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| Introduction. Modesty in Apparel Becoming to Women, in Memory of the Introduction of Sin into the World Through a Woman. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
II.
On the Apparel of Women.79
79 [Written about
a.d. 202. See Kaye, p. 56.] |
Book I.
[Translated by the Rev. S.
Thelwall.]
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Chapter I.—Introduction.
Modesty in Apparel Becoming to Women, in Memory of the Introduction of
Sin into the World Through a Woman.
If there dwelt upon earth a faith as great as is
the reward of faith which is expected in the heavens, no one of you at
all, best beloved sisters, from the time that she had first
“known the Lord,”80 and learned (the truth)
concerning her own (that is, woman’s) condition, would have
desired too gladsome (not to say too ostentatious) a style of dress; so
as not rather to go about in humble garb, and rather to affect meanness
of appearance, walking about as Eve mourning and repentant, in order
that by every garb of penitence81 she might the more
fully expiate that which she derives from Eve,—the ignominy, I
mean, of the first sin, and the odium (attaching to her as the cause)
of human perdition. “In pains and in anxieties dost thou
bear (children), woman; and toward thine husband (is) thy inclination,
and he lords it over thee.”82 And do you
not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this
sex of yours lives in this age:83 the guilt must of
necessity live too. You are the devil’s
gateway: you are the unsealer84 of that
(forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine
law: you are she who persuaded85
85
“Suasisti” is the reading of the mss.; “persuasisti,” a conjectural
emendation adopted by Rig. | him whom
the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed
so easily God’s image, man. On account of your
desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die.
And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of
skins?86 Come, now; if from the beginning of the
world87 the Milesians sheared sheep, and the
Serians88 spun trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the
Phrygians embroidered with the needle, and the Babylonians with the
loom, and pearls gleamed, and onyx-stones flashed; if gold itself also
had already issued, with the cupidity (which accompanies it), from the
ground; if the mirror, too, already had licence to lie so largely, Eve,
expelled from paradise, (Eve) already dead, would also have coveted
these things, I imagine! No more, then, ought she
now to crave, or be acquainted with (if she desires to live
again), what, when she was living, she had neither had nor
known. Accordingly these things are all the baggage of woman in
her condemned and dead state, instituted as if to swell the pomp of her
funeral.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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