I Noticed Something About "Submission"

I think a lot of people learn ancient Greek in order to read the New Testament for themselves.  That wasn’t my primary motivation, but it was certainly on my mind.  For the most part, I haven’t found any great insights into Scripture by reading it in the original.  I suppose that’s to the credit of our translations.  The other day, though, I did notice something that I found rather interesting.

Ephesians 5:22, as we all know, says, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”  That’s the New International Version.  The New Revised Standard Version says, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.”  Both the English Standard Version and the New King James say, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”  Translation after translation carries the imperative: submit, submit, submit.

It’s the sort of thing that we often find embarrassing, and many a sermon has been preached on just what Biblical “submission” means, and how it really isn’t that bad.  The exegete might grab onto the phrase “as to the Lord” to differentiate this submission from abject subjugation.  Or the sermon might focus on the later verses, about how husbands are called to “give themselves up” for their wives.  I’ve grown up with these sorts of sermons all my life, and while I think they are morally sound as far as they go and on firm textual footing, there’s something I noticed just recently that I don’t think I’ve ever quite heard before.

Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t say, “Submit.”

I don’t mean that in the original, “submit” isn’t in the imperative.  I mean that the word “submit” isn’t in the verse at all.  In point of fact, Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t even have a verb.  What it actually says is, “the wives to their own husbands as to the Lord.”  This is not a sentence in Greek any more than it is in English.  This should give the reader pause, and perhaps put him in mind that Ephesians 5:22 is not an appropriate place to begin a citation.

So where is an appropriate place to begin the citation?  I don’t actually think that’s very clear.  This may be surprising, and lest we think poorly of our translators, I think a short digression is in order.

The issue of how to break up sentences is not quite so trivial as it might first appear.  Ephesians was written prior to the adoption of punctuation, so we must infer punctuation from content.  Oftentimes this is reasonably straightforward, but there are times when it isn’t.  Ancient Greek is also fairly fond of embedded clauses and phrases and the like.  For instance, you might encounter a sentence with a structure like this: 

“Hesitating on the front stoop, holding each option in his mind and considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house.”

Even without the punctuation, this is fairly obviously a sentence.  If you know enough English, you can identify that by the presence of the verb (“entered”), and you can infer that the preceding clauses and phrases relate to the main clause.  But suppose you had a sentence like the following:

“hesitating on the front stoop holding each option in his mind and considering whether to knock or to leave he entered the house with trepeditation looking this way and that trying to make as little noise as possible he crept through the empty rooms”

 Is that one sentence?  Is it two?  Is it two, with a fragment of a third?  There are multiple ways that you could punctuate the passage above that are equally correct, even if the actual meaning of the passage is quite clear.

Now imagine that what I have written is not actually English but another language, one in which my stringing together so many gerund phrases is not bad style.  If asked to translate that, you might actually take some of my gerunds and turn them into verbs.  For instance, you might render it like this:

“He hesitated on the front stoop, holding each option in his mind.  Considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house with trepidation.  He looked this way and that, trying to make as little noise as possible, and crept through the empty rooms.”

 And that might not be a bad translation at all, at least for general purposes.  Even though it isn’t exactly “word for word,” it flows much better, and that’s not a quality to be despised in a translation when none of the meaning has been lost.

In the case of Ephesians 5:22, though, I submit that this practice has resulted (all inadvertently, I am sure) in some meaning being lost.  So let us return to that passage.  Let me back up to what I think is the clear start of a sentence and refuse to impose any punctuation after that.  Keeping the verb forms as close to their original as possible, I would translate that block of text (Ephesians 5:15-30) like this:

“Look extremely closely how you walk not as unwise but rather as wise buying out the moment because the days are painful through this do not become foolish but rather understand this the will of the lord and do not become drunk with wine in which is wastefulness but rather be full in spirit saying to each other psalms and hymns and spiritual songs singing and strumming your hearts to the lord thanking always above all god the father in the name of our lord jesus christ submitting to each other in fear of christ the wives to their own husbands as to the lord because a husband is the head of his wife as christ is the head of the church himself the savior of the body but rather as the church submits to christ so also the wives to their husbands in all things husbands love your wives just as christ loved the church and himself gave for her in order that she be cleansed purified in a bath of water in the word so that he might stand her esteemed the church not having either spot or wrinkle or any such thing but rather so that sacred and blameless in this manner the husbands must love their own wives as their own bodies he loving his wife as himself for nobody ever hated his own flesh but rather rears and warms it just as christ the church that we are limbs of his body …”

