XXX. A Motive Power to Salvation In 1 Timothy 2:9-12, after an argument of a very involved Judaic type, difficult for Western thought to comprehend, Paul is led on to a profound remark, very characteristic of his special view. The commentators differ widely about its meaning, but we need not linger over their arguments, as they all fail to convince one another or us. In the primordial association with the power of evil, the typical woman, the representative of the race. Eve, was led into transgression, but the saving power remains in her own nature: “She shall be saved by means of motherhood” (τεκνογονία). What is the meaning of this saying? Dissension reigns, and hardly any interpreter agrees with any other.
We must note in the outset that the preposition 8ta with the genitive means “by means of,” and that interpretations which take it as “by reason of motherhood” must be rejected. Motherhood is the means through which woman “shall gain salvation if her action is guided by faith, love, thankfulness, and self-restraint”. The whole question turns on what Paul meant when he used this term τεκνογονία. He is thinking philosophically, and not of a mere physical process. We have to take into consideration the whole manner of expression in Greek philosophic thought, and the whole history of Greek progress in language and in thought from the simple and concrete to the philosophic and abstract, from Homer to Aristotle and Paul. In that progress the Greek language was engaged in the creation of abstract nouns, just as Greek thought was teaching itself to generalise and to distinguish between ideas which are bound up with one another in the concrete world. If we had before us the works of Athenodorus the Tarsian, we should be better able to appreciate the linguistic task which Paul had to perform when he sought to express in Greek a Christian philosophy, and better able to understand the way in which he attempted to solve the problem before him. (St. Paul the Traveller, p. 354; The Cities of St. Paul, p. 216 ff.)
We must remember how simple and concrete are often the terms by which Greek attempted to express the highest thoughts of moral and metaphysical philosophy. Plato hardly attempted to create a language of the higher philosophy. He argues in the concrete example; he takes refuge in metaphor and poetry and myth, when he must attempt to give expression to the highest philosophical ideas. Aristotle set himself to create a technical terminology in the region of metaphysics; and how simple are his means! The essential nature of a thing is “the what-is-it?” of the thing (τὸ τί ἐστι), i.e. “the answer to the question. What is it?” The goodness, in its most ideal and abstract conception, of a thing τὸ ἀγαθῷ εἶναι: the law of its development is τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι. (I give my own idea of this much-disputed metaphysical term, which perhaps nobody will accept as a translation; but at least all recognise that the idea in Aristotle’s mind was highly abstract and metaphysical, while the words are chosen from the commonest range of expression used by every Greek peasant.) How perfectly plain and common are the words! How close to ordinary life! And yet what a lofty philosophic sense does Aristotle read into them. Or again, let us turn to the Attic tragedy, which sounded the depths and estimated the heights of human feeling.
I take an example which leads up suitably to the thought in this passage of the Tarsian Apostle — a passage the discussion of which by a modern writer (I have tried in vain to recall the writer and the book. My memory in a vague way connects the incident with George Eliot.) first opened to me the realm of Greek thought, and showed me, when I was a student in Aberdeen, how different is interpretation from translation, and how easily one may learn to translate without having any conception of the real meaning of an ancient Greek poet.
Sophocles in the Electra pictures Clytemnestra as she realises the dread bond of emotion that unites a mother to her son. She appreciates its power all the better that it is unwelcome to her. It is too strong for her, and masters her will. And how does she express this? She uses no abstract terms, but four of the simplest and most commonplace words, δεινὸν τὸ τίκτειν ἐστίν. Those who are content with translating according to the lexicon would render these words, “the giving birth to a child is a painful thing,” and miss all the wealth of feeling and thought that lies in them. There cannot be a doubt that Sophocles was expressing the truth (The context removes all doubt: the following words are enough —δεινὸν τὸτίκτειν ἐστιν·οὐδέγὰρ κακῶς πασχοντι μῖσος ὦν τέκῃπροσγίγνετια, which the late Professor Lewis Campbell renders — To be a mother hath a marvellous power, No injury can make one hate one’s child. Moreover, the translation which is condemned in the text above approaches perilously near the grammatical crime of taking the present infinitive in the sense of the aorist infinitive.) (which every one must appreciate in the real experiences of life) that there is no power in human nature more tremendous, more overmastering, more dread to contemplate in some of its manifestations, than the tie of motherhood. Only when the human nature in her is deadened and brutalised or buried, can the woman become stronger than that tie. It is the divine strength moving in her, and it can bend or break her, if she resists. In this feeling of motherhood Paul found the power that he needed for his purpose. Here is the Divine strength in the nature of woman, which can drive her as it will, and which will be her salvation, “if she continue in faith and love and thanksgiving with sober-mindedness”; but which may drive her in the wrong direction if it be not guided by those qualities. The idea of self-developing power, of growth, of striving towards an end outside of oneself, always underlies Paul’s conception of the relation of a human being towards God, To his Greek hearers he compares the true Christian life to the straining effort of a runner competing for the prize, because he knew that there he touched a feeling which was extraordinarily strong in the mind of a Greek man. In the woman’s nature the maternal instinct presented itself as a force that had more absolute power over her than any emotion in a man’s nature had over him. Paul rarely touches on the love between the sexes, and had small respect for it as a divine emotion capable under proper guidance of working out the salvation of either man or woman. In giving expression to this psychological observation, Paul was under the influence of his own time, when philosophical expression was more developed. Abstract nouns had been created in great numbers to express the higher ideas of thought; an abstract noun was needed to express this idea of the power of maternal instinct; and Paul found it in τεκνογονία, which is a simpler and certainly not a less reasonable or correct term than a manufactured word like “philoprogenitiveness” or a question-begging circumlocution like “maternal instinct”. This Greek term may justly be translated “motherhood”.
