The Other’s Conscience and Christ the Head

…for our very selves, made his own blood gush out from his own side, mingled with water, when the soldiers of Pilate pierced him with the spear (John 19:34).

He brings forward the whole story in Numbers, teaching that those who had been baptized in the cloud and in the sea, and had been counted worthy of the spiritual food, slipped because they ate with the idolaters (1 Corinthians 10:2–5; Numbers 25:1–2). And “they rose up to play” stands for committing fornication with the Midianite women (1 Corinthians 10:7–8; compare Numbers 25:6).

“Conscience, I mean, not one’s own, but the other’s” (1 Corinthians 10:29).

So for conscience’ sake one must abstain from what one ought to abstain from. And by conscience I mean not one’s own, for one’s own is the conscience of the one with knowledge, but the other’s, so that he may not be built up in the wrong way (compare 1 Corinthians 8:10), copying in his ignorance what he does not understand, and so become a man who despises instead of a man of great soul.

Tome Four. Discourse Four.

“But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:3).

Some of those in Corinth were newly established in the faith and did not know the right manner of prayer. They had given the faith a home in themselves, but they had not yet learned exactly how one ought to enter the house of God. They came to pray to God and to offer their petitions for themselves, and then Paul found this being done in a most unseemly form. For the men made their approach without uncovering their heads of their customary coverings, and the women likewise came before God with their hair unshaded and uncovered, while nature all but cried out against them both. For nature has given openness to the man, while by modesty it draws the woman in toward seemliness.

Since it was right that he should put them to shame with compelling arguments, so that they would choose to think as they ought, and that he should make the law of nature a kind of umpire of what befits each, Paul tries to persuade them from the natural law to think as they ought, and he goes back to the making of man in the beginning.

By “head” he here means the archetypal beauty. Each of those named here, being enriched with its image, may rightly be understood to have received as a portion a kind of noble descent that in some way belongs to their very being, or, to put it another way, a sameness of nature.

For the first man, that is, Adam, came into being according to the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), for so the Creator of all says somewhere: “For in the image of God I made man” (Genesis 9:6). So the head of man is Christ: the archetype as God, and also of the same form with us by the law of our nature when he appeared as man, although the Word is God. Indeed, everywhere he calls himself Son of Man, although his birth from God the Father is beyond words.

Then the woman came into being according to the image and likeness of man, that is, of Adam. She is in no way of a different stock, but rather of one nature and one form with him. And the forefather Adam himself plainly confessed this when he said, “This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” and what follows (Genesis 2:23).

Some say that the Son has come into being, like the rest of the creatures, of which, they say, Christ is the head, “for the head of every man is Christ.” Before anything else they must consider that the force of their blasphemy will not touch only their teaching about the Son, but, rushing on as in an unchecked course, will drive right through to the Father himself. And how, I will tell.

For if they say that the Word who is from God the Father has come into being, and that it is right to count him among the creatures because he is the head of every man, how would the Father himself not be thought, in the same way, to be created and made, if indeed he is the head of a Son who is related by his very being to us, that is, to creatures (1 Corinthians 11:3)? For, as they themselves say, the head is in every way and altogether bound to the rest of the body by natural laws, so as to be one and the same with it. Then, by way of the Son, the kinship with every man will reach God the Father himself as well. How, then, does he still rise above the nature of things that have come into being? Or whom are we to seek as the Creator of all?