Bible. New Testament -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Jesus Christ -- Historicity
Now Christ, as already stated, is for Paul only a comprehensive
expression for the ideal totality of men, which is therein represented
as an individual personal being. It is clearly the Platonic idea
of humanity, and nothing else; just as Philo personified the divine
intelligence and made this coalesce with the "ideal man," with the
idea of humanity. [347] As in the Platonic view the union of man with
the ideal takes place through love, through immediate intellectual
perception on the basis of ideal knowledge, and the contradiction
between the world of sense and the world of ideas is overcome
by the same means; as also thereby man is raised to membership
in the cosmos of ideas; in just such a manner, according to Paul,
Christians unite together by means of faith and the sacraments into
constitutive moments of the ideal humanity. Thus they realise the
idea of humanity, and enter into a mystic communion with Jesus, who
himself, as we have already said, represents this idea in its united
compass. The consequence of this is, that all that is fulfilled in
Christ is equally experienced along with him, in mysterious fashion,
by those men who are united with him. Consequently they can now be
termed "members of the one body of Christ," who is its "head" or
"Soul"; and this indeed in the same sense as with Plato the different
ideas form but members and moments of the one world of ideas, and
their plurality is destroyed in the unity of the comprehensive and
determining idea of the One or the Good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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