For the Christian angels -he proceeded to explain, as if he had had a long and troublesome acquaintance with them – are all eunuchs; they look down from Heaven on human worshippers, and from that vertical angle sec little but heads and shoulders. 'Any honest person who has had any experience of eunuchs,' he went on – with a sly glance at the choir and at the long aisle reserved for eunuchs of the Civil Service and for personal eunuchs attached to prominent courtiers, such as myself- 'Any such honest person will support me when I assert that the lack of the customary male organs of generation does not, as might be supposed, free the heart from carnal affections. Not by any means! I have indeed seldom known a eunuch who could confess truly to having no tender feelings for women's hands and eyes and feet and hair – oh, but especially for their hair! I know many a rich and learned eunuch who spends his leisure time, wantonly and shamefully, in the slow combing of the hair of some frivolous woman of his household! You may laugh, my sisters, but you know it is so, and it is a great sin that you are committing if you pander thus to the ineffectual lusts of the castrated. Angels are no less subject to temptation than eunuchs: the Arch-Fiend himself was an angel who fell from Grace -was it perhaps partly from delight in the hair of some daughter of Earth? Out of respect therefore for these blessed but beauty-loving angels, who must not be distracted from their religious duty of perpetual hosannas and hallelujahs, it is the first duty of all Christian women with fine hair to keep it securely covered. It is sturdy evil enough to wean human worshippers from their devotions by an ill-timed display of the crowning glory of women, without seeking to drag angels down to earth and thus add to the race of demons – already numerous enough, God knows!'
But the pagan poets, even – he quoted Martial, Propertius, and Juvenal – had written with the utmost horror of women who wore hair that was not their own. Wigs were thus proved to be an offence not only against the Laws of the Church, but against secular canons of beauty and good taste. 'As for the Orthodox view of the Holy Fathers, it could not be clearer, and may be summarized as follows. Male wigs are in general designed to cover baldness: they are therefore in the nature of a skull-cap and constitute a covering, and are therefore anathema. Women's wigs, however (for a bald woman is a rarity), are designed to add to the hair already in existence on their heads, to heighten and improve its effect: they therefore do not constitute a covering, and are anathema. The righteous thunders of the Church, Council after Council, have always been directed at wigs of both sexes: both the cowardly male wig and the immodest female wig. Tertullian has said – but what has Tertullian not said against these stitched and coiled monstrosities of wigs? He has said, amongst other things, that all personal disguise is adultery before God. All wigs, paint, powder, masks, false bosoms are disguises and inventions of the devil.
'Moreover, my erring sisters,' the Bishop proceeded, suddenly pointing very rudely at Chrysomallo and my mistress, whose wigs, after Theodora's, were the two most elegant monstrosities in all St Sophia's that day, 'Tertullian makes a powerful appeal to your common sense as well as to your religious scruples. He writes: "If you will not fling away your impious false hair, as hateful to Heaven, cannot I make it hateful to yourselves as women of worldly discernment, by reminding you that those lascivious, bought ringlets of yours may have had a detestable origin? They may well have been cut from the corpse of some woman dead of the plague, and still retain the seeds of plague alive in them; or, worse, they may have adorned the head of a blasphemer irretrievably damned by Heaven and carry in them God's heavy curse, ineluctable."
