THE MOMENT HAS now come to address the crucial question: what is the nature of the experience that Paul images as “awakening”? At first glance, it might seem that Paul’s summons to awakening has much in common with the exhortations of Hellenistic philosophers to transcend base desires and overcome moral lethargy. Such admonitions occur frequently in the literature of this period, including the Jewish wisdom tradition.1 In the pseudo-Platonic Cleitophon, Socrates’s discourses to those who spend their energy on acquiring wealth, and who are mastered by their pleasures, are judged to be “truly capable of waking us up, as it were, out of slumber” (atechnōs hōsper katheudontas epegeirein hēmas).2 In one of his diatribes, Epictetus argues that one such as Epicurus, who supposes the good to be nothing other than pleasure, says, in effect, to his followers: “Off to the couch and sleep, and lead the life of a worm, of which you have judged yourself worthy; eat and drink and copulate and defecate and snore.”3 The true philosopher, by contrast, is “aroused from his slumbers” (egeiron auton ek tōn hupnōn) by Nature herself, whose message he is to bequeath to others: “remain awake” (agrupnēson).4 The sermon that concludes the Poimandres begins with the admonition: “O people, earth-born men, who have given yourselves over to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, be sober, cease being intoxicated, entranced by irrational sleep” (ō laoi, andres gēgeneis, hoi methē kai hupnō heautous ekdedōkotes kai tē agnōsia tou theou, nēpsate, pausasthe de kraipalōntes, thelgomenoi hupnō alogō).5 As commentators have noted, the language of these philosophical admonitions is reminiscent of Romans 13:11–13.6
But just at the point of similarity, the difference stands forth with clarity: namely, in the means of “awakening.” For the philosophers, the mechanism is knowledge of the self, self-mastery, or accommodation to the will of Nature. Cleitophon observes that Socrates’s admonitions are based upon the premise that “a man should care above all for himself” (pantōn heautou dei malista epimeleisthai).7 Cleitophon draws out the conclusion of Socrates’s argument—“how that for every man who does not know how to make use of his soul, it is better to have his soul at rest and not to live” (hōs hostis psuchē mē epistatai chrēsthai, toutō to agein hēsuchian tē psuchē kai mē zēn kreitton).8 Epictetus’s answer to the question of what arouses a man from slumber is unequivocal: “What else but that which is the strongest thing in men—Nature, which draws a man to do her will, though he is reluctant and groans” (ti gar allo ē to pantōn tōn en anthrōpois ischurotaton, hē phusis helkousa epi to hautēs boulēma akonta kai stenonta).9 Recalling that Orestes was “roused from his slumbers” (ek tōn hupnōn exegeiresthai) by the Furies, Epictetus exclaims: “Such a powerful and invincible thing is human nature!” (houtōs ischuron ti kai anikēton estin hē phusis hē anthrōpinē).10 Thus, “self-control is good” (agathon hē egkrateia), in accordance with the sense given by Nature at birth.11 The gnostic evangelist of Poimandres is awakened from sleep by “the mind of absolute mastery” (ho tēs authentias nous),12 and instructed to “hold in your mind whatever things you wish to learn” (eche nō sō hosa theleis mathein),13 to “behold in mind the archetypal form” (eides en tō nō to archetupon eidos).14 In answer to the question “how shall I come to life again?” the gnostic is told: “The man who has mind in him, let him come to know himself” (ho ennous anthrōpos anagnōrisatō heauton).15 Summarizing his revelatory experience, the gnostic confesses: “For the sleep of the body became the soul’s awakening” (egeneto gap ho tou sōmatos hupnos tēs phuchēs nēpsis), and “All this befell me from my mind” (touto de sunebē moi labonti apo tou noos mou).16
In respect to the means of awakening, the difference between Paul and his philosophical contemporaries could hardly be greater. Although the Pauline summons to awakening involves a kind of knowledge (eidotes), the object of awareness is not the self, or nature, or mind, but the kairos—that is, the messianic event (Rom. 13:11). Indeed, as we shall see, the actualization of the relationship between knowledge and the kairos involves, for Paul, the death of the self, by means of a process that is antinatural, to some degree, and explicitly antiphilosophical.
