Collected Works 28 part 1/2

I. Having now undertaken as my proper task the matter of my opinion, I shall show, in Latin also, that our virgins ought to be veiled from the time they have passed the threshold of their maturity. This the truth demands, and to truth no one can prescribe—not lapse of time, not the patronage of persons, not the privilege of regions. For from these things a custom, having generally taken its beginning from some ignorance or simplicity, is strengthened into usage by succession, and thus is asserted against the truth. But our Lord Christ named Himself Truth, not Custom. If Christ is always and prior to all, equally Truth is a thing eternal and ancient. Let them look to it, then, for whom that is new which is old in itself. It is not so much novelty as truth that convicts heresy.

Whatever savours against the truth, that will be heresy, even an ancient custom. But by his own fault does anyone remain ignorant of a thing; and that which is unknown was as much to be sought as that which is acknowledged is to be received. The rule of faith, indeed, is altogether one, alone unmovable and unreformable: namely, of believing in one only God Almighty, the maker of the world; and in His Son Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, on the third day raised again from the dead, received into the heavens, sitting now at the right hand of the Father, and destined to come to judge the living and the dead through the resurrection also of the flesh.

While this law of faith remains, all other things pertaining to discipline and conduct admit the newness of correction, since the grace of God is of course at work and advancing even to the end. For what sort of thing would it be, that, while the devil is always at work and daily adding to the devices of iniquity, the work of God should either have ceased or ceased to advance? whereas the Lord has for this cause sent the Paraclete, that, since human mediocrity could not take in all things at once, discipline might little by little be directed and set in order and brought to perfection by that Vicar of the Lord, the Holy Spirit. I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now; when that Spirit of truth is come, He will lead you into all truth, and will announce to you the things to come.

But He also declared beforehand concerning this work of His. What then is the administration of the Paraclete, save this: that discipline is directed, that the Scriptures are revealed, that the understanding is reformed, that advance is made toward better things? Nothing is without its due season; all things await their time. In short, Ecclesiastes says: There is a time for everything. Look at the very creation, how it is little by little advanced to its fruit: first there is the grain, and from the grain arises the shoot, and from the shoot the little tree struggles up; then the branches and foliage grow strong, and the whole name of a tree is spread out; thence the swelling of the bud, and the flower is loosed from the bud, and from the flower the fruit is opened; and this too, being for a while rough and shapeless, little by little directing its own age, is trained into the mellowness of a pleasant taste.

So too righteousness—for the God of righteousness and of creation is the same—was at first in its rudiments, a nature fearing God; thence through the Law and the Prophets it advanced into infancy; thence through the Gospel it boiled up into youth; and now through the Paraclete it is being settled into maturity. He alone shall be both called and revered as a master from Christ; for He speaks not from Himself, but the things which are enjoined by Christ; He alone is the forerunner, because He alone is after Christ. They who have received Him set truth before custom; they who have heard Him prophesying even until now veil their virgins. II. But for the present I do not wish to reckon this observance as belonging to truth; let it be for a while a custom, that I may oppose custom even to custom.

Throughout Greece and certain of its barbarous regions, most churches keep their virgins concealed; and this institution is also to be found here and there under this our own sky, lest anyone should ascribe that custom to Greek or barbarian heathenism. But I have put forward those churches which the apostles themselves, or apostolic men, founded—and, I suppose, before certain others. They too, therefore, have the same authority of custom; they set against us times and predecessors rather than these later ones. What shall we observe, what shall we choose? We cannot reject a custom which we cannot condemn, seeing that it is not alien, because it is not that of aliens, since with them, to be sure, we share the right of peace and the name of brotherhood.

One faith is ours and theirs, one God, the same Christ, the same hope, the same sacraments of the laver—in a word, we are one Church. Thus whatever belongs to our own people is ours; otherwise you divide the body. Yet here, as is wont to happen in all things variously instituted, doubtful and uncertain, an examination had to be applied, as to which of two so diverse customs was more in keeping with the discipline of God; and assuredly that one is to be chosen which keeps the virgin known to God alone—for whom, besides that glory is to be sought from God and not from men, even her own good is to be blushed at: you would confound a virgin more by praising than by blaming her, since the brow of transgression is the harder, having been taught shamelessness by the very transgression and in it—

for as to that custom which, by displaying virgins, denies them their virginity, no one would have approved it save such persons as are the virgins themselves. For such eyes will desire to see a virgin seen as the virgin possesses who wishes to be seen; mutually the same kinds of eyes crave one another; it belongs to one and the same lust both to be seen and to see. It is as much the mark of a holy man to be abashed if he has seen a virgin, as of a holy virgin if she has been seen by a man. III. But not even among the customs did those most holy predecessors wish to discern. Nevertheless, more tolerably among us, up until quite recently, communion was extended to either custom; the matter was committed to choice, that each might do as she wished, either to be covered or to be exposed, just as also to marry, which is itself neither compelled nor forbidden.

