The husband head of his wife’: sexism and hierarchy in the ‘hardest’ passage of St Paul (I Corinthians 11)
I Corinthians 11 vv. 3 ff. is surely one of the ‘hardest’ passages for people who want to take the Bible seriously today. It appears to fly in the face, not only of feminism, but of everything most of us nowadays believe about the proper relationship between the sexes.
Here is the text.
But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ. … For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. For this reason, a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God.
Is Paul as ‘sexist’ as he appears? Is this ‘sexism’ something integral to the faith, or is it just a matter of its ‘cultural’ expression in St Paul’s day and age?
If we want to be fair to Paul, we need to begin with the recognition that his understanding of the proper relationship between the sexes is the result of a worldview that is fundamentally hierarchical. How do I know this? Because Paul, in his habitual way, prefaces his criticisms of specific Corinthian practices with an account of the general principle he is invoking:
But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ.
The relationship of wife to husband is said to be similar in kind to the relationship of ‘every man’ to Christ, and of Christ to God. In other words, Paul is speaking of a single kind of a relationship that is exemplified in the cases of: (1) wife: husband; (2) every man: Christ; (3) Christ: God. Also, note that the three cases constitute an ascending/descending chain, with the second term in each case becoming first in the next (i.e. second term at level 1, ‘husband’. becomes first term at level 2, ‘every man’; second term at level 2, ‘Christ’, becomes first term at level 3).
So, what ‘kind’ of relationship is indicated here? There are a number of clues. The first is, of course, the expression ‘the head of’. This might seem obscure but is explicated, by a number of evidently similar uses of the expression elsewhere – largely in relation to case 2 (everyman: Christ):
He (Christ) is the head of the body, the church … (Colossians 1.18)
I take it, when Paul speaks of a relationship of ‘every man’ to Christ, he is referring to the relationship that Christians collectively have to Christ, through the constitution of his ‘body’. The parallelism between this relationship and the relationship of case 3 (Christ to God) is indicated in 1 Corinthians 15, where, first, “‘all’ (i.e. ‘every man’) will be made alive ‘in’ Christ … those who ‘belong to’ Christ”; then, “When all things are ‘subjected to’ him (Christ), then the Son himself will also be ‘subjected to’ the one who put all things in subjection under him”.
What then is the relationship of ‘headship’ that is replicated in a chain of cases where the higher term in each becomes the lower term in the next?
The meaning of ‘hierarchical opposition’
Recent studies in social anthropology allow us to be quite clear about this. We have in these passages a type case of the kind of relationship that Louis Dumont famously explores in his book on the Indian caste system, Homo Hierarchicus: the relationship of ‘hierarchical opposition’. More recent anthropologists are divided on the merits of Dumont’s analysis as an explanation of the Indian caste system. But the theoretical notion of ‘hierarchical opposition’ has been very widely adopted in ethnographic studies of non-Western societies, and has become mainstream in recent social anthropology. According to this notion, the basic hierarchical relationship is one of both encompassment and opposition.
Rather than try to explain this myself, I shall cite the relevant passage of Homo Hierarchicus in extenso. For, as it happens, Dumont uses as his prime example of the basic hierarchical relationship the case of Adam and Eve (obviously the paradigm of the man:woman relationship for Paul and other biblical writers).
I believe that hierarchy is not, essentially, a chain of super-imposed commands, nor even a chain of beings of decreasing dignity, nor yet a taxonomic tree, but a relation that can succinctly be called ‘the encompassing of the contrary’.
The best example I have found is biblical. It is the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, in the first book of Genesis, chapter 2. God creates Adam first, the undifferentiated man, the prototype of mankind. In a second stage, he extracts a different being from this first Adam. Adam and Eve stand face to face, prototypes of the two sexes. In this strange operation, on the one hand, Adam has changed identity; from being undifferentiated, he has become a male. On the other hand, a being has appeared who is both a member of the human species and different from the main representative of this species. In his entirety, Adam – or ‘man’ in our language – is two things in one; the representative of the species mankind and the prototype of the male individuals of this species. On a first level, man and woman are identical; on a second level, woman is opposite or the contrary of man. These two relations characterize the hierarchical relation, which cannot be better symbolized than by the material encompassing of the future Eve in the body of the first Adam. This hierarchical relation is, very generally, that between a whole (or set): the element belongs to the set and is in this sense consubstantial or identical with it; at the same, the element is distinct from the set or stands in opposition to it. This is what I mean by the expression ‘the encompassing of the contrary.
The matter of Adam and Eve is so surprising, so contrary to contemporary ideas, that a brief commentary may be useful. Let us first consider it linguistically. French and English use the same word to designate ‘man’ (representative of the race, first level) and ‘man’ (opposed to ‘woman’, second level). Thus, these languages render ‘woman’ inferior, and we know that necessity plays no role here, as neighbouring languages, German, for instance, have two different words. But this arrangement is interesting because it uses together the two levels and refers immediately back to the ‘the encompassing’. Nor is this type of arrangement an exception; it occurs frequently in vocabularies. I have taken only a schema from the text of Genesis. The text indicates the unity of the couple, ‘they will be one flesh’. This is important, for it is to say that only by reference to the first level can there be unity at the second. This is the heart of the matter, the point which the contemporary mind – and I would say the mind in general – tries with all its strength, and in vain, to blur. You may well declare the two sexes equal, but the more you manage to make them equal, the more you will destroy the unity between them (in the couple or the family), because the principle of this unity is outside them and because, as such, it necessarily hierarchises them with respect to one another. I should immediately add that this is only an incomplete truth. The same hierarchical principle that in some way subordinates one level to another at the same time introduces a multiplicity of levels, letting the situation reverse itself. The mother of the family (an Indian family, for example), inferior though she may be made by her sex in some respects nonetheless dominates the relationships within the family. On might say from an egalitarian viewpoint, that traditional societies are made bearable by these reversals. The egalitarian mind loses sight of this because it is unable to concern itself with more than a single level. If it is forced to consider several levels, it builds them on the same pattern.
