A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul

Stanislas Breton, Joseph Ballan

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231521765
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Stanislas Breton's A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, which focuses on the political implications of the apostle's writings, was an instrumental text in Continental philosophy's contemporary "turn to religion." Reading Paul's work against modern thought and history, Breton helped launch a reassessment of Marxism, introduce secular interpretations of biblical and theological traditions, develop "radical negativity" as a critical category, and rework modern political ideas through a theoretical lens.

Newly translated and critically situated, this edition takes a fresh approach to Breton's classic work, reacquainting readers with the remarkable ways in which an ancient apostle can reset our understanding of the political. Breton begins with Paul's biography and the texts of his conversion, which challenge common conceptions of identity. He broaches the question of allegory and divine predestination, introduces the idea of subjectivity as an effect of power, and confronts Paul's critique of Law, which leads to an exploration of the logics and limits of agency and power. Breton develops these and other insights in relation to Paul's subversive reflections on the crucified messiah, which challenge meaning and reason and upend our current world order. Neither a coherent theologian nor a stable humanist, Breton's Paul becomes a fascinating figure of excess and madness, experiencing a kind of being that transcends philosophy, secularity, and religion.

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BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

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WHEN IT COMES to the life of Paul, we deal with rhapsodic data, scattered throughout the book of the Acts of the Apostles and the letters written to a variety of Christian communities. We find in our two sources, first, what could be called autobiographical confessions.

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“I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of a city which is of no small reputation” (Acts 21.39). In Jerusalem, at the time of a riot which threatened to be the death of him, he responds with head held high to the centurion charged by a tribune with “examining [Paul] by flogging him”: “Are you permitted to flog an uncondemned Roman citizen?” The surprised tribune asks him: “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?… it cost me a great sum to buy my citizenship.” “As for me,” says Paul, “I was born a citizen” (Acts 22.25–28). This title is so dear to his heart that another time, during his captivity in Caesarea, infuriated by the accusations leveled against him by his co-religionists, he solemnly affirms in response to the governor Festus, “I am appearing before Caesar’s tribunal; it is here that I must be tried.… I appeal to Caesar” (Acts 25.6–12).

The most complete narrative can be found in the abridged story presented to us in two letters, written between 53 and 56 C.E.

After having recalled that he had reason “to have confidence in the flesh,” citing the prestigious past of his “race,” he rolls out a series of official reports: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, as to the Law a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the Law, a blameless man. Yet whatever advantages I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ… because of the surpassing value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3.4–9).

Addressing the Jewish people of Jerusalem “in Hebrew,” he insists again upon his origins: “I am a Jew. Born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but educated here in this city and at the feet of Gamaliel (described in Acts 5.35 as “respected by all people”), who taught me the exact observance of the Law of our Fathers, I was full of zeal for God, just as you are today” (Acts 22.3–4).

Early in the letter to the Galatians [1.13], emphasizing the break dividing his life into two periods—before and after the conversion on the “road to Damascus”—he recalls the “violent persecution that he carried out against the church of God and the ravages he wreaked upon it” in order to highlight immediately the transformation that had rendered him “an apostle of Christ.” Having been violently against, he will now be violently for. This rupture is not merely a temporal division. Paul is quick to project it upon another stage, in order to contemplate the event under the aspect of eternity. With the certitude of a knowledge as intuitive as it is absolute, he can write to his beloved Galatians,

But when God, who had set me apart from my mother’s breast and called me by his grace deigned to reveal to me his Son, that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, without consulting flesh and blood, without going up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, I went immediately to Arabia and afterwards again to Damascus. Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas (Peter) and stayed with him for fifteen days; I did not see any other apostle, with the exception of James the Lord’s brother and when what I tell you in writing to you, I attest before God, I am not lying. (Gal. 1.11–19)

The historical series developed by the narration seems to serve the purpose of confirming a primary difference, a separation that has always been at work, ballasting a predestined existence with the weight and the glory of preexistence. The “I am” of Paul, such as he experiences it and interprets it in the light of a transfiguration, attests to a double nature: he is only fully human by a divine dimension; he is authentically divine only in the human singularity of a call or vocation. Refining the point a little, we will attempt to express it in the following manner: “God thinks me, therefore I am.”