Truth was content to make a compact with custom, that it might silently enjoy itself, at least in part, under the name of custom. But since recognition had begun to advance, so that through the licence of either usage the token of the better part might emerge, straightway that adversary of good things, and above all of institutions, wrought his own work. The virgins of men are set against the virgins of God, roused rashly into audacity with brow quite bare; and those seem to be virgins who can ask something of men—much more so a deed like this, namely, that their rivals, so much the more free as they are handmaids of Christ alone, should be surrendered to them! 'We are scandalized,' they say, 'because some go about differently'; and they had rather be scandalized than provoked to emulation.

A scandal, unless I am mistaken, is the example not of a good thing but of a bad one, building up toward transgression; good things scandalize no one save an evil mind. If modesty, bashfulness, and disdain of glory, seeking to please God alone, are good, let those recognize their own evil who are scandalized at such a good. For what? If they should say they are scandalized by the continent among the incontinent, must continence too be recalled? and lest many be scandalized anywhere, must monogamy be refused? Why do not these rather complain that petulance and the shamelessness of ostentatious virginity are a scandal to themselves?

Shall holy virgins, then, on account of such wares-peddling ringleaders, be dragged into the church, blushing because they are recognized in the midst, trembling because they are exposed when summoned as though to defilement? For no less do they refuse to suffer even this. Every public exposure of a good virgin is a suffering of defilement. And yet to suffer the violence of the flesh is the lesser thing, because it comes of the office of nature; but when the very spirit is violated in a virgin by the removal of the veil, she has learned to lose what she was guarding. O sacrilegious hands, which have been able to drag off a garb dedicated to God! What worse would any persecutor have done, had he recognized this to have been the virgin's own choice? You have stripped the girl from the head, and now she is no longer a virgin known to herself; she has become another.

Rise up therefore, O Truth, rise up and burst forth, as it were, from thy patience! I would have thee defend no custom; for now even by that custom under which thou didst enjoy thyself, thou art assailed. Show thyself to be that which veils the virgins; do thou thyself interpret thy own Scriptures, which custom does not know—for if it knew them, it would never have existed. IV.

But inasmuch as it is the way of custom to argue against the truth even from the Scriptures, it is at once objected against us that no mention of virgins was made by the Apostle where he lays down rules about the veil, but only women are named; and that, if he had wished virgins also to be covered, he would have pronounced concerning virgins along with the women who are named—'just as there,' he says, 'where he treats of marriage, he declares what is to be observed also concerning virgins'; and so, that they are not bound by the law of veiling the head, as not named in this law; nay, that from this very fact they are forbidden to be veiled, seeing they are not commanded, being not even named. But we too turn this same argumentation back. For he who knew, in other passages, to make mention of either kind—

I mean the virgin and the woman, that is, the non-virgin—for reason of distinction, in those passages in which he does not name the virgin, by not making a distinction he shows the community of their condition. Besides, he could here too have established a difference between virgin and woman, just as elsewhere he says: The woman and the virgin are divided. Therefore those whom he did not divide by his silence, he united in the other. Nor yet, because there the woman and the virgin are divided, will that division here also lend support, as some would have it. For how much that is said elsewhere is of no force where it is precisely not said! unless indeed the cause be the same as elsewhere, so that a single saying may suffice. But that cause of the virgin and the woman is far divided from this present case. The woman and the virgin, he says, are divided.

Why? Because the unmarried, that is, the virgin, thinks upon the things which are the Lord's, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit; but the married, that is, the non-virgin, thinks how she may please her husband. This will be the interpretation of that division, which has no place in this chapter, in which nothing is pronounced concerning marriage, nor concerning the mind and thought of woman and virgin, but concerning the veiling of the head. And, wishing there to be no dispute about this, the Holy Spirit willed that under the single name of woman the virgin also should be understood, whom, by not naming her expressly, He did not separate from the woman, and by not separating her He joined her to that one from whom He did not separate her.

