“Thou shalt have joy in sadness soon,
The pure calm hope be thine,
That brightens like the eastern moon
When day’s wild lights decline.”—Keble.
SAUL was now a “Nazarene,” but many a year of thought and training had to elapse before he was prepared for the great mission of his life.
If, indeed, the Acts of the Apostles were our only source of information respecting him, we should have been compelled to suppose that he instantly plunged into the work of teaching. “He was with the disciples in Damascus certain days,” says St. Luke; “and immediately in the synagogues he began to preach Jesus, that He is the Son of God;”1 and he proceeds to narrate the amazement of the Jews, the growing power of Saul’s demonstrations, and, after an indefinite period had elapsed, the plot of the Jews against him, and his escape from Damascus.
But St. Luke neither gives, nor professes to give, a complete biography. During the time that he was the companion of the Apostle his details, indeed, are numerous and exact; but if even in this later part of his career he never mentions Titus, or once alludes to the fact that St. Paul wrote a single epistle, we cannot be surprised that his notices of the Apostle’s earlier career are fragmentary, either because he knew no more, or because, in his brief space, he suppresses all circumstances that did not bear on his immediate purpose.
Accordingly, if we turn to the biographic retrospect in the Epistle to the Galatians, in which St. Paul refers to this period to prove the independence of his apostolate, we find that in the Acts the events of three years have been compressed into as many verses, and that, instead of immediately beginning to preach at Damascus, he immediately retired into Arabia.2 For “when” he says, “He who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, immediately I did not communicate with flesh and blood, nor went I up to Jerusalem to those who were Apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and again I returned to Damascus.”
No one, I think, who reads this passage attentively can deny that it gives the impression of an intentional retirement from human intercourse. A multitude of writers have assumed that St. Paul first preached at Damascus, then retired to Arabia, and then returned, with increased zeal and power, to preach in Damascus once more. Not only is St. Paul’s own language unfavourable to such a view, but it seems to exclude it. What would all psychological considerations lead us to think likely in the case of one circumstanced as Saul of Tarsus was after his sudden and strange conversion? The leastlikely course—the one which would place him at the greatest distance from all deep and earnest spirits who have passed through a similar crisis— would be for him to have plunged at once into the arena of controversy, and to have passed, without pause or breathing–space, from the position of a leading persecutor into that of a prominent champion. In the case of men of shallow nature, or superficial convictions, such a proceeding is possible; but we cannot imagine it of St. Paul. It is not thus with souls which have been arrested in mid–career by the heart–searching voice of God. Just as an eagle which has been drenched and battered by some fierce storm will alight to plume its ruffled wings, so when a great soul has “passed through fire and through water” it needs some safe and quiet place in which to rest. The lifelong convictions of any man may be reversed in an instant, and that sudden reversion often causes a marvellous change; but it is never in an instant that the whole nature and character of a man are transformed from what they were before. It is difficult to conceive of any change more total, any rift of difference more deep, than that which separated Saul the persecutor from Paul the Apostle; and we are sure that—like Moses, like Elijah, like our Lord Himself, like almost every great soul in ancient or modern times to whom has been entrusted the task of swaying the destinies by moulding the convictions of mankind—like Sakya Mouni, like Mahomet in the cave of Hira, like St. Francis of Assisi in his sickness, like Luther in the monastery of Erfurdt—he would need a quiet period in which to elaborate his thoughts, to still the tumult of his emotions, to commune in secrecy and in silence with his own soul. It was necessary for him to understand the Scriptures; to co–ordinate his old with his new beliefs. It is hardly too much to say that if Saul—ignorant as yet of many essential truths of Christianity, alien as yet from the experience of its deepest power—had begun at once to argue with and to preach to others, he could hardly have done the work he did. To suppose that the truths of which afterwards he became the appointed teacher were all revealed to him as by one flash of light in all their fulness, is to suppose that which is alien to God’s dealings with the human soul, and which utterly contradicts the phenomena of that long series of Epistles in which we watch the progress of his thoughts. Even on grounds of historic probability, it seems unlikely that Saul should at once have been able to substitute a propaganda for an inquisition. Under such circumstances it would have been difficult for the brethren to trust, and still more difficult for the Jews to tolerate him. The latter would have treated him as a shameless renegade,3 the former would have mistrusted him as a secret spy.
