To Florus 4.44

The time urges us to move on to other matters. But since you plainly have nothing to peddle to uneducated ears except modesty about natural functions, I will touch as briefly as possible on what seems to remain. Who denies that the decency with which we cover our genitals varies according to persons, places, occupations, and customs? Thus nakedness that would be quite obscene in public gatherings carries no shame in the baths. The dress of the bedroom is one thing, half-naked and carefree; dress in public is another, more careful and more ample. Again, neglect of precautions often indicates familiarity: the more unknown or honored the person present, the more carefully one dresses. And no one has blamed sailors or many craftsmen for nakedness. To show that such simplicity belongs more to the work than to the person, even the apostle Peter, following everyone’s custom, fished naked in the boat after the Lord’s resurrection (John 21:7). Turn your eyes next to the work of physicians: in their care for health they apply their art to the parts modesty conceals. Nakedness is even becoming to athletes.

Moreover, not only among young people bound together in a wanton companionship, but even among certain whole nations, both sexes go uncovered and unite without choosing a private place. Yet why be surprised if a Scot and the barbarity of neighboring peoples do this, when the philosophy mentioned above judged the same thing acceptable, and the doctrine of the advocates of inherited sin has arrived at the same point? What fixed measure of modesty, what boundary, can be maintained amid so many variations, and amid practices defended partly by necessity and partly by companionship, by which it could be proved that the devil mixed natural ardor into the sexes? Your opinion’s support has plainly been dissolved by occupations, places, customs, arts, and whole nations together. Meanwhile, what I defend through reason itself and the teaching of the apostle Paul remains unconquered: God, the author of all things, created every body, every bodily member, and every bodily sense. But he arranged them so that, as occasions require, modesty should clothe some of our members and natural decency should display others. It would be as indecent to cover these others as to expose the privacy of the genitals at an unsuitable time (compare 1 Corinthians 12:23–25).