 And so it goes on.  You can probably see several places where you might put punctuation in that block of text.  One thing I don’t think you can get around, though, is this: “the wives to their husbands as to the lord” is grammatically tied up with “submitting to each other in fear of Christ.”  That is where our translators feel they have license to insert the word “submit” into Ephesians 5:22, and you can see that for most general purposes it isn’t a bad translational choice at all.  Moreover, all translations are careful to keep Ephesians 5:21 reading something like “… submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.”

What I think is particularly noteworthy, though, is that the omission of the verb from 5:22 makes it clear (to me, at least) that this whole notion of wives submitting to their own husbands is simply an illustration of the larger point about everybody submitting to one another.  In other words, while it is true that wives are told to submit to their own husbands, it is equally true that husbands are told to submit to their wives, and in fact that all Christians are told to submit to each other.

I am hardly the first person to have noticed that, but seeing where the verbs are (and are not) casts the various teachings I have heard about submission in a new light.  In light of this new, more nuanced reading, I think it is clear that when we exegete this passage by pointing out that the “submission” referred to cuts both ways between married persons, we aren’t just making frantic excuses for an inherently misogynist text.  We are instead correctly pointing out that the thrust of the text is not on wives at all, but on the entire body of believers living in a state of submission.  And that too makes clear that when we talk about “submission” in lofty spiritual terms and pooh-pooh the notion of a wife being subject to her husband’s reign as a mere strawman, we actually aren’t just whistling in the dark.  If the entire church is supposed to be submitted one to another, then the “submission” being referred to really can’t be some misogynist subjugation.  Everybody can’t be subjugated to everybody else.  So if everybody is “submitted” to everybody else, then clearly something less literal than subjugation must be going on.

And although it’s been said many times by other people, I suppose at this point it might be appropriate for me to offer up my own short exegesis about what this “submission” is, if the context of the passage precludes it from being literal subjugation.

The main thing I get from this block of text vis a vis “submission” is that it is a desirable state for the entire church.  But what else can we tell about it?  It seems to be contrasted with the wastefulness (dissipation, if you like) of being an alcoholic.  Rather than that, Paul says, we should be filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, singing and making our hearts thrum (psallontes the heart, playing it like a stringed instrument), giving thanks and submitting to one another.  To me, all these gerunds, with their musical imagery, sound like they are being arrayed to describe the same thing, a sort of spiritual harmony among persons.  But what has submitting to do with music, or harmony?  At this juncture we might safely observe that the word “submitting,” hupotassetai, means “arraying under,” as one might “array” things in an orderly fashion, such as a body of troops - we might observe this etymology without fear of being told we are simply making excuses for the obvious misogynist meaning of the text (we might also observe that another use of this verb is "to place in the shelter of").  This idea of arraying ourselves under one another strengthens my opinion that the concept Paul is trying to get across is not subjugation, one to another, but rather harmony and interleaving with each other.

Still, of course, Paul does say, “the wives to their husbands as to the Lord, because a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church, himself the savior of the body.”  So very well, we might object - insofar as husbands and wives are a subset of everybody, clearly husbands are told to place themselves in harmony with their wives.  And then wives are told to place themselves in harmony with their husbands, because a husband is the head of his wife.  What are we to make of that?  We might observe that the very next words (in the same sentence?) are, “But rather as the church submits to Christ, just so also the wives to their husbands in all things.”