We might, perhaps, have expected that Saul would have stayed quietly among the Christians at Damascus, mingling unobtrusively in their meetings, listening to them, learning of them, taking at their love–feasts the humblest place. We can hardly suppose that he cherished, in these first days of his Christian career, the developed purpose of preaching an independent Gospel. Assailed, as he subsequently was, on all sides, but thwarted most of all by the espionage of false brethren, and the calumnies of those who desired to throw doubt on his inspired authority, it was indeed a providential circumstance that the events which followed his conversion were such as to separate him as far as possible from the appearance of discipleship to human instructors. As a Pharisee he had sat at the feet of Gamaliel; as a Christian he called no man his master. He asserts, with reiterated earnestness, that his teaching as well as his authority, “his Gospel” no less than his Apostleship, had been received immediately from God. Indeed, the main object of that intensely interesting and characteristic narrative which occupies the two first chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians is to establish the declaration which he felt it necessary to make so strongly, that “the Gospel preached by him was not a human gospel, and that he did not even receive it from any human being, nor was he taught it, but through revelation of Jesus Christ.”4 Had he not been able to assure his converts of this—had he not been able to appeal to visions and revelations of the Lord—he might have furnished another instance of one whose opinions have been crushed and silenced by the empty authority of names. It was from no personal feeling of emulation—a feeling of which a soul so passionately in earnest as his is profoundly incapable—but it was from the duty of ensuring attention to the truths he preached that he felt it to be so necessary to convince the churches which he had founded how deep would be their folly if they allowed themselves to be seduced from the liberty of his Gospel by the retrograde mission of the evangelists of bondage. It was indispensable for the dissemination of the truth that he should be listened to as an Apostle “neither of man, nor by any man, but by Jesus Christ, and God, who raised Him from the dead.” Had his Apostleship emanated from (ἀπὸ) the Twelve, or been conferred on him by the consecrating act of (διὰ) any one of them,5 then they might be supposed to have a certain superior commission, a certain coercive power. If, as far as he was concerned, they had no such power, it was because he had received his commission directly from his Lord. And to this independence of knowledge he often refers. He tells the Thessalonians, “by the Word of the Lord,”6 that those who were still alive at the Second Advent should not be beforehand with—should gain no advantage or priority over—those that slept. He tells the Ephesians7 that it was by revelation that God “made known to him the mystery which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men—namely, that the Gentiles are co–heirs and co–members and co–partakers8 of the promise in Christ Jesus, through the Gospel of which he became a minister according to the gift of the grace of God, which was given him according to the mighty working of His power.” He tells the Colossians9 that he became a minister of the Church “in accordance with the stewardship of God given to him for them, that he might fully preach the Word of God, the mystery hidden from the ages and the generations.” From these and from other passages it seems clear that what St. Paul meant to represent as special subjects of the revelation which he had received were partly distinct views of what rule ought to be followed by Christians in special instances, partly great facts about the resurrection,10 partly the direct vision of a Saviour not only risen from the dead, but exalted at the right hand of God; but especially the central and peculiar fact of his teaching “the mystery of Christ”—the truth once secret, but now revealed—the deliverance which He had wrought, the justification by faith which He had rendered possible, and, most of all, the free offer of this great salvation to the Gentiles, without the necessity of their incurring the yoke of bondage, which even the Jew had found to be heavier than he could bear.11
It can hardly, therefore, be doubted that after his recovery from the shock of conviction with which his soul must long have continued to tremble, Paul only spent a few quiet days with Ananias, and any other brethren who would hold out to him the right hand of friendship. He might talk with them of the life which Jesus had lived on earth. He might hear from them those reminiscences of the
“Sinless years
Which breathed beneath the Syrian blue,” of which the most precious were afterwards recorded by the four Evangelists. In listening to these he would have been fed with “the spiritual guileless milk.”12 Now can we doubt that in those days more than ever he would refrain his soul and keep it low—that his soul was even as a weaned child. But of the mystery which he was afterwards to preach—of that which emphatically he called “his Gospel”13—neither Ananias (who was himself a rigid Jew), nor any of the disciples, could tell him anything. That was taught him by God alone. It came to him by the illuminating power of the Spirit of Christ, in revelations which accompanied each step in that Divine process of education which constituted his life.
