Paul and the Universe

I now proceed to unfold the order of that development by which the mind of the Gentile apostle applied to life’s different phases the new idea of Divine government. In accordance with the prhi’ ciple stated in .the previous chapter, I shall look for the steps of that development in the descent from the Divine to the human. I shall seek first of all for any modification which this thought exerted on the apostle’s view of the universe at large, and after wards I shall endeavour to find the traces of its influence in any modification of his attitude towards the common things of earth and time.

What, then, was Paul’s view of the universe at this stage of his pilgrimage? Naturally speaking, it ought to have been a very black one. He was a captive in chains. He had been interrupted in his missionary labours. His work had been seemingly brought to a close at the very moment when he was beginning to prosper. He had been placed in the most thoroughly unsympathetic atmosphere which had ever yet environed him — an atmosphere in which he had neither the geniality of friendship to cheer nor the warmth of enmity to stimulate, but simply the chill of cold indifference. Opposition is a form of sympathy; it indicates that a man’s views are at least an object of interest. But indifference is the absence of all interest either repulsive or cohesive; it is the simple negation of sympathy between one mind and another, and therefore it is the most solitary atmosphere which any mind can occupy. Such was Paul’s atmosphere in Rome. He had passed beyond the reach either of praise or censure, either of friends or foes. He had neither the admiration of his Gentile converts nor the malignity of his Jewish adversaries; he had simply the unintelligent gaze of a new world which did not understand him. If there ever was a time in which Paul might have thought darkly of the possibilities of life, it was now. If there ever was a time in which we should expect him to take a gloomy view of the universe, it would be in these days when he was writing his Ephesian and Colossian epistles. And yet we shall find that it is precisely in these days that his view of the possibilities of life becomes wider and brighter. The period of Paul’s life which of all others is most joyous is the period of the Roman captivity. There is a freedom and a conviction about his utterances at this time which goes beyond the force of all his previous utterances. His hope is more abounding, his view more large, his joy more spontaneous. It seems as if a weight were lifted, as if a source of oppression were removed. And we shall find that this elevation of spirits was not something aimles’s or arbitrary; it came from an elevation of standpoint.

The brightening of his own sky resulted from a brightening of the universal sky, from a more sanguine conception of the possibilities of creation at large. Let us briefly consider the direction in which this clearing of the atmosphere appeared.

Two extreme views have been held as to the nature of this universe — that of the optimist and that of the pessimist. The former is represented by the state religion of the Chinese empire; the latter by the creed of ancient Buddhism. The Chinaman looks upon this world, in so far as it is contained within the bounds of his dominion, as having already reached the limit of perfection and surpassed the necessity for improvement. The Buddhist looks upon this world as being in its very nature a scene of misery, incapable of being improved and unable to be transcended. I have called these the extremes, because they represent to their full extent the opposite views of the universe. There are many intermediate shades between them, approximating either to the one side or to the other; but nowhere else is either view expressed with such uncompromising force. The nearest approach to the Chinaman is the Jew. His view of the world was, on the whole, optimistic. He moved between two golden suns; he had a paradise in the past and a paradise in the future. Latterly, he had a paradise also in the present. He came to believe in the possibility of justification by law, in other words, of being made perfect by the successful observance of a series of national statutes. When he had reached such a thought as this, his optimism was equal to, and analogous to, the optimism of the Chinese empire.

