The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Revisiting Paul's Anthropology in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.)) Few texts have been made more central to Christian doctrines of sin and human nature than ch. 7 of Paul's letter to the Romans. Romans 7:7-25 presents a dramatic monologue of inner turmoil and contradiction, not the good that I want, but the very thing I hate is what I do (7:19).1 This struggle pits not only good intentions against evil actions, but also the body against the mind, the flesh against the spirit, and God's law against sin. Augustine and Martin Luther both understood the monologue as a representation of the human will confessing its incapacity for goodness.2 This very influential reading made an intense inner struggle with sin the normative human condition and placed Paul's text at the center of Christian theologies of sin.3 Yet, although Romans 7 has been tremendously productive for later interpreters, historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have found it difficult to explain many aspects of the text. Even setting aside major issues such as Paul's understanding of sin, the Jewish law, or his anthropology, interpreters have had difficulty explaining Paul's use of literary and rhetorical forms or even the fact that the speaker claims to have died at the beginning of the monologue but then continues to speak for another twenty verses. This study proposes that the monologue of Romans 7 can be better understood in light of a Platonic discourse about the death of the soul. Read in the context of this moral tradition, Rom 7:7-25 emerges as an internal monologue that depicts the radical disempowerment of reason at the hands of the passions. Discussions of extreme immorality in Plato, Plutarch, Galen, and Philo of Alexandria illuminate the plight of the speaker of 7:7-25 as that of reason or mind explaining its utter defeat at the hands of passions and appetites, represented as sin.4 In fact, Romans 7 is most illuminated by the writings of Philo mat similarly use the metaphors of death and dying to describe reason's disempowerment by passions and desires. Not only does Romans 7 use Platonic terms for the reasoning part of the soul such as vouc, (mind) and eoco avOpomoc; (inner person), but the depiction of sin here fits with Platonic traditions of personification and metaphor that similarly represent passions and desires as an evil indwelling being mat makes war, enslaves, imprisons, and sometimes even metaphorically kills the mind. This tradition also explains the contradiction between wanting and doing in 7:14-25 as the plight of mind so disempowered by passions that it cannot put any of its good reasoning desires into action. Platonic traditions make sense of the developing argument of Romans 7 and explain the language of mind, inner person, sin, passions, flesh, body, warfare, slavery, imprisonment, and death. I want to make several points at the outset to clarify the nature and scope of this study. First, I not argue that Paul is relying on Plato directly or that he consistently uses a Platonic model of the soul elsewhere in his letters.5 Rather, I show that in the literary context of Romans 7, Paul uses certain premises that are identifiably Middle Platonic and that these better account for the language, style, and argument of the text. Second, I not argue that Paul is a philosopher or that his letters are informed only by philosophical or moral writings to the exclusion of any number of other traditions, discourses, or interests. Though interpreters have sometimes posed a Paul who is an apocalyptic thinker as antithetical to a Paul who has certain philosophical interests and skills, I can find no justification for the view that the selective appropriation of certain philosophical images and arguments necessarily conflicts with some uniquely Pauline (often apocalyptically conceived) religious sphere of interest and argument. In fact, I hold that issues central to Romans 7, such as the human capacity for good or bad behavior and for obedience or disobedience to God, gain immediacy in light of God's impending judgment of the world for those behaviors. …