We are starting to get far afield from the point of this post, which is that “modern” interpretations of submission as some sort of spiritual harmony rather than misogynist subjugation are in fact much more grounded in the text than they might first appear.  But to carry things through to conclusion, at this point we really must confront the issue of just how the church submits to Christ.  If we imagine that Christ is the head of the church in that he gets to tell the Church what to do and what not to do and sets punishments for the church when it contravenes his words, then I suppose we really are in trouble.  But I don’t think that is either a textually or historically correct view of Christ’s relationship with the church.  Paul does not define Christian morality in terms of obedience to Christ’s dictates (not that Christ had a great many moral dictates in the first place, so far as we know), but rather in terms of reaction to being.  We are the church, and therefore we act in a certain way.  I don’t want to further digress by backing up that assertion with other examples from the Pauline corpus, but even the text before us, which has a certain moralistic cast (talking about how best to live life in the moment), has nothing to do with what Christ tells the church to do.  If the reader can accept this morality-from-status assertion for now (cf. Ephesians 5:1-14, the lead-in to this whole thing, which also ties direct exhortation towards specific moral behavior not to the command of Christ, but to the status of the believer), we may observe that this is a perfectly unobjectionable way for a married woman to model her life.  She alters her behavior, to the extent that she alters it, not because her husband tells her to do anything, but simply because she is married to the man she chose to marry.  We might object if he were ordering her about, but it would be quixotic if she chose to marry him and that choice meant nothing to the way she acted.

And yet, I think, the egalitarian (feminist, if you like) objection to this passage is not so much that it envisions a husband as his wife’s dictator so much as that it envisions the husband as superior to the wife at all (even if that superiority doesn’t involve subjugation).  The response I am used to in sermons to this objection is essentially incredulity: a reader who seriously thinks that Christ, or even Paul, teaches that men are superior to women must simply not be very familiar with the whole body of our extant texts.  And I do think there is something to that.  It is difficult to imagine that the man who wrote that there is neither man nor woman in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28) believed that in the proper Godly order of things, men were superior to women.

Still, let us consider the text before us in light of this objection.  It must be admitted, for one thing, that Paul uses different language towards husbands and wives.  Even if we don’t believe those exhortations to set up an inherent superior-inferior relationship, they aren’t literally the same.  Neither does Paul say, "... submitting to one another in fear of Christ, husbands and wives to each other ..." or something like that.

On the subject of sameness, however, we might observe that the principle relationship between Christ and the church in this passage is that the church is the same flesh as Christ: “That we are the limbs of his body,” it says; and earlier, “himself the savior of the body.”  Paul is not here just trotting out his familiar turn of phrase for the church, “the body of Christ.”  He spends some time discussing how, through Christ’s sacrifice of himself, the church becomes to Christ as Christ himself.  “Loving his wife as himself,” he says, “for nobody ever hated his own flesh.”  Again, the theme of spiritual harmony - and, significantly, of equality (indeed, identity).

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the church is Christ in all respects, indistinguishable from God himself.  Rather, I want to point out what Paul is pointing out.  Paul is plainly using Christ’s relationship with the church as a metaphor here, and I think it is an uncontroversial assertion that when one uses a metaphor, one intends only to highlight certain similarities and not others.  When Lincoln used the metaphor of birth for the American War for Independence in the Gettysburg Address, he did not mean that the Revolution was like birth in all respects.  Figuring out in what respects a metaphor applies and in what respects it does not (for instance, presumably Lincoln did intend his birth metaphor to express the idea that a new entity was created through a tumultuous, blood-soaked process, but did not intend to express the idea that the new entity was incapable of existing on its own and would in fact be dependent upon its mother for a very long time, or that the new entity was incapable of rational thought) is something we have to do from context.

Here, Paul spends all of his words highlighting one particular similarity: that Christ went through a great deal of personal trouble vis a vis humanity in order to bring about a state of such harmony between man and God that humanity could be, as it were, Christ’s own flesh.  We might expound on other similarities between Christ-and-church and husband-and-wife, but this is the similarity that Paul is expounding, and I submit that if we take it farther than that we are simply riffing on our own.  To bring the metaphor home, the text here is saying that husbands should love their wives in such a way that they expend great effort, and brave what hazards may be, in order to bring about such a state of harmony with their wives that they are as inseparable as a person from his own body.  Is that something that only a husband can do, while the wife simply waits to be integrated?  I don't think so.  As every married person knows, after all, the process of altering your identity in light of your spouse - that which "the wives" are called to do - is not only an exceptionally active one, it is the very means by which two spouses harmonize with and become inseparable from each other.  The metaphors used when talking about wives and husbands are different, but the actual activity described is the same: husband and wife achieving a state of profound harmony, a metaphorical oneness.  So I am not really very comfortable saying that the text here is setting up some kind of second-class citizen status for wives.