Is it now, then, a novelty to use a principal term and nonetheless to understand the rest within that term, where there is no necessity of distinguishing the whole one by one? Naturally, brevity of speech is both pleasing and necessary, since speech that is fringed and burdensome and empty. So too we are content with general terms comprehending in themselves the understanding of the particular ones. Now, then, concerning the very term itself. The natural term is 'female'; the general term of the natural is 'woman'; and of the general also the special is 'virgin,' or 'married,' or 'widow,' or however many names of age besides are added. Therefore the special is subject to the general, because the general is prior, as the subsequent to the antecedent and the partial to the universal:

it is understood in that to which it is subjected, and is signified in that same, because it is contained in it. So neither hand nor foot nor any of the members desires to be named when the body has been named; and if you say 'the world,' there will be there also the heaven and the things in it, the sun and moon and constellations and stars, and the earth and the seas and the whole census of the elements. You have said all things, when you have said that which consists of all. So too, by naming 'woman,' one has named whatever belongs to woman. V. But since they so appropriate the name of 'woman' as to think it does not fit any save her alone who has suffered a man, it behoves us to prove that the property of that term pertains to the sex itself, not to a grade of the sex, whereby virgins too are commonly reckoned.

When this kind of second human being was made by God as a help for man, that female was straightway named 'woman'—still happy, still worthy of Paradise, still a virgin: She shall be called, he says, woman. You have therefore a name, not, I say, common to the virgin, but proper to her, which from the beginning the virgin obtained. But some ingeniously will have it that 'she shall be called woman' was said of the future, as though she was to be this when she had unsealed her virginity, since it is also added: Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be in one flesh. Let them first show, then, whether that subtlety of theirs holds good—if she was named 'woman' from the future, what term she received in the meanwhile;

for she could not have existed without a term for her present quality. Besides, what sort of thing is it, that she who was to be called in the future by a designated name, should in the present be called nothing at all! Adam imposed names upon all animals, and upon none from its future condition, but from its present institution, whatever condition might serve it; it was called this, which he willed from the very beginning. What, then, was she called at that time? But indeed, as often as she is named in Scripture, she is called 'woman,' before she was married, and never 'virgin' when she was a virgin; this name then was the one name she had, and that even when nothing was said in a prophetic manner.

For when Scripture relates that the two were naked, Adam and his woman, this too has no flavour of the future, as though it had called her his 'woman' in presage of a wife; but because his woman, even unmarried, was so called as being of his own substance: This, he says, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman. Hence, then, by the tacit consciousness of nature, the very divinity of the soul brought forth into the usage of speech, men not knowing it—as also many other things which we shall be able to show elsewhere are wont to be done and said out of Scripture—that we should call our women 'wives,' although we speak certain things also improperly; for even the Greeks, who rather use the term 'woman' of a wife, have other terms proper to a wife;

but I prefer to reckon this usage to the testimony of Scripture. For where two are made into one flesh through the bond of matrimony, she is called, according to her origin, 'flesh of flesh and bone of bones,' the woman of him from whose substance she begins to be reckoned as become a wife. Thus 'woman' is not by nature the name of a wife, but 'wife' is by condition the name of the woman. In short, she can be called 'woman' and not 'wife,' but a non-woman cannot be called 'wife,' because she cannot even be one. The name of the new female having therefore been established—which is 'woman'—and that which was prior having been unfolded, that is, the name having been assigned, he now turns to the prophetic reasoning, so as to say: For the sake of this shall a man leave his father and mother.

So far is the name separated from the prophecy, as it is also from the person itself, that he certainly did not say it of Eve herself, but with regard to those future females whom he named in the womb of the feminine kind. Otherwise Adam was not going to leave father and mother, whom he did not have, for the sake of Eve; therefore it does not pertain to Eve, because neither to Adam, that which was said prophetically; for it was foretold of the condition of husbands, who, on account of a woman, were to leave their parents—which could not fall upon Eve, because neither upon Adam. If the matter is so, it appears that she was not named 'woman' on account of the future, to which the future did not pertain. To this is added, that he himself set forth the reason of that name; for when he had said: She shall be called woman:

Because she was taken out of her man, and he himself still a virgin. But we shall speak also of the name of 'man' in its own place. Let no one, then, interpret to a prophecy a name which is derived from another signification, especially since it appears where she received a name from the future—namely there, where she is called 'Eve,' by a now personal appellation, since the natural one had gone before. For if Eve is the mother of the living, behold she is named from the future; behold she is foretold as wife and not virgin. This will be the term of one about to marry; for from a married woman comes a mother. Thus here too it is shown that the woman was not then named from the future, who was afterward to receive the name of her future condition. This part has been sufficiently answered. VI.

