by Sarah Ruden
But Paul seems to be up to his usual rough art, so characteristic that it is hard—though not impossible—to imagine that this is an imitation. As elsewhere, a clunky repetition sets the theme. “Traditions” and “handed on” (11:2) are a noun and verb from the same word, literally “the hand-ons just as I have handed them on to you.” We are going to be hearing about custom and authority here.
Are we ever. In the Greek, the word “head” is repeated nine times in all (seven in the NRSV’s English). Authority as “headship” leads into what to do with the physical head. In Tarsus and other cities of the East, especially among Jews, the customs around veils were quite strict, but what about in Europe?
Respectable Greek and Roman women traditionally wore concealing veils in public. Marriage and widowhood were the chief things that a veil signaled. (For a Roman woman, “to get married” and “to veil oneself” were exactly the same word.) The veil held great symbolism: it reminded everyone that all freeborn women, women with families to protect them, were supposed to enter adulthood already married, and that they were supposed to stay chastely married or else chastely widowed until the end of their lives. The veil was the flag of female virtue, status, and security. In the port city of Corinth, with its batteries of prostitutes—including the sacred prostitutes of the temple of Aphrodite—the distinction between veiled and unveiled women would have been even more crucial.
But on the other hand, society was changing fast: slaves (in these more peaceful times when fewer of them were war captives) gaining more status and security in households and settling down more often with slave partners; slaves being freed; divorce proliferating; many more women entering into trades other than their most common trade of prostitution—any or all of these things could have made the veil a matter of controversy. Women not entitled to the veil may have wanted it, and women entitled to the veil may not have wanted it. Bruce Winter puts the emphasis on a new type of married, divorced, or widowed Roman woman on the scene in the first century A.D., more keen on showing off her elaborate hairstyle than on constantly wearing an old-fashioned veil.
But this passage of Paul we are considering may cover (sorry) all types of grown-up women. A big mistake, I think, of Winter and some other scholars is to read the Greek word that means “wife” or “woman” as signifying “wife” throughout the passage. It can mean “wife,” but it is also the usual, neutral word for an adult woman. Fortunately, most biblical translators, like those of the NRSV, opt for “woman” after verse 3 and so do not leave out important contingents.
Acts and the epistles strongly suggest that unattached women were among the early churches’ most active and respected members; and would Paul or his deputies have thrown out a known prostitute from a gathering, as long as she was not there on business? Paul blasts men for engaging prostitutes, but he launches no parallel outburst against the female vendors of sex. He would have known that a large number had no choice—many prostitutes were slaves. But given Paul’s strict code of conduct for Christians, it is hard to imagine how an active prostitute would have fitted into the community. Perhaps the cruelty of Greco-Roman brothels spared the church the headache of the problem in its most difficult form, by giving slave prostitutes no freedom to go and worship.
At the very least, there must have been among the Christians women with pasts. Would not bareheadedness, the lack of a “symbol of authority” on their heads, have galled them? They were entitled to be there—but the norms of the time said that they had to be there in the outfits of degraded, vulnerable beings. It was against custom and perhaps even against the law for them to be veiled. At Greek religious festivals, “women’s police” would circulate, making sure not only that respectable women were not flashily or revealingly dressed, but probably also that other women did not take on the exclusive, prestigious symbols of a matron or widow. In Rome also, dress was regulated in detail: for example, any married woman found to have committed adultery would lose forever the right to wear a floor-length, heavily bordered stola and a veil. Any woman who had ever been a prostitute was of course not allowed to wear them either.
I think Paul’s rule aimed toward an outrageous equality. All Christian women were to cover their heads in church, without distinction of beauty, wealth, respectability—or of privilege so great as to allow toying with traditional appearances. The most hurtful thing about bareheaded, gorgeously coiffed wives might not have been their frivolity but rather their thoughtless flaunting of styles that meant degradation to some of their sisters—as if a suburban matron attended an inner-city mission church in hip boots, a miniskirt, and a blond wig. Perhaps the new decree made independent women of uncertain status, or even slave women, honorary wives in this setting. If the women complied—and later church tradition suggests they did—you could have looked at a congregation and not necessarily been able to tell who was an honored wife and mother and who had been forced, or maybe was still being forced, to service twenty or thirty men a day. This had never happened in any public gathering before.
This, I believe, was Paul’s ingenious combination of common sense and radical defiance for dealing with a very touchy set of issues. What polytheistic literature can best add here is some context to show just how disturbing, how distracting to men and stigmatizing to women, the lack of a veil could be. This context supports the idea that Paul was being protective rather than chauvinistic. The context also helps explain why the passage doesn’t flow, why it sputters with emotion, gets incoherent, changes tactics, and ends almost with a snarl. There was an awful lot at stake.
Paul does not write of “nature” (verse 14) by accident. The ancients believed that it was female hair’s nature to inflame men, almost like breasts or genitals: men experienced women’s hair as powerfully, inescapably erotic, in a way that makes our hair-care product commercials look like an accounting textbook.
