Apostle Paul (2): opposing bodies

The second of two parts on St. Paul's "mystical theology"

It was commonplace in the Roman world of Paul’s time to regard the empire as a great, unified “body,” its ruling “head” personified by the emperor. The metaphor of the body for the kingdom was an old one. Among the Greeks, one finds it in Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes, as well as in the play The Wasps by Aristophanes. Older than all the above is Aesop’s fable, “The Belly and the [Body’s] Members.” It was this last, Aesop’s fable, that evidently inspired the analogy that Menenius Agrippa (d. 493 B.C.) employed to mollify Rome’s rebellious plebeians (craftsmen and laborers) who were on the point of rising up against the patricians (the noble landed class), as recounted by Livy (d. 17 A.D.). [1] If — Menenius Agrippa argued — the working members of the body – the hands, mouth, teeth – were independently minded and refused to cooperate with the belly and were to starve it instead, then the whole body, including those recalcitrant members themselves, would weaken and die. “By using this comparison,” concluded Livy, “and showing how the internal disaffection amongst the parts of the body resembled the animosity of the plebeians against the patricians, he succeeded in winning over his audience.” The analogy of the “body” for society also shows up in the writings of the Roman Stoics, as well as in Philo. So it is that when Paul, in his novel way, adopted the old analogy – not in reference to the earthly kingdom (βασιλεία = “empire”) of Rome, but rather to the kingdom of God (βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ), present in Christ and the ekklesia united to him – he was artfully juxtaposing Christ’s “mystical” Body with the “body politic” of “the world” (Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12-27; Eph. 3:6, 5:23; Col. 1:18, 24). Nor was this merely a “political” move on Paul’s part; this was a mystical and spiritual – meaning substantial and real – perception for Paul, a mystery revealed to him and apprehended in the trials of his own flesh (Col. 1:24). He knew himself to be fully, physically, spiritually incorporated into Christ; his life existed (along with that of every other baptized member of the church) in Christ. Indeed, the expressions “in Christ,” “in the Lord,” and “in him” appear in Paul’s writings some 164 times. It was no mere analogy. We get more than just a hint of how intimate this identification truly was for him when, for example, he describes his altered relationship to “the world” in these striking terms: “But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). For Paul, this was as much a bodily fact as a spiritual truth.