On the Veiling of Virgins 1–10

Having already been obliged to treat this matter as my own view requires, I will show in Latin too that our virgins ought to be veiled from the time they have crossed the threshold of their age: that this is demanded by truth, against which no one can plead prescription, neither length of time, nor the patronage of persons, nor the privilege of regions. For from these, as a rule, custom, having taken its start from some ignorance or simplicity, is strengthened into usage by succession, and so is defended against truth. But our Lord Christ called himself truth, not custom. If Christ is always, and before all things, then truth is equally an everlasting and ancient thing. Let those see to it, then, for whom that is new which is old in itself. It is not so much novelty as truth that refutes heresies. Whatever savours of opposition to truth will be heresy, even an old custom. For the rest, if anyone is ignorant of something, it is by his own fault. And what is not known ought to have been sought out, just as what is recognized ought to be accepted.

The rule of faith, indeed, is altogether one, alone immovable and unreformable: that is, of believing in one God almighty, the maker of the world, and in his Son Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised from the dead on the third day, received in the heavens, now sitting at the right hand of the Father, who will come to judge the living and the dead, through the resurrection of the flesh as well. While this law of faith remains, the other matters, of discipline and conduct, admit the novelty of correction, the grace of God, of course, working and advancing to the end. For what sort of thing would it be that, while the devil is always working and adding daily to the devices of iniquity, the work of God should either have ceased or stopped advancing? Indeed the Lord sent the Paraclete for this very reason, that, since human mediocrity could not take in everything at once, discipline might gradually be directed and ordered and brought to perfection by that vicar of the Lord, the Holy Spirit. “I still have many things to say to you,” he says, “but you cannot yet bear them; when that Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all truth and will announce to you the things to come.” And earlier too he declared this work of his. What, then, is the ministry of the Paraclete but this: that discipline is directed, that the Scriptures are revealed, that understanding is reformed, that there is progress toward better things? Nothing is without its age; all things await their time. In short, Ecclesiastes says, “A time for everything.” Look at creation itself, gradually brought forward to fruit. First there is a seed, and from the seed a shoot arises, and from the shoot a sapling struggles up; then branches and leaves gain strength, and the whole name of tree spreads out; then comes the swelling of the bud, and from the bud the flower is loosed, and from the flower the fruit is disclosed; and the fruit too, for some time rough and shapeless, gradually guiding its age, is trained to mellowness of flavour. So too righteousness (for the God of righteousness and of creation is the same) was first in its rudiments, fearing God by nature; then through the law and the prophets it advanced to infancy; then through the gospel it grew fervent in youth; now through the Paraclete it is being settled into maturity. He will be the only teacher after Christ, both to be called so and to be revered. For he does not speak from himself, but what is commanded by Christ. He alone is the leader, because he alone comes after Christ. Those who have received him set truth before custom. Those who have heard him prophesying, up to now and not only long ago, veil their virgins.

But for the moment I do not want to credit this practice to truth. Let it be custom for the time being, so that I may oppose custom to custom. Throughout Greece and certain of its barbarian regions, many churches keep their virgins covered. This practice exists under our sky too, in some places, lest anyone ascribe that custom to Greek or barbarian heathen ways. But I have put forward those churches which the apostles themselves or apostolic men founded, before certain others, I think. Those churches, then, have the same authority of custom; they set against us times and predecessors more than these later churches do. What shall we observe? What shall we choose? We cannot reject a custom which we cannot condemn, since it is not foreign, because it belongs not to foreigners, but to those with whom we share the right of peace and the name of brotherhood. We and they have one faith, one God, the same Christ, the same hope, the same sacraments of the bath; to say it once and for all, we are one church. So whatever belongs to our people is ours. Otherwise you divide the body. Yet here, as usually happens in all matters variously established, doubtful, and uncertain, an examination should have been made as to which of two such different customs better suits the discipline of God. And surely the one should be chosen that shuts virgins in, known to God alone, who, besides the fact that glory is to be sought from God and not from men, ought to blush even at their own good. You embarrass a virgin more by praising than by blaming her, since sin has the harder forehead, taught shamelessness by sin itself and in sin itself. For that custom which denies virgins while it displays them no one would have approved except some people who are like such virgins themselves. For the eyes that will want a virgin to be seen will be like the eyes of the virgin who will want to be seen. The same kinds of eyes desire one another. To be seen and to see belong to the same lust. It is as much the mark of a holy man to blush if he has seen a virgin as of a holy virgin to blush if she has been seen by a man.

