The Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul - Stanislas Breton

‘Unbound from the Law, faith transgresses all regionalism’ (92)

Paul’s travels. Source: https://viz.bible/journeys/

The apostle Paul is a key figure for Time as Practice. With the possible exception of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), Paul is arguably the first figure in history to demonstrate a mode of experience that is thoroughly living in time. His relationship to the Law (nómos), faith (pistis), regions, history and all other aspects that we’ve come to see as constitutive of our identities are turned into fundamental contingencies of time.

Stanislas Breton’s Saint Paul (1988) set in motion the modern philosophical reconsideration of Paul. Translated into English as The Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul (2011), Breton’s treatment is different than the more traditional scholarly reconsiderations of Paul that one can find in the work of E.P. Sanders and his cohort. The two paths of reconsideration — scholarly and philosophical/theological — are certainly related, with Breton’s perhaps being more influential because of its branching out into the more broad-reaching works of the likes of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben. [1]

The philosophical/theological reconsideration does not seek to uncover the ‘true Paul’. Rather, it seeks to stare back into the origins of Christianity to recover a mode of experience that was buried under the weight of doctrine and Thomist Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. This is not an attempt to reform Christianity by returning it to its ‘roots’ and therefore its truth. It is an effort to update Christianity by reading one of its founders in a way that 1) complicates what it has become and 2) opens it up as an experiential possibility for those who consider themselves thoroughly secular.

Stemming from Heidegger and branching out to Louis Althusser, Breton’s assessment of Saint Paul is more concerned with the philosophical engagement of Dasein and with Althusser’s formulation of ideological ‘interpellation’ than adding to the weight of scholarship on Paul. Both Althusser and Heidegger theorized a relationship of being in time that can’t be locked down as an original thing. Identity is emergent, stretched, interpellated by ideologies, and therefore contingent on the world in which we exist.

Yet, the text does not come off as an Athusserian ‘reading’ of Paul’s life and letters, and to read Paul as thinking Dasein before Heidegger would be wrong. There is very little technical language stemming from Althusser’s science or Heidegger’s specialized vocabulary in Breton’s text. Aside from a couple of non-essential uses of the word ‘interpellation’, I would have missed the Althusserian influence if not for Ward Blanton’s introduction to Joseph N. Ballan’s translation, which I’m using here.

One gets the impression that Breton has found a way for Paul to remain Paul without being contorted into a proto-poststructuralist, twentieth-century Existentialist, or Marxian ‘scientist’.

As a Jew and a Roman citizen living n the Hellenized East, Paul already inhabits plurality and thus makes ‘belonging’ into the very problem of his identity. This is the starting point for Breton’s assessment. [2]

Suspending the Weight of Culture

The ability to suspend the weight of culture to redirect its energy is the innovation of Paul, and why this is an important text to include Time as Practice. It is also the specific aspect of Paul’s theology that the philosophical reconsideration of Paul is meant to put back into contemporary culture. It is clear that modern Christianity has largely abandoned this in favor of the Thomist rationality of the Middle Ages. This critique is woven throughout Breton’s text.

At the heart of Breton’s reading, which became the core of Agamben’s reading in The Time that Remains, is the capacity to suspend the culturally given ‘as a kind of spiritual praxis of self-distancing from the ideologies that rule a given cultural moment.’ [3] In doing so, he sets in motion a reconsideration of human experience that restores time as a fundamental feature of experience.

Looking back to Bergson and Heidegger and pulling their thinking of time through Althusser’s ‘interpellation’, Breton uses the figure of Paul to link time, experience, and contingency. In this way, he allows us to read Paul’s letters as fundamentally engaged with the composition of time. Space does come into it, but less as the primary dimension and more as the effect of Paul’s temporal concerns:

As encountered by the overflowing life of Paul, ‘the world,’ intolerant of borders, becomes the impossibility of stopping anywhere. Inspired by the contrast suggested in German by the terms Umwelt and Welt, I would readily say that cosmos (Welt) means, for Paul, the passage from an environment (Umwelt) to what overflows to the infinite, to that openness in which all regional landscapes are inscribed and fade away. (97)

