THERE are two main passages on which our inferences about the “stake in the flesh” must be founded, and the impression which they leave is only strengthened by more isolated allusions. These two passages, to give them in their chronological order, are: 2 Cor. 12:1–101 and Gal. 4.;2 and I translate them in all their ruggedness, and the interchanges of thought which render it almost impossible to explain the rapid transition of their causal connexions.
i. The first of them runs as follows:—After showing that, however weak and unworthy he may be, he has yet laboured and suffered more than “the super–pre–eminent Apostles,”—a boastfulness the very semblance of which he loathes, but which, again and again, he says has been forced upon him by the intrigues and slanders of interested opponents—he mentions his perilous escape from Damascus, which had made a deep impression on his memory, and then continues: “Boasting, evidently, is not expedient for me; for I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.3 I know a man in Christ fourteen years ago— (whether in the body I know not, or whether out of the body I know not: God knoweth)—caught up, such a one as far as the third heaven. And I know such a man—(whether in the body, or apart4 from the body, I know not: God knoweth)— that he was caught up into Paradise and heard unutterable things which it is not lawful for man to speak. About such a one I will boast; but about myself I will not boast except in mine infirmities. For if I should wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall speak the truth; but I forbear, that no one may reckon about me more than what he seeth me or heareth anything from me. And, that I may not be puffed up by this abundance of revelations, there was given me a stake in the flesh an angel of Satan,5 that it may buffet me that I may not be puffed up. For this, thrice did I entreat the Lord that it might depart from me. And He hath said to me: My grace sufficeth for thee; for power is being perfected in weakness.6 Most gladly, then, rather will I boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may spread its tent over me. Therefore, I am content in infirmities, in insults, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake, for when I am weak then I am powerful.”7
ii. The other passage is Gal. 4:12–16. St. Paul has been vehemently urging the Galatians not to sink to the low level of their previous bondage from the freedom of the Gospel, and in the midst of his reasonings and exhortations he inserts this tender appeal:—
“Become as I am, for I too have become as you, brethren, I beseech you. In no respect did ye wrong me. Yea, ye know that because of infirmity of the flesh I preached to you the first time, and your temptation in my flesh8 ye despised not nor loathed, but as an angel of God ye received me, as Christ Jesus. What, then, was your self–congratulation? For I bear you witness that, if possible, ye dug out your eyes9 and gave them me. So, have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?”
iii. The most prominent allusions to the same bodily affliction are— Gal. 6:17: “Henceforth let no man trouble me, for I carry in my body the brands of Jesus;”10 2 Cor. 4:10: “Always bearing about in the body the putting to death of the Lord Jesus;” and perhaps indirectly, Col. 1:24: “Now I rejoice11 in my sufferings for you, and I supplement in Christ’s stead the deficiences of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His body which is the Church.” When, too, we remember that the word for “stake” is only a more contemptuous form of the word for “cross”.12 there may be a further allusion to this special trial in the words, “I have been crucified with Christ.”13
α. Now, from the first of these passages we see that St. Paul, so far from boasting of exceptional revelations, will only mention them because they are connected with infirmities so painful as to render it ridiculous as well as sinful for him to boast at all, unless he might boast that his very weakness was but a more signal proof of that strength of Christ which had enabled him to do and to suffer more than the very chiefest Apostles.
β. We gather that his trial was something agonising, or it would not be called a stake in the flesh;14 mysterious in its nature, or it would not be described as an angel of Satan; intermittent, as is implied in the word “buffet,” and as is also apparent from various special paroxysms to which St. Paul alludes; and a direct consequence of, or at any rate intimately connected with, his most exalted moments of revelation and ecstasy.
γ. From the second passage, we have the additional particulars, that it was in consequence of some sharp attack of his malady that he had been detained in Galatia; that this malady was of such a nature as to form an actual trial to the Galatians, and naturally dispose them to look on him with contempt, if not with positive loathing; but that they had so completely triumphed over this feeling as to receive him with almost divine respect, and that they had so congratulated themselves on his visit as to have been ready, had it been possible, to dig out their very eyes and give them to their suffering teacher.
