An Event, Not a Conclusion
The change that Saul went through to become Paul was radical and provoked by an event, not a series of concepts leading to a conclusion.
In this regard we have two types of source. The first kind, the best known, consists of the accounts we owe to the pen of Luke, who tells of the event at least three times in the Acts of the Apostles (cf. 9: 1-19; 22: 3-21; 26: 4-23). The average reader may be tempted to linger too long on certain details, such as the light in the sky, falling to the ground, the voice that called him, his new condition of blindness, his healing like scales falling from his eyes and the fast that he made. But all these details refer to the heart of the event: the Risen Christ appears as a brilliant light and speaks to Saul, transforms his thinking and his entire life. The dazzling radiance of the Risen Christ blinds him; thus what was his inner reality is also outwardly apparent, his blindness to the truth, to the light that is Christ. And then his definitive "yes" to Christ in Baptism restores his sight and makes him really see.
In the ancient Church Baptism was also called "illumination", because this Sacrament gives light; it truly makes one see. In Paul what is pointed out theologically was also brought about physically: healed of his inner blindness, he sees clearly. Thus St Paul was not transformed by a thought but by an event, by the irresistible presence of the Risen One whom subsequently he would never be able to doubt, so powerful had been the evidence of the event, of this encounter. It radically changed Paul's life in a fundamental way; in this sense one can and must speak of a conversion.”[1]
Saul was led to
“The basic notion that conversion is the abandonment of the old, isolated subjectivity of the ‘I,’ and the finding of oneself within a new and subjective unity in which the limitations of the former ‘I’ have been surpassed, makes it possible to come into contact with the basis of all truth…”[2] In Galatians 3, 16, Ratzinger adds: “It is essential to note that Paul does not say ‘You are a single mass,’ in some collectivist sense, but ‘You are one.’ You have become a new subject, unique in Christ, and thus, by means of the fusion of the subject, you are now within the realm of the Promise.”[3]
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