Paul: Christianity’s Premier Apostolic Mystic

Harvey D. Egan, SJ

Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021

A review by George H. Martin

 In Paul Found in His Letters I have a chapter “Paul the mystic.” A few months after it was published I discoverer this book among the new books at the Luther Seminary library. I had to see what it was all about. We traveled slightly different roads in our analysis of Paul’s orientation to the mystic life, but where we find great agreement, is Egan’s focus on this: “…Paul’s mystical worldview, his mystical horizon, the lens through which he comprehended that God consummated Israel’s history through the sending of Jesus-Messiah and the Holy Spirit.” (p. 2)  

In terms of the history of scholarship on Paul and mysticism—a sidecar compared with the over-whelming focus on Paul’s theology—we agree that Schweitzer’s take on Paul’s mysticism was, in Egan’s assessment “deficient.” (p. 37) As Egan pursues Paul in relationship to various sacraments—especially baptism and the eucharist—he is in dialogue with many Catholic theologians. He also is well-grounded in the Catholic mystical tradition and brings Paul into conversation, as it were, with various monks and nuns through the first 1500 years of the common era. (This is not an area where I have much to offer.)

I really liked finding Egan’s comments on the way Paul saw the slave Onesimus. I devote considerable attention to the matter in my chapter “Paul Slave of Christ.” In a short paragraph Egan knows Onesimus as someone “sent to Paul”—not a runaway slave—and then as someone converted (i.e baptized) he was sent back to Philemon as his “beloved brother.” As Egan notes Paul was “not a proto-abolitionist.”  He also insightfully adds, “Treating a slave as a beloved brother sound radical to some people even today.” (p. 103)

The two of us agree that Paul’s revelations are his alone. He never said he learned about the Last Supper, for example, from his meeting with Peter. Paul wrote this was “what I received from the Lord and handed on to you.” This was just part of Paul who I suggested “bewildered the high and mighty in the early days of the Jesus Messiah movement.” (Paul Found, 248)

 One very important observation made by Paul, and one that I hope is consonant with what I wrote is that for Paul what he was expecting in the return of the Messiah wasn’t a highway to heaven, but a new creation which would come with his return. In Egan’s words: “Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Holy Spirit, will be affirmed in the eventual future, in ways in which we can only presently guess.” (p. 120)

 With Paul’s emphasis on creation he knew the reality of the world in which he lived. He wrote “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.” (Rom. 8:22) I thought of that verse when Egan at the end of his book was discussing the apocalyptic hope sustained by mystics through the ages. He remembered the 14th century Dominican mystic Henry Suso. His sins he said, “…kept him from praising God. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “the frogs in the ditches praise you. And if they can’t sing, at least they croak.” Egan does much more than that in a book which brings so many mystics in Christian history into conversation with Paul.