What Paul has to say about man rests in the first place [pg 097] on ordinary observation and is of a self-evident character. The special features of his view which go beyond this are to be explained from eschatology and not from Greek thought. Anthropology and psychology, in the development which he gives them, have reference not to the natural man but to the redeemed man, who is risen with Christ, endowed with the Spirit, and already living in a supernatural condition. His conception of the natural condition of man is determined by reference to its actual abolition, and therefore has quite a different orientation from that of the Greek thinkers. How do matters stand in regard to the assertion that his system contains Platonic elements? What comes into question is not Platonism proper, but the religious modification and popularisation of it which later on, in the third century, came to completion in Neo-Platonism. What this philosophy has in common with Paul is the general desire for deliverance from corporeity. When it is more closely considered, however, characteristic differences appear. Platonism as a religion has to do with the deliverance of the soul from its imprisonment in the body, Paul looks for the deliverance of the whole human personality. In the one case the antithesis is between soul and body, in the other between the supernatural body and the corruptible flesh. Platonic religious feeling desires release from all corporeity, what Paul hopes for is a different kind of materiality. He believes in a resurrection, Platonism in mere immortality. For him the fate of the individual is so bound up with cosmical, eschatological events that the new state of existence can only result from a cosmical revolution. Platonism knows nothing of a temporally conditioned redemption of this kind, but represents it as coming to pass immediately after death. The materialism which is implicate in eschatology thus opposes a barrier to the Platonising of Paul’s religious thought. For his conception of spirit a parallel might be sought [pg 098] in Stoicism, which teaches that a spiritual substance proceeding from God permeates the universe, including corporeal organisms, and manifests itself in man as the rational soul. Common to this philosophy and to Paul is the material conception of spirit. But the differences which it exhibits are of such a kind that there can be no question of the Apostle’s dependence upon it. In the Stoic philosophy the spirit is identical with the rational soul; in Paul it is introduced as something new alongside of the latter, and ends by displacing it. According to the philosophic conception it is active in the world from all eternity; according to the doctrine of the Apostle it first appears in the times of the End, and is only bestowed upon a limited section of mankind. The one view is a pantheistic monism, the other is a theistic dualism.