Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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'The intellectual power through words and things
Went sounding on a dim and perilous way.'

Newman's 'confidence towards God' was of a still nobler kind. It rested
on an unclouded faith in the Divine guidance, and on a very just
estimate of the worthlessness of contemporary praise and blame. There
have been very few men who have been able to combine so strong a faith
with a thorough distrust of both logic-chopping and emotional
excitement, and who, while denying themselves these aids to conviction,
have been able to say, calmly and without petulance, that with them it
is a very small thing to be judged of man's judgment.

'What (he asks) can increase their peace who believe and
trust in the Son of God? Shall we add a drop to the ocean,
or grains to the sand of the sea? We pay indeed our
superiors full reverence, and with cheerfulness as unto the
Lord; and we honour eminent talents as deserving admiration
and reward; and the more readily act we thus, because these
are little things to pay.'[89]

Such unworldliness as this, in the well-chosen words of R.H. Hutton,
'stands out in strange and almost majestic contrast to the eager turmoil
of confused passions, hesitating ideals, tentative virtues, and groping
philanthropies, amidst which it was lived.'

Another mark of greatness is unbroken consistency and unity of aim in a
long life. There are few parallels to the neglect of his own literary
reputation by Newman. Higher interests, he thought, were at stake; and
so he had no dream of building for himself 'a monument more durable than
brass,' and of claiming a pedestal among the great writers of English
prose and verse. He accepted long years of literary barrenness; he wrote
historical essays for which he had no special aptitude, and dogmatic
disquisitions which even his genius could not save from dulness; he even
descended into mere journalism. The 'Apologia' would probably not have
been written but for the accident of Kingsley's attack. It has, no
doubt, been said with truth that Newman showed great dexterity in
choosing opponents with whom to cross swords--Kingsley, Pusey,
Gladstone, and his old Anglican self. But this does not alter the fact
that a man who must have been conscious of rare literary gifts made no
attempt to immortalise himself by them. It was for the Church, and not
for himself, that he wrote as well as lived.

That his life is for the most part a record of sadness and failure is no
indication that he was not one of the great men of his time.
Independence is no passport to success in a world where, as Swift said,
climbing and crawling are performed in much the same attitude. And if we
are right in our view that there was something in the composition of his
mind which prevented him from being either a complete Catholic or a
complete Protestant, this too is no obstacle to our recognition of his
greatness. He has left an indelible mark upon two great religious
bodies. He has stirred movements which still agitate the Church of
England and the Church of Rome, and the end of which is not yet in
sight. Anglo-Catholicism and Modernism are alien growths, perhaps, in
the institutions where they have found a place; but the man who beyond
all others is responsible for grafting them upon the old stems is secure
of his place in history.

FOOTNOTES:

[82] Cf. e. _Parochial and Plain Sermons_, vi. 259.

[83] Mark Pattison, _Memoirs_, p. 97.

[84] _Stray Essays_, p. 94.

[85] _Parochial and Plain Sermons_, v. 112.

[86] _Ibid_. vi. 259.

[87] _Ibid_. vi. 340.

[88] _Grammar of Assent_, part i. c. 1 and 2.

[89] _Parochial and Plain Sermons_, vii. 73.

ST. PAUL

(1914)

Among all the great men of antiquity there is none, with the exception
of Cicero, whom we may know so intimately as Saul of Tarsus. The main
facts of his career have been recorded by a contemporary, who was
probably his friend and travelling companion. A collection of letters,
addressed to the little religious communities which he founded, reveals
the character of the writer no less than the nature of his work. Alone
among the first preachers of Christianity, he stands before us as a
living man. Ohiost phepnytai, toi de skiai hahissoysi. We know very
little in reality of Peter and James and John, of Apollos and Barnabas.
And of our divine Master no biography can ever be written.