But those most holy predecessors did not want to choose between the customs either. Among us, at any rate, until recently both customs were followed with some tolerance. The matter was left to choice, so that each girl, as she wished, could be either covered or exposed, just as with marrying, which itself is neither compelled nor forbidden. Truth was content to make a pact with custom, so as to enjoy itself silently under the name of custom, even in part. But since recognition had begun to advance, so that through the freedom allowed to both practices the evidence for the better side was emerging, at once that adversary of good things, and much more of good institutions, did his work. Virgins of men canvass against virgins of God, roused, with a plainly bare forehead, to rash boldness; and they are thought to be virgins who can ask anything of men, let alone such a thing as this: that their rivals, the more free as they are handmaids of Christ alone, should be surrendered to them. “We are scandalized,” they say, “because others go about differently”; and they prefer to be scandalized rather than to be spurred on. A scandal, unless I am mistaken, is the example not of a good thing but of a bad one, building up to sin. Good things scandalize no one except an evil mind. If modesty, bashfulness, disdain of glory, and seeking to please God alone are good, let those who are scandalized by such good recognize their own evil. For what if the incontinent say they are scandalized by the continent: must continence be called back? And lest the many-times married be scandalized, must monogamy be refused? Why should these not rather complain that the petulance and impudence of a showy virginity are a scandal to them? For the sake of heads like these, fit for the market, are holy virgins to be dragged into the church, blushing at being recognized in public, trembling at being uncovered, summoned as though to be violated? For they do not want to suffer this any less. Every public exposure of a good virgin is to her the suffering of violation; and yet to suffer violence of the flesh is less, because it comes from the function of nature. But when the spirit itself is violated in a virgin by the removal of her veil, she has learned to lose what she was guarding. O sacrilegious hands, which could drag off a garment dedicated to God! What worse would some persecutor have done, had he known that the virgin had chosen this? You have stripped the girl of her head, and she is no longer wholly a virgin to herself; she has become another. Rise up, then, Truth; rise up and break out, as it were, from your patience! I want you to defend no custom; for even the custom under which you were enjoying yourself is now being attacked. Show that it is you who veil virgins. Interpret your Scriptures yourself, which custom does not know; for if it knew them, it would never have existed.

But since custom also argues from the Scriptures against truth, it is at once objected to us that the apostle made no mention of virgins when he laid down rules about the veil, but named only women; whereas, if he had wanted virgins too to be covered, he would have declared about virgins as well, naming them together with women, just as there, they say, where he treats of marriage, he also declares what is to be observed concerning virgins. So, they say, virgins are not included in the law of veiling the head, as they are not named in this law; indeed, by this very fact they are to be unveiled, since those are not commanded who are not named. But we turn the same argument back. For he who knew elsewhere how to mention both kinds, I mean the virgin and the woman (that is, the non-virgin), for the sake of distinction, shows, in those places where he does not name the virgin and makes no distinction, that their condition is shared. Moreover, he could have established a difference here too between virgin and woman, as he says elsewhere, “The woman and the virgin are divided.” Therefore those whom he did not divide, by keeping silent, he joined together. Nor, because there the woman and the virgin are divided, will that division also plead for them here, as some would have it. For how many things said elsewhere have no force where they have not been said, unless the case is the same as elsewhere, so that it suffices to have said it once! But that case of the virgin and the woman is far removed from this topic. “The woman and the virgin are divided,” he says. Why? Because the unmarried woman, that is, the virgin, thinks of the things of the Lord, that she may be holy in body and in spirit; but the married woman, 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 declared about marriage or about the mind and thought of the woman and the virgin, but about veiling the head. The Holy Spirit, wishing there to be no dispute about it, meant the virgin too to be understood under the one name of woman; by not naming her specifically he did not separate her from the woman, and by not separating her he joined her to the one from whom he did not separate her.