So what are we left with?  We begin with a depiction of “submission” as an example of the mystic sort of harmony that is supposed to hold sway among all believers, which should put us off the idea that “submission” means subjugation right away.  Paul then goes on to give two more particular examples of what this sort of submission looks like, or perhaps applications of the principle.  It is, he says, the sort of thing that causes wives to care that they are married to their own husbands (and here I think we perhaps see why the text bothers to say “their own husbands,” instead of simply “their husbands,” as some translations have it - implicit in this profound, life-shaping recognition of choice is the fact that this man, and not just any man, is the one that I married).  It is, he says, the sort of thing that causes husbands to chance any consequences in the goal of achieving profound marital oneness.

As I said, these are far from original thoughts, and I hope that they are old hat to anybody who reads this.  But I also hope that, having read this, the reader may feel more confident that these are not attempts to dodge the real thrust of the passage, motivated by a modernist or feminist desire to twist the words of Scripture away from their original antiquated misogyny.  They are the real thrust of the passage, and it is those who have attempted (and attempt) to use the text to justify misogyny who do the twisting.

There are many like it ...

There is a long tradition in historical European martial arts (well, as long a tradition as there can be for a practice that is really only about thirty five years old) of modifying equipment.  Mostly this is because even after thirty-five years we are only just getting commercially produced practice gear specifically for HEMA, so for most of the past four decades people have had no choice but to repurpose other equipment.  Sometimes this results in less than satisfactory work-arounds.  But what is satisfactory is the way in which even small modifications can imbue a piece of gear with totemic significance.

A few weeks ago my studio went to a tournament for the first time (I should post more thoughts on tournaments later).  In preparation for the tournament, we had school patches ordered to put on our fencing jackets.  I sort of expected to dismiss this as a cynical marketing ploy.  I was surprised to discover that I didn’t.

Like a lot of my fellow students, I own an Axel Peterssen Pro fencing jacket, which incorporates a leather plastron in the front.  This poses certain difficulties from a sewing perspective, as the whole point of the plastron is to resist penetration by a sharp object (for instance, a steel trainer that breaks in the thrust rather than flexing like it’s supposed to).  Some students decided to glue their patches on.  Others decided to take it to a tailor.  But I found that it mattered to me a lot that I do it myself, the hard way, with needle and thread.  This wasn’t just free advertising for somebody’s business.  This was an expression of who I am as a fencer, and I needed to make it.  I am a student of the Akademie des Heiligen Schwertes, and the crest of that school has pride of place on the chest of my jacket.  Through Tristan’s teaching, I am associated with the New York Historical Fencing Association, and the crest of that school belongs on my left arm.

And then I realized that one day there might be others, and the order of patches might need to change.  As much as I love the Akademie, it might not be my school forever.  This is really a pretty disquieting thought, because I actually do love the Akademie a lot, but I am … well, me.  Whenever I leave, if I ever join another school, it will be important to me that the crest of that school take its place on my chest, and the AHS crest move to my arm.  Which of course will mean that the NYHFA crest move, and so on …

So I bought a leather needle and some upholstery thread, bought or borrowed some Velcro, and I lovingly added Velcro to my patches and jacket.  The stitching is not fabulous, but it is mine.  And now my fencing jacket is not just protective gear.  My jacket says, This is me.  This is where I come from.  These people have supported my development as a martial artist, and I honor them.

If my jacket describes who I am as a fencer, my waster - my, well, my sword - describes what fencing itself means to me.  When I went to fencing last week, my waster had a bright orange grip.  It got a few looks.  Of course there is a story behind it.