Paul, being a Jew, and a Jew of the later age, shared at first in the optimism of his country and his time. We have his own warrant for saying that he originally believed in the inherent perfectibility of human nature, the law was once to him what it was to his countrymen — a ladder on which the human soul might climb from earth to heaven. When he embraced Christianity he abandoned this sense of present optimism; he ceased to believe that the law was adequate even to convert, much less to perfect, a human soul. The immediate effect of his Christianity was to drive him into an opposite extreme. At no time, indeed, did he ever become a pessimist in the absolute sense. At no time did he abandon his Jewish conviction that there was coming in the future an age of purest gold whose splendour would dispel the present darkness and usher in the reign of the Messiah’s kingdom. Yet, at first to the mind of Paul there was no connection between the coming age of gold and the present age of iron. If he was an optimist for the future, he was on that very accoujit a pessimist for the passing hour. It seemed to him that the only value of the hour lay in the fact that it was passing. In giving up the possibility of justification by law he seemed to have given up everything that made present life worth possessing. The trials and struggles of the common day presented themselves as barriers that must be overcome ere the day of the Lord should dawn — things which ought, indeed, to be borne with patience, but whose only virtue consisted in the lesson of patience which they taught. The sufferings of this life, so far as this life was concerned, had as yet revealed no value. His eye contemplated them only in their relation to a state of existence before whose glory they would pass away. Even in that passage which, of all others in his earlier epistles, comes nearest to the recognition of a remedial element in sorrow (2 Cor. iv. 17, 18), the remedial element is made to depend for its recognition on the contemplation of the objects which are above, “while we look not to the things which are seen, but to the things which are not seen.” The reason is plain. Paul had as yet looked only on the unseen realities. He had hitherto viewed the Gospel of Christ only in its relation to a life incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading; and therefore lie could at first contemplate the sorrows of li/e only in their bearing on this great beyond. His vision was perfectly true, but it was not yet full; it was just and accurate, but it did not embrace all the scene. That the sufferings of life had a bearing on the future world was true, but they had also a bear ing on the present world. Paul had seen the one half of the landscape and it was the higher half; but the lower half remained to be seen, and without it the vision of Christ’s kingdom was not complete.

That vision was to be completed in the Roman captivity. It found its beginning in that new conception of the kingdom of God which contemplated the Messiah not as the sovereign of a state, but as the head of a body. The doctrine of the secular headship of Christ transfigured the whole aspect of earthly sorrow. If the empire of Christ consisted in His power to bear the infirmities of the bodily members, if His highest strength was manifested in His capacity to receive those impressions of pain which the bodily members bore, it followed beyond all question that the sorrows of this present life had themselves an optimistic bearing. They were no longer merely the penalties of past transgressions, they were no longer even merely the training for a state of glory; they were themselves a state of glory. They were at the present moment, now and here, the direct and immediate source of that empire and dominion which the Messiah already wielded, and were to be in the future the source of that dominion which was yet to be added to His sway. Paul does not scruple to declare that the Messiah’s earthly kingdom was only lacking in perfection because it was lacking in its full amount of suffering, and that, when it reached its complete incorporation of human sorrow, it would reach its perfect empire over the hearts of men.

Accordingly, if at this latter stage Paul had been asked his opinion of the present system of things, his answer would have been different from what it would have been in earlier days. In earlier days he would have pronounced the present system of things to be either absolutely good or absolutely bad according to the state of his own experience. In the stage immediately preceding his conversion his attitude would have been optimistic; in the stage immediately

1 Col. 1. 24.

following that event his tendency would have been pessimistic. In both cases, however, his view would have been determined by the belief that the present system of things was already a completed quantity, that the world as it now stands is finished. But when he had reached the days of the Roman captivity this was precisely the belief which had been shaken. He had come to the conclusion that the present world is not a finished structure, that it is only a structure in the process of building. He would have deprecated any judgment as to its ultimate deformity on the ground of its actual appearance. He would have done so precisely for the same reason that he would have deprecated any criticism of a physical building while it was in the act of its formation. He knew that the building stage was of necessity a stage of deformity and apparently a stage of confusion. He attributed the seeming inequalities of the world to the fact that the world was not completed, that it was only in process of growth. ’ l All the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord, “* u the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, maketh increase unto the edifying of itself in love,” are the words in which he expresses his sense of the present position of things. He has come to contemplate the scenes of time as the scenes of an unfinished drama, whose present aspect may be grievous and whose actual manifestation leaves much to be desired, but which yet can only be judged with reference to a concluding act towards which they

i Eph. ii. 21. 2 Eph. Iv. 16.

are hastening, and to whose climax they are unconsciously contributing.

