by Sarah Ruden
10 To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does separate, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
12 To the rest I say—I and not the Lord—that if any believer has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 And if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. It is to peace that God has called you. 16 Wife, for all you know, you might save your husband. Husband, for all you know, you might save your wife.
Here was another urgent question for the Corinthians. Is this it about children? Only that the religious differences of their parents do not taint them? Traditionally, legitimate children were what marriage was for. It certainly wasn’t for channeling a man’s sexual energy—which could go nearly anywhere—and the whole of a woman’s energy belonged to her household, to her children most of all.
Some people might feel that the ancient emphasis on fertility and child rearing in marriage had a lot going for it, but the reality looks rather joyless, with both husbands and wives—especially wives—locked into biological production, like farm animals. And getting the right products—sturdy, flawlessly formed boys—was so important that infant exposure, especially of girls, was routine. The law forbidding the Romans to let a deformed newborn of either sex live was in the Twelve Tables, which had a status somewhat like that of the U.S. Constitution today. Child-centered this system wasn’t.
A Roman wife and mother of the highest status is not someone I envy. She came second to both her husband’s parents and her own children. This could, of course, be a problem in a pinch. In Vergil’s story of a divinely led escape from the sack of Troy that starts the hero Aeneas on the journey to the founding of Rome, the wife literally comes last. Aeneas is narrating:
“My father rose up, conquered by the truth.
In reverence for that sacred star he prayed:
‘No more delay! Gods of my fathers, lead me:
I’ll follow. Save my family, save my grandson.
This was your sign, and Troy is in your power—
So I will yield and go with you, my son.’
Now through the walls the fire’s roar grew louder.
The blasts of heat were rolling closer to us.
‘Dear father, let them set you on my shoulders.
I’ll carry you—you will not weigh me down.
Whatever happens, it will be one peril
Or rescue for us both. Our little Iulus
Will walk with me. My wife will follow, far back.…’
And now I pulled a tawny lion skin
Over my bending neck and brawny shoulders
And took my load. My little Iulus’s fingers
Were twined in mine; he trotted by my long steps.
Behind me came my wife. We went our dark way.
Before I hadn’t minded the Greeks’ spears
Hurled at me, or the Greeks in crowds, attacking.
Now every gust and rustle panicked me
Because of whom I led and whom I carried.
Now I approached the gates. The journey seemed
Finished, when suddenly a massive tramping
Sounded. My father, spying through the shadows,
Shouted, ‘Run—run, my boy! They’re coming close!
I see shields flashing, and the glint of bronze.’
Some enemy god then seized me in my terror
And stole my reason. Byways led me running
Beyond the streets of the familiar city.
And there, my wife, Creusa—no!—was stolen
By fate, or strayed, or else collapsed, exhausted.
Who knows? We never saw her anymore.
I did not think of her or note her absence
Before we reached the mound and ancient shrine
Of Ceres.”
Aeneas is commendably if tardily upset at the thought of what might happen to her, alone in a city that an army with ten years of siege frustration is sacking. He returns to seek her, and just the right turn of melodrama follows. She is dead and out of the way of Aeneas’s future dynasty, but her ghost is self-effacing enough to allow her widower a full howl over his lost treasure:
“I went on, in my race to search the buildings,
But the poor apparition of Creusa
Came to me, taller than the living woman.
Shock choked my voice and stood my hair on end,
But what she said was soothing to my soul:
‘Why do you rave and revel in this sorrow,
Sweet husband? It was by the will of heaven
This came about. It is not right to take me.
The king of high Olympus will not let you.
In your long exile you will plow a wide sea
Clear to the West, where Tiber’s Lydian water
Sweeps smoothly through rich fields of warriors.
A prosperous kingdom and a royal wife
Are yours. So weep no longer, though you love me.
I am a Trojan—Venus is your mother:
I will not serve Greek mothers in the cities
Of arrogant Myrmidons and Dolopians.
The gods’ great mother keeps me on these shores.
Farewell. Cherish the child that we created.’ ”
Cato the Younger, a paragon of Roman rectitude in the mid–first century B.C., gave his wife away to a friend for childbearing once she had borne him as many children as he wanted. The poet Lucan, a contemporary of Paul, shows her dashing back to Cato fresh from the funeral of her second husband and demanding to marry him again so that—now that she is no longer fertile—she can at least share the hardships brought by the invasion that is beginning.