The Roman poet Ovid made book 3 of his Art of Love a women’s manual for seducing men. He explicitly banishes married women (picturing them in their prescribed modest clothes) from his readership and addresses himself to freedwomen on the make—streetwalkers and courtesans. He treats hairstyles first.
We like you elegant: don’t let your hair go lawless:
The hands’ touch makes you lovely or unlovely.
There are so many modes. Let each consult her mirror
And take time to select what most becomes her.
A plain part in the center favors a long face.
The heroine Laodamia had this style.
Round faces like a small knot just above the forehead—
Only that, and they need the ears left bare.
Like tuneful Apollo’s when he takes his lyre up,
Another’s hair can lie on either shoulder.
Or tie it back, like Diana’s when her robe
Is hitched up, and she chases panicked creatures.
Or it might look best when loose and full of breezes—
Or else constricted and tied tightly back.
One picks a hairstyle shaped like Hermes’ lyre;
One’s head props folds up that resemble waves.
Could you count the acorns on a branchy oak tree,
The bees in Hybla, wild things in the Alps?
It’s unthinkable to tally the arrangements.
I couldn’t—every new day adds new styles.
Neglectful looks suit many. You might think it’s sprawling
From yesterday, and yet it’s just been done.
Art mimics chance. “That’s who I love,” said Hercules,
Seeing mussed Iole in her captured city.
The most famous erotic passage about hair is in Apuleius’s Golden Ass. The novel’s protagonist, Lucius, is admiring the young slave girl he is about to bed.
She was dressed in an elegant tunic, with its bright red little belt hitched up highish—right under her breasts, in fact. Her flowerlike hands stirred a cute pot with a rotary motion, and she jiggled gently through the bends of that circle and slid her
arms and legs along it, while her flanks shook slowly and her mobile spine went in lovely soft waves.
I stood stock-still, mesmerized in wonder at the sight—and that limb that had been lying down stood up too. Finally, I said to her, “How beautifully, how wittily, my Photis, you churn that little pot of yours, along with your buttocks. Happy—beyond a doubt sublimely happy—is whoever you permit to stick his finger in there.”
Then the girl—glib, satirical thing—retorted, “You poor thing! Run as far away from my stovelette as your legs will carry you. If this petite flame of mine blasts on you for just a second or two, you’ll be on fire in your guts, and nobody will be able to put it out except me. I know how to season a dish deliciously and shake a bed delectably.”
She was looking back at me over her shoulder and laughing. I didn’t leave until I had carefully inspected her entire appearance. What can I say about the rest, given that I’ve always been preoccupied with hair? I give it an exhaustive gaze in public and savor the memory afterward at home.
I have a fixed and solid reason for judging a woman by her hair. First, it’s the highest part of the body, in an open and conspicuous position: it meets our eyes first. And whereas the rest of the female form is set off by the cheerful, blooming colors of clothing, for the head this is achieved by the glow born into it. Finally, consider that most women strip to show off their natural beauty, take off every piece of clothing in their eagerness to offer their nude loveliness, confident that they’ll win more approval for their rosily blushing skin than for their gold-colored garments; but—it’s blasphemy to say this, and may there never be such grisly proof of my point—if you were to take a superbly beautiful woman, sack her head of its hair and denude her face of its magnificent organic frame, she might have descended from heaven, emerged from the sea, she might be drawn from the waves—she might be Venus herself, with the whole band of Graces in attendance, with the whole race of Cupids in her train, wearing her own divine belt and radiating cinnamon and shedding balsam like dew: if she stepped forth bald, she wouldn’t even please her own husband Vulcan.…
But for my Photis it wasn’t diligent but desultory decoration that imparted her present charm. For her rich hair was gently slackened and hung down along the neck; clingily trailing, it just lighted on the upper border of her dress—but the ends were balled up, knotted and bound at the top of her head.
I couldn’t bear this supremely delectable torture any longer. I threw myself onto her, and right at the peak, on her topmost hair, I placed a kiss—extremely delicious.
Notice the implicit association between hair on display and actual nakedness. This wouldn’t make much sense unless both signaled sexual availability and both were thought of as automatically bringing on male desire. Notice also the play on the idea of baldness, as in Paul, but with the opposite thrust: if women, who should be objects of desire, do not have hair to look at, men will naturally reject them. Paul writes that they should either hide their beautiful hair or shave their heads—their dignity comes from making themselves something other than objects to drool over.
Romantic odes to women’s hair contrasted with spoofs of male baldness, which was considered very ugly if not downright humiliating. In Petronius, the wandering antiheroes shave their heads as part of an emergency disguise—as runaway slaves who have been caught. After their old enemies detect them and reconcile with them, their baldness does not take on any Yul Brynner sexiness.
Eumolpus, a little looser from the wine, was making up jokes about baldness and branding. Once his stiff pretension in prose was exhausted, he turned to poetry and composed a little funeral elegy for our hair:
“Your locks, your only glory, have fallen.
Hard winter has stripped your verdant hair.
Your naked temples are pining for shelter.
