THE THEOLOGY OF PAUL

CHAPTER XVII

LIFE IN THE SPIRIT

As the Pauline doctrine of reconciliation arose from the application of the Jewish ideas of atonement to the special case of the death of Jesus, so his doctrine of the Spirit-the other main root of his theology—arose out of the application of the popular metaphysic which is usually called animism to the special case of the enthusiastic experiences of a Christian Church. In both cases the original church had anticipated Paul in the interpretation of those special experiences which marked its history by means of the theories which were universally current ; but in both cases Paul deepened in an original fashion the interpretations which he found already in the field, and drew inferences from them which led far beyond the views of the original church and proved remarkably fruitful for Christian theology. Thus he found in the field, on the one hand, the facts of the enthusiastic phenomena, which from the day of Pentecost on recurred again and again in the Christian Church and in individual churches, such as, e.g., the Corinthian, were of daily occurrence, and played an important part; on the other hand, the

interpretation of these occurrences according to the presuppositions of the popular animistic theory of spirits which was common to the Jews and heathen of his time, and in general may be considered to belong to the common stock of popular belief in all lands and times.

According to this theory all extraordinary phenomena in the life of nature and of man are due to the influence of spirits or living creatures of a character at once supersensible and sensible, which are not indeed bound by the limits of the gross, visible, corporeal world, but are not, on that account, wholly immaterial, but possess a finer, usually invisible, aërial corporeity, as is, indeed, suggested by the fact that the word for spirit in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin is identical with, or closely related to, the word for wind and breath. As the subjects from which proceed forces and influences, these spirits are active beings; and as their activity is conceived after the analogy of human conscious and deliberate actions, they are, in so far, personal beings-yet only in a certain measure; for our modern strictly defined conception of personality was unknown to antiquity in general, and for that reason it found no difficulty in thinking of the same beings sometimes as personally active subjects, sometimes as objective and passive bodies. Thus we find both conceptions set naïvely side by side even in the Biblical representations; the spirits take possession of a man, dwell in him, make him their basis of speech and action, the divine Spirit distributes his gifts as he will; and alongside of this, the Spirit is an aërial element in which man temporarily or permanently lives, it can be poured

out, and drunk in, like water, manifests itself visibly like tongues of flame, makes itself heard as a stormwind, and is conveyed from one man to another by insufflation or by bodily contact (laying on of hands). It is further connected with this that the spirits are not individuals strictly differentiated from one another but interpenetrate one another; a number of spirits can be fused into a unity, and draw asunder from a unity into a plurality; indeed a spiritual being can work at the same time as a unity and as a plurality, like one breeze amid many breezes, or one flame amid many flames. Therefore the momentous question among exegetes whether the spirits of the prophets, and the spirits of the several wonder-working powers, are different from the Spirit of God or of Christ, or no; and whether the Spirit of God and of Christ are different, or whether the Spirit is a third Subject, in addition to both, never presented themselves to the naïve view of the popular belief. Finally, the spirits as active beings are of various ethical quality, which becomes apparent in their manifestations. If they cause disorder in nature, strike men with sickness or delusion, drive them to reckless action or blasphemous speech, they are impure spirits belonging to the dark world of death, to the kingdom of Satan: if, on the contrary, there proceeds from the Spirit a wholesome influence upon the body or soul of man, if man feels himself raised by the wonder-working power of the Spirit above the limitation of the senses into a higher world of freedom and light, so that he is able to look into the depths of the Deity, to discover the secrets of the heart, penetrate the obscurity of the future, or, in the rush of pious enthusiasm, to give stammering

expression in strange sounds to his joyful feelings; that can only be due to the influence of a good spirit derived from the higher divine world. If, again, in the Christian Church, in consequence of the enthusiastic preaching of the approaching destruction of the present world and the arising of a new world, and in connection with the confession of faith in the heavenly Lord Christ, enthusiastic phenomena of the kind just described presented themselves, it was entirely natural for men to see therein the workings of a supernatural spiritual being, which, going forth from the heavenly Christ-Spirit, wrought signs and wonders in the believers, which were in a sense harbingers and pledges of the wonderful world which was soon to come into being.

The heathen were accustomed to have similar experiences in their mystery-cults, and they also referred their transports and ecstasies and orgiastic frenzy to their being laid hold of, and filled with, the god in whose honour the feast was held, and therefore called the condition "enthusiasmos," that is, being in God. The character of these experiences was essentially the same at that time as they have been at all periods of great religious excitement, and as those which frequently occur in certain neuropathic states and are known by the psychology of to-day under the terms hypnotism, auto - suggestion, psychological automatism, and the like. "Where such phenomena present themselves to minds which are filled with religious presuppositions of a spiritualistic character, they necessarily find an explanation in accordance with these presuppositions. The appearance of an intelligent will in a man unwilled and unmarked by

the personality which customarily rules in this man, is apprehended as the entrance into the man of a spirit from without, or the thrusting out of the man's own soul by a demonic psychic guest. And as nothing has been more common among all peoples and at all times than the spiritualistic (animistic) presuppositions which give rise to this explanation, those affected with "duplication of personality" have from the earliest times to the present day explained these mysterious experiences, in accordance with their non-scientific environment, by that which the Greeks call ecstasy or being possessed by God (κατέχεσθαι ἐκ Θεοῦ). It is not that experiences of this kind do not occur; the arbitrariness lies in the explanation of them. To the Greeks the pythoness remained the best known example of the "possession' of a person by another will and spirit which was very different in character and knowledge from the medium when in a state of full consciousness, and therefore seemed to have forced its way in from without. The sybils, bacchantes, and seers were further examples of the soaring of the soul into the divine, or the entrance of God into the soul. It was inevitable that there should grow up, on the ground of these experiences, a belief in an immediate connection of the soul with the divine-in its possessing the divine nature-and that this belief should feel itself more strongly confirmed by these experiences than by anything else. It was not only in Greece that this occurred.” 1

Even the Orphic theology drew from these enthusiastic phenomena the conclusion that there was a

1 Rhode, Psyche, p. 392.