Argument

Corinth is now the first city of Greece, and in the old days too it prided itself on many advantages of this life, and above all on its great wealth. That is why one of the pagan writers called the place “the rich.” For it lies on the isthmus of the Peloponnese and was very well placed for trade. The city was also full of orators and philosophers, and one of the seven who were called the wise men came, I think, from this city. Now I have mentioned these things not to show off, nor to make a display of great learning — for what is there, after all, in knowing such things? — but because they are useful to us for the argument of the letter. [a]

Paul himself also suffered many things in this city. Christ, too, appears to him in this city and says (Acts 18, verse 10), “Do not be silent, but speak, for I have many people in this city”; and he stayed there two years. In this city (Acts 19, verse 16) the demon also came out, the one the Jews tried to cast out and suffered so badly for it. In this city those of the magicians who repented gathered their books together and burned them, and the total came to fifty thousand (Acts 19, verse 18). In this city too, in the time of Gallio the proconsul, Paul was beaten before the judgment seat.

So the devil saw that a great and populous city had taken hold of the truth — a city admired for its wealth and its wisdom, and the head of Greece (for Athens and Sparta were in a miserable state then, and have been ever since, their power having long ago slipped away from them). And he saw that they had received the word of God with great eagerness. What does he do? He divides the people. For he knew that even the strongest kingdom of all, if it is divided against itself, will not stand. And for this scheme he had a foothold in the wealth and the wisdom of the inhabitants. So certain men formed parties of their own and, appointing themselves, made themselves leaders of the people. Some sided with these and some with those: with one sort because they were rich, with another because they were wise and able to teach something out of the ordinary. These men, for their part, took them in and set themselves up — supposedly — to teach more than the apostle had. He was hinting at this when he said, “I was not able to speak to you as to spiritual people” (First Corinthians 3, verse 1). Plainly it was not his inability but their weakness that kept them from being taught more fully. And this too — “You have become rich without us” (First Corinthians 4, verse 8) — is the remark of a man pointing in the same direction. And this was no small matter, but the most destructive thing of all: that the church should be torn apart. [h]

Besides these, another sin was committed there openly. A man who had had sexual relations with his stepmother not only escaped rebuke, but was even a leader of the crowd, and gave his followers reason to be conceited. That is why he says (First Corinthians 5, verse 2), “And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned.” After this, again, certain men who claimed to be of the more mature sort, and who out of gluttony ate food sacrificed to idols and reclined at table in the temples, were bringing everything to ruin. Others again had quarrels and disputes about money, and took every matter of that kind to the pagan courts. Many men wearing long hair also went about among them, and he orders them to be shorn. There was another fault besides, and no small one: they ate in the churches apart, by themselves, and gave no share to the needy.

They were going wrong on another point too: they were puffed up over the gifts, and so were jealous of one another, and this was also the chief cause of the church’s being torn apart. The teaching about the resurrection was limping among them as well. Some of them had no firm belief that there is any resurrection of bodies, because they still carried the disease of Greek folly. For indeed all these things were the offspring of the madness that belongs to pagan philosophy, and she was the mother of every mischief. That is also why they had become divided: in this too they had learned from the philosophers. For the philosophers were no less at odds with one another. Out of love of power and empty glory they were always contradicting each other’s opinions, and they were bent on discovering something new to add to everything that had gone before. And the cause of this was that they had begun to entrust themselves to reasonings.

They had written to him, then, by the hand of Fortunatus, Stephanas and Achaicus, and by them he himself also writes; he makes this clear at the end of the letter. They did not write about all these matters, however, but about marriage and virginity. That is why he said (First Corinthians 7, verse 1), “Now concerning the things you wrote about,” and so on. And he goes on to give instructions both on the points they had written about and on those they had not, since he had learned all their failings accurately. He sends Timothy too, along with the letter, knowing that letters do indeed carry great force, but that the presence of his disciple would add not a little to them. [n]

Now those who had divided the church among themselves were ashamed to seem to have done it out of love of show, and so they invented cloaks for what had happened: they were, supposedly, teaching more perfect doctrines and were wiser than everyone else. So Paul first sets himself against the disease itself, pulling up the root of the evils and its offshoot, the spirit of separation. And he speaks with great boldness, for these were his own disciples, more than any others. That is why he says (First Corinthians 9, verse 2), “If I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you; for you are the seal of my apostleship.” Moreover, they were in a weaker state than the others, to say the least. That is why he says (First Corinthians 3, verses 1 and 2), “For I have not spoken to you as to spiritual people; for until now you were not able, and even now you are not yet able.” (He says this so that they would not suppose he speaks this way about the past alone.)

It was utterly unlikely, however, that all of them had been corrupted. On the contrary, there were some among them who were very holy. He showed this in the middle of the letter, where he says (First Corinthians 4, verses 3 and 6), “To me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you,” and adds, “These things I have figuratively transferred to myself and Apollos.” Since, then, all these evils sprang from arrogance, and from people’s thinking that they knew something out of the ordinary, he purges this away first of all, and at the very beginning he says: