Abstract
The philosophical turn to the letters of Saint Paul in the 1990s can also be read as a critical assessment of the concept of
1 Introduction
Since the 1990s, several philosophers have engaged with the letters of Saint Paul.1 Not so much for religious reasons and not so much because they share Paul’s faith.2 Nevertheless, they do share one concern, namely whether a new legacy of these letters might possible, culturally, socio-politically and philosophically, in which they have something to say beyond that which was so profoundly criticized by Nietzsche.
This turn to Paul is a re-turn to texts that have been part and parcel of the Western mindset for many centuries. Such a return and rereading, aiming to disclose a new legacy of texts that have been interpreted innumerable times, is always doubly motivated. To capture this double motivation, let us consider two quotations. The first one is from England, England, a novel by Julian Barnes. The female protagonist, Martha, visits the church of St Aldwyn in search of what she calls “a capacity of seriousness [of life]” and which she hopes to find “among the remnants of a greater, discarded system of salvation.” When Dr. Max suggests that she perhaps “decided to seek God as a way of avoiding anti-depressants,” she responds:
No, not that. You misunderstand. I’m not in a church because of God. One of the problems is that the words, the serious words, have been used up over the centuries by people like those rectors and vicars listed on the wall. The words don’t seem to fit the thoughts nowadays.3
Martha discerns a tension between words that used to be vibrant, telling, making a claim on people’s lives and the process of linguistic and cultural wear and tear: in the course of time, the words that were once alive are used up; they lose their appeal, their capacity to speak and, in the end, no longer “seem to fit the thoughts nowadays.” This risk of using up – itself already a Pauline theme to which I will return towards the end of this article – is intrinsic to all disclosive language that says something new. The search for a new legacy is always amidst the remnants of one that has lost its capacity to give meaning.
The effect, however, of words that are used up and traditions that lose their way, is counteracted by the other drive that motivates the return to significant texts. Heidegger captures this drive when insisting on the capacity of the poetic or philosophical word to say and to speak:
The poetry of a poet or the treatise of a thinker stands within its own proper unique word. It compels us to perceive this word again and again as if we were hearing it for the first time. These first fruits of the word transpose us in every case to a new shore.4
The expression “the first fruits of the word,” in German: die Erstlinge des Wortes, is also Pauline and refers to
The turn to Paul, it seems to me, is marked by this double hermeneutical attunement: the awareness of living among remnants and the trust that a poetic and philosophical word nevertheless retains its capacity to speak. In this context, Badiou’s characterization of Paul as a “poet-thinker” gains a deepened, hermeneutical sense.5
If one were to characterize the philosophical turn to Paul from the point of view of content, the first theme that might come to mind is that of the end of history. It is quite obvious that the contemporary thesis concerning the end of history plays a role at the background of the turn to Paul in the 1990s. As Critchley, for instance, summarizes: “The return to Paul is motivated by political disappointment,” and is marked by “the demand for a new figure of activism” in the context of a liberal democracy that – at least at the time – seemed to have no enemies or alternatives left after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.6
Yet, if one is to phrase this thesis in genuinely Pauline terms, it would have to concern the end of the
This suggestion interrupts the ancient model of order and its accompanying ethos imitating and complying to this order. Yet, at the same time, both thoughts – the ontological one concerning the imminent end of the world and the ethical call for non-conformism – belong together intrinsically. These two, the ontological and the ethical, still somehow concur. Moreover, these two thoughts might explain why some of Paul’s words may still speak to thought today. When looking at the starry sky above us, we do not see the same as what Aristotle saw: eternal and perfect planetary orbits pointing to – or rather striving and longing for – an unmoved mover. We, moderns, rather see things that are being born and that die again. The starry sky filled with giants whose existence plays out on a completely different time-scale than our own is thus, despite this difference in scale, marked by a similar play of birth and death, of beginning and ending – and nowadays we are forced to a similar awareness concerning our own planet, which is no longer simply the solid background providing us with the means to live. If there is indeed a concurrence between cosmology and ethics, between the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, it must concern this sense of a beginning and this sense of an ending that we discern in the order of what is – and it must concern the sense of a crisis at the heart of what we thought to be irrevocably stable and permanent.8 Such are, in a very general sense, the philosophical stakes guiding us when returning to and rereading Paul, which thus transgress the limits of the merely political.
