by Sarah Ruden
She’s not blessed with extensiveness—she’s shorter
Than a little Pygmy girl who’s wearing flats,
And jumps on tippy toes to get her kisses.
THE MOST IMPORTANT passage about women in the epistles is 1 Corinthians 7. At the time, practically all girls of freeborn status married, so the new rules said a great deal about how Christian women were to live. Here is the first section of chapter 7:
1 Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” 2 But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 This I say by way of concession, not of command. 7 I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind. 8 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. 9 But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.
Like Shaw, most modern Westerners tend to take Paul, with his preference for celibacy, as grim and negative, urging people to give up the greatest human joys for a chilly, lonely religious life. This mistake comes partly from an assumption that erotic, mutually nurturing marriage was a ready option for Paul’s followers, when actually he was calling them away from either the tyranny of traditional arranged unions or the cruelty of sexual exploitation, or (in the case of married men exploiting the double standard) both.
The language of equality here in 1 Corinthians absolutely does not fit a Shavian reading; it in fact rebels against the unmitigated chauvinistic attitudes Paul would have found in Greco-Roman households, both in his boyhood Tarsus and anywhere he traveled in the Roman Empire later.
For example, in the Greek of the first sentence of this passage, he plays down male-female differences. He does not actually write, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” but “It is well for a person not to touch a woman.” As I’ve mentioned before, an anēr is someone anatomically male, and with all of the male qualities of mind and morals that the polytheists revered. But an anthrōpos (Paul’s word) is just a human being. The male deciding whether or not to have sex is not a brave and noble phallus on legs, who, if he is a Greek or Roman, has broad sexual entitlements. He is a person, a word that can apply to women too.
“The unmarried” are not only women; the word is grammatically masculine plural, but it refers to men and women both. (It is like the English word “actors” used for everyone in the profession, male and female. There has to be a special reason to specify “actresses.”) The word “widows,” too, may be wrong: the masculine form of the word (different by only a single letter) has some manuscript-based claim to belonging in the text here instead, and it means “widows and widowers.”
This kind of evenhandedness could result only from a huge wrench away from the past. Paul, in the polytheistic world, was not only putting brand-new limits on male desire but licensing female desire, which had been under a regime of zero tolerance.
The reason the Greeks and Romans took so little trouble to control men is that, in their eyes, men were naturally sane and civilized. Women, on the other hand—this was the folk wisdom that helped shape all of those sociopathic female characters in literature—were by nature wild, lustful, and depraved. Their families had to keep them under guard and make all of their major choices for them; their husbands had to keep them pregnant; and the whole society had to stifle their individuality and self-expression, because any thought or energy at their own disposal was likely to create lewd adventures, leading to chaos and violence.
Ovid in the Art of Love gives a goofy version of women’s character, but he had the full authority of his culture behind him.
Desire in us is saner and more sparing.
A man on fire observes the bounds of law.
What about Byblis, whose forbidden passion
For her brother made her bravely hang herself?
Myrrha loved her father as no daughter should,
And now she’s bound in bark and hidden away.
The tears she pours down from that fragrant tree
Are an ointment that commemorates her name.
On Ida’s forest-shaded heights, there happened
To live a white bull, the glory of the herd,
With a slight mark of black between his horns—
The single stain on all his milky body.
All of the Gnosian and Cydonian heifers
Thought that he’d make a nice weight on their backs.
Pasiphaėd was his very eager girlfriend,
Who looked on pretty cows with jealous hatred.
Everyone knows it happened! Even Cretans,
Those famous liars in their hundred cities,
Admit it! And I hear she plucked fresh leaves
And tender grass for him, a brand new hobby.
She joined the herd herself, without a thought
For her husband; she preferred a bull to Minos.
Pasiphaë, why those expensive dresses?
Your boyfriend’s got no eye for stuff like that.
You’re off to the mountain herds, and take a mirror.
You try so many hairstyles, like a fool.
Your mirror says you’re not a cow. Believe it!
What you really, really want’s a pair of horns.
If Minos is okay, don’t cheat on him.
If you’ve got to cheat, then do it with a man!
They say the queen would leave her royal bedroom
For the wooded mountains, like a raving Bacchant.e
Often she gave a cow a look to kill,
And asked, “What does my master see in her?
Look at her prancing for him on the young grass!
I bet she thinks she’s pretty—idiot!”—
Then ordered them to take the innocent creature
From the herd and drag her under the curved plow;
Or gave her as a phony sacrifice,
And gleefully held up her rival’s entrails.
Often she offered up the competition,
Taunting their guts: “See how he likes you now!”
She wanted to be Io or Europa,f
One bovine, and one riding on a bovine.
Fooled by the wooden heifer, the herd’s leader
Knocked her up. You could tell who was the father
From the baby.