But he could not in any case have stayed long in Damascus. His position there was for the present untenable. Alike the terror with which his arrival must have been expected by the brethren, and the expectation which it had aroused among the Jews, would make him the centre of hatred and suspicion, of rumour and curiosity. He may even have been in danger of arrest by the very subordinates to whom his sudden change of purpose must have seemed to delegate his commission. But a stronger motive for retirement than all this would be the yearning for solitude; the intense desire, and even the overpowering necessity, to be for a time alone with God. He was a stricken deer, and was impelled as by a strong instinct to leave the herd. In solitude a man may trace to their hidden source the fatal errors of the past; he may pray for that light from heaven— no longer flaming with more than noonday fierceness, but shining quietly in dark places—which shall enable him to understand the many mysteries of life; he may wait the healing of his deep wounds by the same tender hand that in mercy has inflicted them; he may
“Sit on the desert stone Like Elijah at Horeb’s cave alone;
And a gentle voice comes through the wild,
Like a father consoling his fretful child,
That banishes bitterness, wrath, and fear,
Saying, ‘MAN IS DISTANT, BUT GOD IS NEAR.’”
And so Saul went to Arabia—a word which must, I think, be understood in its popular and primary sense to mean the Sinaitic peninsula.14
He who had been a persecutor in honour of Moses, would henceforth be himself represented as a renegade from Moses. The most zealous of the living servants of Mosaism was to bo the man who should prove most convincingly that Mosaism was to vanish away. Was it not natural, then, that he should long to visit the holy ground where the bush had glowed in unconsuming fire, and the granite crags had trembled at the voice which uttered the fiery law? Would the shadow of good things look so much of a shadow if he visited the very spot where the great Lawgiver and the great Prophet had held high communings with God? Could he indeed be sure that he had come unto the Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant, until he had visited the mount that might be touched and that burned with fire, where amid blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words, Moses himself had exceedingly feared and quaked?
How long he stayed, we do not know. It has usually been assumed that his stay was brief; to me it seems far more probable that it occupied no small portion of those “three years”15 which he tells us elapsed before he visited Jerusalem. Few have doubted that those “three years” are to be dated from his conversion. It seems clear that after his conversion he stayed but a few days (ἡμέραι τινὲς) with the disciples; that then—at the earliest practicable moment—he retired into Arabia; that after his return he began to preach, and that this ministry in Damascus was interrupted after a certain period (ἡμέραι ἱκαναί) by the conspiracy of the Jews The latter expression is translated “many days” in the Acts; but though the continuance of his preaching may have occupied days which in comparison with his first brief stay might have been called “many,” the phrase itself is so vague that it might be used of almost any period from a fortnight to three years.16 As to the general correctness of this conclusion I can feel no doubt; the only point which must always remain dubious is whether the phrase “three years” means three complete years, or whether it means one full year, and a part, however short, of two other years. From the chronology of St. Paul’s life we can attain no certainty on this point, though such lights as we have are slightly in favour of the longer rather than of the shorter period.
Very much depends upon the question whether physical infirmity, and prostration of health, were in part the cause of this retirement and inactivity. And here again we are on uncertain ground, because this at once opens the often discussed problem as to the nature of the affliction to which St. Paul so pathetically alludes as his “stake in the flesh.” I am led to touch upon that question here, because I believe that this dreadful affliction, whatever it may have been, had its origin at this very time.17 The melancholy through which, like a fire at midnight, his enthusiasm burns its way—the deep despondency which sounds like an undertone even amid the bursts of exultation which triumph over it, seem to me to have been in no small measure due to this. It gave to St. Paul that painful self–consciousness which is in itself a daily trial to any man who, in spite of an innate love for retirement, is thrust against his will into publicity and conflict. It seems to break the wings of his spirit, so that sometimes he drops as it were quite suddenly to the earth, checked and beaten down in the very midst of his loftiest and strongest flights.
