The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  Paul was always aware of his vulnerability as one who had not known Jesus personally—in one of his most attractive asides (1 Corinthians 15:8) he describes himself in this respect as like a child born late when no one expected it—and this may explain why he distanced himself from those who had known Jesus. This “distancing” is very evident. In Galatians (1:11) he goes so far as to emphasize that the “Good News” he preached was “not a human message given by men” but “a revelation of Jesus Christ”; in other words, his knowledge of Jesus has been received directly from revelation rather than through the disciples, a remarkable and telling assertion given that he had had every opportunity to learn directly from them. Moreover, Paul makes a point of stressing that faith in Christ does not involve any kind of identification with Jesus in his life on earth but has validity only in his death and resurrection. Why this particular emphasis? Could it be that as others can speak with much greater authority of Jesus’ life, he feels he has to carve out a distinct area of expertise where he has scope to develop a theology that is not dependent on knowledge of Jesus’ life on earth? Alternatively, he might, for motives of his own, have felt drawn to Jesus at his moment of greatest weakness, on the cross, seeing it as a prelude to the triumph of the resurrection, a transformation that reflected and symbolized the fulfillment of his own psychological needs. As he put it to the Romans (6:3–4): “when we were baptised in Christ Jesus we were baptised in his death; in other words, when we were baptised we went into the tomb and joined him in death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life.”

  However, if Paul thought that a defined role outside Judaism and apart from the original Apostles would solve the problem of his authority, he was mistaken. There were Jewish Christians in the churches outside Jerusalem (perhaps including the community for which Matthew wrote his Gospel) who were outraged by his argument that the Law and ritual requirements such as circumcision for believers had been superseded (hence the beatings), and there were many Gentiles who found a theology that was rooted in Judaism yet not strictly part of it impossible to comprehend. Paul appears to have known little of the spiritual life of the Greco-Roman world outside Judaism and made little attempt in his letters to explain the Judaic concepts he used in a form that would have been comprehensible to those not brought up in that tradition. Others, such as the Alexandrian Jew Apollos, provided a more intellectual approach to Christianity. Buffeted by these conflicts, Paul seems at times to hardly know who he is. In particular, his identity as a Jew seems to fluctuate according to the pressures he encounters. “Paul’s Judaism was no longer of his very being, but a guise he could adopt or discard at will,” as one influential scholar, C. K. Barrett, has put it.6 It is hardly surprising that on a personal level this highly insecure man became acutely sensitive to threats to his leadership. “Let me warn you,” he tells the Galatians (1:8), “that if anyone preaches a version of the Good News different from the one we have already preached to you, whether it be ourselves or an angel from heaven [sic], he is to be condemned.” He is desperately afraid of competition, and it is highly significant that in none of his letters does he ask his followers to evangelize themselves, as if by doing so they might undermine his own authority. In fact, his desperation as he hears of rival Christian preachers breaks through again and again in the letters. He boasts, cajoles, threatens, and pleads his case, claiming that because of his hard work and suffering for the cause he deserves to be seen as the foremost of the Apostles. In one passage of his letter to the Colossians (1:24), he even gives himself the role of completing what Christ has left unfinished. “It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that has still to be undergone [sic] by Christ for the sake of his body, the Church.”

  And yet it was Paul’s insecurities and abrasive personality that acted as a spur to his highly individual theologies. Paul was not an intellectual, certainly not when compared to his contemporary Philo of Alexandria, who wove Plato and other Greek influences into Judaism (and who was probably an influence on Apollos). There is virtually no evidence of the influence of Greek ways of thinking in his letters, though some have argued that he picked up elements of Stoicism from Tarsus, where there were a number of prominent Stoic thinkers. “It does not seem that he had more than a rudimentary knowledge of Greek literature or philosophy,” his is “a rhetoric of the heart,” and, as V. Gronbech has put it, “the attempt to understand the logic and argumentation of Paul must give a Greek a headache.”7 Although the account of his speech in Athens in Acts must be treated with a certain amount of caution, as probably re-created by the writer of Acts (traditionally Luke), his insistence that an “Unknown God” to whom an altar in the city was dedicated must be the Christian one, and that there would be a resurrection of the dead, clearly failed to convince his audience, and he was openly mocked by the sophisticated and sceptical thinkers of the city (Acts 17:23–34).8 Even though Acts records that Paul attracted some new followers, a rejection by others in the public arena must have been unsettling and possibly underlies his powerful condemnation of Greek philosophy.