But enough about Adam and Eve, let us return to the problem, now in the abstract.
Dumont speaks primarily here of the relationship of the two terms: Adam:Eve at a single level. What he alludes to when he says ‘the same hierarchical principle that in some way subordinates one level to another, at the same time introduces a multiplicity of levels, letting the situation reverse itself’ is exemplified in a wide range of cases in ethnographic studies. And it is what we see in St. Paul. ‘Man’ who stands at level 1 in an encompassing role in regard to ‘Woman’, stands, at level 2, in the opposite role – that of being encompassed – in regard to ‘Christ’; and ‘Christ’, who stands in the encompassing role in regard to Man at level 2, takes the encompassed role in regard to God at level 3. Most terms, therefore, have, at different levels, both the encompassed and the encompassing role. This is what Dumont means by ‘reversals’. The exceptions are ‘God’ at the top and ‘Woman’ at the bottom. Actually, even in the case of ‘Woman’ there is a kind of indirect reversal since her encompassed role (regard to Man) symbolically recalls that of ‘Christ’ who, of course, occupies the encompassing role in relation to Man. Also, in regard to the way she ‘dominates the relationships within the family’, her role recalls that of God in regard to the entire creation.
Brief accounts of hierarchy as it works in practice in a number of cultures can be found in Daniel De Coppet and Andre Iteanu, Of Relations and the Dead.
Does hierarchy in St Paul imply ‘sexism’?
We can now return to the question of whether this hierarchical worldview renders Paul a sexist.
The first thing to say here is that hierarchical relationships are a kind of symbolic structure. Dumont would say that they do not imply power relationships. Indeed, he characterizes Western socio-political structures in opposition to the Indian caste system as about ‘power’ as opposed to ‘hierarchy’ (which he sees as an essentially ‘religious’ concept). That said, hierarchical structures constitute a ready basis on which power relationships can be founded. A full discussion of the relationship of religious structures to structures of political power can be found in Maurice Bloch, ‘The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process’ in Ritual, History and Power. There are a number ethnographic cases that demonstrate hierarchical religious structures may persist in a society long after any possibility of political domination has receded due to Westernization.
A striking example is the way that Samoans conceive of the rules of sitting in a public transport (buses for long trips). While they import within the vehicle the hierarchical rules of sitting in their village ceremonial gatherings (lower ranks must ‘respect’ higher ranks and allow them to sit in the front part, and so on), they are strongly against any importation of the Western class system which gives two (or more) strata of comfort according to the price paid. (Serge Tcherkezoff, ‘Hierarchy is NOT inequality’ in Rio & Smedal, Hierarchy, p.309)
It would be entirely wrong to conclude that hierarchy was simply an expression of power relations.
So, does it follow from Paul’s hierarchical understanding of the relationships of man and woman that women are in some more general sense inferior or subordinate? I don’t think so necessarily – though, in practice, hierarchical practices are a ready basis for political subordination. In Paul’s case, the injunction for wives to honour husbands and husbands to love their wives, repeated on various occasions, doesn’t suggest a particularly oppressive interpretation of the hierarchical relation – especially taken in the ancient classical context.
Second, in interpreting the hierarchical relationship, we have to look at all the levels. The hierarchical relationship of man to woman is also simultaneously the relationship of Christ to the Church, and of God to Christ. Evidently, at levels 2 and 3 the relationship can hardly be one of power – so, neither can it be so at the level of husbands and wives.
Third, there is the element of the ‘multiplicity of levels’. Because terms in the chain can exist in alternately encompassing and encompassed roles, this mitigates (‘makes bearable’) – at least, for those who think in hierarchical terms – the sense they might have of being inferior at one level. According to Dumont, our inability to think this multiplicity, causes us to view the relationship of superiority/inferiority in too absolute terms. Actually, in a properly ‘religious’ system there is no absoluteness to the inferiority (encompassed role) or superiority (encompassing role) that might be experienced at any one level – i.e. of man in respect to woman, or woman in respect to man. On the other hand, if we extract the man:woman relationship from a properly religious/hierarchical context (which as casual modern readers of a hierarchical text we will inevitably tend to do), then it will naturally strike us as very sexist. This may have something to do with the feeling I have personally that there is something unbearably and unjustifiably ‘exclusive’ and inward-looking about the whole notion of the exclusive sexual relationship – where it is not restored to a religious perspective from which that ‘exclusivity’ symbolizes a religious meaning that is potentially universal, such as the relationship of Christ to his Church.
So much, then, for sexism. There remains the question whether a hierarchical worldview is acceptable to Christians in the modern age – or whether we need to ‘egalitarianize’ it so as not to place unnecessary barriers in the way of people’s faith. Actually, I think many of the battles currently on-going between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ are in fact struggles over whether hierarchy is an intrinsic aspect of the Christian faith or merely one cultural expression of that faith amongst others. Can we – should we – attempt to give the Christian message a less Pauline and more egalitarian cultural expression?
I do not know the answer to this question. But I am convinced that a first step on the road to answering it is to discern the real issue underlying the debate. Here, understanding ‘hierarchy’ is, in my view, indispensable, if we want to see the wood from the proverbial trees.
Other related blogs:
ANGELA SAINI: HOW MEN CAME TO RULE
LOST IN (POLITICALLY CORRECT) TRANSLATION: THE CHALLENGE OF BIBLICAL HIERARCHY