it says, "in the streets of the city, nor wander in its desolate places"; for it is truly a wilderness, even if there be a crowd of the dissolute, wherever there is no self-controlled person present.

These women parade around the temples, sacrificing and seeking oracles, daily forming processions with begging priests, mendicant priests of the Mother of the gods, and old buffoon-women who ruin households; and they endure the old wives' whisperings over the wine-cups, learning from the sorcerers certain love-charms and incantations for the ruin of marriages.

And some of the men they already have, others they pray for, and yet others the diviners promise them.

They do not realise, being deceived, that they themselves are giving themselves up as vessels of pleasure to those who wish to be lustful; and exchanging their own purity for the most shameful outrage, they regard their disgraceful corruption as a means of profit.

Many are the ministers of harlots' debauchery, slipping in from every quarter;

for the dissolute are prone to wantonness, like the swine that rush headlong into the part of the boat that is sinking.

Wherefore most forcefully Scripture admonishes:

"Do not bring every man into your house, for many are the snares of the crafty."

And elsewhere it says: "Let righteous men be your fellow-diners, and let your boasting be in the fear of the Lord."

"For you know this well," says the Apostle, "that no fornicator, or unclean person, or covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God."

But some women delight in the company of effeminate men, and crowds of foul-mouthed catamites flow in among them—polluted in body, polluted in speech, made manly for unchaste services, ministers of adultery, giggling and whispering and shamelessly producing through their nostrils that lewd snuffling—the prelude of fornication—trying with unchaste words and gestures to give pleasure, and provoking to laughter.

And there are times when, inflamed by some chance anger, being themselves either fornicators or having zealously gathered a crowd of catamites for destruction, they snort through the nose like frogs, as though they had gall dwelling in their nostrils.

They rear Median dogs and recline together with peak-headed dwarfs, taking delight in monstrous dancers.

And hearing of Thersites they laugh, yet they themselves buy at a high price these Thersiteses, and boast not of yoke-mate husbands, but of those who are indeed a burden to the earth.

And they overlook a chaste widow, who far surpasses a Maltese lapdog, and pass by a righteous old man, who, I think, is more comely than a bought-with-silver freak;

and those women who rear parrots and plovers do not even take in an orphan child, but they expose the babies conceived in their own homes, while they take up the chicks of birds;

and they have preferred irrational creatures to rational beings, although they ought rather to nurture old men who profess self-control and who are, I think, more comely than apes and able to utter something better than nightingales.

"Inasmuch as you did it to one of these least," He says, "you did it to Me."

But these women, on the contrary, have preferred ignorance to self-control, turning their own substance to stone in pearls and Indian emeralds;

yes, and on fading dyes and slaves bought with silver they squander and fling away their money, like glutted birds scratching about in the dung-heap of life.

"Poverty humbles a man," it says;

by poverty it means stinginess, by which the rich are poor in giving, as though they had nothing.

How one ought to conduct oneself at the baths.

What kind of baths, too, they have!

Artificial chambers, compactly built and portable, covered with translucent linen; gilded chairs studded with silver; and countless vessels of gold and silver, some carried about for toasts, some for food, some for bathing;

yes, and even little braziers of coals.

For they have come to such a pitch of intemperance that they dine and get drunk while still bathing;

and the silver vessels with which they show off they tastelessly set out in the bath-houses;

perhaps indeed to display their wealth out of excessive ostentation, but most of all their wilful want of taste, by which they accuse husbands of being unmanly men mastered by women, while they prove in some way or other that they themselves are not able even to be present and able to sweat without a multitude of vessels;

for indeed the poor women, though they have no share in the pomp, partake of the same baths.

The filth of superfluity, then, carries with it a great cloak of blasphemy.

With this, as with a bait, they hook the wretched men who gape at the glitter of the gold;

for indeed, dazzling the tasteless with this, they contrive to make their lovers admire them—lovers who soon afterwards outrage them when naked.

And indeed, to their own husbands they would not strip, courting a pretended trustworthiness of shame; but it is permitted to any who wish, among others, to behold the home-kept women naked in the baths;

for there they are not ashamed to strip before spectators, as before hucksters of bodies.

But Hesiod advises a man not even to cleanse his skin with water that a woman has used.

The baths are thrown open in common to men and women together, and thence they strip themselves for intemperance;

for from gazing comes the desire that springs up in men, as though their sense of shame were washed away from them at the baths.