δ. The other references confirm these conclusions. In one of them we learn that St. Paul looked on his physical infirmities as sacred stigmata by which Jesus had marked him out as His slave, that he might be secured from molestation;15 and in the others that he regarded his living death as a sort of continuation of his Lord’s crucifixion, and a supplement to those sufferings for the sake of His Church, in which Christ allowed His servants to participate by taking up their cross and following after Him for the service of mankind.16
Now these passages at once exclude nine–tenths of the conjectures which have been so freely hazarded, and which could not have been hazarded at all by those who had carefully considered the conditions of the question. Many of these conjectures would not have even deserved a passing mention if they had not, on the one hand, possessed a certain archæological interest as belonging to the history of exegesis, and on the other brought to light some fragments of old tradition, or pointed to certain features in the character of the Apostle.
1. It is, for instance, abundantly clear that the stake in the flesh was nothing of a spiritual nature. If we find such men as Jean Gerson,17 and Luther, and Calvin more or less confidently deciding that the expression alludes to high spiritualtemptations, such as shrinking from his duties as an Apostle, tormenting doubts, and stings of conscience for the past, the decision is only interesting as a proof that these great and holy men could so well sympathise with these painful hindrances. Yet such an explanation is wholly impossible. It is excluded at once by the references to the infirmity as being of a physical description. It is excluded also by St. Paul’s character, and by the circumstances of his life. There is much in his Epistles about weariness and sorrow, about fightings without and fears within, but there is not the faintest trace that the fire of zeal burnt low, even at his moments of deepest discouragement, on the altar of his heart. Nor could tormenting doubts have had much reality in the soul of one who had seen the risen Christ, and to whom were constantly vouchsafed the vivid revelations which not only solved the problems, but even guided the movements of his life.18
2. And while we reject this view of some great Reformers, we must reject quite as decidedly the fixed opinion of the most eminent Roman Catholics. Vague expressions in St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and Gregory the Great seem to have led to an opinion that the stake in the flesh was some form of carnal temptation.19 This view, repeated by the Venerable Bede, has been continued through Aquinas, Bellarmine, Cornelius à Lapide, and other Roman Catholic writers down to Van Est in the sixteenth century, till it has become almost a stereotyped part of the exegesis of the Roman Catholic Church. It is due to the ambiguous rendering of “stake in the flesh,” by stimulus carnis in the Vulgate translation. Now, in this case also— though we may observe with sorrowful interest that the struggles of ascetics to subdue by unwise methods their carnal passions made them glad to believe that even in the case of St. Paul such an infirmity was never wholly removed—we are nevertheless obliged on every ground to reject the explanation. It in no way satisfies the general tenor of St. Paul’s expressions. It is not an infirmity of which by any possibility he could boast. We cannot conceive so revolting a stain on the character of the Apostle as that which would be involved in the supposition that such tendencies, if he had been cursed with them, should have so manifested themselves as to be a hindrance to his ministry, and a source of loathing to those who heard him. It is still more outrageous to imagine that such criminal concupiscence would have been implanted or strengthened in him as a counterpoise to the spiritual pride which might otherwise have resulted from special revelations. But besides all this, it fixes on the memory of the Apostle a weakness from which we may well believe that he was most exceptionally free. It is true that in the Epistle to the Romans he describes, in language of intense emotion, the struggle in the soul between the good and the evil impulse—the Yetserha–tôbhand Yetserha–râof which he had heard so much in the Beth Midrash of his education. But it is idle to imagine that a strife so multiform must be referred to one only of its manifestations. And we judge that St. Paul had very early subdued every motion of rebellious sensuality, not only because no man who ever lived has uttered words of loftier purity; not only because upon his principles more than upon those of any human moralist have been founded the very bases of Christian abstinence; not only because, to an extent unparalleled in literature, he has the high gift of being able to brand the shamelessness of impurity without wounding the delicacy of Christian thought;20 but more than this, because he is able to appeal to others that they should learn by his example how possible it was to live by the rule of a holy continence. Admitting as he does to the Corinthians that it is better once for all to marry than to be consumed by the slow inward fires of concupiscence,21 he yet says to the unmarried, “it is good for them to abide even as I,” and that “he would that all men were even as he himself.”22 There would be hypocrisy, and something worse than hypocrisy, in such language if the “stake in the flesh,” which was still unremoved when he wrote the Second Epistle, were that which this long succession of commentators have supposed it to be.23