Is it something new, then, to use a principal term and still to understand the others in that term, where there is no need to distinguish the whole one by one? Naturally, brevity of speech is both pleasing and necessary, since long-winded speech is burdensome and empty. So too we are content with general terms, which contain within themselves the understanding of the particular ones. Now, then, about the term itself. The natural term is “female” (femina). Under the natural term, the general one is “woman” (mulier). Under the general, again, the special: virgin or married woman or widow, or however many names of age are added. The special, then, is subject to the general, because the general comes first, as the subsequent is subject to the antecedent and the part to the whole; it is understood in the very term to which it is subject, and signified in it, because it is contained in it. So neither hand nor foot nor any of the members needs to be named when the body is named. And if you say “the world”, there will be the sky and what is in it, sun and moon and stars and constellations, and the earth and the seas and the whole list of the elements. You will have said everything when you have said what consists of everything. So too, by naming “woman”, he named whatever is woman.

But since they appropriate the name of woman in such a way as to think it applies only to her who has known a man, we must prove that the proper sense of the word belongs to the sex itself, not to a stage of the sex, so that virgins too are reckoned under it in common. When this kind, the second human being, was made by God as a help for man, that female was at once named woman, while she was still happy, still worthy of paradise, still a virgin. “She shall be called woman,” it says. You have, then, a name not merely common to the virgin but proper to her, which from the beginning a virgin received. But some ingeniously claim that “She shall be called woman” was said with a view to the future, as though she would be this when she had given up her virginity, since he also added, “For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his woman, and the two will be in one flesh.” Let them show first, then, where this subtlety leaves them: if she was named woman with a view to the future, what name did she receive in the meantime? For she cannot have been without a name for her present quality. And what sort of thing is it that she who was to be called by a designated name in the future should be called nothing in the present? Adam gave names to all the animals, and to none from its future condition, but from its present constitution, whatever condition it might later serve; each was called what it was meant to be from the beginning. What, then, was she called at that time? And indeed, whenever she is named in Scripture, she is called woman before she was married, and never virgin while she was a virgin. This was then her only name, and at a time when nothing was said prophetically. For when Scripture reports that the two were naked, Adam and his woman, this too does not smack of the future, as if it had said “his woman” in anticipation of a wife, but because, even unmarried, she was his woman, as being of his own substance. “This,” he says, “is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman.”

From this, then, the very divinity of the soul, by the silent awareness of nature, brought into the usage of speech, without men knowing it, as it has many other things which we can show elsewhere are commonly done and said on the basis of Scripture, that we call our wives our “women”, although we speak somewhat improperly. For the Greeks too, who use the word for woman more often of a wife, have other words proper to a wife. But I prefer to credit this usage to the testimony of Scripture. For where two are made one flesh through the bond of marriage, she who is flesh of flesh and bone of bones is called, according to her origin, the woman of him from whose substance she, now made a wife, begins to be reckoned. So “woman” is not by nature the name of a wife, but “wife” is by condition a name of a woman. In short, one can be called a woman and not a wife, but one who is not a woman cannot be called a wife, because she cannot be one. Having established, then, the name of the new female, which is “woman”, and explained what she was before, that is, having assigned the name, he now turns to the prophetic account, saying, “For her sake a man will leave father and mother.” So far is the name separated from the prophecy, as far as from the person herself, that he did not say this of Eve herself, but of those future females whom he had named in the mother of the female race. Otherwise it was not Adam who was to leave father and mother, whom he did not have, for Eve's sake. So what was said prophetically does not concern Eve, since it does not concern Adam. For it was foretold of the condition of husbands, who were to leave their parents for a woman, which could not apply to Eve, because it did not apply to Adam. If this is so, it is clear that she was not named woman on account of the future, to which the future did not pertain. Add that he himself gave the reason for the name. For when he had said, “She shall be called woman,” he says, “because she was taken from her man,” and he was still a virgin himself. But we shall speak about the name of man in its place. So let no one interpret as prophetic a name which is derived from another meaning, especially since it is clear where she received a name with reference to the future: namely, where she is called Eve, now a personal name, because the natural one had come first. For if Eve is the mother of the living, see, she is named from the future; see, a wife and not a virgin is foretold. This will be the name of one who is to marry; for it is by being married that one becomes a mother. So here too it is shown that she was not then named woman with reference to the future, since she was later to receive the name of her future condition. That is answer enough on this point.