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Before exploring these summary indications in greater detail, it seems appropriate to mention, in keeping with Paul’s own explanations (cf. Gal. 2.1–10 and 2.11–24), the two memorable occasions during which he affirmed in an altogether new depth the difference that he continually brandished and justified: the Jerusalem assembly and the “disagreement [différend]” with Peter, the prestigious apostle who inaugurates, according to tradition, the historical series of sovereign pontiffs.

The first episode takes place circa 48–49, according to chronological probability. We could rightly call it a council that would be, in its own way, exemplary of those what would follow.

The motif of apostolic reunion has nothing of the mysterious about it: it was necessary to put an end to the dissensions agitating the Christian communities, composed of converts from Judaism, on the one hand, and from paganism, on the other. Among the leaders, three trends, roughly speaking, took shape: the first would be a pure return to the old observances, a solution of compromise. Paul, we can infer, represented the second tendency, which aimed to safeguard “the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus,” thus the “truth of the Gospel” (Gal. 2.5). At the end of difficult deliberations, the apostolic council (“the holy Spirit and we have decided,” reports Acts 15.28) concludes the debate with a sentence, conciliar and conciliating, which they believed was capable of harmonizing the divergences. It excluded, to be sure, circumcision as a rite of Christian initiation, but it imposed, among other prescriptions, “abstention from what has been sacrificed to idols, from blood, and from flesh that has been strangled” (Acts 15.29). On the parallelogram of forces in play, it traced the median of a resultant that eased the conflict, at least provisionally.

Paul had likely hoped for fewer concessions. Nevertheless, from that encounter, which inflected the straight line of his universalism, he learned something that would benefit him. Perhaps, in the first place, he decided that these assemblies, which would later be called ecumenical, determine less a truth than a convention of language and of practice. Paul applies what we might dare to call a casuistry of the circumstantial, which he does not mind using in the interest of avoiding a lesser evil (the “scandal of the brothers”) or of creating the conditions for the entry of the word into certain places that had already adopted the rite of circumcision (a rite to which he had already submitted, and not without regret, his disciple Timothy).

Prudence, which is not only Greek and Roman, is a virtue of government. Politics requires a flexibility (on this or that minor point, at least) whose exercise appears as an art of the possible or the suitable rather than as a science of the necessary. Is not the “golden mean [juste milieu]” the inevitable constraint of an honest, respectable mediocrity (often, if not always)?

Though he had been disappointed in the Jerusalem assembly, it would eventually, despite everything, delight the “heart” of the apostle. It is indeed here that his difference is fully confirmed: “recognizing the grace that had been given to me, James, Cephas (Peter), and John, those who were notables and pillars, gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship: we were to go to the pagans, to those of the circumcision (i.e., to the Jews of Palestine); we were enjoined only to remember the poor, which is exactly what I had resolved in my heart to do” (Gal. 2.9–10).

Relieving him of a relative solitude, this accord also ensured the objectivity of his mission (it is never good to be right by oneself), the guarantee of a “being-together,” the consistency of a communion in the same Gospel. Solidarity in a diversity of tasks provides him with an argument that he will often use to respond to his opponents’ suspicions. We are now in a position to better understand the gravity of the incident at Antioch, which permits him to sharply accuse the prince of the apostles. Induced into error by the “people of James’s entourage” (James being a man of strict observance), Peter sets out to “Judaize.” “Before their arrival, he [Peter] would eat with pagans”; “whether they arrived, he drew back and kept to himself for fear.” He “led other Jews and Barnabas himself [the companion of Paul] into hypocrisy.” Hence the scathing apostrophe: “If you are a Jew, but live like a pagan and not like a Jew, how can you compel the pagans to live like Jews?” (Gal. 2.11–14).

To put Peter in his place, that is, to compel the most visible apostle to “walk consistently with the truth of the Gospel”: this was no small affair. To the fear of the one charged with “confirming the brothers” responded the courage of being the man of irreducible difference.

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That difference, which one could say became an obsession, betrays itself, though without always making itself explicit as such, in the innumerable occurrences of the personal pronouns “I” and “Me” scattered throughout the letters. The persistent recourse to the first person is due to more than the rather familiar epistolary style of his writings. It would be ridiculous, moreover, to see here only a morose enjoyment of subjectivity, continually in need of exposing or flaunting itself. The I and the Me have a precise function, namely an apostolic one, in the disciplinary or doctrinal contexts in which they figure.