2 Marcion’s Heretical Heritage
Although the term “meontology” has not yet been mentioned, I have already begun to speak about it, in the form of the end of the world. One way to capture the new legacy of Paul and its difference with the old one, is by bringing out two different ways of understanding what is at stake under the heading of “meontology.”
Critchley devotes the fourth chapter of The Faith of the Faithless to the turn to Paul. When discussing Heidegger, Badiou and Agamben, he notes that their reading of Paul is rather deeply invested in what one might call “meontological passages,” that is, passages that speak about and thus offer a
Critchley’s reference to Marcion is not his own. It goes back to Taubes who in The Political Theology of Paul argues how the Paul appearing in Marcion’s Gnosticism and its intrinsic antisemitism has determined a whole Wirkungsgeschichte, effective history, that tends to depend more on a particular interpretation of Paul than on the Pauline text itself.11 Taubes points out how this Marcionism affected late 19th and early 20th century theology, leaving especially liberal protestant theology basically intellectually defenseless against the uprising antisemitism in Germany – a characteristic and disturbing example in this respect is the theologian Von Harnack, who published a book on Marcion and who explicitly calls the Judaic books included in the Christian bible a Lähmung, a paralysis, of the Christian message.12
According to Taubes, not only theology, but also philosophy is marked by this Marcionism. Carl Schmitt is an exemplary case. Schmitt’s project of a political theology, as Taubes argues, depends on a Marcionite Paul: “[Schmitt] did not take over a text but a tradition.”13 Taubes’s own political theology is an attempt to return to the text and correct the Marcionite legacy looming in Schmitt. Taubes, moreover, does not limit his analysis to Schmitt. He mentions a whole range of authors in whose work he discerns a definite Marcionite legacy. One of them is Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s reading of Paul remains dualist with strongly Gnostic traits. The devaluation of the world in which we live here and now, and for which Marcion of Sinope compensates by introducing in a more or less Platonic-Gnostic flavor, the otherworldly component characteristic of dualism, is transfigured in Nietzsche’s eyes into a full-fledged nihilism in which everything that actually is, is devalued. One characteristic quotation from The Antichrist underlines this nihilism: “When the emphasis of life is put on the ‘beyond’ rather than on life itself – when it is put on nothingness –, then the emphasis has been completely removed from life.”14
The correspondence between Marcion’s Gnostic dualism and the modern Nietzschean interpretation of Pauline thought as nihilistic is important to note here. There is a striking comment of Ward Blanton on Nietzsche’s reading of Paul. Nietzsche, so Blanton comments, “failed radically to transform – rather than simply to excoriate or lament – the ongoing cultural and political functions of the Pauline legacy.”15 It is the Marcionite dimension that obstructs a true reinterpretation and a return to the Pauline text. This allows us to understand what Critchley’s claim actually amounts to when he says that the Paul of Heidegger, Badiou and Agamben is also crypto-Marcionite. For Critchley, the present-day readings offer yet another turn and another return of the Marcionite tradition, failing to transform the Pauline legacy – incapable of hearing its words as for the first time, only repeating what a certain tradition prescribes and only offering a form of nihilism.16
At this point, it seems to me Critchley is treating the return to Paul unfairly. However, in order to offer an alternative to his claim, we should deal straightforwardly with what is right in Critchley’s analysis, namely that readers today are indeed interested in the meontological passages that we find in Paul’s letters. Yet, the question is whether meontology and nihilism can be equated.
3 Beyond Ontological Dualism
In order to elucidate why this is a genuine question, why meontology might not be nihilistic, I want to provide an argument concerning the recent history of continental thought leading up to the 1990s and more in particular the appreciation of ancient philosophy in this period. In my view, this development helped to create a context in which also Paul, a representative of the ancient world, could subsequently be approached differently. This historical development actually goes at the heart of the ancient role and place of the dualism of which I just spoke.
