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Translated by Alba I. Zizzamia
On the occasion of the Pauline Year we present this two part reflection on the Apostle to the Gentiles and model missionary, St Paul. As the Gospels present to us the Divine Personality of Jesus, the majority of the rest of the New Testament presents to us the personality of Paul, the new man in Christ.
Msgr. Ricciotti is the well respected author of numerous works on Church history. This appreciation is taken from the conclusion of his book on St Paul.
What remains today of Paul's work?
In the material sense there is practically nothing left. The numerous and fervent Christian communities he founded in Asia Minor and Macedonia, where Christianity had, as it were, its second cradle, have today all disappeared. The Gospel of Paul was driven from them by the Koran of Mohammed, just as in its turn the Koran is today being driven out by atheistic secularism. The few communities Paul founded elsewhere have wasted to mere shadows. Only the Roman community remains the spinal column of Christianity, but it was not founded by Paul, who always considered it built on foundations laid by others.
In the spiritual sense the precise contrary is true. Paul's work not only persists today in its entirety, but it has grown and spread more than a thousand-fold. When we compare it with what it was at the time of Paul's death we cannot help but think of the Gospel parable of the mustard seed. Today Christianity, in large measure, means Paul, just as human civilization in our era signifies in large measure Christianity. The truly civilized man, consciously or unconsciously, is today to some extent a disciple of Paul.
This historical law, whereby all apparent failure is followed by a real triumph, has always guided the destiny of Christianity, and before Paul, it was established, as it were, by Christ himself.
The conversion of the Jews, to which the mission of Jesus was directly addressed, did not take place. The mission failed: in the land of the Jews not only did the doctrine of Jesus not take root, but forty years later the very nation of the Jews was uprooted and cast out. The failure, therefore, seemed complete. But this had been foreseen: "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone" (Jn. 12:24). Thus it is a failure from which is derived the triumph, a death from which life is born. The seed dies to release the fertile plant. Mortal men, in their smallness, fix their eyes on the immediate and temporary victory; God contemplates the eternal future triumph.
Thus it was with Jesus, and thus it was with his great disciple Paul. During his lifetime the Apostle filled the known world with his activity.
But all works wrought in space alone are transitory because they are stamped on matter; only those works which are stamped on the spirit are everlasting. That is why, after Paul's death, and the death of the works he wrought in space, he continues to fill time with the thought he has stamped on the souls of men.
The analogy between the Master and the disciple is also remarkable for the manner in which they are presented to the historian and the position they occupy in early Christian documents. It has been observed with complete accuracy that the New Testament, unlike the Old, consists essentially of two great biographies, the biography of Jesus in the four Gospels and the biography of Paul in the Acts and the Epistles. The little that remains functions almost as a support to these two biographies, and leans against them. Paul had never been with Jesus nor had he ever seen him during his mortal life, while the other Apostles had accompanied the Master night and day throughout his entire public ministry. Yet we know extremely little about the other Apostles—only the names of some of them—while we have a rich biography, in part an autobiography, of this thirteenth companion, this Apostle born out of due time (1 Cor. 15:8). So choice a privilege was not accorded to any of the others, not even to the beloved disciple, who must have died a very old man, after Paul's death, and in a place where Christianity had been sown by Paul. But perhaps God ordained it thus so that to the portrait of the true divine Model there might be added the portrait of the human model which so closely resembled the first, and from, the two together there might emerge more clearly the spiritual features of the one countenance. "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ" (1 Cor. 11:1) .