Note 55 — VII SYMBOLS OF THE MESSIAH: THE LAMB AND THE CROSS THE CHRISTIAN JESUS I THE PAULINE JESUS

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.55 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.