No one can even cursorily read St. Paul’s Epistles without observing that he was aware of something in his aspect or his personality which distressed him with an agony of humiliation—something which seems to force him, against every natural instinct of his disposition, into language which sounds to himself like a boastfulness which was abhorrent to him, but which he finds to be more necessary to himself than to other men. It is as though he felt that his appearance was against him. Whenever he has ceased to be carried away by the current of some powerful argument, whenever his sorrow at the insidious encroachment of errors against which he had flung the whole force of his character has spent itself in words of immeasurable indignation— whenever he drops the high language of apostolical authority and inspired conviction—we hear a sort of wailing, pleading, appealing tone in his personal addresses to his converts, which would be almost impossible in one whose pride of personal manhood had not been abashed by some external defects, to which he might indeed appeal as marks at once of the service and the protection of his Saviour, but which made him less able to cope face to face with the insults of opponents or the ingratitude of friends. His language leaves on us the impression of one who was acutely sensitive, and whose sensitiveness of temperament has been aggravated by a meanness of presence which is indeed forgotten by the friends who know him, but which raises in strangers a prejudice not always overcome Many, indeed, of the brethren in the little churches, which he founded, had so “grappled him to their souls with hooks of steel,” that he could speak in letter after letter of their abounding love and tenderness and gratitude towards him18—that he can call them “my little children”—that he can assume their intense desire to see him, and can grant that desire as an express favour to them; 19 and that he is even forced to soothe those jealousies of affection which were caused by his acceptance of aid from one church which he would not accept from others. But he is also well aware that he is hated with a perfect virulence of hatred, and (which is much more wounding to such a spirit) that with this hatred there is a large mixture of unjust contempt. From this contempt even of the contemptible, from this hatred even of the hateful he could not but shrink, though he knew that it is often the penalty with which the world rewards service, and the tribute which virtue receives from vice.
It is this which explains the whole style and character of his Epistles.20 The charges which his enemies made against him have their foundation in facts about his method and address, which made those charges all the more dangerous and the more stinging by giving them a certain plausibility. They were, in fact, yet another instance of those half–truths which are the worst of lies. Thus—adopting the taunts of his adversaries, as he often does—he says that he is in presence “humble” among them,21 and “rude in speech,”22 and he quotes their own reproach that “his bodily presence was weak, and his speech contemptible.”23 Being confessedly one who strove for peace and unity, who endeavoured to meet all men half–way, who was ready to be all things to all men if by any means he might save some, he has more than once to vindicate his character from those charges of insincerity, craftiness, dishonesty, guile, man–pleasing and flattery,24 which are, perhaps, summed up in the general depreciation which he so indignantly rebuts that “he walked according to the flesh,”25 or in other words that his motives were not spiritual, but low and selfish. He has, too, to defend himself from the insinuation that his self–abasements had been needless and excessive;26 that even his apparent self–denials had only been assumed as a cloak for ulterior views;27 and that his intercourse was so marked by levity of purpose, that there was no trusting to his promises.28 Now how came St. Paul to be made the butt for such calumnies as these? Chiefly, no doubt, because he was, most sorely against his will, the leader of a party, and because there are in all ages souls which delight in lies— men “whose throat is an open sepulchre, and the poison of asps is under their lips;” but partly, also, because he regarded tact, concession, conciliatoriness, as Divine weapons which God had permitted him to use against powerful obstacles; and partly because it was easy to satirise and misrepresent a depression of spirits, a humility of demeanour, which were either the direct results of some bodily affliction, or which the consciousness of this affliction had rendered habitual. We feel at once that this would be natural to the bowed and weak figure which Albrecht Dürer has represented; but that it would be impossible to the imposing orator whom Raphael has placed on the steps of the Areopagus.29
