Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The head of the man is Christ. Which Christ? The one who is not the man's author? For he set down “head” to mean authority, and authority belongs to none but the author. Whose head, in fact, is meant? Certainly the one of whom he goes on to say, “A male must not veil his head, seeing he bears the likeness and glory of God.” So then, if it is the Creator's likeness he bears (for the Creator, looking upon Christ his Word, the man yet to be, said, “Let us fashion man after our likeness and image”), how could I answer to some head other than the one whose likeness marks me? Bearing as I do the Creator's own likeness, no rival headship can find a place in me. But then why should the woman be obliged to have power set over her head? If it is because she was made from the man and for the man's sake, according to the Creator's own institution, then the apostle has likewise taken care of her discipline out of that very institution from which he explains the grounds of the discipline. He adds too, “Because of the angels.” Whose angels? That is, whose? If they are the Creator's apostates, then rightly so — that her face, which once scandalized them, should now bear some mark of humble dress and dimmed beauty. But if they are angels of some other god, why the caution — when not even the Marcionites themselves go chasing women? We have already shown many times that the apostle lists heresies among evils, and that those are to be reckoned sound who flee heresies as an evil. Likewise, by the sacrament of bread and cup we have already proved, back in the Gospel, the reality of the Lord's body and blood, against Marcion's phantom. And that every mention of judgment belongs to the Creator, as the God who judges, has been argued through nearly the whole work. Now I speak of the spiritual gifts — that these too were promised to Christ by the Creator, under this rule, which I think most fair: that no fulfillment is to be credited to any other than the one whose promise has been proved. Isaiah declared: “There shall come forth a rod from the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise from the root, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” Then he catalogues its several forms: “Upon him shall rest a breath granting insight and discernment, a breath of counsel joined to strength, a breath bringing knowledge together with reverence, and he shall be filled with a breath of awe toward God.” He shows Christ arising in the figure of a flower, sprung from a rod that came from the root of Jesse — that is, from the virgin of David's line, the son of Jesse — in whom Christ the whole substance of the Spirit was to reside, not as something to come upon him afterward, as though he who had always been the Spirit of God, even before taking flesh, had somehow lacked it — lest from this you argue that the prophecy pertains to some Christ who, merely as a man descended from David's stock, was afterward to obtain his God's Spirit — but rather because, from the moment he flowered forth in flesh taken from David's line, every working of spiritual grace was to rest in him, and to cease and come to an end, so far as the Jews were concerned; just as the fact itself testifies, since from that point the Creator's Spirit breathes among them no more, wisdom and the skilled architect and counselor and prophet having been taken away from Judea, so that this is fulfilled: “The Law and the prophets, until John.” Now hear how he declared, too, that once Christ had been received up into heaven, spiritual gifts would follow. “He went up to the heights” — meaning heaven; “he took captivity itself as his captive” — meaning death, or our bondage; “he distributed gifts to mankind's sons” — meaning the freely-given endowments we term charisms. Aptly he writes “to mankind's sons,” rather than plainly “to men,” pointing us toward those sons of men — that is, men in the fullest sense, the apostles. For in the Gospel, he says, “I have begotten you,” and, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again.” Now too there is that further promise of the Spirit, made outright through Joel: “And in those final days it shall come to pass, says the Lord, that I will pour forth my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters will speak as prophets, and on my menservants and my maidservants alike I will pour forth of my own Spirit in those days.” And certainly, if the Creator promised the grace of the Spirit for the last days, and Christ, the dispenser of spiritual gifts, appeared in the last days — the apostle saying, “Yet once the appointed time had run its course, God dispatched his own Son,” and elsewhere, “For the season now stands compressed, drawing to its close” — it is plain, from the very proclamation about the last times, that this grace of the Spirit belongs to Christ the preacher. Compare, finally, the apostle's list of gifts with Isaiah's. “One person,” he says, “receives by the Spirit a message of wisdom” — and Isaiah too, at the very outset, named a breath granting wisdom. “Another gets a message bearing on knowledge” — match that to the breath of discernment joined with counsel. “Another, faith, worked by the identical Spirit” — match that to the breath of reverence and awe toward God. “Another receives powers to heal, another the working of miracles” — match that to the breath of strength. “Another prophecy, another the testing of spirits, another the various tongues, another their interpretation” — match all these to the breath of knowledge. See how the apostle, both in distributing the gifts of the one Spirit and in expounding the prophet's particulars, agrees with him. I might add this too: the very fact that he likened the unity of the varied charisms to the framework of our body, joined together through its many diverse members, shows that the same Lord governs both the human body and the Holy Spirit — the one who was unwilling that the excellences of the charisms should exist in the body of the Spirit which he had not likewise placed in the human body; who also instructed the apostle, by that chief commandment which Christ himself endorsed, that love is to be set above all the charisms: “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself.” And if he recalls something written in the Law — that the Creator would speak in other tongues and other lips — by this recollection he confirms the charism of tongues; nor here either can he be seen to have confirmed, by his preaching, a charism belonging to some alien god. So too, when he prescribes silence for women in the church — that they should not speak, at least for the sake of learning (though he has already shown that they too have the right to prophesy, since he places a veil even upon the woman who prophesies) — he draws the authority for the woman's subjection from the Law, a Law which, let me say once for all, she ought to have known only for her own undoing. But let us now step back from spiritual matters, and let the facts themselves prove which of us claims his own God rashly, and whether it can be turned against my side, that the Creator promised these gifts for his Christ not yet revealed, as though destined for the Jews alone, to have their proper workings in their proper time, in their proper Christ, and among their proper people. Let Marcion, then, produce the gifts of his god — some prophets who nonetheless spoke not from human sense but from the Spirit of God, who both foretold things to come and laid bare the secrets of the heart; let him bring forth some psalm, some vision, some prayer — spiritual, at least, uttered in ecstasy, that is, in a trance, if some interpretation of tongues has attended it; let him prove to me as well that some woman prophesied among his people, some grand claim from those more sanctified females of his. If all these things are more readily produced by me — and certainly in agreement with the rules and arrangements and disciplines of the Creator — then without doubt the Christ, the Spirit, and the apostle will belong to my God. Whoever wishes to press the claim has my declaration to hand.
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