What is the secret behind a wife’s true beauty?

St. Clement of Alexandria believes that a woman’s true adornment is not wrought by others (external adornment), but she is adorned by her own exertions (spiritual adornment). He says, “It is the work a woman performs with her own hands that creates true beauty. It exercises her body and at the same time adorns her, not with some ornament made by others, inelegant, undignified, and gaudy, but something labored over and woven by the modest woman herself with her own hands at the time she needed it. In fact, it is never right for women who live in obedience to God to go about attired with articles bought at the market, but only with the products of her own hands in her house.”¹⁷⁴⁴

St. John Chrysostom says, “Do you wish to be beautiful? Clothe yourself with almsgiving. Put on kindness. Adorn yourself with purity. Be free from pride. All these things are more precious than gold. These things make the beautiful, splendid and the ugly beautiful. When you adorn yourself excessively, O woman, you become worse than the naked for you take off your beauty … tell me, if someone gave you a royal garment and you put on the clothing of a slave over it, would this not be shameful? You have put on the Lord of the angels, do return to earth? Tell me, why do you adorn yourself? To please your husband? Do this at your home!”¹⁷⁴⁵ In choosing a wife, he advises that a man should not “look for money, for high birth, for beauty of body, or anything else but nobility of soul.”¹⁷⁴⁶

1743 St. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies 4.20 (ANF 2:432).

1744 St. Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor or Christ the Educator 3.11.67 (FOTC 23:250–251).

1745 St. John Chrysostom, extract from Brotherly Love (Arabic), 1964: p. 262.

1746 St. John Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life , How to Choose a Wife (PP 7:113)