In the second half of the previous century, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault started to insist on a different reading of ancient philosophy. In Hadot’s formulation, ancient philosophy is not concerned with the question of knowledge as such but rather with that of the art of living. Ancient philosophy is to be understood as a way of life. Foucault, in turn, emphasizes in his last lecture courses the importance of the question of the care of the soul and the self as the basic question of ancient philosophy. While for Hadot probably the Stoics were the culmination point of this form of ancient thought, Foucault, especially in his lectures on the ancient Greek practice of
Maybe […] it could be said that with Platonism, and through Platonism, Greek philosophy since Socrates basically posed the question of the other world (l’autre monde). But, starting with Socrates, or from the Socratic model […] it also posed another question. Not the question of the other world, but that of an other life (vie autre). It seems to me that the other world and other life have basically been the two great themes, the two great forms, the great limits within which Western philosophy has constantly developed.17
Hence, not one, but two themes – an ontological and an ethical one – and these two themes, as we see in Foucault’s linguistic expressions, are concerned with two different forms of alterity or otherness, captured by the basic difference between l’autre monde and une vie autre – and please take note of the place of the adjective autre in relation to the noun: before and after. For Foucault, this distinction takes on the form of a distinction between the ontological or cosmological question that inspired a particular ancient dualism, and the ethical question that is concerned with an other life, here and now, in this world. The difference to which Foucault draws our attention is important, because it shows that one can read ancient thought in a different key, not determined by dualism or ontotheology. Moreover, playing with the place of the adjective autre, Foucault subsequently distinguishes two different relations of world and life, of ontology and ethics. First, the other world of dualism corresponds to another life lived completely in light of the primacy of this other world. In this connection between other world and other life, we recognize the connection of ontology and ethics to which Nietzsche points in Platonism and Christianity. Yet, the ethical motive of a vie autre can also be leading, giving rise to another conception of the world, of the
Foucault’s distinction between these “two great themes” of the other world and the other life can help us to understand why Paul can also be read differently. What if Paul cannot be reduced to the quest for another world with its accompanying life-negating ethics? What if his letters are not simply offering a dualism for the masses but rather display Stoic or Cynic motives concerning the art of living well? Would this not allow for another reading of the ethical and ontological themes in these letters as well?19 Along the lines of such questions we may understand how and why this turn in the appreciation of ancient thought has paved the way for a new way of reading Paul in which meontology can be understood in another sense, different from nihilism.
4 Meontological Passages
Let us now turn to two characteristically meontological passages and describe them in some detail in order to demonstrate how the above considerations exactly work out in a reinterpretation of Paul’s letters. The first is from 1 Cor. 1 and the second from 1 Cor. 7. The first is more cosmologically oriented, whereas the second concerns a description of a mode of living.
4.1 The τοῦ κόσμου -Formulas
The passage from 1 Cor. 1 is discussed by Agamben, Badiou, Taubes and Heidegger alike. The letter as a whole is marked by a rhetorical chorus, repeating the formula
But God chose what is foolish in the world [
τὰ μωρὰ τοῦ κόσμου ] to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world [τὰ ἀσθενῆ τοῦ κόσμου ] to shame the strong; God chose what is low[born in the world;τὰ ἀγενῆ τοῦ κόσμου ] and despised, things that are not [τὰ μὴ ὄντα ], to reduce to nothing [καταργήσῃ ] things that are [τὰ ὄντα ]. (1 Cor. 1:27–28)
In this passage, the people belonging to the Corinthian community are identified as the people who are considered to be “foolish,” “weak,” “low(born),” “despised” in (the eyes of) the world.20 Clearly, by this rhetoric, Paul assigns
(1) First, it is important to read the preference for non-beings in both an ontological and a socio-political key. A strict separation of the ethical and the cosmological is too modern to impose on this passage. Rather, comments concerning the place of humans in the socio-political world pass over without any discontinuity in a comment on non-beings. The expression “non-beings” of which the last sentence speaks, however, does not refer to the product of the imagination or of a certain fiction; it does not refer to something that simply does not exist. As the culminating sentence of the tension built up in the previous lines, the expression “non-beings,”
Apparently, the non-beings concern what is excluded or cast out from the order. Hence, the logic pervading this passage is different from what Nietzsche proposes under the heading of nihilism. The Pauline gesture is not so much to embrace a particular fiction to devalue life here and now. By not simply affirming or embracing the order that is in place – both cosmological and socio-political – but by instead bringing into view that which is not granted a place in this order, the Pauline gesture is rather to show the particular crisis of this order. To capture the sense of this crisis, the cosmological dimension and the political dimension of this order need to be kept together. According to the classical metaphysical point of view,
Hence, the divine partiality for non-beings heard in an ontological and cosmological key is part of a meontology that aims to offer an alternative to onto-theology. Badiou explicitly mentions this Heideggerian concept in his interpretation of this passage:
