1 Corinthians 11:10

THE FEMALE HEAD-DRESS

‘Power on her head because of the angels.’

1 Corinthians 11:10

The little section of the First Epistle to the Corinthians in which St. Paul deals with the question of the retention or disuse of the female head-dress in the public assemblies of Christian worship, is eminently characteristic of his style and method. It appears that in the Church at Corinth some women had occasioned scandal by dispensing with the pephlum, or shawl, with which, from time immemorial, Grecian females had covered their heads on public occasions. Doubtless these Christian women wished to assert the principle of their emancipation from that vulgar tyranny over the weaker sex which made the ordinary Greek woman a mere ‘dwarf of the gynæceum’; doubtless they wished to illustrate, in the most public manner, that they were now the children of a kingdom in which ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). But of the manner of asserting their purely spiritual and ideal truth, the Apostle wholly disapproved.

I. St. Paul abhorred all intrusive self-assertion, all scandal-causing appearance of evil, all unseemly violation of reasonable custom. He knew well that Christianity had not been preached with any view to the violent and revolutionary overthrow of existing customs. He did not wish its Divine and universal principles to be degraded into an excuse for political outbreaks or social fanaticism. It was true that in the Jewish synagogue women worshipped with their heads uncovered; but if there were any converted Jewesses who wished to transfer that custom into the Christian places of worship, they had wholly failed to see that there was no parallel between the cases, since in the synagogue the women worshipped apart from the men, behind a secluding lattice. St. Paul therefore decides that, as regards women, the Greek custom, and not the Jewish, ought to prevail, and indeed the spirit of the Greek and of the Jewish customs were in this matter identical. And singularly enough he decides for the Greek custom in the case of men as well as women. Among the Jews to this day, as in all Oriental countries, a man covers his head with the tallith—a veil with four tassels—when he is in the act of prayer. St. Paul could never have been accustomed to any other mode of worship until his conversion to Christianity. Yet so completely had his views and habits been altered by Christ’s revelation, that he now declares that a man covering his head in worship dishonours his own head, and thereby dishonours Christ Who is his spiritual and eternal Head.

II. But he is not content to rest this decision on his own mere dictum.—As it was the custom of his life to refer even the minutest duties to the loftiest principles, so it was the habit of his mind to settle even the most trivial matters of controversy by a reference to eternal spiritual truths. He therefore rests his decision on two grounds—an appeal to instinctive and natural feeling, and a statement of the Divine law respecting the relation of the sexes to one another and to God. He asks the Corinthians whether they do not feel at once, whether nature itself does not teach them, that long hair is unsuitable, even disgraceful, to man, a mark of dandyism, effeminacy, and sloth; and that, on the other hand, the long soft tresses of a woman are her natural ornament and glory, so that every one would feel it to be a mark of infamy who saw a woman shorn or shaven? And he traces this instinctive feeling to the great revealed truth that woman occupies towards man a position analogous to that which man occupies towards God. Man was created first, then woman; woman for the man, not man for the woman; man to be the image and glory of God, woman to be the glory of the man. Both of them indeed are one in the Lord, but still in due subordination; seeing that man is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of man, and God is the head of Christ. Thus we see that the region in which the thoughts of the Apostle habitually moved was so lofty, that a question of the use or abandonment of women’s veils leads him to speak at once of the creation of man and the Incarnation of the Son of God. It is in the midst of these high and dignified arguments, which at once remove the question from a detail of petty ritual to one of real religious significance, that St. Paul casually drops the strange and disputed phrase that, since man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man; the woman ought ‘to have power upon her head because of the angels.’

III. What is here meant by ‘power.’—When commentators or editors have failed to understand a word, they are generally driven to tamper with it, i.e. to alter the reading, or to give it some very unusual sense, or to give the ordinary sense, and show how the required meaning can be obtained from it. To me it seems that after all the simple good sense of our translators hit on the only true meaning of the expression, which they have placed in the margin of our Bibles. They adopted the proper and faithful course in giving to the disputed word its first plain and obvious meaning of ‘power’; and then, to dispel all unnecessary difficulty, they briefly inserted in the margin what appeared to them to be the true explanation, ‘that is, a covering, in sign that she is under the power of her husband.’ I am convinced that their view is the correct one. Any apparent harshness in this meaning is at once dispelled:—

(a) By the analogies it is indeed unlikely that exousia could ever have come to mean ‘a veil,’ and no authority for such a meaning can be quoted; but these analogies show how easily the word ‘power’ could come to be ‘ a sign of power’ by the common figure of speech which is called metonymy; and if so, it is much more likely to mean a sign of her husband’s power over her, than a sign of her own power, because the whole context is enforcing the superiority of the man, and bears on the ‘He shall rule over thee’ of Genesis 3:16.

(b) Because to this day the veil is regarded in the unchanging East as a sign, not of authority, but of subordination; and the traveller Chardin says that in Persia ‘only married women wear it, and it is the mark by which it is known that they are under subjection.’ And in the Roman customs, with which St. Paul must also have been very familiar, the putting on of a veil in marriage was a sign that a woman lost all independent rights of citizenship.

(c) Because there is a close analogy between this passage and one in Genesis (Genesis 20:16), where Abimelech, indignant that the relationship of Abraham to Sarah had been concealed from him, tells Sarah that he has given ‘her brother’ a thousand pieces of silver—‘Behold he is to thee a covering of eyes.’ This ‘covering of the eyes’ is generally understood to mean ‘a veil.’

—Dean Farrar.

Illustration

‘There is a noble verse by Milton, who seems to combine the notions of the woman’s hair being at once a covering to herself, a glory to herself, and a sign of subjection to her husband:—

“His fair large front and eye sublime declared

Absolute rule, and hyacinthine locks

Round from his parted forelock manly hung

Clustering, but not beneath his shoulder broad:

She, as a veil, down to the slender waist

Her unadorned golden tresses wore

Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved

As the vine waves her tendrils; which implied

Subjection, but required with gentle sway,

And by her yielded, by him best received.” ’