Philosophy of the Self in the Apostle Paul

Is there such a thing? Is there at all an awareness of “the self” in Paul, the apostle of Christ? Is there even “philosophy” of the self in him? These questions might seem uninteresting to students of ancient philosophy, who have traditionally defined their subject in opposition to various forms of specifically “religious” thought in antiquity. I begin from a set of considerations that will hopefully make the possibility of giving a positive answer to those questions appear reasonably interesting.

This claim should be seen against the background of a more or less traditional consensus that one can at most speak of an emerging consciousness of “the” self in antiquity and only in a fairly rudimentary form of a genuine “philosophy” of the self. Thus Taylor, in the book just referred to, basically took a giant leap from Plato to Augustine, and even that only as a sort of background to the later invention or “making” of the self. Against this I shall argue that although there is certainly no explicit and self-conscious philosophy of the self in Paul, we do find in him a use of (pre-existing and well-prepared-for) reflections on something which may very well be called “the self”.3 Interestingly, we shall see that this use emerges in situations of (intellectual) conflict.