As far as Romans of the first century A.D. were going beyond these traditional ideas about the purpose of marriage, we read that they were going shallow, not deep, with decisions made on the basis of convenience, physical beauty, or money—whimsical divorces, reckless adultery, and routine abortions. Juvenal reacts in his usual cynical way:
It’s tough to board ship on a husband’s orders.
The bilge reeks, and the heavens spin above.
A wife barfs on her husband. For her boyfriend,
She’s iron-gutted, lunches with the sailors,
Strolls on the stern, and plays with gnarly ropes.…
“Why does Censennia’s husband say she’s splendid?”
She brought a million, so he calls her chaste.
Yes, he’s aflame—her dowry shoots Love’s arrows.
A man’s greed lets his wife, free as a widow,
Gesture or write to her lovers while he’s there.
“But why’s Sertorius hot for Bibula?”
Shake out the truth: he loves his wife’s face only.
Three wrinkles, and some dryness, and some sagging,
And darker teeth, and eyes a little squinty—
He’s free: “Go pack your bags. Get out of here.
You just annoy me now. You keep on snuffling.
Get out—fast. I’ll replace you with a dry nose.…”
But now she abdicates,
Changes her home, wears out her bridal veil,
Then flees back to the still-squashed bed she scorned,
Leaving the wedding’s decorated awnings,
And the greenery not yet withered on the door.…
The Phrygian sage, the rented Indian
Skilled in astrology advise the rich.
For the poor, the rampart and the circus settle
Destiny. The bare neck with its long gold chain
Asks at the pillars and th
e dolphin column
Whether to dump the barkeep for the ragman.
Poor women bear the dangers, though, of childbirth
And all the work of nursing—fate compels them.
New mothers seldom lie in gilded beds.
That’s what the expertise in drugs achieves.
A marriage—or a divorce—for spiritual purposes was unheard of up until Christianity, and was entirely against Greco-Roman social norms. Paul’s vocabulary itself moves toward change. In verses 10 and 11 are the traditional terms, pointing to the spiritually poisonous traditional gap in power: the wife must not “separate” from her husband—or if she does, she must either stay unmarried or become reconciled to the same man—and the husband must not “divorce” his wife (literally “throw out,” the same word as for disowning a child). Under the laws of the Greeks and Romans, the wife could only remove herself, forfeiting her home and children; the husband, in a divorce, sent the wife back to her parents’ house with nothing but her dowry, and if she had neither parents nor a dowry, he could put her on the street. Nothing could entitle her to a share in his home or to a new one of her own.
But in the following sentences, Paul uses “divorce” for both husbands and wives. When it comes to religion, Christian women as well as Christian men can in extreme circumstances “throw out” their spouses. Paul wants the couple to stay married, but if the unbeliever chooses otherwise, the believer, male or female, “is not bound,” which literally means “is not a slave.” Again, I just don’t see where Shaw and his fellow critics get off.
25 Now concerning virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. 26 I think that, in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are. 27 Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. 28 But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. 29 I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, 30 and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, 31 and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.
32 I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; 33 but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, 34 and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband. 35 I say this for your own benefit, not to put any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and unhindered devotion to the Lord.
36 If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly towards his fiancée, if his passions are strong, and so it has to be, let him marry as he wishes; it is no sin. Let them marry. 37 But if someone stands firm in his resolve, being under no necessity but having his own desire under control, and has determined in his own mind to keep her as his fiancée, he will do well. 38 So then, he who marries his fiancée does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.
39 A wife is bound as long as her husband lives. But if the husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, only in the Lord. 40 But in my judgment she is more blessed if she remains as she is. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.
That word “blessed/happy” is the crescendo of the discussion of marriage. For the Greeks, this word had specifically meant the following:
1. divine
2. divinely favored
3. lucky
4. rich
5. dead
To Greek and Roman readers, Paul might have seemed to be making a strange connection here, in this final part of the passage, between Epicurean ideas of simplicity and inner peace (which are achieved by reason and choice, independent of religion), and a general word for the greatest happiness possible, in which the gods might land you through their favoritism or your bribery of them.
The Epicureans had preached that people should sacrifice their ambitions and passions for a calm state of mind, walk away from business and politics and love affairs, get only the things they needed to stay alive, and enjoy simple pleasures. The classic expression of this is in the epic poem of Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe: it is delightful to see, from the safe, calm land, a ship struggling through a storm, or to witness a battle on a distant plain—or to watch people chasing money, fame, and power when you are doing no such thing.
