CHAPTER XIV PAUL’S CONVERSION

Hitherto my study of Christian or Jewish literature had never followed my intentions. I had intended to read Paul continuously. But first Isaiah, then David, then Moses, and then Isaiah again, had intervened. I was going forward all the while, but by a winding course, like a stream among hills and rocks. Now again I have to describe how—although I sat down with a determination to digress no more but to read through the epistles from the beginning to the end—I was led off to another investigation.

The first phrase in the volume did not long occupy me. True, I had greatly disliked it when I first glanced at it, a few days ago—“Paul a slave of Jesus Christ.” “Slave” was always used by Epictetus in a bad sense, and I had then thought it savoured of servility. But now I knew that the translation of Isaiah often used it to denote a devoted servant of God; and it seemed to me that Paul had perhaps no other word that could so well express how he felt bound to service by Christ’s “constraining love.”

Nor did the next words now cause me much difficulty:—“Called to be an apostle, set apart to preach the good tidings of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy scriptures.” Scaurus had told me how Epictetus had borrowed from the Christians this notion of being “called” to bear testimony to God. Whether he was right or wrong, he had prepared me to find “called” in such a passage as this. It was connected here with an “apostle,” that is, someone “sent” by God. This, too, seemed natural. Though Epictetus did[126] not use the noun, he often used the verb to describe his ideal Cynic—and especially Diogenes—as being “sent” to proclaim the divine law. “Set apart” I understood to mean “set apart” by special endowments of body and mind such as Epictetus frequently attributed to Socrates and Diogenes.

As to the “good tidings,” I knew that Epictetus would have considered it to be a message from God to this effect, “Children, I have placed your true happiness in your own control. Take it from yourselves, each of you, from that which is within you.” But what was Paul’s “good tidings”? Isaiah had described God’s messengers as “proclaiming good tidings,” namely, that God was coming to the aid of men: “As a shepherd will He shepherd His flock and with His arm will He gather the lambs.” Epictetus, as I have shewn above, scoffed at this metaphor of “shepherd.” But I could not help liking it. Homer used it about kings, Isaiah about God. I thought Paul meant, in part, that God would manifest Himself as the righteous King.

But I knew that Paul must also mean more, and that he would not have claimed the attention of the Romans for a mere repetition of an ancient written prophecy. Any child able to read could have repeated that. Paul must have more good news—either about the Shepherd, or about the time, or about the certainty of His coming. At this point, it occurred to me, “Why wait for the gospels that Flaccus is to send me? Why not search through the epistles to find out what Paul’s gospel is?” But I checked myself, saying, “No more digressions.” The next words were these: “Concerning His Son, who came into being from the seed of David according to the flesh; who was defined Son of God, in power, according to the spirit of holiness, from the resurrection of the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” These words I have translated literally and obscurely so as to indicate to the reader how exceedingly obscure they seemed to me. “I must pass on,” I said, “I can make nothing of this. What follows may make things clearer.”

I began to read on, but soon desisted. The words that followed took no hold of my mind. I tried, and tried again, but was irresistibly dragged back to “resurrection of the dead,” and “power,” and “spirit of holiness,” and “defined”—especially[127] to “resurrection.” What kind of “resurrection”? During my childhood I had heard my father tell a story or legend how, just before the battle of Philippi, the spirit of the great Julius appeared to Brutus, saying “Thou shalt see me at Philippi.” There Brutus slew himself. And Scaurus had remarked that a similar fate had overtaken others of the conspirators; so that some might declare that Julius had power to rise from the grave and turn the swords of his assassins against themselves. That, if true, was an instance of the power of a man, or a man-god, rising from the dead in a spirit of vengeance. But Paul spoke of “resurrection of the dead,” and “power,” in connexion with a “spirit of holiness.” Paul (I knew that already from the epistles) had been an enemy of Christ, as Brutus had been of C?sar. Comparing the two conquests, I asked whether more “power” might not be claimed for Christ’s “spirit of holiness” than for C?sar’s spirit of vengeance. For Paul, instead of being killed by Christ, had been made a willing and profitable “slave.” Brutus had been forced to turn his sword against himself; Paul had been constrained by love to turn his new sword, “the sword of the spirit,” against the enemies of his new Master.

What light did this passage throw on the causes of Paul’s conversion? I read it over again. Christ, he said, “came into being,” or was born, “of the seed of David according to the flesh.” Well, that might be one cause. A Jew would be more likely to accept as king a descendant of the house of David. And besides, Jews might think that such a birth fulfilled the prophecy above mentioned about “the root of Jesse.” But there might be many born “of the seed of David according to the flesh.” That which “defined” Christ to be “the Son of God” was “the resurrection of the dead”; and the “defining” was “in power” and “according to the spirit of holiness.” By these last words, Paul seemed to separate Christ’s resurrection from any such apparition as that of Julius, or other ghosts and phantasms; which may appear to this man or to that, and then vanish, either caused by evil magic, and doing an evil and magical work, or doing no work at all; whereas the rising again of Christ was caused by a holy power and resulted in a work of abiding power and “holiness.”