Let us see now whether the apostle too observes the form of this word according to Genesis, assigning it to the sex, calling the virgin Mary a woman just as Genesis calls Eve. For writing to the Galatians he says, “God sent his Son, made of a woman,” who, it is agreed, was certainly a virgin, although Ebion resists. I recognize also that the angel Gabriel was sent to a virgin. But when he blesses her, he reckons her among women, not among virgins: “Blessed are you among women.” The angel too knew that a virgin is also called woman. But someone has thought himself clever in answering these two points: that because Mary was betrothed, she was therefore declared a woman by both the angel and the apostle; for a betrothed woman is in a way married. Yet between “in a way” and “truly” there is a great difference, at least in this passage; elsewhere, indeed, it should be held so. But here they declared Mary a woman not as though she were already married, but as a female nonetheless, even if she had not been betrothed, as one called this from the beginning. For the source from which the form descends must decide the case. Otherwise, as regards this chapter, if she is here treated as betrothed, so that Mary was called woman not as a female but as a wife, then Christ was not born of a virgin, because he was born of a betrothed woman, who by this name ceased to be a virgin. But if he was born of a virgin, betrothed indeed, yet intact, recognize that a virgin, an intact one at that, is also called woman. 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 name the later woman, of whom Christ was not to be born, that is, one who had known a man, but only the one who was present, who was a virgin and was called woman according to the proper sense of this word, which, following the original form, was kept for the virgin and so for the whole race of women.

Let us turn now to reviewing the very reasons by which the apostle teaches that a female ought to be veiled, to see whether the same apply to virgins as well, so that from this too the sharing of the word between virgins and non-virgins may be established, when the same reasons for the veil are found on both sides. If the man is the head of the woman, surely he is also the head of the virgin, from whom comes that woman who has married; unless the virgin is some monstrous third kind, with a head of its own. If it is shameful for a woman to be shaved or shorn, surely it is for a virgin too. Let the world, God's rival, see to it, if it falsely claims that cropped hair becomes a virgin, as it is permitted to a boy. So for her whom it equally does not befit to be shaved or shorn it is equally fitting to be covered. If the woman is the glory of the man, how much more the virgin, who is also a glory to herself? If the woman is from the man and for the man, that rib of Adam was first a virgin. If the woman ought to have authority on her head, the virgin all the more rightly, since she is the one whom the reason concerns. For if it is “because of the angels”, namely those we read fell from God and heaven through desire for women, who can presume that such angels desired bodies already stained, the leavings of human lust, and did not rather burn for virgins, whose bloom excuses even human lust? For Scripture too suggests this: “And it came to pass,” it says, “when men had begun to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God, seeing that the daughters of men were beautiful, took wives for themselves from all whom they chose.” Here the Greek word for women means wives, because marriage is mentioned. So when it says “daughters of men”, it plainly points to virgins, who were still reckoned as belonging to their parents (for married women are named after their husbands), whereas it could have said “wives of men”; likewise it names the angels not adulterers but husbands, since they take unmarried daughters of men, whom it said above were born, so signifying virgins in this way too: born above, but here married to angels. I know them as nothing other than born and then married. So a face so dangerous, which has hurled stumbling blocks as far as heaven, ought to be shaded, so that, standing before God, before whom it stands accused of the angels' banishment, it may blush before the other angels too, and restrain that evil freedom of its head, no longer to be offered even to the eyes of men. But even if those angels had desired women already defiled, all the more should virgins be veiled because of the angels, since all the more could the angels have sinned because of virgins. And if the apostle also adds the prejudgment of nature, that abundance of hair is a woman's honour, because hair serves as a covering, surely this is above all the mark of a virgin, whose very adornment is properly of this kind, that, heaped up on the crown, it covers the very citadel of the head with a ring of hair.