Thus, as so often elsewhere in the Pauline Epistles, the difficulty which has been felt in catching his meaning is caused by taking a wrong point of view and disappears as soon as one looks from the right point of view. The “maternal instinct” does not require actual physical motherhood. It maybe immensely powerful in a childless woman and may be her salvation, though it is, of course, quickened in a wonderful degree towards her own child, and is often dormant until so quickened.
I do not remember that Paul touches this spring of life in any of his earlier letters. But what rational critic would find in that any proof that this letter is not his composition? Is there any of Paul’s letters which does not throw its own distinct rays of light on his character? Is there any that can be cut away without narrowing and impoverishing to some degree our knowledge of his nature? Must we regard it as an essential condition in proving the genuineness of any of his Epistles that it should contain nothing which widens our knowledge of him or throws new light on his character? Rather, it would be a conclusive reason against the Pauline authorship of a letter, if its acceptance or rejection made no difference to our conception of the Apostle’s personality. Paul could not write a letter without revealing something new about his own nature.
Now we observe that, in writing to Timothy, Paul addressed one who had gained from his early home life a strong sense of what maternal feeling is. Paul had a marvellous power of unconsciously sympathising with his correspondents. It is only in writing to Timothy that he gives a picture of home life (2 Timothy 1:5) under a mother’s care. He uses the word “mother” twice in writing to Timothy: except in two quotations from the Old Testament (Ephesians 5:31, Ephesians 6:2), he uses it only three times in all the rest of his letters put together (Romans 16:13, as a metaphor to express his affection for a friend’s mother; (With this compare1 Timothy 5:2παρακάλει. . .πρεσβυτέρας ὡς μητέρας.)Galatians 1:15, Galatians 4:26, in a generic and unemotional sense). He does not indeed show the want of love for a mother which is conspicuous in Horace, (The writer has studied this side of Horace’s poetry in Macmillan’s Magazine, Oct., 1897, pp. 450-457, on “The Childhood of Horace,” and advanced a theory to account for it. Horace never alludes to a mother’s care, but sometimes to a mother’s carelessness; he alludes tenderly to a nurse’s care; he never mentions his own mother; he mentions with fond memory his father and his nurse (when the right text is read in a familiar passage of the Third Book of the Odes, Altricis Pulliae).) but except in sympathy with Timothy he nowhere shows a deep sense of what a mother is and feels and does to her child.
These considerations explain why two words otherwise unknown in Paul’s writings (Unknown also elsewhere in the New Testament.) are forced on him in expressing his thought on this subject. The word for grandmother is “un-Pauline”; but where else could Paul use it except in 2 Timothy 1:5? where else does his interest in family life appear? The word for motherhood is used only in 1 Timothy 2:15, but that is the only place in which he speaks of the idea that lies in the word. The wider terminology of certain Epistles, called through a too narrow outlook “un-Pauline,” really corresponds to and is the inevitable result of the wider range of his thought. (The use of the verbτεκνογονεῖνin the physical sense in1 Timothy 5:14is no proof that the abstract noun derived from it must also have the physical sense in Paul. Sophocles usesτίκτεινoften in the physical sense; but that does not prevent him from employing it in the philosophic or emotional sense in the passage quoted above.)
