Treating of the passage in Exodus which prescribes, among the holy vestments for Aaron and his sons, “linen breeches, to cover the flesh of their nakedness from the reins to the thighs,” Cyril of Alexandria remarks:
Their breeches are of linen, an excellent covering for the ugliness and unseemliness about the thighs. For all things connected with holy men are most honorable, and there is nothing unseemly in them. Now the linen placed upon the parts of the body about the thighs intimates that the cooling of the pleasures of the flesh is most becoming holy men: for linen is cool. But the heat that rouses the foulest desires is foreign to every holy man.