This could be read as primarily spatial, but what Breton is getting at by focusing on Paul’s cosmos as ‘openness’ or ‘opening’ [ouverture] is movement and motion out of which time and space are recomposed:

We can summarize Saint Paul’s world, taken according to its ‘function’ rather than its ‘substance,’ by the three following phrases: unlimited opening, insistent transit, and a permanent tension toward a ‘further still [plus outre]’ that only a mad hope, faith, and love can change into a nec plus ultra. (99)

For Paul, the world (as the entanglement of Welt-cosmos and Umwelt-environment) is always incomplete, which is marked by his distinction between ‘function’ and ‘substance’ in this sentence. We need to understand this incompleteness as fundamentally movement, and therefore temporal, if we wish to avoid the inherent nihilism of spatial (i.e., substantive) thinking. [4]

To say that the world is incomplete is to automatically say that it is contingent through and through, which means new time is always being created. This is the innovation in Western Metaphysical thinking that Breton resurrects from Paul. If everything is in motion, then everything is both empty and full simultaneously. Emptiness, however, is not an endpoint for Paul. Such an endpoint would manifest as a desire for a nihilistic indifference that seeks direct experience of the nihil as the termination of the ‘insistent transit.’

Paul’s cosmos, as we will see, does not allow for the human capacity to bring about the end of this transit, though it desires it inherently. To understand this, we need to understand what Breton means by Paul’s ‘allegorical hermeneutics’ — i.e., his way of interpreting past events of the Jewish tradition and the disruptive appearance of Jesus as ‘the Christ’ as both continuous and discontinuous movements of history.

Allegorical Hermeneutics and the Economy of Salvation

The reconsideration of Paul has led to the reconsideration of Jesus as the Christ. Rather than a redeemer who emerges as the fulfillment of prophecy, Paul’s Jesus revealed the fundamental contingency of time — a time that needs to be put back together again. In the reassembly, he discovers the ideological nature of our experience of time as an ‘economy of salvation’. This economy must see the discontinuity of Jesus as simultaneous continuity.

It [the economy of salvation] all happens as if time, imagined as a scriptural space, integrates the differences inscribed within it as it moves along, so that it might eventually outline, under the invisible hand that guides those differences, the self-portrait of the Christ. (65, my emphasis)

There is much to unpack in this single sentence, but understanding it is central to Breton’s argument. Paul’s allegorical hermeneutics sees history as both continuous and discontinuous. To steal some phrasing from Nāgārjuna, it is not continuous, yet it is continuous; it is not discontinuous, yet it is discontinuous; it is neither continuous nor discontinuous; it is also simultaneously both. ‘Abraham is not Moses’ yet they are part of the same unfolding story. This story is not understandable by humans in the aggregate, but only as it proceeds in an eternal unfolding of new nows — the economy of salvation ‘integrates the differences inscribed within it as it moves along’.

With Althusser and the other poststructuralist thinkers at the time, this experience of time is meant, in part, to undo the prevailing Marxist demand on historical time — that it is driven by a self-sufficient human power that is marching toward its own end where ‘freedom’ is finally and forever realized via violent revolution, if necessary. This demand was always in the service of a particular ‘subject of history’ as the disciplinary ideal of what a free human would be. Those who don’t conform are, therefore, not part of the solution and not included in the final salvation.

For Breton (via Althusser, Derrida, Foucault), humans occupy no privileged position with respect to bringing about or even envisioning an historical end point. History is not a teleological ‘movement toward freedom’ (66). History is the experience of time as an ongoing exegesis of the past in the present. Breton knows that he is talking about ‘ideology’, but he hesitates, knowing that the term is loaded with the weight of Marxist historical time: ‘If I did not fear the pejorative connotations of this substantive, I would readily designate the context that determines the hermeneutics of allegory by the term “ideology” (but I do not say all hermeneutics)’ (65).

Breton’s Paul gives us another way of engaging history without seeing it as a march toward an ultimate freedom defined by a political class with definitive knowledge of how that freedom would be institutionalized and enforced. This requires a different experience of time, which he calls an ‘economy of salvation’. As economy, it has no end point, but only the ongoing management of an equilibrium hesitating between ‘necessity’ and ‘grace’: ‘This equilibrium is delicate, so difficult to maintain that there frequently results a hesitation between a necessity that imposes itself and a gratuity that challenges it’ (66, my emphasis).

The movement of time is structured as this equilibrium that hesitates between necessity and grace, where grace is the ongoing possibility of revelation that must keep our perspective from ossifying into seeing only the telos we wish to see. This non-ossified openness is both full and empty. Full because there is continuity with the past. Empty because that continuity need not be read as ‘a necessity that imposes itself’ as the external guarantor of the continuity.

Breton, through Paul, is confronting the Marxist trick of the twentieth century: the movement of history toward freedom is inevitable, and the privileged class should be epistemologically (‘theory’ vs ‘ideology’), politically, and violently empowered and equipped to hasten its conclusion. Much of the poststructuralism of the late twentieth century can be read as trying to keep the liberators motivation without the retrograde politics this motivation has historically entailed.

Breton’s Paul provides a way out of this historical consciousness by combining the ‘economy of salvation’ with an allegorical hermeneutics. This combination sees time as the movement of a simultaneous continuity-discontinuity that makes possible a new mode of historical exegesis. This new mode respects the past without ossifying it into rigorous traditions that demand adherence. In Paul, Breton finds a figure in history that restores to us the capacity to see ideological interpellation for what it is: the imposition of the weight of tradition on our consciousness such that we can experience only what our traditions allow us to experience.

Breton unpacks this, without naming Nietzsche, through an articulation of the aporia of Eternal Recurrence. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We are treading our way toward a rapprochement between Nietzsche and Paul that was inconceivable to Nietzsche. Yet this rapprochement plodded its way along through the twentieth century. [5] To understand this, we need to understand how Paul confronted the problem of time throughout his mission of which his letters are the most tangible artifacts we have. In doing so, we will arrive at Eternal Recurrence and affirmation.

Before we arrive, however, we must understand Breton’s reading of Paul’s reading of the Christou.

Christou as Historical Consciousness

Paul’s hermeneutical and allegorical exegesis is the economy of salvation when conducted through Jesus the Christ. This is central to understanding Breton’s argument. It has everything to do with changing our consciousness of historical time.

The advent of Jesus the Christ caused Judaism to confront its understanding of history. If this was the promised messiah, then he wasn’t at all what was expected. Saul (before he became Paul) denied this narrative and fought for the continuity of the Pharisaic traditions. On his way to Damascus to round up followers of ‘the Way’, Jesus appears to him, and the conversion from Saul to Paul begins. For someone steeped in the Pharisaic tradition, the power of this apparition presents two possibilities with respect to historical time. Either a radical discontinuity has occurred and the promise to Abraham has been an elaborate hoax, or the past must be reinterpreted to rescue historical continuity.

Henceforth, the figure of Jesus as the Christ provides two routes for historical consciousness. Marcion and the gnostic tradition will take the easier route: the God of the Israelites is deeply flawed, and Jesus revealed the true God whom all must now worship. As the flawed Creator, the Israelite God has created an irredeemable world, which we are required to denigrate and condemn.

Paul, well before Marcion and the gnostics, took the more difficult path. Jesus was in fact the promised Christou. The work ahead is reconstructing history so that this continuity of tradition can make sense. For Breton, this is the genesis of Paul’s allegorical hermeneutics. The interpretive challenge is to see how this apparent discontinuity of a broken messianic expectation was in fact prefigured in the Hebrew scriptures.

In short, allegorical hermeneutics must reconcile a prophetic past that opens to a new future because the prophesied messiah has indeed come:

Where we might discern two movements [as did Marcion], the allegorical method invites us to discern the correlative aspects of a single process, for the going back toward the past is also, and indissolubly, the moving forward of the past toward ‘the One who comes’. (67)

Breton now turns to a problem inherent within any attempt to read history through this allegorical approach — the aporia of ‘the dreary repetition of the same’ where allegory ‘is very close to being a tautology’ (67).

This is precisely what Paul must avoid in his use of allegory: ‘according to Paul, the allegorical method responds to a specific function, to which I will return: to restore between the old and the new an essential link, beyond the break established by its own conversion and, more generally, by ‘being-Christian’ (68).

This restoration of the old and the new avoids being a dreary tautological repetition of same by seeing continuity and discontinuity as coexistent in the Christou. This requires Paul to see time as fundamentally contingency — i.e., the present is always a more or less tenuous/necessary combination of the continuity of the past that does not automatically foreclose the novelty of the future.

We are deep within the French philosophical tradition of Althusser, Derrida, and Deleuze. All of this comes down to Breton and these thinkers via Bergson, and, as I’ve already hinted, through Nietzsche.

Breton captures this understanding of time in a single moment of clarity:

… allegorical hermeneutics brings to light a unifying ‘function’ that opens a new horizon. For this reason allegory is not pure repetition. It enriches the initial given’ (68, my emphasis).

This isn’t a difficult concept of time to understand. We shouldn’t overcomplicate it. The present is the present because, as Bergson put it many times, the past is automatically preserved in the present, but this preservation is not the necessity of a hard determinism. The only aspect that is strictly necessary in this formulation is the repetition of a ‘now’ that is simultaneously continuing the many threads of the past (‘the initial given’) while retaining the possibility of ‘a new horizon’ that can be enriched. [6]

This understanding of time is best captured not with ‘determinism’ or ‘free will’, but with the term ‘contingency’. The latter term does not force us to make a choice between the two former terms. Contingency sees time as neither the expression of a determinist’s movement of inexorable ‘laws’ nor as the wide open playground of the human will without prior constraints.

Contingency puts everything in an original motion out of which different modes of order, and therefore time, can emerge. But they can also be undone, as the figure of the Christou demonstrated and continues to demonstrate.

Christou and Eternal Return

We’ve now arrived at a remarkable rapprochement between Nietzsche and Paul in Breton’s argument. If Nietzsche spared no vitriol in his hatred of Paul, Breton (through his philosophical lineage that passes from Bergson through Heidegger to Althusser) presents an understanding of time that is exactly Nietzsche’s formulation of Eternal Recurrence.

Let’s look at Gay Science 341, ‘The Greatest Weight’. Heidegger called this ‘the first communication’ of Eternal Recurrence. For our purposes, here is Nietzsche’s key passage:

If this thought were to gain power over you, it would transform and perhaps crush you as you are: the question with each and every thing ‘do you want this once more and countless times more?’ would bear upon your actions as the greatest weight!

We must be clear about what, exactly, is eternally recurring. We should not overcomplicate it. The greatest weight is the experience of time as an eternally recurring now that is neither a hard determinism nor a random chaos of disconnected events.

This is why Nietzsche can treat ‘the greatest weight’ as the experience of an eternally recurring question: ‘with each and every thing “do you want this once more and countless times more?’ With each turning of the hourglass — the Eternal Recurrence of the now in which we live — the past is preserved in the present but only as a question of what you will do in the contingency of the now because it will become part of your next now.

In other words, the eternally recurring now is neither foreclosed by necessity nor radically open and untethered from the past. This is why Nietzsche can envision the present as a deeply experiential question that concentrates attention in the present. As experiential concentration of the present, the question becomes ‘the greatest weight’ because, when taken seriously, we realize that we are required to live in a recurring now where our decisions matter because they are part of the accumulation of time.

The upshot when thinking about the structure of time is this: the eternally recurring now is fundamentally and irrevocably an intersection of contingencies.

This is not to say that this contingency always affords the same degree of necessity and novelty. Many situations can be so full of the weight of history that novelty is effectively foreclosed. This is the story of the conversion of Saul to Paul. The weight of Pharisaic tradition is so heavy on Saul’s subjectivity that it takes the violent appearance of Jesus as a blinding whiteness and a booming voice to assert the possibility of turning the weight of the past toward ‘a new horizon’.

Affirmation, Faith, Hope

With this understanding of time as the Eternal Recurrence of a now that is thoroughly contingent, we can begin to understand Breton’s presentation of what Paul understood by ‘Jesus the Christ’.

When we come to grips with ‘the greatest weight’, we begin to understand time as contingency — i.e., what we do matters because the effects of our actions accumulate and do not simply disappear. As a result, we find ourselves in a precarious situation that can tip either way. Nietzsche challenges us: are you crushed by this weight or are you transformed by it? Would you ‘throw yourself to the floor and gnash your teeth’? Or ‘have you once experienced a colossal moment where you would answer him: “you are a god and I have never heard anything more divine!”’

For Nietzsche, amor fati (GS 276) and affirmation became his answers that guarantee the divine and godlike response. For Breton’s Paul, the Christou is the figure that activates the continual presence of this affirmative power in the experience of contingency.

The subject Jesus signifies the human embodiment within history. The predicate Christou signifies ‘the One who comes’. Subject (Jesus) and predicate (the Christou) combine in this being to disrupt the weight of the Law to redirect its energy (a crucial term for Breton’s reading of Paul’s cosmology) away from dreary repetition toward the novelty of hope and faith.

This makes the figure of Jesus the Christ into an orientation to time as contingency, where faith is the faith that time is not foreclosed by rigid necessity, and hope is the hope that a better future is possible. Breton’s Paul finds in faith and hope an experience of time that stretches back to the promise God made to Abraham and pulls it forward as an orientation to the future that is open ended. (This continuity with Abraham’s faith is crucial to Agamben’s reading as well.)

The present becomes a contingency that requires active orientation and disorientation on the part of the subject:

Pauline faith … is presented first of all as a disorientation [dépaysement], an uprooting from the environment in which Abraham had been secure up until that point. It places its trust (pistis) in a promise that opens a new horizon of thought and action. (91-2)

Faith in Jesus the Christ, then, is the active experience of this capacity to suspend the weight of culture and tradition — ‘in which Abraham had been secure up until that point’ — and to open ‘a new horizon of thought and action’.

We must have faith in this promise: that the movement of time is contingency all the way down, and we are not bound to the traditions of the past as the foreclosing of future horizons of ‘thought and action’ (i.e., experience). In other words, we must bring to the greatest weight of this contingency of time the affirmative power of a faith that time is structured this way, and equally of a hope that our experiences can change and adjust as contingency continues to unfold.

Like Abraham before him, Paul has broken through the weight of history by recognizing the fundamentally contingent nature of the eternally recurring now. We are no longer locked into an historical consciousness that is the agent of another’s deterministic view of history.

For Abraham and for Paul, it took the sudden and insistent revelation of a God to make this experience of time possible. Identities often get so ossified that it takes an external intervention — and act of grace — to dislodge one from tradition so that new horizons can become possible.

Grace, Law, Faith

Within an experience of time as contingency, we must marshal affirmative experiences that simultaneously respect the continuities of time while maintaining their emptiness with respect to necessity. For Paul, faith is the belief that time carries with it an inherent contingency, while grace is openness to the possibility that prevents contingency from becoming a passive hope for a fully redeemed future.

From Paul’s point of view, grace is the religious form of contingency. Chance plays no role in his thought, nor does he dream of a moment that would reveal to him the fate of the world. But it is clear to him that no necessity could decide his origin or the course of his life. In his own way, he could have written, ‘The world is all that happens by an initial, gratuitous gift’. (92)

The following paragraphs of Breton’s text are crucial not because they are a scholarly intervention into the theology of Paul. In Breton’s weaving together of ‘on the one side, Law and faith; on the other, Law and grace’ (92), he untethers Christianity from a medieval apologetics that relied on ‘a general (and psychological) theory of “the human act”, such as Saint Thomas had proposed’ (94).

The Christian apologetics of the Middle Ages sought the reconciliation of the newly available works of Aristotle with Christian doctrine. These works were largely available in Latin translation by 1150, and they became the basis for much of the curriculum of the emergent universities across Europe by the time Aquinas was studying with Albert the Great in Paris. In the universities, reason and free will became foundational concepts — the basis for a psychological theory of ‘the human act’ — and faith became a downstream choice from the exercise of reason.

Thus begins (or perhaps accelerates) the long and drawn out shift, traced by Henri de Lubac in Surnaturel, of human subjectivity becoming the agent of its own salvation within the Christian tradition. Reason becomes a center of gravity around which human free will revolves. The Enlightenment will find a redemptive power in humanity exercising its own reason, but this can be traced back, following de Lubac’s analysis, to Cajetan’s reading of Aquinas. In any event, the Death of God is well underway, and, as Nietzsche reminds us, ‘we have killed him’.

This apologetic shift, accelerating in the Middle Ages, changes the sequence of faith, freedom, and reason such that reason comes first and thus enshrines a human capacity at the beginning of the economy of salvation. Salvation, as freedom, results from the free rein of human reason that brings about its own progression. We are well on our way to Kant’s answer to the question ‘Was its Aufklarung?’ and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. [7]

Breton wants to recover a different sequence from Paul:

Far from preceding faith, freedom is the gift of faith itself, inasmuch as it frees us from the Law and observances. It creates a ‘milieu of becoming’, as foreign to the free will of the philosophers as to the repetitive and secularizing compulsion that would lead us back to the past. ‘Christ has set us free so that we might remain free. Therefore stand fast and do not return again to the yoke of slavery’(Gal. 5.1). (94)

Faith comes first as the openness to the future that respects the gift of Eternal Recurrence. To experience Eternal Recurrence, is to have this faith, as we’ve seen. But now Paul finds himself in a potential trap. How does this experience of Eternal Recurrence not become the occasion to inject love as a new Law: ‘for Paul himself seems to make a commandment out of love’ (94).

In other words, if love is the source of the Law, how does Paul not find himself injecting another Law into the Law as a replacement? Breton acknowledges the trap, but says no, this is not a requirement though it is a trap. The commandment to love is not an obligation that is the love of some thing or some one.

The love of which Paul writes is an ‘inspiration’ as opposed to a commandment. The latter (commandment) has definitive obligations and behaviors that can be codified: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s stuff. A commandment turns the temporality of Eternal Recurrence into the activation in the present of a retrospective truth: this is what the Law says we should do, therefore we shall do it. The future is foreclosed as the endless repetition of the same retrospective truth and its codified obligations.

Faith and love are inspirations, which is a very different mode of experiencing the Eternal Recurrence of the now than adherence to commandments and codified obligations. It is much closer to Nietzsche’s affirmation: ‘Paul lives and thinks [his faith] as movement and as affirmation’ (85).

The work, therefore is never done and does not seek an end in codified obligations that arrive in their absolute finality. Faith and love must maintain a particular orientation to the world and others that does not reify experience into a Law of obligatory commandments. To treat faith and love as inspiration is to embrace a mode of experience that does not seek final clarity in the use of reason, though it does seek clarity that can never be final: ‘for the one who has come is still to come’ (84)

Love and faith, therefore, can ‘transcend the objects of their gaze’ and are ‘less the satisfaction of an order one has been given than a listening to the other and an availability to all without condition’ (94). [8]

We must also resist the Hellenistic temptation to reduced faith and love to separate atomic concepts. We are seeking access to a mode of experience that does not start from, nor seek, rigorous definitions — ‘what is faith?’ ‘what is love’? ‘what is the most important commandment?’

Inversely, the true Christian is one who knows how rediscover the novelty of his faith in the shadow of the ancient patriarch. The old Covenant and the new Covenant, which allegorical exegesis sought to unite, are reconciled thanks to the reciprocity of movements that, integrating the past in the present and the present in the past, render a single homage to the ‘Lord of history’ in the freedom of faith. (95)

We live in the perpetual transit of the Eternal Recurrence that can only be understood as more or less coordinated regulars of movement. We can treat it as foreclosure or freedom, but it is always the gift bestowed by a grace we didn’t ask for.

Perpetual Transit

When we begin to experience time as the contingency of Eternal Recurrence, the cosmos starts to appear fluid and incomplete. One of Breton’s great innovations is to link Paul’s understanding of history to a cosmos that accommodates this history.

Whether this reading stands up to scholarly scrutiny is beside the point. As a theologian and philosopher, Breton is taking on a Pauline configuration of history himself. By looking back to Paul, he makes him our contemporary (as Paul did with Abraham) by tracing a continuity through the mode of experience that we’ve outlined above. Reactivating that mode of experience for the late twentieth century was the theological and philosophical point.

Despite being from Tarsus, ‘a Greek city that he has told us is not “without renown”,’ Paul does not start from a Hellenistic theory of the cosmos. He does not sit at home thinking up a cosmos to fit his mission to the Gentiles. The mission comes first, on the road to Damascus, and the assumption of a cosmos that is compatible with this mission emerges as an assumption: ‘Prior to all speculation, the “world” was, for the apostle to the Gentiles, a function of opening [ouverture], closely connected to his vocation, a function he could not have thematized as a problem because it was an essential component 0f his life and of his missionary activity’ (97).

