Paul of Tarsus. The Man Who Invented the Morality You Still Use

Around the year 50, a short, balding, physically unimpressive Jew from the Roman province of Cilicia climbs the rock of the Areopagus in Athens. He is standing almost exactly where Socrates stood four and a half centuries before him – on the hill where Athens had always judged its thinkers. Around him are the two schools that still ran the Greek mind: the Stoics, who taught that the wise man needs nothing, and the Epicureans, who taught that the gods are far off and indifferent. This is philosophy's own turf. And a tentmaker has walked onto it to argue.

Luke, who records the scene in the seventeenth chapter of Acts, gives us the opening move. Paul has walked the city and noticed its forest of altars, and among them one hedge against oversight, inscribed to the unknown god. He seizes it. The one you worship without knowing – that is the one I have come to name. Then he says the thing no Greek had ever quite said on that hill: that this God does not live in temples made by hands, that human hands do not serve Him as though He needed anything, and that He has made of one blood every nation of men.

Of one blood. Hold that phrase. It will decide the next two thousand years.

And remember what the Areopagus was: Athens' oldest court, no philosophers' debating society, whose charge of introducing foreign gods had once killed Socrates on this hill – so Paul stood closer to a dock than a lectern.

The Athenians listen politely until he reaches the resurrection of the dead, and then the hill does what hills of clever men do. Some laugh outright. Others, more diplomatic, tell him they will hear him again some other time. A handful follow him out. Read as a trial, it is an acquittal; read as a debate, it looks like a failure. Either way it was the first contact between Athens and Jerusalem, and Jerusalem had come to stay.

Let me tell you who he was, because the modern student has usually never been made to take him seriously as a thinker. His name was Saul, later Paul. He was born in Tarsus, a Cilician city that rivalled Athens in philosophy, at about the time Jesus was born. He was a Jew of the strictest party, a Pharisee, and, Acts says, a Roman citizen by birth, raised inside Jewish law and fluent in the Greek that carried ideas across the empire. He earned his living making tents; Wright reminds us that perhaps two-thirds of his talk about Jesus happened in a hot, cramped workshop rather than a synagogue, his hands hardened with labour. He began his public life as a persecutor – Acts pictures him holding the coats of the men who stoned the first Christian, though his own letters claim only that he 'persecuted the church of God.' Then, at Damascus, something happened to him that he spent the rest of his life trying to explain – the blinding light on the road is Luke's telling – and he became the opposite of what he had been.

What he did next is the most underrated intellectual event in Western history. Over perhaps fifteen years he wrote a series of letters to small, frightened, quarrelsome congregations around the Mediterranean – to Corinth, to Galatia, to Rome, to Philippi. They were occasional letters, written to solve local problems. Read cold, they are also the founding documents of the moral universe you live in.

Here is the claim, and I want you to feel how large it is. The convictions a secular student today assumes are simply human – that every person has equal dignity, that the perspective of the victim carries moral weight, that caring for the weak is a strength rather than a defect, that conscience is a court inside you, that love is the highest thing – not one of them is natural, and not one is Greek or Roman. Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, follows them one at a time back to their source, and the source keeps turning out to be the same handful of letters. Even the atheist who throws Christianity away throws it away, almost always, using Paul's own hands.

In a letter to some churches in Galatia, written probably in the 50s, Paul lost his temper over a question of religious law and, in the heat of it, wrote a sentence that had no precedent anywhere. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

You have to put this sentence back into the world it fell into, or it will mean nothing to you. Two lectures ago we sat with the darkest page in Aristotle – his argument, made soberly in the Politics, that some human beings are born slaves, that they have bodies like tools and lack the part of the soul that governs itself, and that to master them is as fitting as to master an ox. That was no raving of a monster. It was the considered view of the most careful mind Greece produced, and no serious person contradicted it. The Greek world was a staircase of unequal beings, and everyone knew his step.

Into that staircase Paul drops a sentence that says the steps are not real. This is not about kindness at all. At the only level that finally counts, a slave and his master are the same person. About women it is just as unconditional. In the new thing being born there is no such thing as a woman's assigned place. It would take eighteen centuries for the full bill of this sentence to come due – through abolition, through the rights of women, through the whole grammar of human equality. But the sentence was written first. A Jewish tentmaker wrote it, against Aristotle, and Aristotle lost.

John Barclay names the mechanism. In the ancient world a gift was always priced to the worth of the recipient, and to lavish one on a nobody was folly, like sowing seed in the sea. Paul's gospel is a gift that ignores worth – and once worth is no longer the currency, the whole staircase of graded beings loses its pricing mechanism. Equality is not something Paul argues for; it falls out of a grace that, belonging to no one, must go to everyone.

And it was never only a sentence. Meeks showed the line was older than Paul – a formula spoken over converts as they rose from the baptismal water, slave and master stripped and re-clothed by one rite. The equality was done to bodies before it was a philosophy.