When I moved to New York, Blue Rose and Karyai gave me a month’s worth of fencing lessons as a going-away present.  I turned this into a Pentti+ Type III nylon waster, which for a variety of reasons I am quite happy with both as a solo drill and as a sparring tool.  The only thing I don’t like about it is the grip, which is more rectangular than oval (KDF requires a loose grip on the sword that can slide easily around the handle, and which rather awkward when the handle isn’t, you know, round).  As far as I can tell, nobody likes the grips on the Penttis, though they have enough other positive characteristics that they are still the international standard in synthetic wasters.  Some people (including some of my fellow students) are of the opinion that since tournaments don’t allow you to compete with your own Pentti, you might as well get used to the square grip.  But most of those people have steel trainers with much more realistic handles that they can use for drills.  Since I’m not likely to have a steel sword for a while, I decided to modify my Pentti’s handle.

The grip tape on mine was shredding anyway (nobody told me you aren’t supposed to fence while wearing rings), so I decided to insert some cardboard shims to round out the grip, and then rewrap the whole thing.  And then I thought, since I was going to be exposing the nylon of the handle anyway, maybe I should inscribe something on it.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe I was inspired by Shanah Van’s love tattoo.  Or maybe there’s just a universal impulse to inscribe things that are important to us.

I decided on a tennis overgrip for my new wrap, which in turn meant I needed to decide which color I was going to get, because apparently tennis overgrips come in a bewildering variety of colors.  Naturally, this decision could only be made from a heraldic standpoint, and naturally, the heraldry in question could not just be classical.

I had recently decided that whenever I finally get my steel trainers (I can only use one at a time, of course, but many people eventually acquire two, to train with a partner) I wanted one to have a green grip and the other a blue one.  In classical heraldry (much of which is surprisingly modern; of course I am aware medieval and even Renaissance heraldry was much more practical than the symbolism-laden construct that we have inherited), green is associated with hope, joy, and fidelity in love; while blue is associated with truth and loyalty.  In Mandalorian armor, green is associated with duty, while blue is associated with reliability.  These are fitting reminders for something that supports me as an absent father and husband and as a lawyer.  So I resolved to own a trainer with a green handle, named Ijaa’bora - Duty.  After that, eventually, one with a blue handle, named Ruusaan - Reliable One.  But with green and blue taken, what color should my Pentti be?

Ultimately I decided to answer that question by asking what my Pentti means to me.

Drilling with my Pentti is calm.  Even if I am tired and cranky from my run up and down the minor hills of Prospect Park, when I am on the knoll or in the hollow where I drill my mind is quiet, like it is when I am painting.  At the same time, it is deeply invigorating.  When I wield it during warm-up cuts in class, I feel my muscles awaken and my breathing deepen as my whole body looks forward to what is to come.  It is satisfying.  The end of a sparring session, when I have withstood an hour’s worth of sweat and blows and know that I could keep going, feels like the end of a dance.  And it is a symbol of my friends’ love for me.

So I no longer own just a Pentti+ Type III nylon waster.  I own Shereshoy, whose name means … well, shereshoy.  Openness to what life will bring, and the groundedness to eagerly seek it out.  The desire to live, and the drive forward into the unknown - which is, really, simply another facet of the desire not just to live but to live.  Shereshoy means … I think the best literal translation is to seize life.  But what it really means is joy.

In Mandalorian armor, the color associated with this lust for life is orange.  In classical heraldry, orange is associated with worthy ambition - a fine synergy for this foreign adventure of mine, and coincidentally related to Master Liechtenauer’s characterization of the art of fighting as the art that dignifies.

So I took down my Pentti from its hook on my door and carefully cut out the shims using a pattern cut from paper borrowed from my Brooklyn roommates, from cardboard that came from the chair I bought when I finally admitted in a deeper way that I am here, and not elsewhere.  Beneath the shims I carefully inscribed the handle with orange ink: ner gai cuyi shereshoy - “my name is Joy.”  I wrote it in Mandalorian to remind me of family, in the style of Greek dedications to remind me of friends.  Then I bound that up beneath my cardboard and sealed it with an orange tennis overgrip, and I hung Joy upon my door.