Even though he eschews the need for ‘system’ in his thinking, Paul’s cosmos retains much of the Greek cosmological vision of coherence and harmony. This is similar to Saint John who ‘presents the cosmos as the theater of a struggle between light and darkness.’ But different from the direction Marcion on the gnostics took it: ‘Marcion could use these troubling texts without much subtlety to justify his rejection of the Old Testament as the empire of the evil god, thus confirming the impression of a ‘double lordship’” (96-7).

Paul was not immune to these challenges. The problem of theodicy is inherent to Christianity and its vision of a God who created a world in need of redemption. Unlike Marcion, Paul does not see the created world as a finished product. Just like humanity’s ‘economy of salvation’, the cosmos itself is bound up in this economy. In Breton’s reading of Paul, there is, therefore, no hard boundary between ‘the human’ and ‘nature’. Both are moving together in a reciprocating relationship:

In short, any possible advance that humanity makes, or inversely any possible decline, will also show up, whether positively or negatively, in the fate of nature. In this sense, there is and there must be a history, be it dialectical or no, of nature. We now know that for Paul, this history cannot be anything other than an ‘economy of salvation’. (121)

Paul is not, it should be clear, describing a ‘system of relations’ that are fixed forever. The combined history of nature and humanity is not yet written. It remains, as Breton has repeatedly said, an economy of salvation. As economy, Breton is signally a mode of experiencing time as an ongoing endeavor. An economy has not end, though it does have relatively stable equilibria that will, at times, become disequilibria.

We must understand this economic composition of time because it is at the heart of Breton’s reading of Paul’s cosmology, which is inseparable from his subjectivity existing at the confluence of Hellenism and Judaism, not to mention Roman citizenship and its penchant for administration.

Breton’s Paul is combining the two world views of Genesis and the Hellenists with respect to the cosmos. His combination appears more intuitive than rigorously thought out. Again, Paul is not primarily an intellectual systemizer. He has a practical mission to the Gentiles without being given the concrete content of a message. Paul is only told what to do on the road to Damascus, not how to do it or what his message should be. [9]

From Genesis, Paul gets a creator God who gave humanity ‘dominion’ over nature. This inheritance from Genesis is a ‘will to power’ that puts humanity in charge. Crucially, this history has an ‘integrative unity’ that subordinates ‘its elements to a destination, determined in advance, in the same way that an archer traces with an arrow the path to the target’ (123).

This composition of historical time sees history as progressing toward an end, but the end is 1) already determined and 2) brought about by the exercise of ‘dominion’ by humanity over nature. It is an economy of glory exercised through a knee-jerk Nietzschean will to power. Breton’s metaphor of the archer and his arrow puts all the power into the hands of the archer who is arranging the forces of nature — the engineering of the arrow, the tension of the bow and its release — to hit a predetermined target. The alliance of God with a chosen people, effectively puts the people’s will to power as the outcome of the trajectory of the arrow.

Yet, within this story, there are other possibilities. Humanity is woven into God’s creation as part of the whole. This can provide the sense of Heidegger’s ‘thrownness’ of being that moves all the emphasis to a becoming that sees humanity as one part of the creation. Perhaps more important, however, is that humanity gains a vision of itself and the world as caught up in a dialectical movement of freedom and slavery where a desire for freedom animates the human adventure in time. The outcome of this movement should be seen as completely up to the grace of God that limits the effectivity of the will to power to bring about a permanent end. ‘All the while, man remains himself inserted, like all things, in the movement of a history which is first of all that of a chosen people, continually menaced by slavery and therefore in expectation of a more-or-less imminent liberation from [by?] the savior God’ (125).

From Hellenistic thought, Paul gets the idea of a harmonious unity of the cosmos that is already there in the form of a ‘world soul’. The Stoics saw this world soul as constantly in motion, but the traditions of ancient Greek thought saw a ‘system of relations’ whose unity is built in. Greek eternity is never-ending time — the heavens will keep rotating as they always have. By contrast, the cosmos of Genesis has a beginning and a promised end. Eternity, as Augustine ultimately formulated it in Confessions XI, is outside of time and has nothing to do with time.