Two honesties before we go on. Paul drew none of the social conclusions later readers would – he expected the world to end within his lifetime, and told slaves to stay slaves. The abolitionist harvest of that sentence is the work of later hands, not a programme Paul announced. And the seed fell on no empty ground: grace runs everywhere through the Judaism he was raised in – he universalised a Jewish inheritance rather than minting it from nothing.

The Greek project, from Thales to Plotinus, had one summit word: sophia, wisdom. To know. The philosopher was literally the lover of wisdom, and the highest human life was the life of a mind seeing truth. This is the ideal you inherited without noticing, every time you assume that the smartest person in the room is the best.

In a letter to the fractious, showing-off church at Corinth, Paul takes that summit and calmly sets something else on top of it. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge… and have not love, I am nothing.

Read that as philosophy, because it is philosophy. To understand all mysteries and all knowledge is exactly the Greek dream, the thing Aristotle organised his whole life around. Paul says: reach it, hold every last piece of it, and if you have no love you are nothing. Not lesser. Nothing. He has taken the terminal value of an entire civilisation and demoted it beneath a thing that civilisation barely had a serious word for. Then he closes the passage by ranking what lasts, and puts love at the very top, above even faith and hope.

And it was never only a ranking of virtues. In Corinth the church ate together, and Paul was furious about how: the rich ate their fill while the poor, off work, got nothing – 'one goes hungry, another is drunk.' His poem about love was really a rule about who eats: at this table a slave and his master share one loaf, or it is no Lord's table.

A modern person who says, without thinking twice, that a brilliant cruel man is worse than a slow kind one is quoting this letter. They have never read it. They do not need to. It got into the water a long time ago, and they have been drinking it their whole lives.

Now the hardest and most original thing he did. A few lectures ahead of us on this same era – I am getting ahead of our order, but hold the two lectures together – we will watch René Girard argue that the Cross broke the ancient machinery of sacred violence by taking the side of the victim against the mob. Girard wrote that in the twentieth century. Paul got there first, and not by a little. He was writing about the meaning of the Cross in the 50s, decades before a single Gospel narrative existed. He is the earliest interpreter we have of the most consequential execution in history.

And what he saw in it was an inversion of everything the ancient world called honour. To Rome a crucified man was the lowest thing imaginable, a slave's death, an obscenity you did not mention in polite company – a century on, the satirist Lucian would still sneer at Christians for worshipping 'that crucified sophist.' To Paul this obscenity is the hinge of the cosmos. We preach Christ crucified, he writes to Corinth, unto the Greeks foolishness – and at once he turns the insult into a banner: the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Every pagan hierarchy of strength over weakness is stood on its head in one line.

In a letter to Philippi he quotes what may be the oldest Christian hymn, and it is pure philosophy of descent. God, being in the form of God, emptied himself, took the form of a slave, and humbled himself to death, even the death of the cross. The Greek word is kenosis, self-emptying. The highest thing does not sit at the top waiting to be reached. It climbs down itself, on purpose, all the way to the bottom. There is a bitter aptness to where he probably wrote it: Wright places the Philippian letter in a prison cell at Ephesus – no light, vermin, little food, a man expecting execution. The theorist of self-emptying wrote he emptied himself while he was being emptied out. Remember that when we reach Plotinus, whose God could never do such a thing and would think it beneath divinity to try.

There is one more thing Paul built that you use every waking hour, and it is the least visible because it is the most inward. Open the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans and you find a man narrating a civil war inside a single self. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. He knows the good. He wants the good. He watches himself choose against it, and he cannot explain why, except that there is something in him at odds with himself.

Nobody in the ancient world talked like this. The Greek picture of wrongdoing was mostly ignorance: you did wrong because you did not truly know the good, and had you known it you would have done it. Paul says something stranger and, if you are honest, far truer to your own experience: you can see the good clearly, want it, and still betray it, and the betrayal comes from inside your own will. That is the discovery of conscience as an inner tribunal, a courtroom you carry with you and cannot leave.

One honest qualification. The word Paul reaches for, syneidesis, was not his coinage – the Stoics had minted it for the spark of the divine they held burned in every mind. What was new was the drama Paul put inside it: the Stoic conscience calmly witnessed; his is a will at war with itself.

Three hundred years later a North African named Augustine will read this chapter and build the entire interior self out of it – the self that watches and accuses itself, the self we will meet two lectures from here. Behind Augustine's garden and his Confessions stands Romans 7. Behind every diary and every three-in-the-morning reckoning with your own conduct stands Romans 7. Paul reached into the human person and switched on a light that has never gone off.

If you suspect I am overselling one man, let me hand you my best witness, and he is a hostile one. Friedrich Nietzsche spent the last lucid year of his life writing a book called The Antichrist, and its real target is not Jesus, whom he half-admired. Its target is Paul. Nietzsche understood, more clearly than most Christians ever have, exactly what Paul had done, and he hated him for it with a pure and educated hatred.