One must, in Paul’s logic, go so far as to say that the Christ-event testifies that God is not the god of Being, is not Being. Paul prescribes an anticipatory critique of what Heidegger calls onto-theology, wherein God is thought as supreme being, and hence as the measure for what being as such is capable of.21
Paul’s meontology enables a reinterpretation and recalibration of our conceptions of God,
(2) Second, let us discuss in more detail the particular meaning of the term “meontology” if recalibrated in this way. Compared to the metaphysical God as the culmination point of the order that the Greeks termed
At this point, consider the following comparison that may help us to position
Agamben is the one who has best captured this element when speaking of the “exigency of the lost” and of “the ontological squandering that we bear within ourselves.”24 The beings – or, rather, the non-beings – that are excluded from flourishing form a claim and a demand on the order that excludes them. Elsewhere, Agamben describes this squandering and exigency in terms of possibilities that are not actualized. There, he does so against the background of Leibniz’s Theodicy and the famous image of the pyramid of all possible worlds. In a culmination point of the onto-theological paradigm, Leibniz portrays the demiurge as the God who returns again and again to the pyramid of all possible worlds to take delight in his choice for this one world to exist rather than any of the other possible worlds. In a moving passage, Agamben comments:
It is difficult to imagine something more pharisaic than this demiurge, who contemplates all uncreated possible worlds to take delight in his own single choice. For to do so, he must close his own ears to the incessant lamentation that, throughout the infinite chambers of this Baroque inferno of potentiality, arises from everything that could have been but was not, from everything that could have been otherwise but had to be sacrificed for the present world to be as it is.25
The suspension of this order does not open an empty space of mere non-being. Rather, it discloses a well-defined space of possibilities, namely the possibilities that have not been granted to what exists. As an unfavorable fate can deny the child the ability to speak or even the gift of life itself as in stillborn children, actuality is marked by possibilities that are not granted to what is. These precluded possibilities are the possibilities of non-beings that are not merely nothing and from which a demand can be heard to be granted the possibilities to flourish.26 Paul’s depiction of the members of the community in Corinth as insignificant, foolish, weak, and despised, refers to possibilities that have not been granted to these people in the current order of the world; it refers to what stays behind with respect to those that flourish and tingle with great power and dazzling wealth.
(3) Third. In Rom. 4:17, Paul also uses the expression
4.2 The ὡς μὴ -Formulas
After having shown how philosophy discovers in Paul’s interrogation of the cosmos not a dualism, but another ontological concern, namely one which views the world in light of unheard, profoundly new possibilities, the question arises what this means for ethics and ethical concerns regarding the mode of living. If there is indeed a concurrence between the ontological and the ethical, how can this Pauline version of the difference between in principio and initium, between a first calling and a re-calling, between an order and its suspension or
To answer this question, I want to look at a passage from 1 Cor. 7, also meontological and also discussed extensively by contemporary philosophical readers. This passage ends with the famous proclamation of the passing away of this form of the world, and it begins with the statement that the time that remains is only short. In between, we encounter a recommendation of how to live. The specificity of this mode of living is mirrored in the rhetoric Paul uses here: this ethos or ethics is articulated in or with an “as not”-chorus:
those having wives may be as not [
ὡς μὴ ] having, and those weeping as not [ὡς μὴ ] weeping, and those rejoicing as not [ὡς μὴ ] rejoicing, and those buying as not [ὡς μὴ ] possessing, and those using the world as not [ὡς μὴ ] using it up. For passing away is the figure [or: the mode of being] of this world. (1 Cor. 7:29–31)29
In the immediate context of this passage, Paul differentiates between the worldly calling and what Agamben calls the “messianic vocation,” which re-calls the worldly one.30 The “as not”-chorus basically demonstrates how the relation between these two callings or vocations works out. The second calling is not simply another calling, replacing the first, worldly calling. Rather, the second call is placed in a particular tension with the first one – the second call does not substitute or destroy the first one. Hence, it neither calls to another, fictional world nor establishes any vocations cultivating a specific hostility to life here and now.31
What does this mean? How to make sense of the “not” of the “as not”? It has been suggested that this “as not”-chorus is basically Stoic. The “as not” would then express indifference, like the Stoic
To capture what it means to enact a calling in this strange mode of the “as not,” let us first suggest what it means to enact one’s calling in the worldly mode. To live in conformation to the worldly order is to identify oneself with this first vocation, that is, to be totally wrapped up or absorbed in the place that this order assigns as one’s own, proper and appropriate place. Thus, the ontological sense of
At this point, let us grant the nihilists one more chance to speak up. If the second vocation is not a new vocation and does not call for anything, does that not mean this second calling or recalling introduces a crypto-nihilism? If it only revokes the vocations that exist and that orient us in the world, does such a revocation not result in disorientation in life? What is the life that remains in this time that remains?