But the Greeks and Romans in general thought that the gods alone, not a person’s own choices, were powerful enough to create a winner, in this world or the next. Here is a hymn to Earth, of uncertain date, but probably from the fifth century B.C. or earlier:
You give lush fields and lovely children, lady.
You give and take the livelihood of humans.
Whoever your heart honors with its kindness
Is happy—all things lavishly are his.
Crops weigh his fields down, cattle crowd his meadows,
And fine possessions overflow his mansion.
Earth’s favorites rule by good laws over cities
Of lovely women; splendid wealth attends them.
Their sons thrive in exuberance and pleasure.
Their joyful virgin daughters leap and scamper
In flower-draped troupes on softly blooming meadows.
This is your favor, holy, generous goddess.
So what was this preacher, this man called Paul, trying to do? He wrote that if you could, you should detach yourself and get out of the rat race, but also that you should go way beyond what the Epicureans advised: if you could manage, you should actually not get married, and if you were married, you shouldn’t let it control so much of what you did and thought (even if you were a woman). But wait: what simple pleasures outside the rat race were there without a home and family? Lucretius certainly wasn’t detached from a desire for these; he offered particularly anxious instructions for begetting the “cute children” anyone was supposed to be unhappy without.
Wait again. Paul claimed that what he had to offer was much better than adorable children and a good night’s sleep, better even than conventional people’s version of the greatest happiness: a rich household with glorious progeny, and reputation, power, and wealth to hand on to them—which all, by the way, was also mainly about marriage. And he preached that bliss beyond this didn’t come to a few by the whims of the gods, but could come to anyone as God’s free gift: you got bliss from keeping yourself open to him.
Paul did make a huge change in the status of women and in marriage, but not the one we ascribe to him. By bringing the question of happiness into it, he let loose not only that hope and possibility, but with it all of the complexity that ancient customs had tamped down. People now had to figure out relationships between the sexes: whether to have relationships at all, whether they bring too much pain and trouble, whether something else would be more fulfilling, how to balance relationships with the spiritual life, and how to love each other selflessly rather than take each other for granted as providers and breeders. It’s lucky that Christians counted on divine help, because they were going to need it.
Say that a fictional woman in Greek or Roman literature—Cydippe, for example—were a Christian, and her fate were not marshaled along by gods representing nature and state authority. Acontius is in love with her, ties notes to little gifts and throws them through her window, talks to her parents, who like him but are not going to pressure her. She is drawn to him in turn, but she is attached to praying in the ekklēsia. She sees her mother kept at home by the younger children, while her father can go to any meetings he likes. Her parents struggle to be friends. They ca
re for each other, but different things interest them.
She asks God what she should do, and he does not answer except to say that he loves her enough to have handed his son to murderers for her sake. She is really going to have to make this decision, and she will never be able to blame anyone else for it. Nothing is made up about her life, nothing is written: no fate, no dynasty, no adventures she must produce heroes for but cannot come along on. She has life more abundantly than women before her have ever had it, the shock of it, the glaring light of it. This is what God gave her: all hers, and eternal.
* Cited in The Writing of St. Paul: A Norton Critical Edition, Annotated Text and Criticism, ed. Wayne A. Meeks (New York: Norton, 1972).
† Part of the manuscript tradition has verses 34 and 35 here, and part has them at the end of the chapter. A copyist may have originally written these five sentences in the margin, a mere reference to, say, 1 Timothy 2:11–12—so the passage might not even be Pauline, let alone Corinthian: a majority of modern scholars say Paul didn’t write the “pastoral” Epistles.
Another difficulty is that the ban on women’s speaking contradicts 1 Corinthians 11’s exhortations to women to wear veils while they “pray or prophesy” in the church—see this page.
‡ The exception is Corinna of Tanagra, a Greek poetaster of the late sixth and/or early fifth century B.C., whose work—including an account of two mountains having a singing contest and hurling pieces of themselves at each other—was performed publicly. She was not a role model but a “sow.”
§ In the epic Aeneid, Dido, or Elissa, commits suicide when abandoned by her lover, the hero Aeneas, on his way to Rome.
‖ Claudius was emperor from 41 to 54 A.D.
a The Palatine Hill in Rome was the site of the most expensive homes and became the headquarters of the emperors. It is the source of our word “palace.”
b He wasn’t above a crude joke, such as wishing that the purveyors of circumcision would go castrate themselves (Galatians 5:12).