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LATE NITE SERMONETTE: DR. OMED RAMBLES ABOUT ST. PAUL
Paul and not Jesus was the founder of Cross-tianity, or rather the historical church was founded on Paul, particularly Paul’s theology as stated in the Letter to the Romans. Romans had a profound effect on such church fathers as Augustine of Hippo for the Catholics and both Martin Luther and Jean Calvin for the Protestants.
Paul’s letters are almost my favorite part of the New Testament, because he is so contradictory; he really is fighting, and writing, out a titanic struggle within himself and on the paper (papyrus, vellum?). Also, he is the only autobiographical voice in the New Testament. I don’t mean that Paul is telling us his life story, though he gives us a few details in passing, I mean that he is writing poetry in the solipsistic autobiographical lyric mode. You can hear the latter day Pauls and Paulettes crying out at coffee houses all over the country. My affinity to Paul is due to my own tendency to “Lyric Solipsism.” Paul was attempting to integrate a massive brute of an epiphany, dating from his mugging on the road to Damascus.
I have seen more than one poet of this ilk, on stage behind the microphone, whose poetry and person were positively vibrating, trembling with desire to impart their particular “Truth, Way, and Light” unto the audience with the same desperate sincerity as St. Paul. A bystander at one of my readings might accuse me of doing the same.
But I don’t believe in god. I’m on the opposite side of the theodicy from Paul (see my Sermon on Metaphor). But Paul did believe, and he subscribed to an extreme dualism. He directly opposes the flesh (bad) and the spirit (good). In as much as his thoughts on this matter and others constitute the foundation of church teaching down to the present, I don’t see how anyone can deny that this dichotomy and this dualism are at the heart of the theory and practice of Christianity. “Ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The spirit itself beareth witness” (I personally love the game of playing DJ sampling scripture, selectively quoting the “saiths” of the gospel.
Paul not only condemns the human body as corrupt and sinful; he believes human beings are inherently sinful, we are all, righteous and unrighteous, lost souls fallen from grace. His idea was that good, bad, or indifferent; we are all damned souls unless we are saved by faith and faith alone. I personally think Paul projected his inner conflicts, passion, and guilt on the universe at large. Some think Paul acquired his dualism from pagan Greek philosophy. The Greeks celebrated the human form as divine in painting, sculpture, in poetry and athletic contests. Plato believed in ideal forms, and that everything we perceive, including our bodies, are imperfect shadows or echoes of the ideal. I’m sure Greek dualist ideas in one form or other were available to, and influenced Saul of Tarsus, citizen of Rome. But I don’t think you can blame Plato or the Greeks for the extremity of Paul’s tortured dualism, or his loathing of the flesh. There were dualist strains in Jewish religious thought at the time, as well. The Essenes and the community that buried the Dead Sea scrolls by the evidence of the scrolls themselves are revealed to be extremely dualist. Is it that far to go from the beliefs of these sects to, say, John the Baptist and his one time follower Jesus of Nazareth? No citation comes immediately to mind, however, which would suggest either messiah or prophet thought the body was by nature evil.
Paul, as the former Pharisee he claimed to be, was certainly a “heretic” to the mainstream of the Jewish faith, a faith and tradition Jesus was entirely comfortable within, and from which he never departed, in spite of his unique insights. Paul, like many a maniacal poet before and after him, was making it up as he went along, writing in big letters with a florescent magic marker. Paul thought the Parousia, the Second Coming was due any minute; he could not know that his surviving letters would be fossilized as the oldest and most holy relics of Mother Church. But you can’t escape the fact that Paul’s breathless exhortations to the faithful are the foundation of Christianity as it stands today. Every jot and tittle is a brick in the floor of the basilica.
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