Augustine on Headship in the Home
According to Augustine, “If the husband is the head, the husband ought to live more virtuously and go ahead of his wife into all good deeds”
As a guest preacher, probably sometime in the early fifth century, Augustine of Hippo preached a sermon on the Ten Commandments. Throughout the sermon, he draws an analogy between each of God’s commands and the strings of a ten-stringed musical instrument (see Psalm 33:2). He uses the same analogy elsewhere, most notably in Enarrationes in Psalmos.
As part of his exposition of the prohibition on adultery, Augustine urges men to be even more careful than their wives in living chaste and holy lives, directly addressing them with these words:
You ought to lead your wife in virtue—remember, chastity is a virtue—but instead you flop on the couch after a single surge of desire! You want to conquer your wife, but you yourself lie there on the couch, conquered by lust. You are the head of your wife—“the husband is the head of the wife”—but your wife is going ahead of you to God.
Do you want your household to hang its head downward? Whenever a wife lives a better and more virtuous life than her husband, that’s when the household hangs its head downward. If the husband is the head, the husband ought to live more virtuously and go ahead of his wife into all good deeds, so that she may imitate her husband and follow her head. Christ is the head of the church, and the church is ordered to follow its head and walk in the footsteps of its head, so to speak. In the same way, a household has a husband as its head and a wife as its body. Where the head leads, the body follows.
So why does the “head” keep wanting to turn where it doesn’t want the body to follow? Why does the husband head in a direction that he doesn’t want his wife to follow? In this command, the Word of God becomes your enemy, if you men do not will to do what the Word of God wills you to do. (Sermo 90:3)
When it comes to our apologetics for a Christian view of sex and sexuality, there are three points of particular interest in this proclamation from Augustine:
What does “adultery” mean in the Ten Commandments? Augustine understands the prohibition against adultery to forbid not only sexual affairs involving married persons but also every act of sex outside the context of a man and woman who are married to each other. There is no space in Augustine’s thought for any sexual activity outside the marriage of a man and a woman to be perceived as godly or good.
Should men be held to the same sexual standards as women? Augustine holds men to a high standard that would have seemed radical and extreme in his context. He commands men to be the ones who take primary responsibility for chastity and purity, setting an example in their own households and beyond—which is the opposite of what our culture, and even the church, has frequently allowed. Later in the sermon, Augustine goes on to say to the men,
You’ve heard of wives being taken to court because they’re found with houseboys. But what about a man taken to court because he was found with his servant girl? No one’s ever heard of that—but that’s just as much a sin! It is not divine truth that makes a man seem more innocent in this act that’s equally sinful; it’s human wrongheadedness. … After this sermon, wives are going to complain to their husbands, ‘What you are doing is not right. We both heard [the preacher] saying so! We are Christians. So give to me what you require of me. I owe you my faithfulness, you owe me your faithfulness, and we both owe Christ our faithfulness. Even if you lie to me, you can’t lie to the One to whom we both belong; you can’t deceive the One who bought us.” (Sermon 90:4)
What does “head” mean in Ephesians 5:23? By the time Augustine preaches this sermon, the notion that “head” in Ephesians 5:23 refers to authority or leadership seems to be assumed. The bishop of Hippo clearly understands Paul’s words in Ephesians to describe headship that involves a wife following her husband’s lead, and Augustine does not feel at all compelled to defend this interpretation. What Augustine describes is clearly a headship of positive imitation rather than a demanding or authoritarian domination. To put it another way, what the wife is called to follow not a command but an example. It is, therefore, as much a headship of virtuous responsibility as it is of authority. Nonetheless, Augustine clearly understood Paul’s metaphorical usage of “head” to imply leadership not merely a “source.” Of course, this Latin text from the fifth century does not settle the longstanding question of whether or not “head” (κεφαλή) entailed some measure of authority in the first-century Greek of Ephesians 5:23, though the ancient evidence consistently leans toward “head” as a term that implied leadership. Still, it’s important to recognize that, by the time of Augustine, this traditional understanding of “head” was embraced without objection.
Love this! Such a timely message for families of all ages in our day. This is encouragement and instruction for men of the family of faith who struggle with the chaos of our cultural/societal setting. Well said Dr. Jones!