And to this he constantly refers. There is hardly a letter in which he does not allude to his mental trials, his physical sufferings, his persecutions, his infirmities. He tells the Corinthians that his intercourse with them had been characterised by physical weakness, fear, and much trembling.30 He reminds the Galatians that he had preached among them in consequence of an attack of severe sickness.31 He speaks of the inexorable burden of life, and its unceasing moan.32 The trouble, the perplexity, the persecution, the prostrations which were invariable conditions of his life, seem to him like a perpetual carrying about with him in his body of the mortification—the putting to death—of Christ;33 a perpetual betrayal to death for Christ’s sake—a perpetual exhibition of the energy of death in his outward life.34 He died daily, he was in deaths oft;35 he was being killed all the day long.36
And this, too—as well as the fact that he seems to write in Greek and think in Syriac—is the key to the peculiarities of St. Paul’s language. The feeling that he was inadequate for the mighty task which God had specially entrusted to him; the dread lest his personal insignificance should lead any of his hearers at once to reject a doctrine announced by a weak, suffering, distressed, overburdened man, who, though an ambassador of Christ, bore in his own aspect so few of the credentials of an embassy; the knowledge that the fiery spirit which “o’erinformed its tenement of clay” was held, like the light of Gideon’s pitchers, in a fragile and earthen vessel,37 seems to be so constantly and so oppressively present with him, as to make all words too weak for the weight of meaning they have to bear. Hence his language, in many passages, bears the traces of almost morbid excitability in its passionate altarnations of humility with assertions of the real greatness of his labours,38 and of scorn and indignation against fickle weaklings and intriguing calumniators with an intense and yearning love.39 Sometimes his heart beats with such quick emotion, his thoughts rush with such confused impetuosity, that in anakoluthon after anakoluthon, and parenthesis after parenthesis, the whole meaning becomes uncertain.40 His feeling is so intense that his very words catch a life of their own—they become “living creatures with hands and feet.”41 Sometimes he is almost contemptuous in his assertion of the rectitude which makes him indifferent to vulgar criticism,42 and keenly bitter in the sarcasm of his self–depreciation.43 In one or two instances an enemy might almost apply the word “brutal” to the language in which he ridicules, or denounces, or unmasks the impugners of his gospel;44 in one or two passages he speaks with a tinge of irony, almost of irritation, about those “accounted to be pillars”—the “out–and–out Apostles,” who even if they were Apostles ten times over added nothing to him:45—but the storm of passion dies away in a moment; he is sorry even for the most necessary and justly–deserved severity, and all ends in expressions of tenderness and, as it were, with a burst of tears.46
Now it is true that we recognise in Saul of Tarsus the restlessness, the vehemence, the impetuous eagerness which we see in Paul the Apostle; but it is hard to imagine in Saul of Tarsus the nervous shrinking, the tremulous sensibility, the profound distrust of his own gifts and powers apart from Divine grace, which are so repeatedly manifest in the language of Paul, the fettered captive of Jesus Christ. It is hard to imagine that such a man as the Apostle became could ever have been the furious inquisitor, the intruder even into the sacred retirement of peaceful homes, the eager candidate for power to suppress a heresy even in distant cities, which Saul was before the vision on the way to Damascus. It is a matter of common experience that some physical humiliation, especially if it take the form of terrible disfigurement, often acts in this very way upon human character.47 It makes the bold shrink; it makes the arrogant humble; it makes the self–confident timid; it makes those who once loved publicity long to hide themselves from the crowd; it turns every thought of the heart from trust in self to humblest submission to the will of God. Even a dangerous illness is sometimes sufficient to produce results like these; but when the illness leaves its physical marks for life upon the frame, its effects are intensified; it changes a mirthful reveller, like Francis of Assisi, into a squalid ascetic; a favourite of society, like Francis Xavier, into a toilsome missionary; a gay soldier, like Ignatius Loyola, into a rigid devotee.
What was the nature of this stake in the flesh, we shall examine fully in a separate essay; but that, whatever it may have been, it came to St. Paul as a direct consequence of visions and revelations, and as a direct counteraction to the inflation and self–importance which such exceptional insight might otherwise have caused to such a character as his, he has himself informed us. We are, therefore, naturally led to suppose that the firstimpalement of his health by this wounding splinter accompanied, or resulted from, that greatest of all his revelations, the appearance to him of the risen Christ as he was travelling at noonday nigh unto Damascus. If so, we see yet another reason for a retirement from all exertion and publicity, which was as necessary for his body as for his soul.