On Being Wrong, & On Conversion

"I've seen religion, from Jesus to Paul."

- John Lennon, I Found Out


Many people think,"If my enemy is wrong, I must be right." But this is not true. My enemy or opponent can be wrong, genuinely wrong, & I can be wrong as well at the same time. My enemy's wrongness does not automatically validate my position. Both parties to a dispute can be wrong.

You may object that applying this makes it impossible ever to decide who is right or wrong, or who is which in which combination or mixture; that all one can do is float reading the newspaper in a Dead Sea of indecision. Not at all. It is simply a permanent caveat in this impermanent World.

A similar idea applies to the experience of conversion in the individual. Just because I've been converted, it doesn't mean I've gone from wrong to right. I can be wrong before conversion, & wrong in a different way, or in the same way but expressing it differently, afterwards. St.Paul - going from Saul to Paul & the Road to Damascus (Acts, ch.9) being one of the great paradigms of the experience of conversion - & St.Augustine of Hippo seem to me prime examples of this; they were wrong before conversion, & wrong in a different way afterwards.

You can see the continuity before & after in St.Paul's personality in action; whether against or for Christianity, whatever he thought & believed, he was going to do something about it. As Saul he was wrong to persecute the new sect. His strong reaction against it surely betrays a secret attraction, as is so often the case with Inquisitors, which prepared the ground for the Road to Damascus. After his conversion, Paul was equally insistent that Jesus was the only true route to salvation, which if you're not a Christian is a highly contestable position, granting that 'salvation' of some kind is even necessary. I can argue that Christianity is offering me the solution to a problem I don't have in the first place, creating a problem where there isn't one; that I am in a state of lacking God's grace. If there is no God in the Christian sense, then I cannot lack his grace. Salvation as a metaphor for psychic development is a different matter. I may well be in need of that. To be fair to Christianity, what matters is the actual experience & not the cultural label clumsily attached to it.

When I hear St.Paul preaching Christianity, my reaction is to shout out with the craftsmen & people of Ephesus, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians !" Things move on though, & it is as anachronistic to worship the Classical gods & goddesses, however attractive, as it is to write a play in blank-verse.

This proposition that one can be wrong both before & after conversion is one of the things that Camus is getting at in La Chute, although he never states it explicitly that I can remember. This is one of the reasons I find that book so powerful.

A thought to leave you with: western Christianity in my opinion has far more to do with Paul & Augustine than it does with Jesus.