Paul, Hammarskjold, and Life in the Spirit

Other essays in this Christianity section focus on the Letters of Paul in the New Testament, especially his Letter to the Romans. My account of Paul makes him more like what we call “Pentecostal” Christians today, and for this reason his particular path seems not easily available those today (like myself) who have no personal experience of Spirit-possession. But I think there are some fundamental similarities between Paul’s spirituality and the spirituality expressed in the diary of Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961) (published posthumously as Markings). The present essay explains some of the main similarities between the kind of goodness characteristic of Hammarskjold’s spirituality, and the Spirit-based spirituality of Paul:

• Hammarskjold is a “driven” man. In his best moments, his drive to do what is right and struggle for rightness in the world and in himself, is a powerful but “irrational” force, not under his rational control and deliberate will. The Spirit in Paul is also something that comes upon a person, driving her from within — in its most dramatic instances it feels as though one is being “possessed” by some powerful force. I will argue that this kind of experience is central to the contrast Paul draws between “Spirit” and “Law,” and his associated contrast between the law-oriented Judaism he previously adhered to, and the new Spirit-oriented Judaism he associates with following Jesus.
• The Spirit in Paul is something a person feels within herself, but at the same time feels as “not me.” Hammarskjold describes a similar inner force felt within when he says “although it is in me, is outside and above me.” And Paul, like Hammarskjold, insists that this inner drive is not something one should take personal credit for, or use for one’s own personal interests.
• The spirituality of Paul, and of Hammarskjold, is an intensely emotional, passionate spirituality. It is based on attending to very strong feelings, even when these feelings are difficult to express and make rational sense of. One would never arrive at this way of being by purely rational thought. But not just any kind of passions are involved here. This passion is something like sexual passion, for example, in that it is something that takes over (“possesses”) a person and makes her feel “carried away,” rather than something under her deliberate rational control. The passion of Paul and Hammarskjold, by contrast, is a passion for rightness, driving a person to devote her life to something important for its own sake, especially for doing what is right and struggling for the victory of rightness in the world.
• Both Paul and Hammarskjold are seized by this drive in a very perfectionist form, and a form most disconnected from, and even contrasted with, ordinary human standards of tangible success. Hammarskjold’s drive is not satisfied by normal kinds of human achievements – his most despairing feelings about his “meaningless” life come at a time when he is most accomplished by ordinary human standards. He feels on the contrary that satisfaction with conventional signs of success is one of the main obstacles to following the passionate internal drive for rightness and importance he values most highly (“never let success hide its emptiness from you… and so keep alive that pain in the soul that drives us beyond ourselves.”) Similarly, when Paul speaks of the universality and inescapability of “sin” in the Letter to the Romans, he does not have in mind what we would ordinarily consider individual acts of wrongdoing. Rather: “All are sinful because all fall short of the Glory of God” — the “Glory of God” representing in Paul the demands of God for perfect rightness. The crucified Jesus also sometimes serves for Paul as an image of a kind of goodness most disconnected from any standards of “success” in the world.
  The discussion of Hammarskjold above argued that Hammarskjold is justified in connecting his inner drive with “God” (as ultimate “authority”) to the extent that his drive participates in some transcendent Goodness, and that we should understand “transcendent” in Plato’s sense as perfect Goodness. And in the Platonic context, transcendent Goodness is always very difficult to understand and grasp in itself, but it is the perfection of some kind of goodness more easily accessible to us in more familiar if less perfect forms. So this is how we should treat Paul’s concept of “God’s Holy Spirit.”
• “Possessed by God’s Holy Spirit” describes some particular and specific kind of goodness, not just any kind, or goodness in general (one should already begin to see how the passionate nature of this goodness makes it different from the more “cool” goodness of Buddhist Nibbana).
• This goodness deserves being treated as divine (as “God’s Spirit”) in the same sense that Plato calls Platonic Forms “divine paradigms” — i.e. insofar as it is conceived in its most perfect form, transcending all familiar human concepts and ordinary human capacities. The Platonic concept of participation and analogy allows us to rationally understand divine transcendent goodness through lesser imperfect examples, while not reducing this transcendent goodness to something more ordinary, less transcendent than what Paul conceives it to be.