As I sit in a new therapist’s waiting room for the third time in my life, I notice I’ve been thinking a lot about choices lately, and the absence of them. And I suspect the situation got screwed up sometime during the Axial Age (some two thousand years ago).

Saul/Paul’s gift to the world was the soul divided against itself. If you ever find yourself deeply at odds with yourself, you have the Apostle Paul to thank. Before him, no one really wrote about it that much. For Paul, it is key to everything.

But “at odds with yourself” doesn’t quite describe it. For Paul –and for countless Christian writers after him– to be a person at all is to be deeply divided between sin and grace, between flesh and spirit. Augustine added the mythology of Original Sin to the mix, and untold gallons of ink have been spilled since trying to balance out the equation, sin and death and the flesh versus grace and the spirit and peace. Paul thought that the mind is stuck with making the choice, so perhaps it’s little wonder. But in the end, Paul gives no peace, only the knowledge that we are obligated to do what we cannot do.

The Axial Age soul was disoriented and needed a home. The mythological security of archaic times was dead and gone. No longer could a local tribe, a local temple, a local king and his gods give comfort; the realities of empire wouldn’t allow it. The old gods were defeated by the gods of the conquerers, and there were too many gods and religions to choose from. Before there had been no choice, only “our way of life.” Now there were the bare requirements of the empire, and a bewildering array of gods and philosophies vying to help you take control of the rest.

What Paul did was put us in a permanent holding pattern. Oh, sure, Paul had some clear ideas about who your god should be. But his solution to the problem of the Axial soul is no solution. You must make a choice, Paul says, but you can never follow through on it. Wisdom, he says, is to know this, and to know it deeply. There will be no resolutions. In fact, a sense of resolution is probably a sign of failure to live between the perpetual “already” and “not yet.”

Note the difference from the soul’s trouble in classic times. The tragic hero was not split within himself but split between the demands of family and city and tribe. There may be seeds of Paul here, but only seeds. The tragic hero was above all a man of action, not a man of “a hundred indecisions…a hundred visions and revisions.” (Prufrock is undoubtedly Paul’s progeny.)

Is it any wonder we are divided against ourselves today? Paul’s divided self might have been limited to only the few literate folk before the printing press, but the Protestant and Catholic Reformations saturated the Western soul with Paul’s model. Pietism and its children only moved the phenomenon below the middle classes. Now we are all divided.