3. It may, then, be regarded as certain that the stake in the flesh was some physical malady; for the fancy first mentioned by Chrysostom and adopted by the Greek fathers, as well as by Hilary and Augustine, that it means the oppositionandpersecutionwith which St. Paul met at the hands of Judaists, and perhaps especially of one leader among them who was “a thorn in his side,”24 is too entirely at variance with the conditions of the question to deserve further notice. But when, in our anxiety to understand and sympathise as far as possible with the Apostle’s personality, we still ask what was this malady, we are left in uncertainty. To omit the more futile conjectures, neither attacks of headache nor earache mentioned traditionally by Tertullian and Jerome, nor the stone which is the conjecture of Aquinas, present those features of external repulsiveness to which the Apostle evidently alludes as the concomitants of his trial. The only conjectures which have much intrinsic probability are those which suppose him to have suffered from epilepsy or from ophthalmia.
4. There is something to be said in favour of the view that it was Epilepsy. It is painful; it is recurrent; it opposes an immense difficulty to all exertion; it may at any time cause a temporary suspension of work; it is intensely humiliating to the person who suffers from it; it exercises a repellent effect on those who witness its distressing manifestations. Moreover, it was regarded in ancient days as supernatural in its character, was surrounded with superstitious fancies, and was directly connected by the Jews with demoniacal possession.25 Further, St. Paul himself connects his infirmity with his trances and visions, and the soul of man is so constituted that any direct intercourse with the unseen world—even, in a lower order, any deep absorption in religious thought, or paroxysms of religious feeling—does tend to a violent disturbance of the nervous organism.26 It would be specially certain to act in this way in the case of one whose temperament was so emotional as was that of St. Paul. It is not impossible that the prostration which followed his conversion may have been induced by the shock which his system received from his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus; and that the recurrence of this shock, involving a chronic liability to its attacks, accompanied that second trance in the Temple, which determined his future career as the Apostle of the Gentiles. His third ecstasy happened fourteen years27 before he wrote the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and therefore at some period during his second residence in Tarsus. If we take the words, “thrice I besought the Lord,” literally, we may then further believe that it was at each of these recurrences of anguish upon the renewals of special revelations that he had made his most earnest entreaty to be delivered from the buffets of this angel of Satan; and that it was only during, or after, his third and most memorable vision that his Lord pointed out to him the meaning of the trial, and told him that, though it could not be removed, he should be strengthened with grace sufficient to enable him to bear it.28
5. But even if this was the actual “stake in the flesh,” there is the strongest reason to believe that St. Paul suffered further from acuteOphthalmia, which also fulfils in every particular the conditions of the problem. This, too, would have the advantage of following the analogy of God’s dealings, by being a trial not arbitrarily inflicted, but one which might have resulted naturally—or, to use the more exact term, let us say, providentially—from the circumstances through which Paul had passed. We know that he was physically blinded by the glare of light which surrounded him when he saw the risen Lord. The whole circumstances of that event—the noonday journey under the fierce Syrian sun, the blaze of light which outshone even that noonday brightness, and the blindness which followed it—would have been most likely to leave his eyes inflamed and weak. His stay in the desert and in Damascus—regions notorious for the prevalence of this disease—would have tended to develop the mischief