1 Corinthians 11:2-16

PAUL’S SIXTH RESPONSE: REGARDING THE HEAD-COSTUME OF THE DIFFERENT SEXES IN RELIGIOUS SERVICES, 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.

Stanley well describes the intense religions significance of modes of dress in ancient times. In earlier Greece the length of the garment decided whether a man was an Ionian, with one set of gods and rites, or a Dorian, with another. But it was in the religious duties that the dress of the head possessed a marked import. The Jews, as Grotius says, were accustomed to perform the services of the temple with the head covered, assigning as a reason for the symbolic act that their unworthy eyes might not behold the majesty of God. This mode of reverence they transferred to the synagogue; so that, following Hebrew custom, St. Paul would have required men as well as women to worship with covered head. The ancient Greeks, on the contrary, sacrificed with bared heads. In ancient Italy, before the Roman age, the Greek custom prevailed; but AEneas, it is said, brought from Troy the custom of sacrificing with covered head; the assigned reason being, that the eyes of the man might not, in performing the holy rite, chance to fall upon any unholy or ill-omened object. This became the permanent custom for all ages of pagan Rome. So that Paul, rejecting the covered head of both Jerusalem and Rome, enjoined the bared head of Greece upon the males of the Corinthian Church. This uncovered head symbolized holy cheer and boldness before men in worship according to Christ. Hence Tertullian tells the Pagans, “We Christians pray with outspread hands, as harmless; with uncovered heads, as unashamed: without a prompter, as from the heart.” The custom prevalent in modern Europe, derived from the ancient Germanic races, of baring the head in reverence to a superior, though it is the idea most obvious to an American Christian, has no actual place here. That custom presupposed that princes and nobles, wearing a crown as symbol of rank, would retain it on the head on all occasions of etiquette, and require an inferior’s head, as a reverse symbol, to be bare of any cover whatever; so that the bared head and the bow of the head are now the universal symbols of deference.

Equally various, among different tribes and times, was and is the mode of wearing the hair. The ancient Greeks wore the hair long; and “flowing-haired Acheans” was one of the customary epithets applied to them by Homer. But in Paul’s time the hair was uniformly cut, except upon religious vows. The long hair of a male, done up in elaborate style, was a symbol of base effeminacy, belonging to men of prostituted manhood. The Burmese, both men and women, wear long hair, and the Chinese wear long hair braided into a pigtail.

It will be seen, perhaps, in the course of our notes, that Paul’s directions were based, partly upon symbolic reasons, temporary in their character, partly upon the natural sense of beauty, and partly upon fixed divine law. It is in this last case only that the direction is specially permanent in its nature; in the other cases the maxim might apply, “The rule ceases when the reason of the rule ceases.”