According to Paul, “awakening” is an experience wherein the past event of the Messiah’s death and resurrection comes together with the present moment in the life of believers, such that “salvation” acquires a higher degree of actuality than it had “when we [first] believed” (Rom. 13:11). Because Paul represents awakening as an increased concentration upon the messianic kairos—that is, upon an event that has already happened, and in which his Roman readers have already believed—we are justified in regarding awakening as a graduated process,17 whose initial stages may be traced in Paul’s earlier epistles.18
In Galatians 1:15–16, Paul looks back to the moment of his calling as an apostle of Messiah Jesus: “But when it pleased him [that is, God], the one who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me through his grace, to reveal his son in me, in order that I might preach him [that is, the Messiah] among the gentiles, immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood.”19 The crucial phrase, apokalupsai ton huion auton en emoi, has caused interpreters much consternation.20 What kind of revelation does Paul have in mind? Evidently not a “vision” such as that attributed to Paul in the book of Acts.21 When Paul speaks of visions elsewhere in his epistles, he uses forms of the verb horan (to see).22 Paul’s choice of the unusual term apokaluptein in Galatians 1:16 should be given full weight, and the verb should be translated literally: “to disclose,” “to bring to light,” “to unveil.”23 The preposition en in the phrase en emoi is not a substitute for the ordinary dative, denoting the object to which something happens, so that the phrase should be translated “to me.”24 Paul uses the same expression in Galatians 2:20 (en emoi Christos) where there is no possibility that the preposition denotes an object.25 Thus, the entire phrase, apokalupsai ton huion autou en emoi, suggests something latent in Paul that was “unveiled” by his first encounter with the messianic event.26
However elliptical Paul’s account of his experience in Galatians 1:15–16 may be, there is no mystery about the content of the revelation: it was the death and resurrection of the Messiah.27 It must be said that Paul places special emphasis upon the Messiah’s death (2 Cor. 5:14; Rom. 5:6–8), even focusing upon the humiliating manner of his death—death on the cross (1 Cor. 1:18; 2:2; Phil. 2:8).28 “The word of the cross is the power of God to us who are being saved,” Paul declares (1 Cor. 1:18).29 Paul insists that the Messiah died “for all” (2 Cor. 5:14–15), including the “weak” and the “ungodly” (Rom. 5:6), and especially, judging from the majority of those who responded to this message, the Messiah died for the “uneducated,” the “powerless,” the “low-born,” that is, the “nothings and nobodies” (1 Cor. 1:26–28).30
At points, Paul provides glimpses of the effect of the messianic event upon himself and others. The inner experience disclosed in such passages is paradoxical in the extreme. In 2 Corinthians 5:14, Paul formulates the substance of the messianic event in the form of a premise: “One died for all” (heis huper pantōn apethanen).31 Paul represents this premise as something he has been able to “discern” (krinantas touto), because “the love of the Messiah grasps us,” or “holds us fast” (hē agape tou Christou sunechei hēmas).32 But the conclusion that one might expect from such a premise—“so that all might live,” or “so that all might be spared death”—is not what follows; instead, Paul draws the emphatic inference: “so then all died” (ara hoi pantes apethenon).33 It is the same when Paul speaks in the first person in Galatians 2:19–20, whether the “I” (egō) is to be regarded as personal or paradigmatic: “I have been crucified with the Messiah; it is no longer I who live” (Christō sunestaurōmai; zō de ouketi egō).34 Finally, we may mention Romans 6:3–4, where Paul refers to the rite of initiation into the messianic community: “Do you not know that as many of us as have been baptized into Messiah Jesus were baptized into his death? (ē agnoeite hoti, hosoi ebaptisthēmen eis Christon Iēsoun, eis ton thanaton autou ebaptisthēmen). Therefore we have shared a grave with him through baptism into death (sunetaphēmen oun auto dia tou baptismatos eis ton thanaton).”35 We may add only that Paul’s initial experience of the messianic event as a death of the self was not a one-time occurrence, but evidently accompanied him throughout his life as a servant of the Messiah. In 2 Corinthians 4:10–11, Paul reflects: “[We are] always carrying about in the body the death of Jesus (hē nekrōsis tou Iēsou). . . . For while we live, we are always being handed over to death (eis thanaton paradidometha) on account of Jesus.”36
This strange, unexpected consequence of the messianic event as Paul experienced it—namely, the death of the self—stands in striking contrast to the expectations voiced in nearly contemporary Jewish texts such as the Psalms of Solomon, where the Messiah confers upon those who belong to him wisdom, righteousness, and joy.37 Of greater relevance to the present inquiry is the clean contradiction between Paul’s account of his awakening and the ideal of self-recovery promoted by the philosophers sampled above. Indeed, Paul’s approach seems to have more in common with that of the philosophical amateur Seneca, who saw death as the only way out of the nightmare of existence under Nero.38 In his letters to Lucilius, Seneca returns repeatedly to the thought of suicide, directing his reader’s attention to “any tree . . . any vein,” as the path to freedom.39 Seneca confesses to a longing for “death, little by little, in a steady weakening not without its pleasures, a peaceful annihilation I know well, having lost consciousness several times.”40 Eventually, as is well known, Seneca took this way out.41 To return, one last time, to Seneca’s Hercules, when the hero finally awakens from sleep in his right mind, and sees what he has done, his first thought is of suicide: “Why I should longer stay my soul in the light of day, and linger here, there is no cause. . . . By death must sin be healed.”42
Yet the difference between Paul and Seneca with respect to the death of the self is obvious and significant.43 For Paul, the messianic event has partitioned the self.44 Only a part of Paul has died. To be sure, Paul speaks of this part as if it were the whole: “I no longer live” (Gal. 2:20a). But in each of the passages cited above, something lives on. In 2 Corinthians 5:15 Paul explains: “And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves (hina hoi zōntes mēketi heautois zōsin), but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”45 So the part that dies is the self-seeking part; and the part that lives on has attached its being to the sacrificial death of the Messiah. Similarly, in Galatians 2:20 Paul declares: “I no longer live, but there lives in me Messiah (zē de en emoi Christos); and what I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God (en pistei zō tē tou huiou tou theou), who loved me and gave himself for me.” So the part that dies is the part denoted by the first-person pronoun (egō), the egoistical part in its totality; and the part that lives on is the messianic seed, which was latent in Paul from the beginning (Gal. 1:15–16),46 and has now been activated by the faithfulness of Messiah Jesus (cf. Gal. 2:16),47 whose yes-saying to the love of God was so complete that he handed over his own life. One thing is clear: the messianic partition of the self that Paul experienced is not the body/soul dualism of the philosophers, on the basis of which the philosophers practice “the art of dying.”48 The Messiah who now lives in Paul “lives in the flesh” (Gal. 2:20); the “life of Jesus” that is “manifested” on the other side of death is “manifested in our bodies . . . manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor. 4:10–11).49 The messianic partition of the self divides the totality of Paul’s being. Paul has passed through death, held fast by the intensity of the Messiah’s love, “participating in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3:10). Only the messianic remnant remains, lives on in hope of resurrection (Phil. 3:11; Rom. 6:4).