38. XXXVI. Influence of Contemporary Custom on Paul

XXXVI. Influence of Contemporary Custom on Paul

There is another difficulty in understanding Paul’s teaching besides the figurative nature of the language in which he was compelled to appeal to the understanding of pagans and Jews in the first century. Not merely was he obliged to suit his expression to their powers of comprehension. His own comprehension was perhaps in certain respects imperfect. It is perhaps true to say that he was to some extent bound in the fetters of his time and guided in its way of contemplating the world. He was not free from the beliefs and even the superstitions of his age. How far they influenced his mind and thought is far from certain: in the present writer’s opinion they exercised far less influence on him than some modern writers think, and less even than would appear from the occasional expressions which occur in his letters.

One might quote from his letters a certain number of phrases or statements, which are a riddle to exercise the ingenuity of commentators, and which are probably the expression of some belief or superstition current in Jewish circles at that time; but these are of small importance in studying the teaching of Paul. They are commonly mere incidental phrases. They hardly ever touch the essentials of his doctrine. They might all be left on one side without taking away anything from his teaching. Yet they are quoted by some writers, and dwelt upon at considerable length, as if Paul could be best understood through them and could not be correctly understood except through them. Regarding these as wholly unimportant in their bearing on his doctrine, we need not linger on them; and they are here mentioned only to guard against the error of overvaluing them. They are of interest only in estimating the character of Paul as a man. He was caught in the net of his own age: in the non-essentials he sometimes, or often, remains impeded and encumbered by the tone and ideas of his age; but his teaching is for every age, and in all important respects rises clear and free above his own time and above all limitations and imperfections due to his circumstances, and soars into the empyrean of eternal truth. It is essentially true to say of him, as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, He was not of an age, but for all time. At this point we shall discuss only one example. Some, or perhaps many, of Paul’s references to angels are influenced more or less by popular superstition. Again, the instructions of a practical kind which he sometimes gives regarding the conduct of women are peculiarly liable to be affected by current popular ideas: there is no department of life in which a man’s views are so apt to be coloured by early circumstances and training and by current social ideas as his views about the proper conduct of women. Where both angels and women are found in any passage, Paul is doubly liable to be fettered by current ideas and superstitions. Of this one example may be quoted. When Paul orders women to wear veils always (1 Corinthians 11:4-10.) he says, “if a woman is not veiled, let her also be shorn”: an unveiled woman is as bad as a woman with her head close-cut or shaved. Now, the disgrace of having the hair cut is a purely external matter: the loss or the cutting may be due to accident or to precaution against disease: it involves only the loss of a natural adornment, and may naturally be regretted and mourned on that ground. After all, however, this is only a matter of social estimation, not of moral quality; yet Paul, in using this comparison, assumes that it has a moral and religious character. The wearing of long hair is not an ethical duty, but only expedient, socially and aesthetically. Accordingly the attempt of Paul to exalt the wearing of the veil into a religious duty is discredited by the comparison which he uses for the purpose of clinching his argument. The one and the other duty stand on the same level. Neither is morally binding.

It is probable that Paul’s early associations with Tarsus are largely responsible in this matter. The veiling of women was practised more closely and completely in Tarsus than in any other Greek or Graeco-Asiatic city known to Dion Chrysostom; (The Oriental and non-Hellenic strictness that was practised at Tarsus in regard to veiling is described on the authority of Dion in my Cities of St. Paul.) and Paul, who had grown up to regard veiling as a duty incumbent on all women, now presents it to the Corinthians as a moral and religious obligation. He declares that women, qua women, ought to veil, and that it is an outrage on the nature of women not to do so. One cannot plead that he is merely urging the Corinthians to have regard to current social conventions and customs. It is quite true that one should not lightly outrage such social customs, and always Paul teaches so; but here he presents the obligation to veil in a far more emphatic fashion as an eternal unvarying duty imposed on woman by her own nature and by the relation in which she stands to the universe as a whole. In this matter we must recognise one of the rare instances of the Apostle’s occasional inability to rise above the ideas of his own time. Old prepossessions, dominant in his mind from infancy, made him see a moral duty, where in our modern estimation only a social custom was really in question. In the modern European judgment, Paul seems to prefer the lower and poorer view of human and womanly nature to the higher and nobler view. Here he shows himself of an age, and not for all time. How different a conception does he exhibit of women, where he writes with the insight of a prophet to the Galatians (Galatians 3:28) that in the perfected church “there can be no different rank and standard of estimation for male and female, for ye are all one in Christ”. To buttress his opinion Paul has recourse to the popular superstition: “for this cause ought the woman to have authority on her head because of the angels”. In her relation to the universe as a whole she may come under the power of, and even be exposed to outrage by, demons or angels, unless she has on her head the authority which protects her from them. (The meaning of “having authority on the head” (1 Corinthians 11:10) is explained in The Cities of St. Paul.) It was a popular superstition that women were liable to fall under the influence of such angelic beings, (An example of this belief appears inGenesis 6:2-4.) who were more powerful in many ways than men; but through obedience to the social conventions they gained authority and immunity from the power of demons or angels. The veil was their strength and their protection, and the social convention was made more binding on women by the sanction and penalty involved in this belief

Here we have an example of the first century Tarsian Jewish education, and its strong influence on the man. Yet how small a part of Paul’s teaching is this! how far it is from even touching the essential elements of his doctrine! how out of harmony it is with himself in another place and another vein of thought!

One must, however, always remember that, to our judgment, Paul’s method in reasoning is frequently liable to seem unconvincing. He sometimes draws his arguments and his illustrations and analogies from quarters that carry no conviction to our minds, and he trusts to the predilections that lay deep in every Jewish mind at that time. His quotations from Scripture are often divorced from their context, and used in a sense which is quite out of harmony with their fair meaning in their original position. His analogies are sometimes forced and, in our view, unnatural. It would, however, be a serious blunder to estimate the quality and the insight either of Paul or of Plato by the superficial appearance of their argumentation. The Platonic Socrates is presented to us as discussing with his own contemporaries; and he overpowers them by arguments that often appear to us extremely unfair and weak. But in both Paul and Plato there lies beneath the surface of their ratiocination the direct insight into truth. To understand them, we must accept their intuition at its real value, and not at the rank of the argumentation which appeared convincing, doubtless, to contemporary taste, but which does not appear so to us.

How far Paul’s opinions about women should be regarded as springing from his insight into the divine force that moves the world, we do not venture to judge; they are out of harmony with ours; but the fault may well lie with us, and we may be judging under the prepossession of modern custom, which will perhaps prove evanescent and discordant with the plan of the universe and the purpose of God. Nature and the history of the future will deter mine; but on the whole matter we appeal from Paul to Paul himself, and from 1 Corinthians 11:8-9, to Galatians 3:28. The mere fact that we can appeal from Paul to Paul, and from one saying to another, shows that we should not hastily conclude that in any one saying the whole of Paul’s doctrine on the subject is summed up. (See also a later section.) There can, however, be no question that his argument or analogy drawn from the length of the hair confuses between what is only customary or aesthetic and what is ethically binding and universal.

Other examples of the influence exercised on Paul by current popular ideas and opinions might be quoted and discussed at length; (A case in point may be the much-discussed and obscure passage of1 Corinthians 15:29, “what shall they do which are baptized for the dead?”) but they are quaint and curious, rather than instructive. They do not touch the greatness of Paul, and it would only tend to distort our views about the real nature of his teaching if we devoted further attention to this subject. The biographer of Paul will do well to study them more carefully, for they throw light on his personal quality as a human being; but we are not writing a biography at present.