[128]

This it was that led me into a new digression. Recalling how the spirit of C?sar was said to have appeared and spoken to Brutus, I desired to know what words the spirit of Christ said to Paul, and when and how Christ appeared to him. I wished also to inquire about the nature of Paul himself, before and after his conversion; and whether he shewed signs of restlessness, and of ambition to become a leader in a new sect. Perhaps I should have spared myself this searching if I had known that, along with the gospels, Flaccus was sending me Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. But the results of the search were helpful to me. So I will set them down in case they may be helpful to others.

First, then, I found that, before his conversion, Paul had been a Jew of the strictest kind. “Ye have heard,” he said to the Galatians, “how that beyond measure I used to persecute the church of God and laid it waste, and I advanced in the Jews’ religion beyond many of mine own age among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” That expression “ye have heard” clearly shewed that it was a matter of notoriety. The writer meant (I thought) not only “ye have heard from me,” but also “from others,” perhaps meaning his enemies, the Judaizers (often mentioned in this epistle), who pointed at him the finger of scorn, saying, “This is the man that changed his mind. This man thought once as we do.” To the Philippians also Paul said that he had every claim to be confident “in the flesh,” being “A Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, persecuting the church; as to the righteousness that is in the law, blameless.” So also he said to one of his assistants, Timothy, that he, Paul, had been “the chief of sinners” because he had persecuted the church.

Elsewhere I found him writing to the Romans that his heart sorrowed for his countrymen and that he could almost have prayed to be “accursed from Christ” for their sake, for they, he said, had the Patriarchs, and to them were made the promises; and he expressed a fervid hope that in the end the nation would receive the promises, though for a time they were shut out. What he said to the Romans convinced me, in[129] an indirect way, almost as strongly as what he said to the Galatians and Philippians, that Paul had been a genuine patriot, observing the traditions, as well as the written law, of the Jews, and persecuting the Christians with all his might because he thought (as we also were wont to think in Rome) that they were a pestilential sect, destructive of law, order, and morality. So much for what Paul was before his conversion.

Next, as to what happened to him at the moment of his conversion. First I turned to the Corinthian letter describing the appearances of Christ after death, to see whether anything had escaped me in the context—any words uttered by Christ to Paul, for example, at the time. But there was nothing except the bald statements, by this time familiar to me, “He is recorded to have been raised on the third day according to the scriptures; and he appeared to Cephas; then to the twelve; afterwards he appeared to above five hundred brethren, of whom the greater part remain till now, but some are fallen asleep; then he appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of all, as unto one born out of due time, he appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.” All this Paul had previously delivered to the Corinthians—so says the letter—as a “tradition,” and as a part of his “gospel.”

This gave me no help. All that I could infer from it was that Christ probably “appeared” to his enemy Paul in the same way in which he had “appeared” to his friends and followers, and that the “appearing” must have been of a cogent kind, since it convinced an enemy. Nor did I gain much more from the Galatian account, which was as follows: “But when it was the good pleasure of God—who set me apart for this service even from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace—to reveal His Son in me that I might make it my life’s work to preach the good tidings about him among the nations, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood, neither did I go up to Jerusalem to those that had been apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and turned back again to Damascus.”

Here I was in doubt whether “reveal His Son in me,”[130] meant “reveal by my means,” or “reveal in my heart,” that is, “unveil in my soul the image of the Son, which up to that time I had smothered with self-will and obstinacy”—as though “the Son” had been all the while in Paul’s heart, but he had been refusing to acknowledge him. This latter interpretation I preferred. But still there was no mention of any words uttered by Christ to Paul at the moment of his conversion. Only, as Paul implies elsewhere that he had not seen Jesus in the flesh, that is, in person, I presumed that there must have been some such utterance as “I am Jesus,” or “I am the crucified”:—else, how would Paul have recognised the appearance?

As to the place of conversion, however, some light was afforded by the words “I turned back to Damascus,” shewing that he had been near Damascus when it happened. And the epistle to the Corinthians said that he had been let down in a basket from Damascus so as to escape the Jews. It appeared that he was persecuting the Christians up to the time of his conversion; that he was doing this in or near Damascus when he was converted; and that the Jews living in that city turned against him after his conversion, so that he had to escape from them.