On Belief

I've been meaning to write about this for a long time, which means it isn't timely anymore, but oh well. I can't remember the last time I saw a convincing character of faith in science fiction. I suppose there aren't that many of them, but now that I think of it, I can't think of one. The first one I can remember is a Christian monk in Babylon 5who explains to a Minbari that the emotional heart of his religion is Jesus deciding not to run away in Gethsemane. Maybe that's the best one; I suppose his statement could be true for a person who takes his Christianity seriously. Shepard Book is a great character, but he feels to me like he's written by a man who doesn't understand Christianity. Maybe that's unfair of me. His remarks on faith in Serenity tweak a pet peeve that I have about belief, better illustrated by Elizabeth Shaw from Prometheus. "Because that's what I choose to believe," her father tells her when asked how he knows that people go some place beautiful when they die. The idea clearly resonated with Shaw, who repeats the sentiment in environments that are certain to be hostile to it. She plants it like a standard, an iconoclastic banner ready to blow the mind of anybody with the guts to self-examine themselves. She states it as if it is brave. But it's not brave to believe something because one chooses to believe it. It's either craven or perfectly normal. It can be craven, because intellectually honest people don't choose to believe anything without reasons that support their choice, and intellectual dishonesty is cowardly almost by definition. It can be perfectly normal because the reasons we have to support our beliefs are never good enough to satisfy every critic. In the end, we all choose a standard of proof that we demand our reasons meet, but that standard is never high enough to answer every conceivable objection. The world does not admit of airtight proof. Either way - both ways - choosing to believe is not a salient feature of religion. I'm being guilty of projecting my own version of Christianity on everybody's version of religion here, but I'm pretty sure that statement holds up. Religion is not about the act of believing in itself, nor the act of choosing to believe. I can see how it seems that way to outsiders - if a person holds a belief that is surprising to you, one that seems inadequately supported, it's natural to look for reasons other than evidence to support their belief, and naked will is an attractive possibility. But that's not what it looks like from the inside. Real religious people don't go around telling each other that they hold their beliefs because they choose to. They don't evangelize by telling non-believers that they have to choose to believe. Real religious people think they have good reasons to believe their religions are accurate, the same way that they think they have good reasons to believe in anything else they believe. (I'm going to narrow the scope of my statements to Christianity now, because I'm beginning to tread in waters I feel less sure of - though I don't mean to imply that what follows isn't true of other religions.) Nevertheless, the idea of believing something based on will alone is an attractive one. Human beings love will; the notion that our own will can stand defiant against all forces that would change it is a romantic one. And religion - at least, Christianity - does promote such a scenario. But it isn't belief. Christianity never says that one should simply choose to believe. What it does say is that one should simply choose to love. All people have character traits, and commit actions, that make them unworthy of love. Christianity says not to care. It doesn't say that those things aren't true - people really are unworthy of love. It doesn't say to focus on people's good traits rather than their bad traits. That's just lowering the standard of worthiness, and Christianity assiduously avoids that. It never says, "Well, if you just focus on these characteristics, this person is worth loving." It only ever says, "This person, taken as a whole, does not give you adequate reason to love them. Love them anyway." I hate to adduce John 3:16 when it can be avoided (I don't want to sound like a tone-deaf placard-waving idiot), but this is one of those times when that verse is important. The great triumph of the will in Christianity is to say, "I love you." Not "I love you even though ..." or "I love you because of your ..." but just "I love you." God did not love us because we were worth it. He did not love us by ignoring our bad parts and loving our good parts. He just did, because that's the kind of entity he is. The nature of God, in essence, was more compelling than the extrinsic evidence. That is what this fantasy of choosing is really about - reaching inside ourselves and finding a motivation that does not change the evidence, but overrides it. When life gives us reasons to doubt our faith, Christianity does not tell us to choose to believe anyway. We're told to deal with them, and see whether they warrant our unbelief or not. But when people give us reasons not to love them, Christianity does tell us to choose to love them anyway. Not because they're worth it. Because that's what we choose to do.