It will be seen, then, that at the period of the Roman captivity Paul’s attitude towards the world, as a world, had been reversed. He had ceased to view it merely as a foil to bring out the resistance of the kingdom of God; he had come to look on it as itself an essential part of that kingdom, one of the rooms in the many mansions of the Father. There is another point, however, to which I wish to invite attention, a point of not less clearness and of still greater importance. The doctrine of the secular headship of Christ not only opened up to Paul a more optimistic view of the universe; it would hardly be too much to say that it first revealed to him the universe itself. It did for him very much what the telescope does for the man of science. In one respect the telescope has enlarged our vision of the field of nature; but, paradoxical as it may seem, there is another respect in which it has made our universe smaller. It has caused us to experience somewhat of that feeling which we get by travelling — that the circle of life is not so big as we thought it was, and that the things abroad are unexpectedly related to things at home. If the telescope has widened our sense of the universe’s vastness, it has lessened our sense of its variety. It has everywhere simplified and minimised the materials of actual existence. It has shown us that the laws which operate in our globe are operative through all space. It has taught us that there is an analogy between all the works of nature from the least unto the greatest. It has made us aware that, while ’ l star differeth from star in glory,” it is the difference not of kind but of degree, and that the life of the smallest is supported by the same great principle which regulates the being of the largest. Above all, it has revealed to us the fact that between the remotest points of space there is stretched a cord of continuity by which the extremities of creation are joined and the many are made one — a cord which binds together things that were once thought to have no affinity, and makes it impossible to touch a part without directly affecting the whole. It is here that specially Paul’s new conception of the system of nature carried with it a telescopic effect. It was the discovery of a principle of continuity, of a cord by which things were bound together which had once seemed heterogeneous. It was the awakening to the knowledge that the system of nature is not a series of isolated objects, but a connected and united universe, a life which circulates, indeed, through endless varieties and manifests itself in numberless forms, but which through all vicissitudes and through all variations preserves an unbroken unity and retains a common element. This was the great fact which burst upon the mind of the Gentile apostle when he conceived this new idea of Divine government, and I now proceed to consider the nature of that change which it produced upon his view.

The popular notion is that the conception of the universe entertained by the Jewish nation is in itself more favourable to the religious life of man than the conception of the universe which has been prevalent since the days of Copernicus. The idea is entertained that the belief in the earth as the centre of the universe is naturally and necessarily calculated to increase man’s faith in the providential care of a Supreme Intelligence. And yet I think a deeper reflection will tend at least greatly to modify this view. I have no doubt indeed that, other things being equal, the belief in the earth’s centrality was a factor favourable to faith. But the qualifying clause is a most important one. Provided those parts of the universe which lie above and below the centre are analogous in their nature to the parts embraced within the centre, I should concede at once that the Ptolemaic system of astronomy would lend itself to religion better than the Copernican. But if, on the other hand, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, while regarding this earth as the centre of the universe, looked upon the centre as having no resemblance to the circumference, the matter would wear a very different aspect. I should say that in this case the Copernican system of astronomy, supplemented by the gravitation theory of Newton, was an infinitely higher aid to religious belief. Although in this modern system the earth is no longer the centre of the universe, the universe has itself become analogous to the earth; one common law binds the highest and the lowest, and, what is more important, binds the highest to the lowest. There may be a measureless distance between the earth on which I stand and the central point of the universal system, but through that distance there stretches one and the same law connecting the phenomena of my life with the phenomena which prevail at the centre. There is, in short, in the universe of our modern thought an established line of communication between the system of nature at its apex and the system of nature at its base, and by the existence of that line of communication the apex and the base are proved to be, in their nature, one.

