Paul

Paul is presented as a major source for Christian mysticism, but not as a mystic who describes becoming one with God. The book instead emphasizes a Christ-centered pattern: people enter relationship with God through encounter with Jesus Christ, and transformation is expressed as Christ living in the believer. Paul’s accounts of conversion and ascent also show the limits of language when spiritual experience exceeds what ordinary description can contain.

Paul and the spiritual reading of Scripture

Paul’s writings serve as a source for understanding Scripture at more than one level. In the account of Origen’s approach, the Bible has a body, a soul, and a spirit: its historical or common meaning is its body; readers advancing spiritually discover its soul; and those who reach the secret wisdom of God discover its spirit. Paul’s reference to hidden wisdom supplies the language for that deepest level. The framework makes scriptural reading itself a kind of ascent, as readers move beyond the surface toward spiritual understanding.

The book also connects Paul’s thought with the distinction between the outer and inner person. The outer nature is wasting away while the inner nature is renewed, a contrast that Origen relates to the two creations described in Genesis: the human being made in God’s image and the human being formed from the dust. Paul’s language gives this contrast a continuing spiritual significance. The inner life is not simply an escape from bodily existence; it is the site of renewal and desire for God, even as the outer person remains subject to change.

Conversion and the form of testimony

Paul’s conversion is presented through accounts that differ in their choice of detail. Luke tells the story three times in Acts. These versions use two recurring images: a light that surprises Paul and a voice. In the third account, the voice speaks Hebrew. Paul’s own account in Galatians is more compressed: God is pleased to reveal his Son to him, and Paul states the fact of his conversion without the mythical images used in Luke’s narratives. The contrast does not erase the event; it shows how a transformative experience can be narrated through different forms, from vivid signs to concise testimony.

Paul’s conversion also becomes a turning point in Augustine’s remembered story. In the garden, after Ponticianus has told Augustine and Alypius about Antony and the lives of monks, Augustine is agitated by the contrast between their simple prayer and self-denial and his own divided life. He returns to the house, opens Paul’s letter to the Romans, and reads words that address the desires he has struggled to master. The book interprets the passage’s decisive demand as putting on Jesus Christ. For Augustine, Paul’s words arrive at the right moment: he describes relief flooding his heart and doubt falling away. Paul is not a participant in the garden scene, but his letter gives Augustine language for change and a way to understand conversion as a new life in Christ.

Ascent, mystery, and Christ-mysticism

Paul’s account of ascent gives the book one of its clearest examples of the difficulty of describing mystical experience. In 2 Corinthians, he writes of a person caught up to the third heaven and into Paradise, while remaining unsure whether the experience occurred in or out of the body. The expressions third heaven and Paradise are not treated as a literal map of a journey. They are images reaching toward an experience for which Paul says no repeatable account can be given: the person heard things that cannot be told and that mortals are not permitted to repeat. The narrative therefore marks both an encounter and the boundary of what testimony can disclose.

Albert Schweitzer’s interpretation sharpens the distinction between Paul and classical accounts of mystical union. Schweitzer argues that Paul does not describe becoming one with God; he has, in Schweitzer’s terms, a Christ-mysticism rather than a God-mysticism. The relationship with God comes through encounter with Christ, and Paul’s formulation that Christ lives in the believer expresses this pattern. Schweitzer regards union with Christ as Paul’s central Christian achievement. The emphasis is not on a dissolving of the self into God, but on a transformed life defined by Christ’s presence.

Desire and the life shaped by Christ

Paul’s language also links inward transformation with desire and moral change. In the book’s account of Origen, the inner person is renewed, while the outer person is subject to decay and competing impulses. Paul’s contrast between the inner self’s delight in God’s law and another law at war within the person gives spiritual life the character of an ongoing struggle. The account does not present mystical experience as a guarantee that ordinary conflict disappears; rather, it places renewal within the tension between the life people seek and the forces that pull them elsewhere.

That pattern appears again in Bernard of Clairvaux’s interpretation of the Song of Songs. Bernard recalls having once looked after his own interests, then identifies with Paul’s declaration that Christ lives in him. He uses Paul’s example to explain why Peter and Paul could abandon their own vineyards and devote themselves to the communities entrusted to them. In this reading, inward transformation has an outward consequence: self-interest gives way to service, and the language of union with Christ becomes a measure of a life directed toward others. Across these accounts, Paul’s importance lies both in what he says about spiritual experience and in the language later writers use to interpret conversion, desire, renewal, and service.