Saint Paul

Saint Paul is a powerful but largely textual presence in the book. His letters become both a means of spiritual change and a source of dispute: Augustine encounters a decisive passage in Romans, and Thomas Merton draws on Pauline language to describe life identified with Christ, while accounts of slavery and racial oppression expose the harmful uses readers have made of his authority.

A Voice in Conversion Narratives

The book places Saint Paul’s writings at the center of Augustine’s turn toward Christian life. Before that moment, Augustine had been searching among philosophical and religious teachings for a way to know God. Stories of people who had left urban life for prayer and self-denial unsettled him; in the garden, a child’s repeated instruction to pick up and read led him to open the Letter to the Romans. The passage he encountered confronted the desires and habits that had held him back and directed him toward life in Jesus Christ.

The narrative presents the reading not as an isolated intellectual discovery but as the point when a long search met a moment of readiness. Augustine had already read Saint Paul, and the book describes his letters as bringing together insights he had found in Neoplatonism with the gift of divine grace. The Romans passage gave that encounter an immediate personal force: Augustine understood that change required putting on Jesus Christ, and he described relief from anxiety and the dispersal of doubt. In this account, Saint Paul’s words serve as the occasion for a transformation that Augustine’s own philosophical inquiry had not achieved.

An Authority Contested by the History of Slavery

The book also shows how Pauline authority could be heard very differently in the context of slavery. Howard Thurman’s grandmother, a former slave who inspired his faith, loved hearing the Bible but refused to listen to anything written by Saint Paul because he had told enslaved people to obey their masters. Her response makes the issue intimate: the authority of scripture was not an abstraction, but something encountered against the lived history of enslavement.

During Thurman’s 1935 pilgrimage in India, the principal of a law college challenged him about Christianity’s role in that history. He pointed to Christian slave traders, slave owners, and ministers who had invoked the apostle Paul to give religious sanction to slavery. He also confronted Thurman with the contradiction between Christian professions and the segregation, lynching, and racial violence African Americans endured, including within churches. Thurman did not defend the Christianity implicated in those acts. Instead, he distinguished it from the religion of Jesus and argued that his own criticism of slavery and racial prejudice was more severe than his host’s. The exchange shows Saint Paul’s words functioning as part of a public argument over who may claim Christian authority and what that claim legitimizes.

Pauline Language and Mystical Identity

In Thomas Merton’s account of mystical experience, Saint Paul supplies language for a self no longer centered on the isolated ego. Merton understands the experience through Christ and the Holy Spirit within the person: the mystic is identified with Christ rather than remaining merely an empirical self. The Pauline declaration that Christ lives within the believer gives theological shape to this account of self-transcendence. Here Paul is not presented as a warrant for social hierarchy but as a guide to a transformed spiritual identity.

Across these episodes, the book does not offer a biography of Saint Paul or settle the disagreements surrounding his writings. Instead, it traces the consequences of their reception. The same apostolic voice can be encountered as a summons to personal conversion, a foundation for mystical reflection, or an authority cited in defense of slavery. That contrast makes Saint Paul’s place in the book less a single portrait than a record of how scriptural interpretation can shape both inward change and judgments about justice.