With St. Paul it is quite different. He is a saint without a luminous
halo. His personal characteristics are too distinct and too human to
make idealisation easy. For this reason he has never been the object of
popular devotion. Shadowy figures like St. Joseph and St. Anne have been
divinised and surrounded with picturesque legends; but St. Paul has been
spared the honour or the ignominy of being coaxed and wheedled by the
piety of paganised Christianity. No tender fairy-tales are attached to
his cult; he remains for us what he was in the flesh. It is even
possible to feel an active dislike for him. Lagarde ('Deutsche
Schriften,' p. 71) abuses him as a politician might vilify an opponent.
'It is monstrous' (says he) 'that men of any historical training should
attach any importance to this Paul. This outsider was a Pharisee from
top to toe even after he became a Christian'--and much more to the same
effect. Nietzsche describes him as 'one of the most ambitious of men,
whose superstition was only equalled by his cunning. A much tortured,
much to be pitied man, an exceedingly unpleasant person both to himself
and to others.... He had a great deal on his conscience. He alludes to
enmity, murder, sorcery, idolatry, impurity, drunkenness, and the love
of carousing.' Renan, who could never have made himself ridiculous by
such ebullitions as these, does not disguise his repugnance for the
'ugly little Jew' whose character he can neither understand nor admire.
These outbursts of personal animosity, so strange in modern critics
dealing with a personage of ancient history, show how vividly his figure
stands out from the canvas. There are very few historical characters who
are alive enough to be hated.

It is, however, only in our own day that the personal characteristics of
St. Paul have been intelligently studied; and the most valuable books
about him are later than the unbalanced tirades of Lagarde and
Nietzsche, and the carping estimate of Renan. In the nineteenth century,
Paul was obscured behind Paulinism. His letters were studied as
treatises on systematic theology. Elaborate theories of atonement,
justification, and grace were expounded on his authority, as if he had
been a religious philosopher or theological professor like Origen and
Thomas Aquinas. The name of the apostle came to be associated with
angular and frigid disquisitions which were rapidly losing their
connexion with vital religion. It has been left for the scholars of the
present century to give us a picture of St. Paul as he really was--a man
much nearer to George Fox or John Wesley than to Origen or Calvin; the
greatest of missionaries and pioneers, and only incidentally a great
theologian. The critical study of the New Testament has opened our eyes
to see this and many other things. Much new light has also been thrown
by studies in the historical geography of Asia Minor, a work in which
British scholars have characteristically taken a prominent part. The
delightful books of Sir W.M. Ramsay have now been supplemented by the
equally attractive volume of another travelling scholar, Professor
Deissmann. A third source of new information is the mass of inscriptions
and papyri which have been discovered in the last twenty years. The
social life of the middle and lower classes in the Levant, their
religious beliefs and practices, and the language which they spoke, are
now partially known to us, as they never were before. The human interest
of the Pauline Epistles, and of the Acts, is largely increased by these
accessions to knowledge.

The Epistles are real letters, not treatises by a theological professor,
nor literary productions like the Epistles of Seneca. Each was written
with reference to a definite situation; they are messages which would
have been delivered orally had the Apostle been present. Several letters
have certainly been lost; and St. Paul would probably not have cared
much to preserve them. There is no evidence that he ever thought of
adding to the Canon of Scripture by his correspondence. The Author of
Acts seems not to have read any of the letters. This view of the
Epistles has rehabilitated some of them, which were regarded as spurious
by the Tuebingen school and their successors. The question which we now
ask when the authenticity of an Epistle is doubted is, Do we find the
same man? not, Do we find the same system? There is, properly speaking,
no system in St. Paul's theology, and there is a singularly rapid
development of thought. The 'Pastoral Epistles' are probably not
genuine, though the defence of them is not quite a desperate
undertaking. Of the rest, the weight of evidence is slightly against the
Pauline authorship of Ephesians, the vocabulary of which differs
considerably from that of the undoubted Epistles; and the short letter
called 2 Thessalonians is open to some suspicion. The genuineness of
Ephesians is not of great importance to the student of Pauline theology,
unless the closely allied Epistle to the Colossians is also rejected;
and there has been a remarkable return of confidence in the Pauline
authorship of this letter. All the other Epistles seem to be firmly
established.

