A thorn in Paul’s flesh?

Over the centuries interpreters have put forward countless possibilities, which I have almost certainly not tracked down in full, let alone been able to list one by one in this piece. What did strike me, however, is that quite a few interpretations say at least as much about the interpreters themselves as about Paul.

Interpretation by Church Fathers

It all started fairly innocently. The first Church Fathers to specify Paul’s problem thought of something like a severe earache or headache. In other words, they took ‘in the flesh’ literally: it was a physical ailment.

Someone like John Chrysostom (347–407) disagreed. For him it was a figure of speech, and Paul was talking about people who thwarted him. He found support in the expression ‘a messenger’ (literally ‘an angel’) ‘of Satan,’ which made him think of concrete opponents. Chrysostom did, however, shift considerably on the question of who these people were. First they had to be opponents of Christianity, then enemies from within, and at the very end of his life he saw in them the people who had wanted to have Paul imprisoned.

It can hardly be a coincidence that Chrysostom himself, in the course of his own career, faced such varied opposition in exactly that order. Incidentally, others in his day were also quick to think of persecution when it came to the ‘thorn.’

From that time onwards, however, another interpretation came into vogue: Paul was supposed to have been plagued by strong, barely controllable carnal desires. The appeal of this possibility is obvious. It gave monks the example of someone who had struggled at least as hard as they did, and who was at the same time a holy apostle. This reading also received a helping hand from the fact that the Greek word for ‘thorn’ had become stimulus in the Latin translation, a word than can mean ‘goad’ or ‘thorn’ and, figuratively, ‘incitement’ or ‘spur.’

Epilepsy

Around 1900 interpretation took a completely different direction: people thought of epileptic fits. There even seems to be a foothold in Paul’s own words. Where the translation quoted above has him being ‘tormented,’ he uses a verb (kolafizō) that primarily means ‘to be struck,’ or even ‘beaten with fists’ (compare the King James Version: ‘to buffet me’).

Epilepsy was also thought to fit the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, his temporary blindness, and even his visions and ecstasies. The problem, however, is that this amounts to reading ‘cumulatively’: narrative elements from Acts are all too easily combined with a text like this one. Moreover, this possibility in particular betrays a rather modern urge to explain religious phenomena, in natural terms. Even the origins of Christianity were at times explained in this way.

Psychoanalysis and homosexuality

At the beginning of the twentieth century psychoanalysis made its entrance as well, and the struggle with sexuality returned in another guise. Paul was judged to be emotionally unstable, which suggested unresolved childhood traumas. His apparent aversion to marriage was taken to point to homosexuality (cf. Cavendish Moxon), which within psychoanalysis could be regarded as a form of incomplete sexual development.

The usefulness of this analysis of Paul was also clear. Since he had had such a great influence on Christianity, it was important to separate the healthy and valuable from the unhealthy and destructive.

It is in such a psychoanalytical approach that we see most clearly how arbitrarily, even compulsively, Paul’s words were read. Contemporary theory and ideas all but overgrew the ancient texts.

Surprisingly, the diagnosis of homosexuality returned once more at the end of the twentieth century, albeit with a twist (cf. John Shelby Spong): Paul’s homosexuality was supposed to have led to strong feelings of guilt and unworthiness. Paul’s conversion and God’s acceptance do not take away his unease, but God does keep telling him: ‘My grace is sufficient for you’ (2 Cor 12:9). Once again the interpretation seems to have been prompted chiefly by present-day questions about homosexuality, and far less by concrete indications in the texts themselves.

As we can see, the curiosity of interpreters knows hardly any bounds. Besides the possibilities already mentioned, I found a whole series of others. On the purely physical level, we read of deafness, an eye condition, malaria (which reminds me personally of the experience of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaries), stammering, deformity, leprosy and rheumatism. On the more psychological level, there is talk of depression and despair, for instance as an expression of what would nowadays be called bipolar disorder, as well as hysteria and stress-induced irritability.

An unsolvable cold case

In the end, I do think that Paul’s ‘thorn’ was a physical ailment rather than a figure of speech. But even then a real diagnosis remains impossible, for, as the German commentator Hans Windisch drily remarked about a century ago, ‘the patient himself died almost 1,900 years ago.’ We have to make do with the few symptoms he mentioned at the time, and their wording is hopelessly vague and fits many clinical pictures. So we shall never know. All we can do is try not to do what so many before us have done, and not attribute to Paul whatever we ourselves struggle with or are obsessed by.

Finally, a suggestion that is attractive in its simplicity is that the ‘thorn’ may have been a real splinter. Modern people perhaps underestimate how stubborn and painful such a thing could be in antiquity. There are even ancient recipes for removing splinters, and they did not always work. Or am I putting this possibility forward because my own father was a timber merchant?