Let us now see whether the Apostle too observes the form of this term according to Genesis, assigning it to the sex there, thus calling the Virgin Mary a 'woman,' just as Genesis calls Eve so. For writing to the Galatians, he says: God sent His Son, made of a woman—who, it is agreed, was assuredly a virgin, though Hebion resist it. I acknowledge also that the angel Gabriel was sent to a virgin; but when he blesses her, he reckons her among women, not among virgins: Blessed art thou among women. The angel too knew that a woman, even a virgin, is so called. But to these two points also someone has thought himself to have answered ingeniously: since indeed Mary was betrothed, therefore she was pronounced 'woman' both by the angel and by the Apostle; 'for the betrothed is in a manner married.'

Yet between 'in a manner' and the truth there is quite a difference, at least in this passage; for elsewhere it may indeed be so held. But now they did not pronounce Mary a 'woman' as though already married, but rather as being nonetheless a female, even if not a betrothed one—as though this had been said from the very beginning; for that necessarily takes precedence from which the form descends. Moreover, as regards this chapter, if here she is equated to a betrothed one, so that Mary was called 'woman' not as a female but as a married one, then Christ was not born of a virgin, because born of a betrothed one, who by this name will have ceased to be a virgin; but if He was born of a virgin, though of a betrothed one, yet an intact one, acknowledge that a woman, even a virgin, even an intact one, is so called.

Here certainly nothing can seem to have been said prophetically, as though the Apostle named a future woman, that is, a married one, by saying 'made of a woman'; for he could not have named the later woman, of whom Christ was not to be born, that is, one who had suffered a man, but that one who was present, who was a virgin and yet was called a woman. VII. After the property of this term according to the form of the beginning has been defended for the virgin and thus for the whole race of women, let us now turn to reviewing the very reasons through which the Apostle teaches that a woman ought to be veiled, whether they apply equally to virgins also, so that from this too the community of the term between virgins and non-virgins may be established, while the same causes of the veil are found on either side.

If the head of the woman is the man, assuredly it is also the head of the virgin, out of whom is made that woman who has married—unless indeed the virgin is some third monstrous kind, its own head. If it is shameful for a woman to be shaved or shorn, assuredly it is so for the virgin also. Accordingly, let the world, that rival of God, look to it, if it thus falsely makes cropped hair a comeliness for the virgin, just as it is permitted to a boy. Therefore she to whom it equally does not befit to be shaved or shorn, it equally befits to be covered. If the woman is the glory of the man, how much more the virgin, who is a glory even to herself; if the woman is of the man and for the sake of the man, that rib of Adam was first a virgin; if the woman ought to have power over her head, so much the more justly the virgin, to whom pertains the very thing which is at issue.

For if it be on account of the angels—namely those whom we read to have fallen from God and heaven on account of lust for females—who can presume what sort of angels desired bodies already defiled and the remnants of human lust, so as not rather to have burned for virgins, whose bloom excuses even human lust? For Scripture too thus suggests: And it came to pass, it says, when men had begun to become more numerous upon the earth, that daughters also were born to them; and the sons of God, beholding the daughters of men, that they were fair, took to themselves wives of all whom they chose. For here the name 'women' in the Greek savours of 'wives,' because mention is made of marriage.

When therefore it says 'daughters of men,' it manifestly portends virgins, who would still be reckoned as among their parents—for the married are named after their husbands—since it could have said 'the wives of men'; equally, in naming the angels not adulterers but husbands, inasmuch as they take unmarried daughters of men, whom it above called 'born,' thus too it signified virgins, above 'born,' but here married to angels. I know not otherwise how they were 'born' and thereafter married. A face so perilous, then, ought to be overshadowed—a face which has hurled scandals as far as heaven—so that, standing before God, to whom it is defendant on the charge of the exterminated angels, it may blush also before the other angels, and may at last restrain that evil liberty of its head, no longer now to be offered even to the eyes of men.

But even if those angels had craved females already contaminated, so much the more ought virgins to have been veiled on account of the angels, by so much the more as the angels could have transgressed on account of virgins. And if the Apostle further adds the prejudgment of nature, namely that the redundancy of hair is a woman's honour, because the hair is instead of a covering, assuredly this is most of all a mark of the virgin, whose adornment itself is properly such that, heaped up upon the crown, it covers the very citadel of the head with the compass of the tresses. VIII.