The other source of information about St. Paul's life is the Acts of
the Apostles, the value of which as a historical document is very
variously estimated. The doubts refer mainly to the earlier chapters,
before St. Paul appears on the scene. Sane criticism can hardly dispute
that the 'we-passages,' in which the writer speaks of St. Paul and
himself in the first person plural, are the work of an eye-witness, and
that most of the important facts in the later chapters are from the same
source. The difficult problem is concerned with the relation of this
writer to the editor, who is responsible for the 'Petrine' part of the
book. There is very much to be said in favour of the tradition that this
editor, who also compiled the Third Gospel, was Lucas or Lucanus, the
physician and friend of St. Paul. It does not necessarily follow that he
was the fellow-traveller who in a few places speaks of himself in the
first person. Luke (if we may decide the question for ourselves by
giving him this name) must have been a man of very attractive character;
full of kindness, loyalty, and Christian charity. He is the most
feminine (not effeminate) writer in the New Testament, and shows a
marked partiality for the tender aspects of Christianity. He is
attracted by miracles, and by all that makes history picturesque and
romantic. His social sympathies are so keen that his gospel furnishes
the Christian socialist with nearly all his favourite texts. Above all,
he is a Greek man of letters, dominated by the conventions of Greek
historical composition. For the Greek, history was a work of art,
written for edification, and not merely a bald record of facts. The
Greek historian invented speeches for his principal characters; this was
a conventional way of elucidating the situation for the benefit of his
readers. Everyone knows how Thucydides, the most conscientious historian
in antiquity, habitually uses this device, and how candidly he explains
his method. We can hardly doubt that the author of Acts has used a
similar freedom, though the report of the address to the elders of
Ephesus reads like a summary of an actual speech. The narrative is
coloured in places by the historian's love for the miraculous. Critics
have also suspected an eirenical purpose in his treatment of the
relations between St. Paul and the Jerusalem Church.

Saul of Tarsus was a Benjamite of pure Israelite descent, but also a
Roman citizen by birth. His famous old Jewish name was Latinised or
Graecised as Paulos (Sahylost means 'waddling,' and would have been a
ridiculous name); he doubtless bore both names from boyhood. Tarsus is
situated in the plain of Cilicia, and is now about ten miles from the
sea. It is backed by a range of hills, on which the wealthier residents
had villas, while the high glens of Taurus, nine or ten miles further
inland, provided a summer residence for those who could afford it, and a
fortified acropolis in time of war. The town on the plain must have been
almost intolerable in the fierce Anatolian summer-heat. The harbour was
a lake formed by the Cydnus, five or six miles below Tarsus; but light
ships could sail up the river into the heart of the city. Thus Tarsus
had the advantages of a maritime town, though far enough from the sea to
be safe from pirates. The famous pass called the 'Cilician Gates' was
traversed by a high-road through the gorge into Cappadocia. Ionian
colonists came to Tarsus in very early times; and Ramsay is confident
that Tarshish, 'the son of Javan,' in Gen. x. 4, is none other than
Tarsus. The Greek settlers, of course, mixed with the natives, and the
Oriental element gradually swamped the Hellenic. The coins of Tarsus
show Greek figures and Aramaic lettering. The principal deity was
Baal-Tarz, whose effigy appears on most of the coins. Under the
successors of Alexander, Greek influence revived, but the administration
continued to be of the Oriental type; and Tarsus never became a Greek
city, until in the first half of the second century B.C. it proclaimed
its own autonomy, and renamed itself Antioch-on-Cydnus. Great privileges
were granted it by Antiochus Epiphanes, and it rapidly grew in wealth
and importance. Besides the Greeks, there was a large colony of Jews,
who always established themselves on the highways of the world's
commerce. Since St. Paul was a 'citizen' of Tarsus, i.e. a member of
one of the 'Tribes' into which the citizens were divided, it is probable
(so Ramsay argues) that there was a large 'Tribe' of Jews at Tarsus; for
no Jew would have been admitted into, or would have consented to join, a
Greek Tribe, with its pagan cult.

