In concert with James, Evelyn Underhill’s subsequent study of mysticism provided an equally engaging window into the soul of “spiritual consciousness.” Her definition of mysticism also illuminates Paul’s. Underhill writes: “Broadly speaking, I understand it [mysticism] to be the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order.”5 As Underhill goes on to state: “This tendency . . . gradually captures the whole field of consciousness” . . . and attains its highest end “in the experience called ‘mystical union.’”6
Not long after both James’ and Underhill’s work, Albert Schweitzer offered a similar definition, but he made a distinction in arguing that Paul’s mysticism (as Schweitzer preferred to address Paul’s response to the Transcendent) was never an “in-God mysticism” but was instead an “in-Christ mysticism.” The former would have been unthinkable to Paul in Schweitzer’s mind, as Paul’s avowed monotheism could never have embraced the idea of absolute oneness with God. God is God; human beings are not, pure and simple.7 In spite of this point, however, we find in 1 Corinthians Paul’s allusions to a number of mystical experiences that contradict Schweitzer’s position, opening Paul to “depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” Schweitzer would go on to distinguish between what he called “primitive mysticism” and “intellectual mysticism.” Primitive mysticism seeks to unite itself with the divine through rituals and ceremonies, whereas intellectual mysticism is “a common possession of humanity.” Schweitzer defined the latter as occurring “whenever thought makes the ultimate effort to conceive the relation of the personality to the universal.”8 He concluded that Paul’s mysticism was a mixture of the two. Schweitzer further argued that Paul’s in-Christ union with God—also available to others—was rooted in Paul’s eschatological views and as such intended primarily for the elect.
All three studies shed immense light concerning Paul’s life and thought. In his Galatians statement, Paul’s proclaimed union with Christ reveals the depth of his noetic experiences, thus becoming the existential nucleus of his consciousness and being. In doing so, Paul set himself on a path that Schleiermacher would express philosophically in his principle concerning the feeling of absolute dependence of the finite upon the infinite. For Schleiermacher, the historical Jesus personified this feeling to perfection, thus making Christ’s God-consciousness a gateway to human salvation. For Paul, however, it is more than Christ’s “God-consciousness” that opens the door to a new life indwelled by God’s Spirit; rather, it is Christ’s death and resurrection, embracing all humanity—Schweitzer’s limitation notwithstanding—that Paul took to be actual events of God’s mighty acts of history. For Paul and for theology in general, the latter (that God actually enters history) is what underwrites all faith and, without which, faith would be delusional, or merely an act of human hope and aspiration.
We cannot underestimate Paul’s Gal 2:20 passage, because it encapsulates the heart of Pauline theology concerning that alone which fulfills human existence: the realization that Christ is one’s truest link with the Eternal. One might call it Paul’s normative principle, a supposition on which all else is based, especially his ethics. This is true, though his views are laden with presuppositions that were inseparable from his era’s cosmological perspective. In addition, Paul incorporated other significant principles he derived principally from a minimum of four sources: (1) his knowledge of the Jesus movement, (2) his understanding of the Messiah as envisioned in the Septuagint and late Jewish apocalyptic writings, (3) his dissatisfaction with rabbinical casuistry, and (4) his fifteen years of concentrated reflection prior to and including the time he first met with Peter, James, and John, or attended the so-called Jerusalem Conference of Acts 12:25.
Let us begin with Paul’s presuppositions. All of them were part of the age into which he was born. The first is his acceptance of a realm of transcendence that is superior to any created dominion of time, matter, or space. Both Judaism and Christianity still hold to this cosmological view. Its corollary enjoined what the New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has labeled sarcophobia, or a fear of the flesh, if not a wary disdain of the physical realm.9
This presupposition was not Paul’s alone. It predates the apostle, if not Plato, whose mentor Socrates enshrined it in Plato’s doctrine of the two realms of what can be known: the one permanent, unbegotten, perfect, and eternal, versus its counterpart in the impermanent, begotten, imperfect, and passing. The one represents true Being, the other becoming. The one has ever been, the other is purely derivative. Hinduism knows of the same presupposition under the names of Brahman and Maya, or Purusia and Prakriti, though not identical with Plato’s realm of ideas.
As a child of his time, Paul was influenced by this deeply embedded cultural view. In truth, he never thought to challenge it, nor did few others, save the Sophists. It was a factor of everyone’s Weltanschauung. Even Jesus shared it. Said Jesus, “God is Spirit and those who worship God must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). For Paul and Jesus, there is no way to escape the phenomenon of transcendence—that spiritual dimension that puts one’s self-understanding in question, resulting in either a heightened or disturbing consciousness of one’s relationship with God. Speaking of this condition of humankind in general, Paul writes: “For what can be known about God is plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Rom 1:20).
That is primal transcendence in its most latent form, waiting only to be seized and appropriated as the guiding light of one’s soul. Years before Paul, Plato wrestled with a similar, though purely intellectual, form of transcendence, as his mind ascended “upward” toward the highest concepts reason can conceive. Plato’s legacy dominated the Greco-Asian world, even among those who had never heard of him or read a single word of his works.
At first glance, there is nothing wrong with this view. Of course, the unbegotten precedes all derivative existence. It represents the idea of the Transcendent in its fullest cosmological and ontological essence. That Being should be prior to Non-being is logical, otherwise Non-being is self-contradictory. If Non-being existed before Being, then it would have the metaphysical value of Being. For this reason, the philosophical as well as the scientific conundrum of how anything came from nothing begs the question that countless efforts have sought to resolve. In our modern era, Hume came as close as anyone to resolving it in his maxim “like effects require like causes,” or at a minimum, “equal causes.” Thus Being precedes what is begotten, rendering the idea of Non-being to the putative opposite of Being. It is when one identifies one’s finite and begotten beingness with Being itself that metaphysical boundaries are crossed, which in its most extreme form results in the philosophical position known as monism—that all things are one and the self is nothing more than an extension of the One.
Paul’s struggles with his weaknesses and inner doubts prevented him from falling into such a pitfall, yet he clearly identified his existential being with Christ’s risen life, along with the abolishment of his old self; nonetheless, it is this proclivity that requires attention if we are to appropriate the value of transcendence in our own lives. The abolishment of the old self might be true from a “spiritual” viewpoint, but it establishes a discontinuity of the present self with its unique former self in a way that belies the human condition and the integrity of one’s genuine individuality or personality.
That Paul could not have known this should be recognized, as no one wishes to judge Paul from an anachronistic position. Judging Paul on this basis clearly commits the fallacy known as nunc pro tunc (“now for then”), a bias that holds the past responsible for a range of knowledge inaccessible or unknowable at the time. Yet, if our contemporary