Certainly the opposites of all these apply to the man, so that he does not veil his head: because he has not by nature received an abundance of hair; because it is not shameful for him to be shaved or shorn; because it was not on his account that the angels went astray; because he is the glory and image of God; because his head is Christ. So when the apostle treats of the man and the woman, why she ought to be veiled and he not, it is clear why he was silent about the virgin as well: for the same reason, namely, letting the virgin be understood in the woman, for which he did not name the boy either, as being reckoned in the man, embracing the whole order of each sex by their proper words, woman and man. So too Adam, while still untouched, is called man in Genesis: “She shall be called woman,” it says, “because she was taken from her man.” So Adam was a man before the union of marriage, just as Eve was a woman. On both sides the apostle declared enough to cover the whole species of each sex, briefly and fully, with so well-furnished a definition: “Every woman,” he says. What does “every” mean, if not of every kind, every order, every condition, every rank, every age? For “every” is whole and entire and lacking in no part of itself. And the virgin is a part of woman. Likewise, about the man not being veiled, he says, “Every.” See: two different names, man and woman; “every” for each; two laws answering each other, on the one side of veiling, on the other of uncovering. If, then, from the fact that it says “every man”, the name of man is common also to one not yet a man, the beardless male, and since the name is common according to nature, the law of not veiling is also common according to discipline for him who among men is a virgin, why should it not likewise be taken as settled that, when woman is named, every virgin woman too is contained in the sharing of the name, so as to be contained also in the fellowship of the law? If a virgin is not a woman, neither is a beardless youth a man. If the virgin is not covered because she is not a woman, let the beardless youth be covered because he is not a man. Let the same virginity receive equal indulgence: as virgins are not compelled to be veiled, so let boys not be ordered to be unveiled. Why, on the one side, do we recognize the apostle's definition as absolute concerning every man, and not ask why he did not name the boy too, while on the other side we evade it, though it is equally absolute concerning every woman? “If anyone,” he says, “is contentious, we have no such custom, nor has the church of God.” He shows that there had been some contention on this point, to extinguish which he used this whole summary, not naming the virgin, to show that there should be no doubt about veiling her, and naming every woman, whereby he had named the virgin. So the Corinthians themselves understood it. Indeed to this day the Corinthians veil their virgins. What the apostles taught, those who learned it approve.

Let us see now whether, just as we have shown that the arguments from nature and from the reason given apply to the virgin as well, so too the prescriptions of church discipline concerning the woman also have the virgin in view. A woman is not permitted to speak in church, nor to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer, nor to claim for herself a share in any function belonging to a man, still less in the priestly office. Let us ask whether any of these is permitted to a virgin. If it is not permitted to a virgin, but she is subject to the same condition in everything, and the necessity of humility is reckoned for her together with the woman, how will this one thing be permitted to her which is not permitted to any female? What prerogative does she deserve against her condition, if she is a virgin and has resolved to sanctify her flesh? Is she granted dispensation from the veil for this, that she may enter the church conspicuous and marked out, that she may display the honour of holiness in the freedom of her head? She could more worthily have been honoured by some prerogative of a man's rank or office. I know plainly that somewhere a virgin not yet twenty years old was placed in the order of widows. If the bishop owed her some relief, he could surely have provided it otherwise, with due regard for discipline, so that such a marvel, not to say monstrosity, should not now be pointed out in the church: a virgin widow; all the more portentous in that she did not cover her head even as a widow, denying herself both ways, both as a virgin, since she is reckoned a widow, and as a widow, since she is called a virgin. But she sits there uncovered by the same authority as a virgin; whereas to that seat are chosen, besides their being sixty years old, not only women who have had one husband, that is, who have been married, but mothers, and indeed those who have brought up children, so that, trained by the experience of all the affections, they may readily know how to help the others with counsel and comfort, and so that they may have passed through the things by which a female can be proved. So nothing by way of honour is allowed a virgin on the ground of her place.

The same holds for any other marks of distinction. For it would be quite unjust if females, who are subject to men in everything, should display a mark of honour for their virginity, by which they would be looked up to, gazed at, and extolled by the brothers, while men, so many virgins, so many voluntary eunuchs, went about with their good unseen, wearing nothing that would make them conspicuous too. For they too will have to claim some insignia for themselves: the feathers of the Garamantes, or the headbands of the barbarians, or the golden cicadas of the Athenians, or the topknots of the Germans, or the tattoos of the Britons; or else, the other way round, let them hide in church with their heads veiled. We are sure that the Holy Spirit would rather have granted some such thing to males, if he had granted it to females, since, besides the authority of their sex, males ought rather to be honoured on the ground of continence as well. The more eager and hot their sex is for women, the more laborious their continence, and so the worthier of every display, if the display of virginity is a dignity. For does not continence also surpass virginity, whether that of widowers, or of those who by consent have already renounced their common indignity? For virginity rests on grace, but continence on virtue. It is a great struggle not to desire what you have grown used to desiring. But what you have never known the fruit of desiring, you will easily not desire, having no adversary, the desire for that fruit. How, then, would God not rather have granted some such honour to men, either as being more closely his own image or as labouring more? But if nothing was granted to the male, much less to the female.