  As has been suggested, Paul’s theology developed in response to specific challenges—the nature of which is often unknown—that impelled him to provide varied and often inconsistent responses. It was not only the differing needs of the fledgling Christian communities which made coherence difficult; as John Barclay has suggested, there is a tension inherent in Paul’s attempt to create a new spiritual world while remaining within a conceptual mould of Judaism from which he is unable to break free. As we have seen, “he interprets the Christ event in categories drawn largely from Jewish apocalyptic.”9 However, some broad themes can be established. Like all early Christians, Paul had come to terms with the horror of Jesus’ crucifixion, and, as has already been suggested, an exploration of its meaning forms the core of his theology. The death and resurrection of Christ, proclaims Paul, bring a new era for mankind in which all who have faith in Christ (Greek and Jew, slave and free, male and female) will enter a new life. As is usual with Paul, those readers who rejoice in the equality of all enshrined in this proclamation are then brought down to earth with a text such as 1 Corinthians 14:34, which enjoins women to remain silent at meetings and, if they have questions to ask, to ask them of their husbands at home! Paul sets the coming of Christ in a historical context that can be reconstructed from different passages in the letters. The story starts with Adam. Adam sinned in the garden of Eden and with him sin entered the world. For Paul sin is a heavy, albeit abstract, entity that burdens the human race. Yet, and here Paul maintained his Judaism, there is a God who acts providentially for mankind. At times Paul even seems to go so far as to suggest that God introduced sin into the world deliberately so that he could exercise his saving compassion: “For God has consigned all people to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all” (Romans 11:32). God is the opposite of the darkness of Sin, “the Spirit” that contrasts with “the Flesh.” For Paul “the Spirit” is the power of God’s love for humanity, the driving force of the Christian life. The term “Flesh” is used to sum up the state of humanity when in opposition to God. “Flesh” is backed by other dark forces. Paul saw the Greek gods as demons, and the letter to the Ephesians (probably not written by Paul but reflecting his theology) refers to “the Sovereignties and the powers which originate the darkness in this world, the spiritual army of evil in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12). This concept of good and evil as two forces in opposition to each other can be traced back to Zoroastrianism, which spread from its native Persia into the Mediterranean world and can be found reflected in the Essene Judaism in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in Gnosticism. Paul presumably absorbed it from Jewish sources.

  Until the coming of Christ, the conflict between Spirit and Flesh is unresolved. It is true that God has given the Law to one chosen people, the Jews. The Law gives Paul great problems. On the one hand it provides a code of behaviour
, “Our guardian until the Christ came and we could be justified by faith” (Galatians 3:24); on the other it cannot be perfect as a standard because otherwise the salvation of Christ would not be necessary. Paul’s attitude to the Law is ambivalent, as with much of his theology “he wrote different things about it according to the circumstances.”10 He praises the Law for its concept of loving one’s neighbour as oneself, which he regards as its central message, yet he believes that those living under the Law remained enslaved and subject to Sin. An added difficulty is how to explain why the Jews alone had the Law and what would happen to them now that the Law is superseded. Paul’s answer seems to be that they have to adapt to the new world where they too can share in the faith in the risen Lord (Romans 11:25 suggests this), but they will not be in a position of any privilege as their own relationship with God has not been perfect. In short, the Law has to be set in context as some kind of inadequate instrument available only to one people—the Jews—until Christ came for all, Jews and Gentiles alike, and the Law could be set aside as superseded. There is a sense, therefore, in which, for Paul, Christ replaces the Law. Jesus himself, as we have seen, may have intended only to fulfill the Law, not replace it.