With respect to these questions, Agamben’s reading of Paul offers a unique answer by his focus on the notions of
What Agamben might have missed in his reading – because he so strongly emphasizes the alternative that
Let me conclude by tying the two keywords of the meontological passages,
I have taken up the question of meontology in Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Saint Paul and Contemporary European Philosophy: The Outcast and the Spirit (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), esp. chap. 4. This essay offers an important continuation of the argument set out in this monograph and in this chapter.
Alain Badiou, one of the protagonists in the story of this turn to Paul, cannot help himself and repeats several times in his relatively thin book that he considers the resurrection of Christ to be a fable, see Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), e.g., 4, 58, 108.
Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 242–43.
Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, GA 54 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982), 18. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 12. Translation slightly altered.
Badiou, Saint Paul, 2.
Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012), 157. See also Van der Heiden, Saint Paul and Contemporary European Philosophy, 4–5.
See, e.g., Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Kunst und Nachahmung,” in Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage, GW 8 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990), 25–36, at 34–35.
See Dennis J. Schmidt, “Thank Goodness for the Atmosphere: Reflections on the Starry Sky and the Moral Law,” Research in Phenomenology 50, no. 3 (2020): 370–85.
See esp. Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 177–83.
Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 195–202.
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 60–61. Note that for Critchley, the “crypto- Marcionism” of present-day readers is a “crypto-Harnackianism,” see The Faith of the Faithless, 169, 175.
Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 51.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39 [= §43].
Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 3–4.
For the specific sense of nihilism and Critchley’s identification of meontology and nihilism, see Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 177–78, 187. Even Badiou, whose account closely approaches a form of dualism and who in a way seems to regret the loss of the militancy in Paul and still at work in Marcion’s heretic heritage, insists that his Pauline dualism is not ontological but militant in nature, see Badiou, Saint Paul, 34–36.
Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, trans. by Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 245.
The duality of the notion of the world that Foucault discovers here, world in the sense of order and world in the sense of the social world reiterates a difference to which already Heidegger points in ancient thought, see Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, GA 9 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976), 144–45, and which Arendt carefully develops in her account of the double sense of the world in Augustine as the world of creation and the human world, see Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 66.
Foucault’s portrayal seems to suffer from one important drawback. His approach tends to separate cosmology and ethics and thereby seems to allow only for a political change of the socio-cultural world in which we live here and now; this seems to be at odds with the ancient emphasis on
See also the New Living Translation (NLT);
Badiou, Saint Paul, 47.
Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 256n74.
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 96.
Agamben, The Time That Remains, 40.
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 266. It is difficult not to recognize in the expression “the present world,” the Pauline notion of the present figure of this world,
Note how Agamben changes here the Leibnizian principle that all that is possible demands to exist into the demand of all that exists to have possibilities for its existence, see Agamben, The Time That Remains, 39.
Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 55.
Hence, newness is not to be understood in a dualist, Marcionist sense, but concerns the specific sense of the initium. It seems to me that this is missed by Critchley in his identification of the sense of newness in both Badiou and Heidegger with a crypto-Marcionist motive, see Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 200–1. As I explain elsewhere, what is at stake here is not a dualism but a dialectic necessitated by the sense of the outcast, see Van der Heiden, Saint Paul and Contemporary European Philosophy, 185–96.
Translation taken from Agamben, The Time That Remains, 23.
Agamben, The Time That Remains, 23.
Rather, the “as not”-chorus concerns, to use Heidegger’s terminology, the enactment, Vollzug, of this call. “As not” shows this enactment to belong to the tension between a calling and its re-calling. To capture this enigmatic tension, Heidegger suggests that in this enactment of the “as not,” one’s life “remains unchanged, and yet it is radically changed.” Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 85.
Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 54.
In this context, Heidegger speaks about a new sense granted by the “as” of the “as not”: “these relations to the surrounding world receive their sense not out of the formal significance they indicate; rather the reverse, the relation and the sense of lived significance are determined out of the original enactment.” Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 84–85.
Note that Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series culminates in the concept of use, as the title of the last volume of this series indicates: Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Interestingly, though, Agamben first develops this concept in his reading of Paul and, more precisely, of the passage discussed here.
Cf. Socrates’ description of the soul as user of the body, in which the user is the one who rules, Plato, Alcibiades I 129d–130b.
See, e.g., Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 2001), §15.
Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 24–30.