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INTRODUCTION
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(often characterized as the psyche, psuche, or mind, nous), in contrast to the perishable part of human existence. Likewise, although not in identical fashion, the Christian tradition, especially the Pauline, connects the outer person with the perishing of the temporal body, and the inner with its eternal counterpart. In 2 Corinthians, Paul associates the outer person, or the exo anthropos, with mortal flesh (4:11), the soma, or body (4:10), and an earthly tent (5:1). Elsewhere the outer person is invoked in respect to human genealogical history (Gal 4:23 and 29) and the law of sin (Rom 7:23). The exo anthropos is thus associated with historical time—or, more specifically, with time itself—and the worldly medium in which the human is born, dwells, and perishes in time. In contrast to the outer person, the inner person, or eso anthropos, is aligned with that dwelling not made by human hands which lives on eternally in the heavenly house: “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan earnestly, desiring to be clothed [ependusasthai] with our house which is from heaven” (2 Cor 5:1–2). The metaphor of clothing seen in Paul will be significant for Augustine, especially in relation to the “holy interior clothing of [the] heart.”20 Likewise for Hadewijch, especially in her Liederen (songs), clothing oneself in Christ is a figure for the process of perfecting one’s person—outer and inner, both at once. The outer person is—as David Aune, Eric Jager, and philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben have argued—not part of a dualism, and neither is it entirely Platonic, for it is “not described as inherently evil or as in opposition to ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος [o eso anthropos] though the outer person and the inner person are clearly in tension, for the latter is ‘sighing under a burden,’ i.e. desiring release from the drawbacks of physical existence.”21 Rather, the outer body works in a dynamic tension—substantially and temporally—with the inner person. By means of the inner, the outer finds a truer measure and means for becoming a spiritual vessel, renewing itself in the measure of the divine: “Thus we do not wear out. Even though our outer person is being wasted away, our inner person is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16). The inner person does not operate in the dominant rhythm of historical time but, rather, according to the immanent temporality and of law of the divine: “For I delight in the law of God according to the inner person” (Rom 7:22). Even though the law of the divine is associated with the inner person, the inner person and the law of the spirit intersect with historical time, needing renewal “day by day.” Paul refers to fulfi llment of the righteousness of the spiritual law as a form of “walking” according to the spirit (Rom 8:4), claiming a dynamic interaction between eternal and temporal realms, translating the spiritual law belonging to the inner into a manifest way of being in the world.