  It is not clear whether Paul believed that Jesus had been preexistent from the dawn of time. Many scholars think not, arguing that the “hymn” in Philippians (2:6–11) that suggests that Paul believed he was is a later addition.11 Rather, Jesus appears on earth as a man, and it is through his death and resurrection that he is exalted by God as “a second Adam.” Paul had, further, to explain why Christ had to die in such a horrific way; Geza Vermes suggests he may have drawn on Jewish myths (not contained in scripture) of an Isaac who was willing to be sacrificed for the Jews but never was. Isaac’s readiness to be sacrificed was held in abeyance, as it were, until it was fulfilled by the death of Christ. 12 Paul also draws on the traditional Jewish idea that a sacrifice atones for past misdeeds, but he develops it to argue that Christ’s is so significant that it does away with the need for any further sacrifices. As Hebrews (9:12–13), which develops Paul’s ideas, puts it:

  The blood of his sacrifice is his own blood, not the blood of goats and calves, and thus he has entered the sanctuary once and for all and secured an eternal deliverance. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer have power to hallow those who have been defiled and restore their external purity, how much greater is the power of the blood of Christ.

  So Christians should not sacrifice; while Paul may have been thinking of sacrifice primarily in the Jewish context, the prohibition extends to pagan sacrifices as well.13

  Exalted though Christ may have been, Paul does not go so far as to make him as part of the Godhead. He envisages him as subject to God. At the second coming, which Paul believes to be imminent, “When all things are subjected to Christ, then the Son himself will be subjected to the Father who put all things under him, that God may be everything to every one” (1 Corinthians 15:27–28). In other words, Christ is an intermediary between humanity and God. Paul casts himself in a comparable role. “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ,” he told the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 11:1). Although the particular instance of Jesus as intermediary between man and God was eclipsed by the later doctrine of the Trinity, stating that he was an intrinsic part of the Godhead, the concept of intermediaries—and these were to include the Virgin Mary, the martyrs and other saints—flourished in the early Christian centuries. Paradoxically, Paul’s contribution in this respect was overlooked at the Reformation, when his writings were used to support the idea of direct faith in Christ without the mass of intermediaries, the saints and martyrs who had become part of Catholic Christianity over the centuries.

  Paul’s teachings on faith have proved difficult to interpret, but they are essential to his theology.14 Having faith involves an opening of the heart to Christ, underpinned by a simple trust in God’s goodness. It is essentially an emotional rather than rational state of being. “Faith,” said the fourth-century ascetic Anthony, “arises from the disposition of the soul . . . those who are equipped with the faith have no need of verbal argument.”15 Yet, for Paul, the consequences of having faith in Christ’s death and resurrection are dramatic. Through faith the believer is “rescued from the power of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of God’s beloved son” (Colossians 1:13–24). Paul writes of the process by which the sinner who has faith dies with Christ (Romans 6:3–11), becomes part of a single body with Christ, even puts on Christ as if he were a piece of clothing, achieving a full identification with Christ through his death and then rising with him from the dead. This personal and highly emotional commitment to Christ is something new in antiquity (although again there are precedents in the writings of the Qumran community). Whereas in traditional Greco-Roman religion the public observation of rituals is primary, Paul presents something radically different, proposing that the orientation of the inner person to God and Christ is essential. It is an idea that reaches its fruition in Augustine, who, in his Confessions, talks of God actually being inside a person’s intimate being and in a continual and often, in Augustine’s case, stormy relationship with him.

  Many passages of Paul suggest that having faith is in itself sufficient to ensure salvation in Christ. This is the important concept of “justification” by which God accepts the believer as righteous simply because of his or her faith. In other passages, on the other hand, Paul stresses the importance of charity, as in the famous passage of 1 Corinthians 13, where it is the greatest of “faith, hope and charity,” and in Galatians 5:6, where “what matters is faith that makes its power felt through love.” This leaves open the question of whether “good works” are necessary for salvation. For Paul this may not have been a major issue because, like the Christian community in Jerusalem, he believed in the imminence of the second coming. There is an urgency in the need to adopt faith. So short is the time before Christ returns that there is not even a chance to make major changes in one’s behaviour. However, as time elapsed, and the second coming failed to materialize, it became clear that this was not enough. Paul found himself in the difficult position of having to explain how the faithful should live when the death and resurrection of Christ had superseded the Law, which had hitherto provided a coherent basis for behaviour. Paul wrote of “living according to the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16–26), but what this would mean in practice was very vague. Perhaps without intending to do so Paul had raised a radical possibility, that through faith in Christ one might be free to live without the traditional restrictions of society. With the overthrow of old laws, the “liberated” could potentially grasp every kind of freedom. Many Christians had already begun to define their own lives—to Paul’s horror, one Corinthian had even formed a sexual relationship with his stepmother! Paul’s response to this was that “he is to be handed over to Satan so that his sensual body may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 5:5). There are echoes here of the banishment and perpetual exclusion ordered by the Essenes for those who transgressed their codes.