Since women were supposed to stop at nothing once they got started, Greek and Roman husbands had the opposite notion to that of Victorian husbands as to why they could be sexually selfish: it wasn’t that women, or good women, were not responsive; it was that any woman was all too responsive. If you indulged your wife, you nursed a monster. You must marry a very young, very sheltered girl and make sure that she never took it into her head that she was there for anything besides childbearing. The poet Lucretius (mid–first century B.C.), for example, warns husbands against letting their wives move their hips during sex, which was supposed to send the semen off course.
Paul’s Jewish tradition put some equal sexual duties and restrictions on husbands and wives, but there also the aim was pregnancy: a couple had to have sex around the time the wife ovulated, and must not have sex when she could not conceive. Paul comes up with something altogether new: husbands and wives must have sex with each other on demand, because they both need it—it’s the reason they got married. According to these verses, they may need it equally. The rules for marriage treat human sexuality as a part of nature that needs expression.
History or, if you like, providence m
ay have worked rather ironically to our benefit. Paul’s main concern was to make room for celibacy, which could give his followers more freedom and a closer relationship with God; and he also sought communal order and rationality in this time of change and excitement. But nevertheless his new rules give the proper basis for marriage, the erotic one; and they also address the chief reasons that marriages break down: the failure of partners to act generously toward each other, keeping intimacy after any passion is gone; and the loss of trust, typical when men have greater freedom and a smaller stake in the relationship.
The supreme serendipity is that, in founding communities that could shelter the celibate, Paul changed people’s experience of their emotions and their bodies in ways that inevitably changed marriage, though the new kind did not send down deep roots until the modern age and the end of the authoritarianism that began to blight the church in the generations after Paul. But real marriage is as secure a part of the Christian charter, and as different from anything before or since, as the command to turn the other cheek.
Greco-Roman literature gives an idea of the questions Christians may have been asking about this choice now in their own hands: faithful marriage or celibacy.
First of all, where were the parents? Parents married off their children, by right. I don’t know any factual pre-Christian case of a child’s defiance, which would have led to public outrage, disinheritance, or even death.g
Greek New Comedy and Roman comedy show the kind of fantasies people had when they could not choose their own spouses. But since the stories are set in the real, everyday Greco-Roman world, the fictional happy ending for the young couple in love can come about only through absurd coincidences: for example, the girl is a slave just about to start in prostitution (so she is a virgin the young man can actually meet), but she is also his heiress cousin, kidnapped as a baby by pirates and now miraculously restored to her parents through the recognition of talismans she has somehow managed to keep (so that her prospective father-in-law can opt for the marriage from the usual motives).
Parental authority weighs on the legend of Acontius and Cydippe, in the third-century B.C. Alexandrian poet Callimachus and in Ovid. At a religious festival, the young man Acontius connives to secure the girl he has glimpsed and fallen in love with, Cydippe, by tossing her an apple with the inscription “I swear by Artemis to marry Acontius” to innocently read aloud. (He can, of course, not decently speak to her, and he must move fast before she reenters the seclusion of her home.) Though terrible consequences will follow if she breaks the oath, neither party dares to tell what has happened. Cydippe three times sickens almost to death when her parents prepare for her marriage to another man, but her father learns the truth only by a visit to an oracle; she confirms the story when he returns home.
When Christianity gave girls and young men a rationale for refusing to marry at all, chaos apparently broke loose. Girls are said to have been jailed but persistent; tortured and mutilated but restored to wholeness; sold into prostitution but converting their would-be clients or turned to impenetrable rock; marrying but managing to persuade the groom on the wedding night not to have sex but to become a partner in chastity. They stayed virgins literally by miracles.
Unconvincing as many of the tales are, they point up hard facts: respectable Greeks and Romans were expected to marry; parents were the enforcers, backed up by state authority.
Celibacy was a rare and very specific religious privilege, peopling such small institutions as the College of Vestal Virgins in Rome. Celibacy by free choice seemed to mean that the generations could stop at the whim of inexperienced young people.
Another question for newcomers to Christianity would be where the patriarchal husband had gone. Families kept legal ties to the daughters they married off, but this only prevented utter dependence, when men approaching what passed for middle age married pubescent girls. There is a Greek version of such a marriage in Xenophon (fourth century B.C.). A husband proudly tells a friend how he trained his new bride, starting with a question he himself answered at quite tedious length: “Tell me, wife, have you realized the rationale on which I took you and your parents gave you to me?”
Here, in a wedding song of Catullus, is a more dramatic, Roman version of a couple with the same kind of age difference. The poet addresses the evening star that signals the time of consummation:
Hesperus, what sky-crossing fire is crueler?
