The Paradox of Paul: The Hunter Who Was Caught

There is a peculiar type of story that delights children and philosophers alike; it is the tale of the hunter who becomes the hunted. This divine irony finds its most thunderous expression in the story of St. Paul, who rode out one morning as the hunter of Christians and found himself, by an embarrassing twist of cosmic justice, the most hunted man in all Christendom. If this were merely a matter of changing sides in a quarrel, it would be interesting but not immortal. The profound joke (if one may say so with reverence) is that Paul became the very thing he had set out to destroy, and in becoming it, he became more himself than he had ever been before.

Modern people, with their love of neat psychological explanations, have tried to explain away Paul's conversion as a kind of mental crisis, a breakdown of nerves brought on by secret doubts. They might as well try to explain away a thunderbolt as a mild case of static electricity. These critics, who pride themselves on seeing through everything, cannot see the one thing that is as plain as a picture painted on the sky – that the conversion of Paul was not a man reaching a conclusion but a conclusion reaching a man. He was not a philosopher who followed his thoughts to their logical end; he was a prisoner of logic who was ambushed by something entirely beyond logic.

It is worth noting that Paul was an educated man, which is precisely what makes his case so interesting and so inconvenient for the comfortable theorists of gradual religious evolution. He was not some ignorant peasant who might be dismissed as susceptible to superstition. He was, in fact, rather like a modern man – learned, logical, and wonderfully sure of himself. He was, in short, the last man in the world who would have been expected to fall victim to a religious hallucination. He was much more likely to write a clever article explaining why other people fell victim to religious hallucinations.

The supreme evidence that Paul's conversion was not a product of his own psychology is that it ran counter to every psychological tendency he possessed. It would be difficult to imagine a man more constitutionally unsuited to become a Christian. He was, by his own admission, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, which means he was not merely religious but religiously religious. He had that particular type of scrupulous and scholarly mind that finds it almost impossible to change its opinions, because it has reasoned out every detail of its convictions with perfect precision. Such a man might possibly have become an atheist through long years of philosophical doubt; that would have been, in its way, a natural intellectual evolution. But to have such a man suddenly turn head over heels and proclaim a new and seemingly preposterous religion – this is not evolution but explosion.

And what a religion! If Paul had merely decided to become more tolerant of Christianity, that would have been a conceivable development. But he did not become more tolerant; he became, if possible, more intolerant than ever – only now his intolerance was turned in exactly the opposite direction. He remained what he had always been, a zealot; but he became a zealot for the very thing he had zealously opposed. He kept all his old qualities but gave them new marching orders. His precision, his logic, his fierce intellectual energy were not destroyed but transfigured. The same mind that had once drawn up meticulous indictments against the Christians now drew up meticulous defenses of Christianity. The same passion that had made him a persecutor made him, when turned the other way, rejoice in persecution.

Here we touch upon the deepest paradox of all. Paul did not merely change from being a persecutor to being persecuted; he came to see persecution itself in an entirely new light. To the old Paul, persecution was a sign of strength; to the new Paul, it was a sign of weakness transformed into strength. "When I am weak, then I am strong" – this is not the sort of thing that occurred naturally to Roman citizens of good family and education. It is not the sort of thing that occurred naturally to anybody. It is, in fact, the precise opposite of what occurs naturally to everybody. Yet Paul not only said it but lived it, with a kind of passionate logic that has haunted human thought ever since.

The modern mind, which prides itself on being liberated from dogma, cannot quite rid itself of the dogma that all religious conversions must be gradual and reasonable. But Paul's conversion was neither gradual nor reasonable; it was sudden and, by any ordinary standard, entirely unreasonable. He was knocked off his horse – a position, let it be noted, in which a man's dignity is already considerably compromised. And having been knocked off his horse, he was then struck blind – hardly the sort of experience calculated to encourage calm and rational reflection. The whole episode has about it a kind of divine comedy, as if Heaven itself were playing a rather outrageous practical joke on its most dedicated opponent.

But the joke had a serious purpose. Paul's blindness was not merely physical; it was symbolic of that deeper blindness which he, and perhaps all of us, must pass through before we can see clearly. He had to lose his old way of seeing before he could gain a new one. And what he gained was not merely a new set of opinions but a new way of looking at everything. The persecutor had to become blind in order to see what his victims saw; he had to become weak in order to understand where true strength lay.

This transformation was not, as some modern critics would have it, a matter of Paul imposing his own personality on Christianity. Rather, it was a matter of Christianity imposing itself on Paul's personality. The remarkable thing is not how much Paul changed Christianity, but how much Christianity changed Paul – while leaving him, in another sense, exactly what he had always been. He remained a logician, but now his logic served a different master. He remained a zealot, but now his zeal had found its proper object. He remained a citizen of no mean city, but now his citizenship was in heaven.

The story of Paul presents us with a portrait of what might be called organized revolution. He was not converted from order to chaos but from one kind of order to another. The same mind that had once delighted in the intricate structure of the Law now delighted in the even more intricate structure of Grace. He did not become less systematic; he simply discovered a higher system. And this perhaps is why his writings have proved so inexhaustible – they combine the precision of a legal document with the passion of a love letter.

There is another paradox here, and it is one that goes to the heart of Christianity itself. Paul became free precisely by becoming a slave – a slave of Christ. He gained his life by losing it. He achieved dignity by accepting humiliation. He found strength in weakness. These are not, it must be emphasized, mere rhetorical flourishes or pretty pieces of mysticism. They are a precise description of what actually happened to him, and what he claimed could happen to anybody.

The final paradox of Paul's life is that this most learned of the apostles became, in the end, a fool for Christ's sake. The man who had once taken pride in his wisdom came to see that God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. The great persecutor became the great persecuted, and found in this reversal not a defeat but a victory. The hunter became the hunted, and discovered that he had been hunting the wrong quarry all along. He had set out to capture Christians and found himself captured by Christ.

This is not, as some would have it, a story of a man's search for God. It is the story of God's search for a man. Paul was not looking for Christ; Christ was looking for Paul. And having found him, Christ did not destroy Paul's personality but fulfilled it. The persecutor became the persecuted without ceasing to be Paul; indeed, he became more fully Paul than he had ever been before. This is the final mystery and the final comedy – that in losing himself, Paul found himself, and in finding himself, he found something far greater than himself.

The modern world, which is so fond of psychological explanations, might do well to consider that sometimes the explanation is more miraculous than the miracle. It is easier to believe that Paul was knocked off his horse by a blinding light than to believe that he knocked himself off by a process of rational deliberation. The conversion of Paul remains what it has always been – a divine comedy, a holy paradox, and a standing reminder that God's ways are not our ways, and that sometimes the best hunter is the one who allows himself to be caught.

-The Seeker's Quill