Here there is a manner of speaking that had once intrigued Spinoza, in chapter 11 of the Theological-Political Treatise. He wonders if “the apostles and prophets wrote their epistles as apostles and prophets, or as teachers.” And he observes that the apostle knows how to speak in his own name, in contrast to the prophet who, speaking in the name of God, is merely the site on which the light of revelation shines. With his use of the term “apostle,” Spinoza is thinking above all of Paul, who seems to him to personify the apostolic genius. He immediately cites a variety of texts from the epistles in support of his remark, to show that the apostle to the Gentiles had no fear of speaking, as Spinoza has it, “according to his own opinion [secundum suam sententiam loquitur].”¹ Three references in particular appear to him to be strong indications of an original statute. On the question of the remarriage of the widowed, for example, Paul says quite frankly what he thinks: “the wife, in my judgment, will be happier if she remains as she is,” but he adds that that personal position is not a divine command, thought it is perhaps not to be neglected. “And I think that I too have the Spirit of God” (2 Cor. 7.40). Formulas like this one are hardly rare. The philosopher locates them “in very numerous passages,” among them Romans 3.28: “We hold that man is justified by faith, without practice of the Law”; and again “I hold that the sufferings of the present time are not with comparing with the glory to be revealed in us” (Rom. 8.18). A text from 1 Corinthians (7.6–7), a propos of advice given to married people, adds: “What I have told you here is a concession, not a command. I wish that everyone were like myself, but each has received a particular gift from God.” In the same context: “For those who are virgins, I do not have a command from the Lord, but I give an opinion as one who, by the Lord’s mercy, is trustworthy” (7.25). “And so on,” concludes Spinoza, who infers from such cases a kind of law of expression, typical of the apostle and in perfect contrast with the attitude of the prophet.

The passage from “I” to “we” and from “we” to “I” solicits the attention of the philologist, for whom it does not pose any difficulties: for us, it is instead a matter of an emergence of the Ego, which, under a variety of stylistic forms, indicates the originality of a break. Spinoza is so conscious of this that he ventures to formulate it by way of a bold opposition: “the apostles everywhere employ argument, so that they seem to be conducting a discussion rather than prophesying; the writings of the prophets, by contrast, contain only dogma and decrees, because in these writings God is introduced as speaking not like one who reasons but as one who imposes decrees from the absolute imperative of his nature.”² The authority of the prophet does not tolerate reasoning: whoever intends to confirm their positions by rational activity submits them by that very fact to a judgment of arbitration.

Paul seems to proceed in this very fashion, precisely because he does exercise his capacity to reason. Thus he addresses himself the Corinthians, “I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say” (1 Cor. 10.15). The novelty that struck the exegete-philosopher concerns the apostle and his congregations. Everyone, we might say, has the right to exercise autonomy of judgment and rational discursivity. In Paul, moreover, what we might call a hierarchy of values of affirmation emerges. Not all propositions are situated on the same plane. Some propositions are of human origin, though these same may also be inspired by the Spirit: advice, prescriptions, theological discourse, all of which place responsibility on the agent or actor pronouncing them. Others, and Paul makes this distinction clear, invoke another source and another authority. Paul’s Ego is inscribed in the interval that separates these two instances and that, by this very gap, secures for his humanity the irreplaceable position of an authentic “I am.”

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So precious are these remarks that they scarcely define either the apostle’s situation or his own conception of it. In order to understand the emergence of which we have spoken, we must go back to the other side of the apostolic age, to the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels, and John’s in particular. Paul did not read these texts. Yet this or that feature [trait] in which Jesus affirms his novelty can help to clarify the Pauline difference, to which the epistles testify.

I shall limit myself to some simple citations, abstracted from their context, in order to comment upon them in accordance with the analogical transposition they suggest:

You have heard it as it was said to the ancient ones: “You shall not murder; and if someone murders, he shall be brought to judgment.” But I say to you, whoever becomes angry with his brother shall be brought to judg...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Dispossessed Life: Introduction to Breton’s Paul
• Preface
• 1: Biographical Outline
• 2: Hermeneutics and Allegory
• 3: Jesus the Christ: Faith and the Law
• 4: The Pauline Cosmos
• 5: The Church According to Saint Paul
• 6: The Cross of Christ
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index