The threshing floor is glittering bare.
Nature, you cheat, the first charms you bestow
When we’re born are also the first to go.”
“You wretch, your hair once glowed more fair
Than Phoebus’s, or than his sibling’s.
But now you’re stripped as smooth as bronze,
Or mushrooms grown from rainy dribblings.
You shun the smirking girls. You see
In your hair’s death a token of mortality.”
He wanted to offer more, which probably would have been worse than what we’d heard already, but there was an interruption. One of Tryphaena’s maids took Giton below deck and decked him out in a curly wig belonging to her mistress. She even produced false eyebrows from a little box and, tracing the curves where his eyebrows had been, repaired the damage to his features. All of his beauty was restored. Tryphaena recognized her own Giton, burst into tears, and gave him her first really sincere kiss since encountering him again.
I was happy that the boy had returned to his original glory, but I had myself to think about. I kept hiding my face, because I knew I was mutilated to no ordinary extent. Not even Lichas saw fit to speak to me. But the same maid noticed my embarrassment and took me aside to adorn me with a wig no less splendid. In fact, I was even more handsome than before, because my new hair was bright blond.
Ovid managed to combine both themes—the beauty of hair and the comic horror of baldness—in a poem about his girlfriend’s losing all of her lovely hair to an imprudent beauty treatment. If bald men were funny, bald women were funnier. What was supposed to be severely trimmed or bald on a refined woman was her pubis (see this page, in the quotation from Ekklesiazousae), as Ovid not very discreetly jokes.
I used to tell you, “Stop! Don’t drug your hair.”
But you can’t dye it now. There’s nothing there.…
Alas, she hardly holds her weeping in.
She hides her cheeks’ red pigment of chagrin.
Her old hair on her lap, she gazes down.
Alas, that’s not a place for it to crown.
Hmmm. Is there a pudendum allusion in Paul’s dismissal of an unveiled woman, that she is as good as bald?b He may well be linking uncovering the head in public to treating the head like the pubis. (“You want to show it? Then why don’t you show you-know-what? But then you’d better shave both.”)
Even without the joke, the range of Paul’s tone here—sometimes hectoring, sometimes flattering, sometimes mocking—argues against the psychological take on him that many modern readers insist on: that he is merely a repressed and bitter man, lashing out at women because he hasn’t got one and can’t admit to wanting one.
In fact, the variety of pressures he applies reminds me of the passages in which he claims to have “begotten” his followers, with the implication that through his advice, instructions, and example he is now raising them. Update his arguments circumstantially, and we are in twenty-first-century suburbia, with Dad: “You can’t go out in public in such a skimpy outfit! You might as well be naked. You’re so beautiful—I can’t stand to see you exposed this way. Don’t you feel embarrassed? You are different from boys, and that’s why you’re more restricted, but you’re just as important in the big scheme of things. You keep arguing, but this is how this society works.”
In any case, the passage on veils was nothing like a chauvinist diatribe by contemporary standards. Again, Juvenal gives useful reference points. He can say nothing about women’s appearance, especially when it is unconventional, that is not insulting:
The purple sports cloaks, oil for rubdowns, stabbing
Of the dummy—we’ve all seen when they’re for women.
They attack it with a wooden sword and shield,
Go through the whole drill; such a shameless lady
Could blare the horn at the Floraliac—
Or does she want to be a gladiator?
How modest is this helmeted runaway
From her sex, girlfriend of violence? One thing
Makes manhood unappealing: it’s no fun.
The glory, if your wife’s goods go on auction:
Her sword be
lt, armlets, plumes, a broken left greave.
If the girl’s got a taste for the arena,
She’ll sell that gear in public—lucky you!
But they sweat in delicate robes, their favorite parts
Chafe in those little underwear of silk.
See her groan through prescribed thrusts, bending over
Beneath her helmet’s weight, see those cork bindings:
How big and thick they’re weighing on her knees!
Then laugh when she disarms to squat and pee.
No woman will think anything is shameful
Or forbidden once she’s wrapped her neck in green gems,
And stretched her ears out with gigantic pearls.
Nothing’s more loathsome than a wealthy woman.
Ugly, absurd, the dough gobs puff her face out.
Soaked through with goop and reeking like an empress,
She glues together her poor husband’s lips.
They wash to meet their boyfriends. Who would bother
To look nice at home? For boyfriends they buy spikenard
And whatever else the slender Indians send us.
She takes her time, removes the outer plaster;
You can see who she is! She laves on milk,
For which she takes a retinue of asses
To the North Pole, if that’s where she’s been exiled.
But what needs such a queue of medications?
What’s plastered with damp blobs of bread that’s baked
Out of the choicest wheat? A face—or abscess?
The slave, poor Psecas, does the hair—her own
Shredded, her clothes torn from her arms and bosom.
The bullhide whip avenges twisted hair’s crimes.…
They load so many layers on, they build
The head so high in such a complex framework:
Face-on, she’s the Andromache of legend—
Lesser, unrecognized behind. Suppose, too,