when it had once been set up; and though we are never told in so many words that the Apostle suffered from defective sight, there are yet so many undesigned coincidences of allusion all pointing in this direction, that we may regard it as an ascertained fact. Apart from the initial probability that eyes which had once been so seriously affected would be liable to subsequent attacks of disease, we have the following indications:—(i.) When speaking of his infirmity to the Galatians, St. Paul implies that it might well have rendered him an object of loathing; and this is pre–eminently the case with acute ophthalmia. The most distressing objects, next to the lepers, which the traveller will ever see in the East—those who will most make him inclined to turn away his face with a shudder of pity and almost involuntary disgust—are precisely those who are the victims of this disease.29 (ii.) And this would give a deeper pathos and meaning to the Apostle’s testimony that the Galatians in the first flush of their Gospel joy, when they looked on the preacher of those good tidings as an angel of God, would, had it been possible, havedugouttheireyesin order to place them at the sufferer’s service, (iii.) The term, “a stake in the flesh,” would be most appropriate to such a malady, because all who have been attacked with it know that the image which it recalls most naturally is that of a sharp splinter run into the eye.30 (iv.) Moreover, it would be extremely likely to cause epileptic or other symptoms, since in severe attacks it is often accompanied by cerebral disturbance, (v.) In spite of the doubt which has been recently thrown on the commonly accepted meaning of the expression which St. Paul usas to this Galatiaus, “Ye see in what larg letters I write to you with my own hand,” it must at any rate be admitted that it suits well with the hypothesis of a condition which rendered it painful and difficult to write at all. That this was St. Paul’s normal condition seems to result from his almost invariable practice of employing an amanuensis, and only adding in autograph the few last words of greeting or blessing, which were necessary for the identification of his letters in an age in which religious forgeries were by no means unknown, (vi.) It is obvious, too, that an ocular deformity, caused as this had been, might well be compared to the brand fixed by a master on his slave. (vii.) Lastly, there is no other reasonable explanation of the circumstance that, when St. Paul had uttered an indignant answer to the High Priest, and had been rebuked for it, he at once frankly offered his apology by saying that “he had not recognised the speaker to have been the High Priest.” Now, considering the position of the High Priest as Nasîof the Sanhedrin, seated at the end of the hall, with the Ab Beth Dîn on one side of him, and the Chacham on the other,31 it is almost inconceivable that Paul should not have been aware of his rank if he had not suffered from defective sight. All that his blurred vision took in was a white figure, nor did he see this figure with sufficient clearness to be able to distinguish that the overbearing tyrant was no less a person than the High Priest himself.32
But if these conjectures are correct—and to me they seem to be almost certain—how immensely do they add to our conception of Paul’s heroism; how much do they heighten the astonishment and admiration which we feel at all that he endured and all that he accomplished This man, who almost single–handed carried the Gospel of Christ from Damascus to Rome, was so great a sufferer from inflammation of the eyes that he was often pitiable to look upon; was unable to write except with pain, and in large letters; was liable to attacks of severe ag uy, accompanied at times with loss of consciousness. He was so weak and ailing that under circumstances of danger he was personally helpless; that he had to be passively conducted from place to place; that it was almost impossible for him, I will not say only to preach, but even to get through the ordinary routine of life without companions to guide, and protect, and lead him by the hand.33 We can then see how indispensable it was that St. Paul should have some “that ministered unto him;” how strongly he would feel the necessity of being always accompanied upon his missions by faithful friends;34 how much anguish might lie in his remark that in his strong affection for the Thessalonians he was even ready for their sakes to part with his beloved Timotheus, and to be left at Athens alone.35 How close, then, and how tender would be the bond of mutual gratitude and affection which would inevitably grow up under such circumstances between himself and the little band of disciples by whom he was usually accompanied! With what deepened bitterness would he feel the cruelty of neglect and ingratitude when, at his first answer, no man stood with him, but all forsook him!36