The Conversion of Paul, 24th January 2021

On the eve of celebrating the conversion of St Paul, I have been inspired by the paintings of this scene, in your service sheets. Do take a moment to look at them.   Caravaggio and William Blake – very different styles, yet also quite similar in certain ways.

You may have seen other representations of this scene – with Saul on his way to Damascus to round up and probably kill many of the Christians. Saul’s zeal borders on obsession. Artist representation all have this seismic moment, as this great persecutor of Christians, encountered Christ himself and becomes the evangelist par excellence. Saul realises that in the name of religion, he had become a murderer. In the name of love, he had become hate. It’s a lesson to us today, showing that religion can be the most liberating thing in the world, but also the cause of the most awful atrocities.

All of the paintings I’ve seen attempt to show what it feels like to have an encounter with God. The painting styles are quite different. Caravaggio in his typically moody oil painting. Blake’s is a watercolour in his lovely sort of sweeping painting style.

And yet there are similarities. Both Caravaggio and Blake have scaled back the scene. There are no heavenly hosts in the heavens, or other companions that accompany Saul. Both painting have him with cruciform arms outstretched, perhaps highlighting what would become Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. It was going to involve a great personal cost – of hardship and sacrifice – and ultimately his life.

There are also similarities in how they represent this encounter. Saul is not being zapped from an eternal source – an angel, Christ or God, for example. While the encounter is resolutely ‘God-given’—there is something altogether more internal; psychological even.

Caravaggio seems to present Saul as having a mystical experience of Christ. Christ himself is physically absent from the image (apart from the ‘heavenly light’ that illuminates Saul). It’s sort of pressing us to imagine what’s going on in his mind.

It feels a rather ‘modern’ representation of the conversion in that it suggests that a vision is a psychological episode rather than a physically observable irruption in the external world. Caravaggio would have been aware of mystical traditions. Such encounters acknowledge that God’s power and presence cannot be reduced to worldly phenomena. True to the mystical tradition is that the road to union with God comes by way of purgation. The illumination that comes from this encounter includes a necessary stripping back.

In Blake’s painting, Christ dominates the top half, bathed in light. He’s surrounded either by a heavenly host, or perhaps by the souls of those whom Saul was persecuting. Christ appears to be pointing Saul in the direction of Damascus. There is this lovely detail, with Christ’s robes almost touching Saul, suggesting a mingling of the human and the divine. This was for Blake, as it is for Eastern Orthodox theology, the ultimate aim of the journey of faith. We see here the moment at which Saul definitively opened his eyes of faith. Whilst he was struck blind by this encounter, his eyes were opened to the truth, that God was indeed present in the person of Christ.

And what a different this encounter with the risen Christ made. We owe much of our NT to the apostle Paul. Tom Holland’s remarkable book, Dominion, sees St Paul as the great revolutionary, with the most enduring impact on Western thought over the past two millennia. Drawing upon the best in his Jewish roots, St Paul affirmed that humans are equal in the eyes of God. Joe Biden said exactly this in his inauguration speech: ‘My Catholic faith drilled into me a core truth – that every person on earth is equal in rights and dignity, because we are all believed children of God.’

This is straight from St Paul, who restored human dignity at a time when perhaps four out of five people were slaves, and oppression and wholesale injustice toward the poor and the outsider were the universal norm. Into this corrupt and corrupting empire Paul shouts, he levels the playing field with this stunning affirmation, with which I shall end: “You, all of you, are sons and daughters of God, now clothed in Christ, where there is no distinction between male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free, [gay, straight or bi, single, married or divorced, Tory or Labour, Republican or Democrat]… but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26-28). May that be our prayer today.

References

Natasha O’Hear