So matters stood when Cilicia became a Roman Province in 104 B.C. The
city fell into the hands of the barbarian Tigranes twenty years later,
but Gnaeus Pompeius re-established the Roman power, and with it the
dominance of Hellenism, in 63. Augustus turned Cilicia into a mere
adjunct of Syria; and the pride of Tarsus received a check.
Nevertheless, the Emperor showed great favour to the Tarsians, who had
sided with Julius and himself in the civil wars. Tarsus was made a
'libera civitas,' with the right to live under its own laws. The leading
citizens were doubtless given the Roman citizenship, or allowed to
purchase it. Among these would naturally be a number of Jews, for that
nation loved Julius Caesar and detested Pompeius. But Hellenism could not
retain its hold on Tarsus. Dion Chrysostom, who visited it at the
beginning of the second century A.D., found it a thoroughly Oriental
town, and notes that the women were closely veiled in Eastern fashion.
Possibly this accounts for St. Paul's prejudice against unveiled women
in church. One Greek institution, however, survived and flourished--a
university under municipal patronage. Strabo speaks with high admiration
of the zeal for learning displayed by the Tarsians, who formed the
entire audience at the professors' lectures, since no students came from
outside. This last fact shows, perhaps, that the lecturers were not men
of wide reputation; indeed, it is not likely that Tarsus was able to
compete with Athens and Alexandria in attracting famous teachers. The
most eminent Tarsians, such as Antipater the Stoic, went to Europe and
taught there. What distinguished Tarsus was its love of learning, widely
diffused in all classes of the population.

St. Paul did not belong to the upper class. He was a working artisan, a
'tent-maker,' who followed one of the regular trades of the place.
Perhaps, as Deissmann thinks, the 'large letters' of Gal. vi. 11 imply
that he wrote clumsily, like a working man and not like a scribe. The
words indicate that he usually dictated his letters. The 'Acts of Paul
and Thekla' describe him as short and bald, with a hook-nose and
beetling brows; there is nothing improbable in this description. But he
was far better educated than the modern artisan. Not that a single
quotation from Menander (1 Cor. xv. 33) shows him to be a good Greek
scholar; an Englishman may quote 'One touch of nature makes the whole
world kin' without being a Shakespearean. But he was well educated
because he was the son of a strict Jew. A child in such a home would
learn by heart large pieces of the Old Testament, and, at the Synagogue
school, all the _minutiae_ of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed
to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in
consequence became extremely retentive. The perfect pupil 'lost not a
drop from his teacher's cistern.' At the age of about fourteen the boy
would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in
St. Paul's case it was Gamaliel. Under his tuition the young Pharisee
would learn to be a 'strong Churchman.' The Rabbis viewed everything
from an ecclesiastical standpoint. The interests of the Priesthood, the
Altar, and the Temple overshadowed everything else. The Priestly Code,
says Mr. Cohu, practically resolves itself into one idea: Everything in
Israel belongs to God; all places, all times, all persons, and all
property are His. But God accepts a part of His due; and, if this part
is scrupulously paid, He will send His blessing upon the remainder.
Besides the written law, the Pharisee had to take on himself the still
heavier burden of the oral law, which was equally binding. It was a
seminary education of the most rigorous kind. St Paul cannot reproach
himself with any slackness during his novitiate. He threw himself into
the system with characteristic ardour. Probably he meant to be a
Jerusalem Rabbi himself, still practising his trade, as the Rabbis
usually did. For he was unmarried; and every Jew except a Rabbi was
expected to marry at or before the age of twenty-one.

He suffered from some obscure physical trouble, the nature of which we
can only guess. It was probably epilepsy, a disease which is compatible
with great powers of endurance and great mental energy, as is proved by
the cases of Julius Caesar and Napoleon. He was liable to mystical
trances, in which some have found a confirmation of the supposition that
he was epileptic. But these abnormal states were rare with him; in
writing to the Galatians he has to go back fourteen years to the date
when he was 'caught up into the third heaven,' The visions and voices
which attended his active ministry prove nothing about his health. At
that time anyone who underwent a psychical experience for which he could
not account believed that he was possessed by a spirit, good or bad. It
is significant that Tertullian, at the end of the second century, says
that 'almost the majority of mankind derive their knowledge of God from
visions.' The impression that St. Paul makes upon us is that of a man
full of nervous energy and able to endure an exceptional amount of
privation and hardship. A curious indication, which has not been
noticed, is that, as he tells us himself, he five times received the
maximum number of lashes from Jewish tribunals. These floggings in the
Synagogues were very severe, the operator being required to lay on with
his full strength. There is evidence that in most cases a much smaller
number of strokes than the full thirty-nine was inflicted, so as not to
endanger the life of the culprit. The other trials which he
mentions--three Roman scourgings, one stoning, a day and night spent in
battling with the waves after shipwreck, would have worn out any
constitution not exceptionally tough.