Hereupon I tried to imagine Paul the persecutor, in his course of “persecuting the church,” suddenly stopped by an apparition of Christ. In respect of his acts, Paul—though he could not possibly have been so cruel—might be compared to Nero, who also persecuted the Christians. But in respect of righteousness and truth and fervour, Paul was like Epictetus. Then I recalled the story recently told me by Scaurus, how he and his father had come suddenly upon the young Epictetus, in the Neronian gardens, staring upon the Christians in their torments, and how Scaurus had remarked upon the ineffaceableness of the impression produced on his own mind and (as he believed) on that of my future Teacher. That I could well understand. But Scaurus and Epictetus were merely passive spectators. Paul was a perpetrator. “How much deeper,” I said, “and all the more deep and terrible in proportion to his sense of justice and truth, must have been the impression on Paul’s mind, when he suddenly woke up to the fact that he had[131] been persecuting the followers of Truth, the disciples of the Suffering Servant of God, predicted by the prophets!”

Then it appeared to me that perhaps the precise words uttered by Christ in that moment of Paul’s shock and agony were not of so much importance as the feeling of shock and agony itself, followed by a great wrenching away of prejudices and misconceptions, and by a sudden influx of a dazzling light on eyes habituated to darkness. Looking again at the Philippian letter, I perceived how much Paul had to give up, how lightly he regarded the sacrifice of all his prospects of prosperity and promotion among his own people: “But whatever things were once gains to me, these I have counted as loss for Christ’s sake. Nay, more, I count all things as loss for the sake of the preeminence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord; for whose sake I suffered the loss of all that I had, and I count it all as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him—not having as my own righteousness that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that is from God based on that faith—that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and fellowship with His sufferings, being conformed with His death; if by any means I may attain to the resurrection of the dead! Not that I have already received, or am already perfected. But I pursue the chase, if by any means I may seize as a prize that for which I was also seized as a captive by Christ Jesus!”

These last words made me understand how Paul might have regarded Christ as manifested in him rather than to him. Isaiah saw God uplifted on high outside him. But Paul felt the Son of God enthroned as sovereign within him: I remembered reading in some drama how the wife of a dethroned and submissive sovereign goads him to rebel against his successor, saying—
“Hath he deposed
Thine intellect? Hath he been in thy heart?”

This was just what Paul experienced and exulted in avowing. Christ had “deposed” Paul’s former self, and substituted a new self of his own as viceroy, to rule Paul, “in his heart.” A soldier might say that Christ, in the moment of taking Paul[132] prisoner, had (so to speak) given him back his sword, saying “Use it on my side among all the nations of the earth, that they also may receive the good tidings of the forgiveness of sins.” But in fact (according to Paul’s view) Christ had done much more than this. He had given Paul a new sword, “the sword of the spirit.” He had also made his whole nature anew, according to Paul’s own saying, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, behold all things are made new.”

Not that I was as yet convinced that Christ had actually risen from the dead. For I did not yet feel sure that Paul might not have been deceived by himself and by the Christians. But I did now feel sure that Paul was honest and did not knowingly deceive his readers. And it was becoming more and more difficult to believe that self-deception or Christian deception could have produced effects on multitudes of men so great and permanent as those which were plainly discernible in the epistles.

I remember at this time trying to prevent my growing admiration for Paul’s work from blinding me to his defects. Such phrases as “let him be anathema,” and “dogs,” and “whose belly is their glory,” and “I would that those who are thus desolating you would even emasculate themselves”—these and others I marked with red in my volume. I knew Epictetus would have condemned them. But I soon perceived that these fiery flashes of wrath were reserved for those whom Paul regarded as proud and greedy ensnarers and oppressors of helpless souls; proud of knowledge that was no knowledge; greedy of money and influence to which they had no right; shutting their eyes against the light, and dragging back poor pilgrims just as they were on the point of entering into the City of Truth. Towards others, even if they might have appeared as rivals, he seemed to me to feel no rivalry, merging all such feeling in allegiance to Christ. Some, he said to the Philippians, preached Christ “thinking to add affliction” to his bonds, out of jealousy and spite. “What then?” he says, “Whatever may be the motive, Christ is preached, and I rejoice. Yea, and I will rejoice.” In the same spirit he wrote to the church of Corinth concerning those among them who[133] said, “I am of Apollos,” “I am of Cephas,” “I am of Paul”—condemning all partisanship, although he gently reminds them of his singular relation to them, “Even though ye have ten thousand tutors in Christ, yet ye have not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus through the Gospel I begot you.”

Another detail interested me. Paul (I found) differed greatly from Epictetus in physical constitution, Epictetus used to teach us that a Cynic had no business to be “infirm” of body. At all events, he said, no such person can do the work of a Cynic Missionary. When he extolled “the sceptre of Diogenes,” he used to tell a story of the way in which that philosopher, lying by the roadside, sick of a fever, called on the wayfarers to admire him. It was the road to Olympia, and people were on the way to the games: “Villains!” he shouted to them, “Stay! Are you going all that way to Olympia to see athletes fight or perish, and will you not stay to behold a contest between a man and a fever?” But this contest, I think, ended in Diogenes’s death. As a rule, both he and Socrates had been perfectly and robustly healthy: and Epictetus seemed somewhat to despise those who were otherwise.

