The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West

In the history of Western Christianity — and hence, to a large extent, in the history of Western culture — the Apostle Paul has been hailed as a hero of the introspective conscience. Here was the man who grappled with the problem “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do …” (Rom. 7:19). His insights as to a solution of this dilemma have recently been more or less identified, for example, with what Jung referred to as the Individuation Process; but this is only a contemporary twist to the traditional Western way of reading the Pauline letters as documents of human consciousness.