What Paul had done, in Nietzsche's own phrase, was a transvaluation of all values: he had taken the aristocratic morality of the ancient world, where good meant strong and noble, and turned it inside out, so that the poor and the wronged became the blessed and strength itself came under suspicion. Nietzsche wanted the old values back. He wanted a world that honoured power without apology, and he saw, correctly, that one obstacle stood in the road of every European heart, and that the obstacle had been put there by Paul. His whole late project was an attempt to reverse a single ancient move.

And Nietzsche was not the first enemy to concede the scale by attacking it. Three centuries earlier a Greek called Celsus raged at the movement for spreading among 'slaves, women and little children,' teaching the low that they need not take their beliefs from their betters – the transvaluation resented in real time by a Platonist who wanted the staircase kept. And the last pagan emperor, Julian, having renounced Christianity to restore the old gods, found he could not out-give the Christians' care for the poor, and set about copying it, complaining that 'the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well.' He was paying Paul the deepest compliment an enemy can pay: he could fight the revolution only by imitating it.

This is why Nietzsche is the most useful thing that ever happened to Paul's reputation. He is the enemy who concedes the scale of the victory in the very act of attacking it. A student who wants to reject Paul is welcome to try, but let him notice what Nietzsche noticed: to get out from under Paul you have to go all the way back and consciously revalue mercy as weakness. Almost nobody is willing to do that. Which means almost everybody, including the ones who sneer at the whole business, is still standing inside Paul's revolution, using his floor to spit at his ceiling.

This course has a rule, and I will not break it for a man I admire. When we reach the dark page of a thinker, we read it out loud and we do not soften it. Paul has several such pages.

The heaviest is one line in the thirteenth chapter of Romans: Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. For two thousand years tyrants and the churchmen who served them have quoted that verse to tell the beaten to hold still. It has blessed the divine right of kings and excused a great deal of cowardice in the face of evil. Whatever Paul meant by it, writing as a subject of Nero, the sentence has done centuries of harm.

Then there are the household codes, the passages telling slaves to obey their masters and wives to submit to their husbands. Even here it is not simple. When Paul commands sexual restraint he aims it, unusually, at the husbands – holding men to the fidelity his world asked only of wives, in a culture where a married man's use of courtesans and his own slaves raised no eyebrow. The rhetoric that grates on a modern ear was, in its moment, a leash on male licence. Against these codes stands Paul's own practice, which was better than his worst sentences. He calls a woman named Phoebe a deacon of her church and trusts her to carry the letter to Rome. He greets a woman named Junia as outstanding among the apostles. He works beside Priscilla, whom he names ahead of her husband. And his little letter to Philemon, sending a runaway slave back to his owner as a brother beloved, hovers one inch from demanding that the man be freed, and never quite says it. Freedom is implied on every line. It is nowhere commanded. That inch is the tragedy of Paul, and of much that came after him. The man who wrote neither slave nor free also sent Onesimus back. Both are true. Hold both.

I am writing this in a country at war, and you are most likely reading it in one. So let me end where it actually bites.

Two hundred kilometres and two thousand years from Paul, a state has organised itself around the exact creed he spent his life taking apart. The thing worshipped in Moscow is strength as such: the nation as a body that proves its holiness by how much it can crush, with the victim counted guilty by the mere fact of being a victim. That is no new evil. It is the oldest religion on earth, the pagan cult of power in a modern coat, and it is precisely the thing Paul climbed the Areopagus to declare finished.

Here is what I want you to see. The moment you feel that the murder of civilians is an outrage and not a routine cost of greatness, you are having a Pauline reflex. The instinct that makes you count the dead child on the other side as fully a person, of one blood with you, is not neutral common sense. It is a specific inheritance, argued into the world by one man against the whole grain of antiquity, and it can be lost.

A letter survives on papyrus from the year before Christ. A soldier named Hilarion writes home to his pregnant wife, tenderly, begging her not to worry – and in the same breath: if the child is a boy, keep it; if a girl, throw it out. He was no monster, and no exception. In that world a newborn girl could be left on a rubbish heap, and few felt more than mild regret. The horror you feel reading that line is not native to the animal. It is Paul's, handed down.

Cultures have lived without it for almost all of human history, and one very large culture is trying to climb back out of it right now.

To defend your country, in the end, is to defend a moral grammar – the sentence that says the weak are not for crushing and the victim is not to blame. A tentmaker from Tarsus wrote that grammar. You are its heirs, whether or not you believe a word about his God.

In the next lecture we meet the last great pagan mind, Plotinus, who reached for the divine with more beauty than almost anyone before him, and who insisted to the end that you have to climb to God alone. Paul had already said the opposite. God, he wrote, came down himself. Keep both in view. The argument between them is not over.