Susanna Krizo

Hi everyone,
I have just spent 3 months in the dense fog of sleep deprivation, and I don’t think Samuel is going to sleep for another 3, for he likes to eat every two hours around the clock.
That said, let’s get back to business:
If marital love (eros) is hierarchical, we have a problem with 1 Cor 7, which talks about eros love: husband does not have authority over the his wife’s body, and vica versa. I.e. there can be no hierarchy when both must yield preference to the other.

As far as governing authorities are concerned: they were given by God BECAUSE OF SIN (Rom 13) to punish evild-doers and give praise to the one’s who do good. There can be no comparison between an authority which is given at creation and one which is instituted because of sin, unless we of course agree with the early church and say that the man’s authority was given because the woman ruined it all by introducing sin, while the man was innocent.

As far as slavery is concerned: if Paul was arguing that a wife should submit to a husband as slaves submit to their masters, we have a problem with 1 Cor 7 again: Paul instructs the slaves to take advantage of manumission (being set free) if they can, but to the wife and husband he writes that divorce is not an option UNLESS THE UNBELIEVER WISHES TO DEPART. I.e. the authority of the master is not something that we should consider given by God, but the cause of greedy, selfish humans who wish to avoid the menial tasks while accumulating more wealth than they should. (I must add that divorce should be sought in case of abuse of any kind for God has called us to peace, not to be hurt by someone’s unrepentant heart).

As far as the comparison between wives, children and slaves is concerned: children grow up and need parental guidance only for their own safety and well being when immature children. Slaves, as already pointed out, can be manumitted, and Christian masters are told to treat them as their brothers/sisters; there is not hierarchy between siblings. The only reason Paul refers to slaves is because sinful humans will always enslave others and these instructions are needed for that specific reason (Paul has other instructions for the freeborn laborers: work, or don’t eat). These three are also lumped together because they all belong to the same familia. I.e these three groups interacted in Rome in a daily basis wherefore the instructions are found together. Note also that it is the wife and the husband who are above the children and slaves, the slaves had to obey the Domina as well, or rather, she was in charge of the slaves and their work. The children were instructed by a slave, the fathers were rarely involved in the upbringing of the children. Paul is not trying to create a hierarchy of worth, he is giving a Christian family instructions how to live with each other in an era when slavery was a fact of life.

As far as love is concerned: A Roman man considered love towards a woman slavery due to the passion which the man would not be able to control (hence Augustine writes in his book Confessions that God loves without passion). Love towards other men, especially male children, was considered to have a cooling effect on the male psyche and Roman men would often buy young boys as their “pets.” Now re-consider what Paul writes in Eph 5: husbands love your wives as yourselves. Quite radical in a time when a wife was considered an inferior, silly thing, whose existence was necessary only to create legitimate offspring.
The idea of “concordia” (mutual affection) shows up in Stoic philosophy late second, early third century and the church picked it up quickly as did Rome. Hence we find these ideas in all Roman literature and church literature from the third century on. But although the husband and wife were to have mutual affection towards each other, the relationship was that of inequality (thanks to Aristotle). And it is here that we find the root of modern complementarism, since these ideas are impeded in the writings of Tertullian and Augustine. As far as the Bible is concerned, these ideas are as foreign to it as the idea that a person should love someone else less than him/herself.