  While the rewards for those with faith are great, the corollary dimension of Paul’s teaching, the fate of those without faith, has had an equally powerful and enduring influence. Once again Paul’s teaching is inconsistent: at times he suggests that the faithless will be condemned when Christ comes again, at others that all might be saved. So while Paul tells the Corinthians that just as all died in Adam so all will be saved in Christ (1 Corinthians 15:22), the Philippians (3:19), in contrast, are told that the enemies of the cross of Christ are destined to be lost. In the first two chapters of Romans Paul seems to include not only the enemies of Christ among those who will be condemned. He implies (Romans 1:20–21) that the existence of God is so obvious those who “refuse to honour” him have no excuse.16 They will be abandoned by him to their degrading (sexual) passions and worse. “Your stubborn refusal to repent is only adding to the anger God will have towards you on that day of anger when his j
ust judgments will be known” (Romans 2:5). (It is significant that Paul refers to the day of judgment as one of “anger” rather than, say, “joy.”) In the second letter to the Thessalonians it is made clear that those who refuse to accept “the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ” will be punished for eternity (1:9). Perhaps the important point to be made is that Paul’s teachings, or those assumed in the early Christian centuries to be his, read in conjunction with others in the New Testament, have allowed many Christians to conclude that punishment for evildoers is eternal, even for those who have not heard of Christ. Even as late as 1960, for instance, it was possible for the Chicago Congress of World Mission to declare that “in the years since World War II, more than one billion souls have passed into eternity and more than half of those went to the torment of hell fire without even hearing of Jesus Christ, who He was or why He died on the Cross of Calvary.”17

  The idea of being open to “faith” is a powerful one; the longing to surrender the self to another who can provide certainty is an enduring part of the human psyche. However, for those who believe in the importance of using reason to define the truth, this surrender must raise concerns. Plato, for instance, specifically condemned “faith” as a means of finding the truth; for him the only secure way of understanding the immaterial world was through the use of reason (note, however, the conceptual difficulties in Plato’s “reasoning” explored in chapter 3). Although there is no evidence that Paul knew of Plato’s thought, we can assume that he realized that his concept of “faith” was vulnerable when set against the mainstream of the Greek intellectual tradition. As we have seen, he may have been unsettled by his confrontation with the pagan philosophers in Athens. His response was to hit back with highly emotional rhetoric, the only weapon to hand. So for Paul it is not only the Law that has been superseded by the coming of Christ, it is the concept of rational argument, the core of the Greek intellectual achievement itself. “The more they [non-Christians] called themselves philosophers,” he tells the Romans (1:21–22), “the more stupid they grew . . . they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.” In his first letter to the Corinthians (1:25) he writes, “The wisdom of the world is foolishness to God.” There is something of the mystic in Paul’s disregard of logic (and a paradox in the way he uses his considerable rhetorical skills to attack the very intellectual tradition of which rhetoric was part).18 This disregard had unfortunate consequences. As Paul’s writings came to be seen as authoritative, it became a mark of the committed Christian to be able to reject rational thought, and even the evidence of empirical experience. Christians would often pride themselves on their lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride. Even educated Christians such as Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) followed Paul. Drawing directly on the Corinthians verse quoted above, Gregory commented, “The wisdom of this world is concealing the heart with strategems, veiling meaning with verbiage, proving false to be right, and true to be false,”19 and, as we will see, the Greek intellectual tradition was to be increasingly stifled by the churches. So here are the roots of the conflict between religion and science that still pervades debates on Christianity to this day. By proposing that Christian faith (which exists in the world of muthos) might contain “truths” superior to those achieved by rational argument (logoi), it was Paul, perhaps unwittingly in that he appears to have known virtually nothing of the Greek philosophical tradition he condemned, who declared the war and prepared the battlefield.20