Assuredly these same things, taken conversely, bring it about that the man should not veil his head: namely, because he has not naturally attained the abundance of hair; because it is not shameful for him to be shaved or shorn; because the angels did not go astray on account of him; because he is the glory and image of God; because his head is Christ. And so, when the Apostle treats of man and woman—why she ought to be veiled, but he not—it appears why he also kept silence about the virgin, allowing the virgin to be understood in the woman by the same reasoning by which he also did not name the boy as to be reckoned in the man, having embraced the whole order of either sex by the proper terms of 'woman' and 'man.' So too Adam, while still intact, is in Genesis named 'man.'

'She shall be called woman,' he says, 'because she was taken out of her man.' Thus was Adam a man before the union of marriage, just as Eve was a woman. Concerning each party the Apostle pronounced sufficiently as to the whole class of either sex, both briefly and fully, so well framed is his definition: 'Every woman,' he says. What does 'every' mean, if not of every kind, of every rank, of every condition, of every dignity, of every age? For 'every' is that which is whole and entire and lacking in no part of itself. But a virgin also is a part of woman. Likewise concerning the man who is not to be veiled he says 'every.' Behold two distinct names, man and woman, and 'every' applied to each; two laws bound to one another, on this side of veiling, on that of uncovering.

Therefore, if by the phrase 'every man' the name of man is common even to one who is not yet a man, to the beardless male; and if, since the name is common according to nature, the law of his not being veiled who among men is a virgin is likewise common according to discipline: why should it not be prejudged in the same way that the virgin woman too, once 'woman' is named, is included in the fellowship of the name, so that she may be included also in the sharing of the law? If a virgin is not a woman, neither is the beardless one a man; if the virgin is not covered because she is not a woman, let the beardless one be covered because he is not a man; let the same indulgence be granted equally to their virginity; just as virgins are not compelled to be veiled, so let not boys be commanded to be unveiled.

Why do we in part acknowledge the Apostle's definition to be absolute concerning every man, and do not carp at it—asking why he did not also name the boy—yet in part play false, though it is equally absolute concerning every woman? 'If any man,' he says, 'seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the church of God': he shows that there had been some contention about this matter, to extinguish which he used the whole compendious statement, neither naming the virgin—so as to show there was to be no doubting about veiling—and naming 'every' woman, since he had named the virgin. So too the Corinthians themselves understood it; and to this day, in fact, the Corinthians veil their virgins: what the apostles taught, those who learned it approve.

Let us now see whether, just as we have shown that the arguments from nature and from cause apply to the virgin as well, so also the prescriptions of ecclesiastical discipline concerning the woman have regard to the virgin. It is not permitted to a woman to speak in church, nor to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer, nor to claim for herself the lot of any manly function, still less of the priestly office. Let us ask whether any of these things is lawful for a virgin. If it is not lawful for a virgin, but she is subjected in all things to the same condition, and the necessity of humility is reckoned to her along with the woman, whence shall this one thing be lawful for her, which is not lawful for any female? What prerogative does she deserve against her own condition?

If a woman is a virgin and has proposed to sanctify her flesh, is the indulgence of the veil therefore granted to her, that she may enter the church conspicuous and marked, that she may display the honor of her sanctity in the liberty of an uncovered head? She might more worthily have been honored by some prerogative of manly rank or office. Indeed I know that somewhere a virgin was placed in the order of widows before she was even twenty years old. If the bishop owed her some relief, he could surely have provided it in another way, with regard for discipline preserved, so that there should not now be denoted in the church such a marvel—not to say a monster—a widowed virgin: the more portentous in this, that she neither covers her head as a widow, denying herself both ways, being neither a virgin, since she is reckoned a widow, nor a widow, since she is called a virgin.

But she sits there uncovered by the same authority as a virgin does; to which seat, besides being over sixty years old, women are sometimes chosen not only who have had one husband, that is, married women, but also mothers, and indeed those who have brought up children, so that, being schooled by the experience of all the affections, they may readily know how to aid the others both by counsel and by comfort, and having no less passed through those things by which a woman can be proved. So little is anything permitted to a virgin by way of honor as to place, and just as little as to any distinguishing marks.

For the rest, it would be quite inhuman if women, who in all things are subject to men, should carry the honor-bearing mark of their virginity, by which they are looked up to and gazed upon and magnified by the brethren, while men—so many virgins, so many voluntary eunuchs—should walk with their good hidden and blind, wearing nothing that would make even themselves illustrious. They too, then, ought to claim for themselves some distinguishing marks: whether the feathers of the Garamantes, or the fillets of the barbarians, or the cicadas of the Athenians, or the ringlets of the Germans, or the tattoos of the Britons; or let it be the other way round: let those veiled about the head lie hidden in the church.