Now, in the later Judaism, the system contemplated in the outer world was precisely the reverse of this. It is true that there as elsewhere the earth was viewed as the centre of the universe, and that to this extent man had an advantage in realising the presence of a providential care. But then, there was a great gulf fixed between the centre and the apex — between man and God. I do not speak of a gulf of spacial distance; that conception is unavoidable in any view of nature which reaches the standard of intelligence. But the difference between God and man in the developed stage of Jewish theol ogy was practically a difference not simply ot degree but of kind. If the God of that theology had been merely the first in a series of intelligences, however vast in its gradations that series might be, there would still have always existed a line of communication between the extremest parts of the universe. But the God of Jewish theology was not the first of a series; He was a life separated from all the rest of a series. He not only was without a rival but without a second. It was His essence to be alone, His nature to be incommunicable. In the conception of the Jew, God would have ceased to be God if He had dwelt in any other light than a light which was inaccessible. The fulness of His glory consisted expressly in His inaccessibility, lay precisely in the fact that no man could see His face and live. And the reason why the Jew attributed to the Creator this isolation from the creature was his contempt of creature life. The whole creation was in a state of suffering and it was in a state of suffering because it was in a state of sin. To the mind of the Jew, suffering was inseparable from sin. He did not, indeed, regard it as outside the Divine gov ernment, but it was within that government only as a form of penal infliction. To attribute, therefore, a participation in suffering to God was in his view blasphemous; it was tantamount to denying the Divine majesty. It was imperative that the associations of Divinity and sorrow should be kept for ever apart, lest the purity of the Infinite garment should be sullied by contact with corruption. Accordingly, to the mind of the Jew, God was a Being who dwelt alone. It was in the interest of His holiness rather than in the interest of His greatness that he assigned Him this solitude. He felt that, if creature-life was a life of suffering, and if a life of suffering was the fruit of sin, there could be no direct intercourse between the creature and the Creator; there must be fixed an eternal and impassable chasm between the Divine life at the apex of the universe and the most saintly human life that inhabited the centre.

The question was, How was this chasm to be filled? However much God was alone in His nature, He was b the Jew perpetually present in His action on the

1 Of. Rom. vlii. 20, and sequel.

affairs of men. If on the one hand it was imperative to preserve the conception of His unspotted holiness, it was on the other no less necessary to keep undimmed the impression of His theocratic power. How was God at one and the same moment to be a Presence dwelling alone in the solitude of His own perfections, and a Power active and operative in the affairs of human life? Such was the problem which presented itself to the mind of the later Judaism — the filling of that vast chasm which the infinitude of the Divine holiness had seemed to interpose between the centre and the summit of the universe of being.

And the later Judaism made an effort to solve that problem. It proposed to fill up the chasm between man at the centre and God at the apex by means of a hierarchy of celestial intelligences, a ladder of intermediate beings descending in order of their perfection from the highest archangel to the lowliest of those ministering spirits who inhabited the region immediately above the human. On the steps of this vast descent came the messages both from above and from below, the announcement of the will of God to man and the announcement of the needs of man to God. On these steps rose the prayers of the human to the Divine, on these descended the answers of the Divine to the human. There was no direct communication, there was no immediate communion, but there was established what seemed to be an equivalent for the want of these — a gradation of finite intelligences ever reaching nearer the ultimate goal.

I say “what seemed to be,” for in reality the filling of the chasm was only in appearance. There was no real gradation established between the life of the Creator and the life of the creature. The distance between the apex and the centre of the universe was not bridged by one hair’s-breadth. It was easy to stretch in fancy a stair of communication between the intelligence nearest to man and the intelligence nearest to the Divine; but when the latter point was reached the chasm remained infinite still. Between the Divine and the intelligence nearest to the Divine there was as great a sphere of separation as existed before the attempt was made to fill it. Man in his earthly centrality remained as much divorced from God in His solitary perfection as he had been without the intervention of celestial spirits, and the intervention of these celestial spirits, useless as it was to bridge the gulf, became simply a cumbrous appendage to the re- 30gnised objects of theological thought.

Now, Paul was a child of the later Judaism, and shared in all the intensity of its problems. He came into the world at a time when his countrymen had made a full trial of the intervention of celestial spirits. Paul himself had shared in that belief of his nation and had found it wanting. I believe he found it wanting even before he became a Christian, and that a sense of its want was one of the factors which impelled him towards Christianity. But there is no doubt at all that after he became a Christian the belief in these celestial mediators was one of the greatest hindrances to his religious communion. One has only to read his later epistles in order to see how much his mind was troubled by the thought of l l principalities and powers “intervening between himself and his God; they had been originally a source of strength, but they were now an element of weakness. Even so early as in his epistle to the Romans we find him exclaiming, ‘I am persuaded, that neither angels, nor principalities, nor powers, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” One wonders at first sight why such things should separate from the love of God. We are tempted originally to suppose that Paul is speaking of wicked spirits, of the emissaries of Satan. Yet, in truth, it is not so. He is speaking of those very celestial intelligences who by the previous generation had been regarded as the revealers of the Divine will, the messengers from God to man and the ambassadors from man to God. Just in proportion as Christianity has widened and deepened his sense of the Divine nature, the soul of the apostle feels fretted by the intervention of lesser natures between himself and the Divine. It is an impulse of protestantism that impels him. It is the struggle of his personality to be in contact with the apex of the universe, the craving of his nature to be at one with the Infinite Essence of all things. He feels that the belief in principalities and powers is practically the belief in a prison-house. In the old days, when his God was an isolated unit, he had welcomed them as imaginary steps up the steep ascent which divided him from the summit of creation. But now that he had believed in Christ they

