5. When he was living at
Rome he wrote a treatise on
the preservation of virginity, which all the pagans and enemies of God, all apostates and persecutors, and whoever else hate the Christian name, vied with one another in copying out, because of the infamous charges and foul reproaches which it contained against all orders and degrees among us, against all who profess and call themselves Christians, in a word, against the universal church; and also because this man declared that the crimes imputed to us by the Gentiles, which were before supposed to be false were really true, and indeed that much worse things were done by our people than those laid to their charge. First, he defames the virgins themselves of whose virtue he professed to be writing, speaking of them in these words:
“Some of them change their
dress and wear the costume of men, and are ashamed of the sex in which
they were born; they cut their hair short, and raise their heads with
the shameless stare of eunuchs. There are some who put on Cilician
jackets, and with hoods made up into
shape, make themselves like horned owls and night birds, as if they
were becoming babies again.”
There are a thousand such
calumnies, and worse than these, in the book. He does not even spare
widows, for he says of them, “They
care for nothing but the belly and what is next it;” and he adds
many other obscene remarks of this kind. As to the whole race of
Solitaries, it would take too long to give the passages written by him
in which he attacks them with the foulest abuse. It would be a shame
even to recount the indecent attacks which he makes upon the Presbyters
and the deacons. I will, however, give the beginning of this violent
invective, by which you may easily imagine what a point he reaches in
its later stages.
“There are some,” he
says, “of my own order, who only seek the office of Presbyter or
deacon so that they may have more license to visit women. They care for
nothing but to be well dressed, to be well scented, to prevent their
feet from being loose and bulging. Their curly hair bears the mark of
the crisping iron; their fingers sparkle with rings; and they walk on
tiptoe, for fear a fleck of mud from the road should touch their feet. When you see them, you would take them for bridegrooms rather than clerics.”
He then goes on to hurl his
reproaches against our priests and ministers, specifying their faults, or rather their crimes; and to represent the access allowed them to married ladies not only in a disgraceful light, but so as to seem positively execrable: and after having cut to pieces with his satirical defamation the whole race of Christians, he does not even spare himself, as you shall presently hear.
