Philippians 1:23

συνέχομαι δὲ. On the reading, see critical note.—Δὲ takes up the last clause, with a slightly differencing addition; “What to choose I do not see, but stand in suspense.”

ἐκ τῶν δύο. With συνέχομαι, the imagery is of a man “compressed” by forces acting “from both (ἐκ τῶν δύο) sides” upon him, so as to keep him fixed in the midst.

It is a wonderful and entirely Christian dilemma. “The Apostle asks which is most worth his while, to live or to die. The same question is often presented to ourselves, and perhaps our reply has been the same. But may we not have made it with a far different purport?… Life and death have seemed … like two evils, and we knew not which was the less. To the Apostle they seem like two immense blessings, and he knows not which is the better” (Ad. Monod, Adieux, No. II.).

τὴν ἐπιθυμίαν. Almost, “my desire.” He distinguishes the ἐπιθυμία, the preference by pleasure, from the preference by principle, the προαίρεσις (if we may use the word) simply to do the will of God for others. “Where his Treasure is, there is his heart.”

εἰς τὸ�. The verb occurs elsewhere in N. T. only in Luke 12:36, πότε�., “when he shall return” (but we may well explain the word there of “setting out” homeward). Ἀνάλυσις occurs 2 Timothy 4:6, obviously in the sense it bears here. Verb and noun alike can refer, by usage, to either (a) the solution of a compound (so here the Vulgate, cupio dissolvi), or (b) the undoing of a cable, to set sail, or the striking of a tent, to travel. Verb and noun are both absent from LXX., but the verb is not infrequent in the Apocrypha, and there usually means to go away, or, as the other side of that act, to return (Tob 2:8; Judges 13:1). This points to (b) as the probable thought of the verb here; and this is supported by the comments of the Greek expositors; Chrysostom e.g. paraphrases our text by ἐντεῦθεν πρὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν μεθίστασθαι, καὶ σὺν Χριστῷ εἶναι. St Paul “desires” to leave for home; to strike his camp, to weigh his anchor, for the better country. See the same thought under other phraseology 2 Corinthians 5:1-8; the wanderer’s “tent is taken down,” καταλύεται, that he may “go home to the Lord,” ἐνδημῆσαι πρὸς τὸν κύριον.

In Suicer’s Thesaurus (of the language of the Greek Fathers) ἀναλύω and its noun are treated at length, and the words are shewn to have glided in post-apostolic Greek into an almost synonym for dying (Lucian, Philops. c. 14, has ὀκτωκαιδεκάτης ὢν�). He tells how Melanchthon, dying (1560), talked to his friend Camerarius, “prince of Greek scholars in his day,” about ἀναλύω, dwelling with delight on this passage, criticizing the Vulgate rendering, and vindicating that of departure, migration. Luther here has abzuscheiden, “to depart.”

καὶ σὺν Χριστῷ εἶναι. Such is the blissful “other side” of the Christian’s death. Cp. carefully 2 Corinthians 5:7, with its profound intimation that to step at death out of the “walk by faith” is, ipso facto, to begin to “walk by Object Seen” (διὰ εἴδους), in the disclosed presence of the Lord. “Christianity … does not [in the presence of death] tell us of the splendours of the invisible world, but it does far better when, in three words, it informs us that (ἀναλῦσαι) to loosen from the shore of mortality is (σὺν Χριστῷ εἶναι) to be with Christ” (Isa. Taylor, Saturday Evening, ch. XXVI.).

The Christian, in this life, is “with Christ,” and Christ with him. But so is the Presence manifested in that life that it is as if it had not been known before. Cp. Acts 7:39; words which St Paul had heard spoken.

πολλῷ γὰρ μᾶλλον κρεῖσσον. On the reading, see critical note.—With μᾶλλον κρεῖσσον cp. ἐλαχιστότερος, Ephesians 3:8. The phrase may well be characteristic of St Paul’s vivid feeling. But classical Greek gives parallel examples: e.g. æsch. S. c. T. 673, τίς ἄλλος μᾶλλον ἐνδικώτερος; Soph. Ant. 1210, ἕρποντι μᾶλλον ἆσσον. In popular Latin there is a distinct tendency to such double comparatives, e.g. Plaut. Capt. 3. 4. 112, nihil invenies magis hoc certo certius; Stich. 5. 4. 22, magis dulcius. “Much rather better” is a bold accumulation.—Observe that he finds this “betterness,” in the unseen bliss, in comparison not with this life’s darkest but with its brightest; he has just said that “to live (on earth) is CHRIST.”