Suddenly a man of genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters on
the scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning Stephen. He
persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport which he combines
with the business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of Jesus,
whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom of that particular
sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims
under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the
terror of death, which may be called also the terror of sex and the
terror of life. Now Jesus, with his healthy conscience on his higher
plane, was free from these terrors. He consorted freely with sinners,
and was never concerned for a moment, as far as we know, about whether
his conduct was sinful or not; so that he has forced us to accept him as
the man without sin. Even if we reckon his last days as the days of
his delusion, he none the less gave a fairly convincing exhibition of
superiority to the fear of death. This must have both fascinated and
horrified Paul, or Saul, as he was first called. The horror accounts for
his fierce persecution of the Christians. The fascination accounts for
the strangest of his fancies: the fancy for attaching the name of Jesus
Christ to the great idea which flashed upon him on the road to Damascus,
the idea that he could not only make a religion of his two terrors, but
that the movement started by Jesus offered him the nucleus for his new
Church. It was a monstrous idea; and the shocks of it, as he afterwards
declared, struck him blind for days. He heard Jesus calling to him from
the clouds, "Why persecute me?" His natural hatred of the teacher for
whom Sin and Death had no terrors turned into a wild personal worship
of him which has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing seen in a false
light.
The chronicler of the Acts of the Apostles sees nothing of the
significance of this. The great danger of conversion in all ages has
been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower
mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding
it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level
by degrading it. Years ago I said that the conversion of a savage
to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery. The
conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted
the religion that had raised one man above sin and death into a religion
that delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that
their own common nature became a horror to them, and the religious life
became a denial of life. Paul had no intention of surrendering either
his Judaism or his Roman citizenship to the new moral world (as Robert
Owen called it) of Communism and Jesuism. Just as in the XIX century
Karl Marx, not content to take political economy as he found it,
insisted on rebuilding it from the bottom upwards in his own way, and
thereby gave a new lease of life to the errors it was just outgrowing,
so Paul reconstructed the old Salvationism from which Jesus had vainly
tried to redeem him, and produced a fantastic theology which is still
the most amazing thing of the kind known to us. Being intellectually
an inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding the irrational real
thing for the unreal but ratiocinable postulate, he began by discarding
Man as he is, and substituted a postulate which he called Adam. And when
he was asked, as he surely must have been in a world not wholly mad,
what had become of the natural man, he replied "Adam IS the natural
man." This was confusing to simpletons, because according to tradition
Adam was certainly the name of the natural man as created in the garden
of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own time had described as
typically British Frankenstein's monster, and called him Smith, and
somebody, on demanding what about the man in the street, had been told
"Smith is the man in the street." The thing happens often enough; for
indeed the world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the street
and average sensual men and economic men and womanly women and what
not, all of them imaginary Atlases carrying imaginary worlds on their
unsubstantial shoulders.
The Eden story provided Adam with a sin: the "original sin" for which
we are all damned. Baldly stated, this seems ridiculous; nevertheless
it corresponds to something actually existent not only in Paul's
consciousness but in our own. The original sin was not the eating of the
forbidden fruit, but the consciousness of sin which the fruit produced.
The moment Adam and Eve tasted the apple they found themselves ashamed
of their sexual relation, which until then had seemed quite innocent
to them; and there is no getting over the hard fact that this shame, or
state of sin, has persisted to this day, and is one of the strongest
of our instincts. Thus Paul's postulate of Adam as the natural man was
pragmatically true: it worked. But the weakness of Pragmatism is that
most theories will work if you put your back into making them work,
provided they have some point of contact with human nature. Hedonism
will pass the pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up to a certain point
every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy
works in Russia and Democracy in America; Atheism works in France,
Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or
No-ism, in England. Paul's fantastic conception of the damned Adam,
represented by Bunyan as a pilgrim with a great burden of sins on his
back, corresponded to the fundamental condition of evolution, which
is, that life, including human life, is continually evolving, and must
therefore be continually ashamed of itself and its present and past.
Bunyan's pilgrim wants to get rid of his bundle of sins; but he also
wants to reach "yonder shining light;" and when at last his bundle falls
off him into the sepulchre of Christ, his pilgrimage is still unfinished
and his hardest trials still ahead of him. His conscience remains
uneasy; "original sin" still torments him; and his adventure with Giant
Despair, who throws him into the dungeon of Doubting Castle, from which
he escapes by the use of a skeleton key, is more terrible than any he
met whilst the bundle was still on his back. Thus Bunyan's allegory of
human nature breaks through the Pauline theology at a hundred points.
His theological allegory, The Holy War, with its troops of Election
Doubters, and its cavalry of "those that rode Reformadoes," is, as a
whole, absurd, impossible, and, except in passages where the artistic
old Adam momentarily got the better of the Salvationist theologian,
hardly readable.
Paul's theory of original sin was to some extent idiosyncratic. He
tells us definitely that he finds himself quite well able to avoid the
sinfulness of sex by practising celibacy; but he recognizes, rather
contemptuously, that in this respect he is not as other men are, and
says that they had better marry than burn, thus admitting that though
marriage may lead to placing the desire to please wife or husband before
the desire to please God, yet preoccupation with unsatisfied desire may
be even more ungodly than preoccupation with domestic affection. This
view of the case inevitably led him to insist that a wife should be
rather a slave than a partner, her real function being, not to engage a
man's love and loyalty, but on the contrary to release them for God by
relieving the man of all preoccupation with sex just as in her capacity
of a housekeeper and cook she relieves his preoccupation with hunger
by the simple expedient of satisfying his appetite. This slavery also
justifies itself pragmatically by working effectively; but it has made
Paul the eternal enemy of Woman. Incidentally it has led to many foolish
surmises about Paul's personal character and circumstance, by people so
enslaved by sex that a celibate appears to them a sort of monster. They
forget that not only whole priesthoods, official and unofficial, from
Paul to Carlyle and Ruskin, have defied the tyranny of sex, but immense
numbers of ordinary citizens of both sexes have, either voluntarily
or under pressure of circumstances easily surmountable, saved their
energies for less primitive activities.
Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for
the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the
natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable
only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had
Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on
its legs again in the name of Jesus.