Paul, on the other hand, frequently spoke of his “weakness,” meaning physical infirmity or sickness. It was “owing to weakness,” he told the Galatians, that he preached the gospel for the first time among them; and he called it a “temptation (or, trial) in the flesh.” This I took to mean that he had been delayed in Galatia by some sickness, and had founded the Church there while in that condition. So to the Corinthians he said, “In weakness and in fear and in trembling did I come addressing myself to you.” But that letter went on to say, “And my word and my preaching were not in the persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and power”—so that “power” went hand in hand with “weakness.” Once at least I found Paul praying to be delivered from “weakness.” “I will not boast about myself”—so he writes to the Corinthians—“except in my weaknesses.” And then he went on to explain the “boasting” as being quite different from that of Diogenes. For the Cynic cried, in effect, “Come and see how strong I am!” But Paul meant that he would[134] “boast” because, when he felt weakest, then his Master came to his aid and made him strong. This he expressed in a way that perplexed me at first: “There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me, that I might not be lifted up above measure. About this, I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me. And He said unto me, My grace sufficeth for thee, for in weakness is Power made perfect.”

For some time I could not understand this phrase, “an angel of Satan.” But afterwards I found Paul writing to his Thessalonian converts that, when he wished to come to help them, “Satan hindered him,” so that Satan appeared to be a hinderer of the gospel. Then it seemed to me that among the Jews and Christians certain diseases might be regarded as demons, or the work of demons—just as, in Rome, “Fever” is worshipped as divine and has temples. This fact I had heard Epictetus mention; and he also condemned those who pray to be delivered from fever. The right course was, he said, “to have the fever rightly.” Paul seemed to say, “first pray to be delivered from fever, if it seems to hinder you from doing the work of the Lord. Then, if it be revealed to you as the will of the Lord that you should bear the fever, be sure that He will make your bodily weakness spiritually strong. Thus the temptation from Satan, the Hinderer and Adversary, shall be turned into a strengthening trial from God, your Helper and Friend.”

Summing up the marvellous changes that seemed to have come about for Paul in consequence of Christ’s “appearing” to him, I was more than ever disposed to believe that it was of a divine origin and a great deal more than a mere “appearing.” I thought it must have been an “appearing” to the inner eye, the spirit, as well as to the outer eye.

When we Romans and Greeks use the word “spirit,” we mostly think of a shadowy unreal appearance of the dead. We should not call Jupiter, or Zeus, a “spirit.” But I perceived that, with Paul, “spirit” was more real—and, if I may so say, more eternally solid—than “body.” It was the real “person.” The word “person” in Greek, as also in Latin, means a “mask” or “character.” There is, with us, no one word to express[135] “real person.” Common people think the body real, but the spirit unreal. Paul used the name “spiritual body” to describe a “real person,” raised from the dead in Christ. Well, then, it seemed to me that the power of Christ on Paul might be described, not only as an “appearing” but also as the grasp of a “real person,” “taking hold of” Paul’s spirit with a spiritual hand so as to strengthen and direct him. What else was it that made him so strong?

The strength of Epictetus in bearing trials and sufferings had long excited my admiration. But now the strength of Paul seemed greater. Epictetus bore—or at least professed to bear—only his own burdens. As for those of others, he said, “These are nothing to me.” Paul was like a gentle nurse or tender mother with the weaklings among his converts. “Who,” he asked, “is made to stumble, and I burn not? Who is weak, and I am not weak?” And yet, in his weakness, he was a very Hercules or Atlas, strong enough to bear “the care of all the churches”! This “weak” man was always fighting, always craving to fight, and always conquering—up to the time of his impending departure, when he exclaimed that he had “fought the good fight”! And through what an extent of the civilised world! “From Jerusalem to Illyricum”—so he wrote to the Romans! In that same letter he announced his intention of carrying the eagles of the New Empire into Rome itself, and of passing onward from Rome to the invasion of Spain! No wonder that he felt able to say, “I take pleasure in weaknesses, in outrages, in straits and necessities, in persecutions and hardships, in Christ’s behalf; for in the moment when I am weak, in that moment I am strong.”

“I am strong”! Yes. Rolling up the volume as I retired to rest that night, I was constrained to agree with that, at all events. “About some things,” said I, “or perhaps about many things in your letters I am doubtful; but assuredly you are strong. I myself am also certain that you are honest. But that you are strong—and that, too, with a strength that comes from faith in the resurrection of your Master—this not even an atheist or Epicurean could deny.”