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As we are going to speak of the customs and rules of the monasteries,
how by God's grace can we better begin than with the actual dress of the
monks, for we shall then be able to expound in due course their interior
life when we have set their outward man before your eyes. A monk, then, as
a soldier of Christ ever ready for battle, ought always to walk with his
loins girded. For in this fashion, too, the authority of Holy Scripture
shows that they walked who in the Old Testament started the original of
this life,--I mean Elijah and Elisha; and, moreover, we know that the
leaders and authors of the New Testament, viz., John, Peter, and Paul, and
the others of the same rank, walked in the same manner. And of these the
first-mentioned, who even in the Old Testament displayed the flowers of a
virgin life and an example of chastity and continence, when he had been
sent by the Lord to rebuke the messengers of Ahaziah, the wicked king of
Israel, because when confined by sickness he had intended to consult
Beelzebub, the god of Ekron, on the state of his health, and thereupon the
said prophet had met them and said that he should not come down from the
bed on which he lay,--this man was made known to the bed-ridden king by the
description of the character of his clothing. For when the messengers
returned to him and brought back the prophet's message, he asked what the
man who had met them and spoken such words was like and how he was dressed.
"An hairy man," they said, "and girt with a girdle of leather about his
loins;" and by this dress the king at once saw that it was the man of God,
and said: "It is Elijah the Tishbite:" i.e., by the evidence of the
girdle and the look of the hairy and unkempt body he recognized without the
slightest doubt the man of God, because this was always attached to him as
he dwelt among so many thousands of Israelites, as if it were impressed as
some special sign of his own particular style. Of John also, who came as a
sort of sacred boundary between the Old and New Testament, being both a
beginning and an ending, we know by the testimony of the Evangelist that
"the same John had his raiment of camel's hair and a girdle of skin about
his loins." When Peter also had been Jut in prison by Herod and was to
be brought forth to be slain on the next day, when the angel stood by him
he was charged: "Gird thyself and put on thy shoes." And the angel of
the Lord would certainly not have charged him to do this had he not seen
that for the sake of his night's rest he had for a while freed his wearied
limbs from the girdle usually tied round them. Paul also, going up to
Jerusalem and soon to be put in chains by the Jews, was met at Caesarea by
the prophet Agabus, who took his girdle and bound his hands and feet to
show by his bodily actions the injuries which he was to suffer, and said:
"So shall the Jews in Jerusalem bind the man whose girdle this is, and
deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles." And surely the prophet
would never have brought this forward, or have said "the man whose girdle
this is," unless Paul had always been accustomed to fasten it round his
loins.
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