We must bear in mind this terrible record of suffering if we wish to
estimate fairly the character of the man. During his whole life after
his conversion he was exposed not only to the hardships of travel,
sometimes in half-civilised districts, but to 'all the cruelty of the
fanaticism which rages like a consuming fire through the religious
history of the East from the slaughter of Baal's priests to the
slaughter of St. Stephen, and from the butcheries of Jews at Alexandria
under Caligula to the massacres of Christians at Adana, Tarsus, and
Antioch in the year 1909'--(Deissmann). It is one evil result of such
furious bigotry that it kindles hatred and resentment in its victims,
and tempts them to reprisals. St. Paul does speak bitterly of his
opponents, though chiefly when he finds that they have injured his
converts, as in the letter to the Galatians. Modern critics have
exaggerated this element in a character which does not seem to have been
fierce or implacable. He writes like a man engaged in a stern conflict
against enemies who will give no quarter, and who shrink from no
treachery. But the sharpest expression that can be laid to his charge is
the impatient, perhaps half humorous wish that the Judaisers who want to
circumcise the Galatians might be subjected to a severer operation
themselves (Gal. v. 12). The dominant impression that he makes upon us
is that he was cast in a heroic mould. He is serenely indifferent to
criticism and calumny; no power on earth can turn him from his purpose.
He has made once for all a complete sacrifice of all earthly joys and
all earthly ties; he has broken (he, the devout Jewish Catholic) with
his Church and braved her thunders; he has faced the opprobrium of being
called traitor, heretic, and apostate; he has 'withstood to the face'
the Palestinian apostles who were chosen by Jesus and held His
commission; he has set his face to achieve, almost single-handed, the
conquest of the Roman Empire, a thing never dreamed of by the Jerusalem
Church; he is absolutely indifferent whether his mission will cost him
his life, or only involve a continuation of almost intolerable hardship.
It is this indomitable courage, complete self-sacrifice, and
single-minded devotion to a magnificently audacious but not
impracticable idea, which constitute the greatness of St. Paul's
character. He was, with all this, a warm-hearted and affectionate man,
as he proves abundantly by the tone of his letters. His personal
religion was, in essence, a pure mysticism; one worships a Christ whom
he has experienced as a living presence in his soul. The mystic who is
also a man of action, and a man of action because he is a mystic, wields
a tremendous power over other men. He is like an invulnerable knight,
fighting in magic armour.

It is an interesting and difficult question whether we should regard the
intense moral dualism of the Epistle to the Romans as a confession that
the writer has had an unusually severe personal battle with temptation.
The moral struggle certainly assumes a more tragic aspect in these
passages than in the experience of many saintly characters. We find
something like it in Augustine, and again in Luther; it may even be
suggested that these great men have stamped upon the Christian tradition
the idea of a harsher 'clash of yes and no' than the normal experience
of the moral life can justify. But it is not certain that the first
person singular in such verses as 'O wretched man that I am! who shall
deliver me from this body of death?' is a personal confession at all. It
may be for human nature generally that he is speaking, when he gives
utterance to that consciousness of sin which was one of the most
distinctive parts of the Christian religion from the first. It does not
seem likely that a man of so lofty and heroic a character was ever
seriously troubled with ignominious temptations. That he yielded to
them, as Nietzsche and others have suggested, is in the highest degree
improbable. Even if the self-reproaches were uttered in his own person,
we have many other instances of saints who have blamed themselves
passionately for what ordinary men would consider slight transgressions.
Of all the Epistles, the Second to the Corinthians is the one which
contains the most intimate self-revelations, and few can read it without
loving as well as honouring its author.

We know nothing of the Apostle's residence at Jerusalem except the name
of his teacher. But it was at this time that he became steeped in the
Pharisaic doctrines which loamed the framework in which his earlier
Christian beliefs were set. It is now recognised that Pharisaism, far
from being the antipodes of Christianity, was rather the quarter where
the Gospel found its best recruits. The Pharisaic school contained the
greater part of whatever faith, loyalty and piety remained among the
Jewish people; and its dogmatic system passed almost entire into the
earliest Christian Church, with the momentous addition that Jesus was
the Messiah. A few words on the Pharisaic teaching which St. Paul must
have imbibed from Gamaliel are indispensable even in an article which
deals with Paul, and not with Paulinism.

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