By Gary Topping–
A couple of Sundays ago fellow blogger George Pence and I sat together at Mass listening to the reading from Ephesians 5 where St. Paul admonishes wives to be subordinate to their husbands. We grinned widely while our wives—and most of the other women present—glowered at the lector. Here it was, right from the mouth of God, and we looked forward to some good teasing later at lunch.
During his homily, Fr. Jacek Buda, OP, wrestled with trying to justify that unpalatable reading to a largely hostile audience, arguing that St. Paul shouldn’t really be taken literally and that what he meant was that all of us should willingly subordinate ourselves to each other and to Christ. Our fellow blogger, Deacon Scott Dodge, followed a similar line (on his own blog, not TheBoyMonk), emphasizing the first sentence of the reading, which does establish the context that God wants us all to be subordinate to each other as the Church is subordinate to Christ. Msgr. M. Francis Mannion followed suit in his September 6 column in The Intermountain Catholic.
Given what we read here and in other places in Paul’s writings about our codependence as diverse members of the Body of Christ, this seems to be good Pauline theology. But it also seems to me a bit strained in its attempt to make Paul acceptable to members of modern liberal democracies, to whom (or to the best of whom, at least) such prejudices as sexism are anathema. As a historian, I would remind us, in the oft-quoted admonition of L. P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (Actually, I wouldn’t go as far as Hartley, but that’s a subject for another essay.)
Was St. Paul a male chauvinist? Of course he was. Paul was a Jew and a citizen of the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. If he were not a male chauvinist, he would have been a unique figure indeed in that cultural environment, in which the inferiority of women was universally accepted. There were no women sitting around the table at Plato’s Symposium. While ancient history can cite a few examples of independent and even powerful women—Cleopatra and the Roman poet Catullus’s mistress “Lesbia” (Clodia) come to mind—they occur to us so readily because in fact they were so rare. To the ancient mind, women belonged in the kitchen and the nursery and nowhere else.
In other places in his writings, Paul firmly establishes his “traditional” view of woman’s role (the ancient world is where that “traditional” role became a tradition). In his letter to the Colossians, he affirms the subordinate role of women in even less nuanced language than in Ephesians. In I Timothy 5, he calls women gossips and busybodies, and admonishes young widows to keep their lust under control by remarrying and getting back into the kitchen where they belong.
It is not irrelevant to point out that Paul’s hierarchical view of society included acceptance of slavery. Slavery is mentioned in both passages in Ephesians and Colossians where the subordination of women is affirmed, as well as independently in I Timothy 6-12 and Titus 2:9. To be sure, he admonishes masters to be kind to their slaves in the same way as he admonishes husbands to love their wives. But a hierarchical society is basic to his thinking.
So if I, a historian, were giving a homily on those passages, what would I say? (You can be thankful that I, as a lay person, won’t be giving such a homily!) I would interpret Paul’s views as simply cultural—artifacts of a worldview that most of us no longer accept. We no longer stone adulterers and homosexuals, though I admit that we still execute criminals, so we aren’t yet completely civilized. I would say that we should take Paul at his word that we should love each other and treat each other kindly and to recognize that we are all members of the Body of Christ, and forget about the rest.
Before my readers mistakenly construe my interpretation of Paul’s social views as completely negative, let me point out that Paul was in the forefront of the movement toward Christian universality, which was only in embryonic form in the first century. As recounted in Acts 5 and Galatians 2, Paul prevailed in a great struggle against the “Judaizers,” who argued that Christianity was only for the Jews and that converts needed to be circumcised and to follow the Mosaic law. He prevailed in that argument even against St. Peter at the Council of Jerusalem. One could extend his thought to the proposition that if Christianity were to be truly for all people, Gentiles as well as Jews, perhaps it should be for all men, women and slaves as well, and that perhaps spiritual equality could lead to social equality. St. Paul never got there, but he was on the way.
