De Bono Pudicitiae

DE BONO PUDICITIAE. - A letter that has come down to us among the works of St. Cyprian, in which a bishop, in strongly rhetorical language, points out to his faithful the motives for chastity, praises it, indicates its three degrees in virginity, in continence, in honorable marriage, shows the wickedness of adultery, proposes the examples of Joseph and Susanna, condemns luxury and women's artifices, exhorts them to struggle and pray in order to remain chaste.

There are clear imitations of Tertullian's De pudicitia and of St. Cyprian's De habitu virginum. That it is not by the latter appears from the fact that it does not figure in the list of his works given by Pontius, nor in the catalogue of the same discovered by Mommsen, as well as from the difference of style, from the scarcity of biblical citations, so frequent in St. Cyprian, from the absence of any allusion to his troubled vicissitudes, whereas the authentic writings of the bishop of Carthage all have a vivid flavor of contemporaneity. Weyman, followed by most, basing himself on the analogies of situation and form and on the manner of citing the Bible, holds Novatian to be the author of this opuscule and of its twin, De spectaculis; Monceaux, with Moricca, sees in the two opuscules counterfeits due to a rhetorician, probably a cleric of the school of Cyprian.

Michele Pellegrino