You tear the daughter from her mother’s arms.
She clings—yet you still tear her from her mother
And give the chaste girl to the burning young man.
Are enemies in a captured city crueler?…
Virgin, you must not fight with such a husband.
It isn’t right—your father gave you to him,
Your father, and your mother—you must mind them.
They own a part of your virginity:
Your father’s granted a third, your mother a third.
Only a third is yours: you are outvoted.
They gave their rights to their son-in-law with the dowry.
By what miracle could the women in Paul’s churches be expected to exercise any equal authority in marriage, let alone over the quintessentially male domain of sex? The demand for faithfulness now applied equally to both men and women—a real shocker.
It would be hard to say which literary passage best dramatizes how complete a Greek or Roman male’s right to adultery was (as long as he left other men’s wives and virgin daughters alone). It would be like trying to find one passage in modern European literature that, better than all others, illustrates the belief in the right to bodily integrity. The ancient belief in men’s right to range is just as implicit in the entire way they lived and in a great many of the stories they told. I have read of considerate men staying faithful to their wives within the walls of home, keeping their hands off the slaves (male and female) and not bringing women (or little boys) home; and some authors felt that this was the only decent way to behave. But I have never seen any hint that a wife was entitled to challenge what her husband did outside: any speculating or accusing was nagging. Juvenal shows wives selfishly, viciously keeping their husbands awake with their jealousy.
But what about a passage showing the utter lack of male embarrassment about roaming? This one is from Homer’s Iliad, an oral epic written down in the eighth century B.C. Hera, the queen of the gods, has had a makeover by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She is plotting to seduce her consort Zeus away from his lookout onto the Trojan battlefield, so that the warriors she champions in opposition to him can have a chance. She rivets his attention just as she has planned, and this is how he gives voice to his desire for her.
“Right now let’s have a good time making love.
No goddess and no woman, until now,
Has overwhelmed my heart so powerfully:
Not Ixion’s wife, my lover, who gave birth
To Perithous, a counselor like us gods;
Not Acrisius’s daughter Danaë, with trim ankles,
Who gave me Perseus, the world’s greatest warrior;
And not the child of famous Phoenix—Minos
And godlike Rhadamanthus came from her;
Or Semele and Alcmene—both in Thebes:
Semele, who blessed mortals with Dionysus;
Alcmene, mother of brave Heracles;
Or the queen Demeter with her lovely hair;
Or splendid Leto, no—and not yourself:
Such sweet desire for you has seized me now.”
The speech is an epic poet’s joke. The king of the gods, unlike lowly mankind, can have sex with married women, deflower respectable virgins, acknowledge his illegitimate children, and burble about it all to his wife—just as, in our storytelling tradition, James Bond can have erotic adventures with superhuman ease. But to get a sense of the difference in background values, try to imagine James Bond married and making this speech to his wife. Would he still be the good guy?
Paul does not car
e how unquestioned men’s freedoms were. The word porneia, or “sexual immorality” (see my discussion in chapter 2), seems not only to forbid any sex outside of marriage (not necessarily a legal union, but a permanent and responsible one) for either partner, but also to label such an act with loathing.
Paul lays down the law of equality with these common business terms, stressing mutually binding rules:
opheilē: “conjugal rights”: normally a “debt” of money
exousia: “authority,” including state authority (see this page–this page for both of these words)
aposterē: “deprive”: normally “defraud,” “refuse payment,” “default”
It was now going to matter whether spouses filled each other’s needs: this was the new law and ethic for them. This, again, contrasts wildly with rules for marriage among the polytheists. Against Neaira is the prosecution’s speech in a late-fourth- or early-fifth-century B.C. lawsuit against a man for allegedly marrying a former courtesan and marrying off her daughter to an Athenian religious official, so that she would be making sacrifices on the city’s behalf. That is, the plaintiff, as he is entitled to do, seeks to ruin a man for taking a woman he loved out of prostitution and trying to provide for her child.
Julius Caesar’s wife Pompeia was hosting an all-female night ritual that a notorious playboy allegedly invaded in disguise. Caesar was not interested in whether his wife was actually at fault or tainted, but divorced her by messenger, perhaps the next morning. His famous explanation for why he had acted without any proof was that he thought his wife should not even be under suspicion.
Paul’s idea for how a marriage should work was the fulfillment of the Jewish scriptural command that a married couple was to be “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, echoed by Jesus in Matthew 19:5–6 and Mark 10:7–8). The husband should treat the wife’s body as his own and serve its most intimate needs, and vice versa. The only higher obligations are to God; the couple should approach even these only in collaboration with each other: that is how important peace and equality in a marriage are. Where, if not from a brain fever, did Shaw pick up the idea of a Pauline wife as a sexual and domestic servant?