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| Tertullian Refers Again to the Question of the Origin of All These Ornaments and Embellishments.
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Chapter X.—Tertullian Refers Again to the Question of the
Origin of All These Ornaments and Embellishments.233
| 233 Comp. i. cc. ii. iii. v.
vii. viii. |
It was God, no doubt, who showed the way to dye
wools with the juices of herbs and the humours of conchs! It had
escaped Him, when He was bidding the universe to come into
being,234
to issue a command for (the production of)
purple and scarlet sheep! It was God, too, who devised by careful
thought the manufactures of those very garments which, light and thin
(in themselves), were to be heavy in price alone; God who produced such
grand implements of gold for confining or parting the hair; God who
introduced (the fashion of) finely-cut wounds for the ears, and set so
high a value upon the tormenting of His own work and the tortures of
innocent infancy, learning to suffer with its earliest breath, in order
that from those scars of the body—born for the
steel!—should hang I know not what (precious) grains, which, as
we may plainly see, the Parthians insert, in place of studs, upon their
very shoes! And yet even the gold itself, the “glory”
of which carries you away, serves a certain race (so Gentile literature
tells us) for chains! So true is it that it is not intrinsic
worth,235
but rarity, which constitutes the goodness
(of these things): the excessive labour, moreover, of working
them with arts introduced by the means of the sinful angels, who were
the revealers withal of the material substances themselves, joined with
their rarity, excited their costliness, and hence a lust on the part of
women to possess (that) costliness. But, if the self-same angels
who disclosed both the material substances of this kind and their
charms—of gold, I mean, and lustrous236
stones—and taught men how to work them, and by and by instructed
them, among their other (instructions), in (the virtues of)
eyelid-powder and the dyeings of fleeces, have been condemned by God,
as Enoch tells us, how shall we please God while we joy in the
things of those (angels) who, on these accounts, have provoked
the anger and the vengeance of God?
Now, granting that God did foresee these things;
that God permitted them; that Esaias finds fault with no garment of
purple,237
represses no coil,238
reprobates no crescent-shaped neck ornaments;239
| 239 Lunulas = μηνίσκους, ib. | still
let us not, as the Gentiles do, flatter ourselves with thinking
that God is merely a Creator, not likewise a Downlooker on His own
creatures. For how far more usefully and cautiously shall we act,
if we hazard the presumption that all these things were indeed
provided240
at the beginning and
placed in the world241
by God, in order that
there should now be means of putting to the proof the discipline of His
servants, in order that the licence of using should
be the means whereby the
experimental trials of continence should be conducted? Do
not wise heads of families purposely offer and permit some things to
their servants242
in order to try
whether and how they will use the things thus permitted; whether (they
will do so) with honesty, or with moderation? But how far more
praiseworthy (the servant) who abstains entirely; who has a wholesome
fear243
even of his lord’s indulgence!
Thus, therefore, the apostle too: “All things,” says
he, “are lawful, but not all are expedient.”244
How much more easily will he
fear245
what is unlawful who has a reverent
dread246
of what is lawful?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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