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were simply hindrances, impediments, barriers, middle walls of partition between his eyes and the light of heaven. Instead of being the steps on which he could rise, they were the stones on which he must stumble, the obstacles which blocked his way in running the race which was set before him; and he felt irresistibly that, until he had cleared them out of his path, he was in the presence of an element which might separate him from the love of God.

But as Paul enters on the period of his captivity his language on this subject becomes much more triumphant. When he wrote to the Romans his triumph was still in the future, something which he expected in the light of faith. But when he wrote to the Ephesians and Colossians the victory was no longer a matter of faith but of sight; the principalities and powers of the heavenly places were already vanquished. They were vanquished by being superseded, by having their province taken away through the service rendered by a Higher Life. Christ had conquered them by passing beyond them, and he had passed beyond them by stooping beneath them. They had been devised to meet a supposed emergency which was not a real emergency. The Divine Life had been thought incapable of uniting with the sufferings of the human life because the union with such suffering implied a union with sin. But now the Divine Life itself had solved the enigma; it had united itself even with sin. It had come down not only through the intervening chasm between itself and the celestial spirits, but through all that subsequent region which the celestial spirits had been supposed to traverse. It had founded a new ideal of empire, an ideal in which greatness ceased to be identified with unapproachableness, and became synonymous with its opposite. It had established a new order of dominion, a dominion in which to be king of the universe was to be the head of a body, and therefore the servant of all its members. It had revealed a new type of majesty, a type in which the essence of regal glory was not to be a solitary unit deriving its distinction from its distinctiveness, but to be the burden-bearer of all life, the supporter of all weakness, the recipient of all sorrow. The universe of Paul had passed through a transformation analogous to that which his own life had passed through. It had been transformed like himself from a Jewish into a Christian existence, from a life whose glory was isolation into a life whose joy was fellowship. It had broken down its middle wall of partition between its centre and its apex, and had displayed to the eye of the beholder a line of uninterrupted communion between the highest and the lowest. It would not be difficult from the epistles of the captivity to give many illustrations of this sense of emancipation with which Paul beheld the disappearance of the celestial mediators; but we shall content ourselves with one. Speaking of Christ as having by death and resurrection united the extremes of universal being, Paul says, l i Having put off from Himself the principalities and the powers, He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them.”1

l 1 Col. 11. 15.

What are these principalities and powers which Christ is said to have abolished? Are they that hierarchy of angelic spirits who are called the ministers to the heirs of salvation? Are they that company of malign intelligences that are supposed to constitute the army of the Prince of the air? They are neither. They are not actual existences but existences in the imagination. The imagination was all along the sphere of their action and the source of their hurtfulness. Their evil lay in the fact that they did not represent the universe as it really was, but the universe as it was not. They were the at tempt to supply a non-existent emergency, a difficulty that was only seeming. They were devised to fill up a chasm in the universe which existed only in fancy. They were intended to connect the centre with the apex, in ignorance of the fact that the centre was connected with the apex already. They owed their being to the supposition that the Divine Life was bound to be a life of solitude, whereas of all lives it was bound to be the least alone. Christianity had broken the illusion. It had revealed the paradox that the greatest is of necessity the least, that the height of imperialism is the depth of service. Paul’s is a protest against the dividing of the universe, — a protest against the later Judaism, against the earlier Gnosticism, against all of every creed and soil who, by the interposition of principalities and powers, had denied the uniting bond which connects the highest with the lowest. He did for the first century what the man of modern science has done for the nineteenth — proclaimed the unity of nature and the binding of all things under a common law. The only difference between the man of modern science and the founder of Christian theology is this, that while the one finds his principle of unity in believing in a force which he cannot define, the other has discovered it by taking one additional step — by assigning to that force the attribute of personality and calling it by the name of Love.