St. Augustine
1Magis quid agas cum eis qui obtemperare nolunt, cogitandum est, quam quem ad modum eis ostendas non licere quod faciunt. Sed nunc epistula sanctitatis tuae et occupatissimum me repperit et celerrimus baiuli reditus neque non rescribere tibi neque ad ea quae consuluisti, ita ut oportet, respondere permisit. Nolo tamen de ornamentis auri vel vestis praeproperam habeas in prohibendo sententiam, nisi eos qui, neque coniugati neque coniugari cupientes, cogitare debent quo modo placeant deo. Illi autem cogitant quae sunt mundi, quo modo placeant vel viri uxoribus vel mulieres maritis, nisi quod capillos nudare feminas, quas etiam caput velare apostolus iubet, nec maritatas decet; fucari autem pigmentis, quo vel rubicundior vel candidior appareat, adulterina
Letters of St. Augustine
What you are to do with those who refuse to1 comply requires more consideration than how you can show them that what they are doing is unlawful. But at present the letter of your Holiness has found me extremely busy and at the same time the bearer’s great haste to return has not allowed me either to make no reply to you or to give an adequate answer to the problems on which you asked my advice. Still, I should not like you to make any over-hasty decision about the forbidding of ornaments of gold or finery, except that those who are neither married nor desirous of being married ought to be thinking how they may please God. For that class of people think of worldly things, how they may, if they are husbands, please their wives, or if wives, please their husbandsb; the one exception is that it is not becoming in women, even in those who are married, to uncover their hair, since the apostle bids them cover the whole head.c But as for painting the faced so that it may appear ruddier or fairer, this is immoral deceit.
- aFor Possidius see pp. 128, 190 above.
- b1 Cor. vii. 32–34.
- c1 Cor. xi. 5–6.
- dThe habit of painting the face was denounced by all the Christian writers: Tertullian, De Cult. Fem. ii. 7 “videbo an eum cerussa et purpurisso et croco et in illo ambitu capitis resurgatis”; Cyprian, De Hab. Virg. 14, blames the fallen angels for teaching “oculos nigrore fucare et genas mendacio ruboris inficere et mutare adulterinis coloribus crinem”; Ambr. De Virginibus, i. 6. 28 “quaesitis coloribus ora depingant, dum viris displicere formidant”; and frequently by Jerome: Ep. 54. 7 “quid facit in facie Christianae purpurissus et cerussa?”; Ep. 107. 5 “cave ne aures perfores, ne cerussa et purpurisso . . . ora depingas.” In Doct. Chr. iv. 21. 49 Augustine quotes passages from Cyprian and Ambrose on women who paint the face, and in De Bono Viduitatis, 19. 24, he advises a virgin and a widow “simulatum candorem ac ruborem et pigmentis illitum non adhiberetis, etiamsi viros haberetis; non putantes dignos quos falleretis, nec vos quae fallere deberetis.”