To summarize: on the one hand (Genesis), God created a world in need of redemption and gave that power of redemption to humanity as a will to power exercised as dominion over nature. On the other hand (the Greek inheritance), Paul lives in a world that is already unified as a ‘system of relations’ that can be known and experienced. Breton’s Paul reconciles these by making the Greek cosmic unity into an open function rather than a closed system. By function Breton means to temporalize the unity and to make any final unity — an eternally harmonious cosmos — completely up to God. This is what Breton means when he writes that Pauls’ cosmos can be summarized as ‘unlimited opening, insistent transit, and a permanent tension toward a ‘further still [plus outre]’ that only a mad hope, faith, and love can change into a nec plus ultra’ (99).

We cannot stop here, however. Breton’s intervention is not about installing a fundamental emptiness at the heart of being. He is not an Existentialist of the Sartrean variety. Nor is he faithful to Heidegger whose Dasein tends to show up as an individual’s struggle for meaning. Both of these models will activate a will to power that finds its expression in glory.

Breton’s Paul is resolutely Christian and seeks another composition of time that is not animated by a desire for domination and glory. To understand this, we need to turn our attention to how the mode of subjectivity that Breton finds in Paul is inserted into an incomplete cosmos that is not purely eschatological (Judaic), not purely an object of inquiry into a system of relations (Hellenism), but is also not a chaos of random events without unity or coherence.

The ‘All’ and a Will to Power without an Eschaton

Combining the cosmologies of Genesis and Hellenism is difficult as the above summary should have demonstrated. Paul is not systematic in his approach, and Breton does not claim that his analysis is anything other than speculative and ‘too-quick’ (125). With Breton, we should resist making a system out of a worldview that Paul never needed to be systematic. To label these speculative thoughts as ‘cosmology’ (as opposed to mere ‘cosmos’) seems already to go too far.

Breton’s Paul seems to manage the combination of cosmos by rethinking what the ‘unity’ of the cosmos and the ‘all’ of God’s power mean. The speculative conclusion is this: the creation is not done, and the cosmos is incomplete. ‘The act of divine power concerns precisely the “all,” which is less an object than a sphere of expansion’ (100).

God’s power, in other words, keeps creating and thus introduces humanity into a cosmos that is perpetually ‘in transit’. To ensure that this cosmos has order and is not a random chaos, God has imbued each creature with commandments and imperatives that it is bound to pursue. These imperatives do not guarantee the existence of a systematic order that can be ‘the object of speculation and a subject for contestation and argument.’ Rather, order ‘has the energy of a commandment.’ Order, in other words, results from the dialectical interplay of these imperatives as each thing seeks the ‘correlation of being and meaning, of meaning and finality, and finality of mission or vocation’ (101).

There is no guarantee, however, that this pursuit of mission or vocation is transparently available to each creature. This would mean returning the experience of time to the pursuit of knowledge with the result that we hold onto a will to power that is aligned with glory and domination of humanity over nature as well as other humans.

This is where Breton is trying to negotiate a Paul who grants agency to humanity without that agency being expressed as a will to domination and glory. It is, however, a will to power, but one that constantly is trying to figure out how the past connects to the present and what should happen next.

The ‘next’, however, remains blurry. The telos of the creature and of the cosmos is only understood by God. All that the creature has is the inkling that it has a telos that it does not fully grasp. This is the paradox that Paul’s letters (and those of the Pauline tradition that Breton makes liberal use of) must spell out an negotiate: we are animated by a desire for ultimate freedom without this desire having any definitive knowledge of what this state would be like.

Indeed, the ultimate ‘revelation,’ which unveils the divine filiation of man and the universe, exceeds the capacities of human language in its present condition. That which will be the “man-world” has not yet appeared. No figure could outline the future of such a transformation. Nonetheless, in these vibrant texts, quivering with the hope of which they speak, ignorance of detail as to the ‘how’ does not undermine the certainty with regard to the issue in question. (122)

This is Paul’s ‘radical innovation’, and it is at this moment that we get Breton’s definitive moment of confrontation with the Nietzschean tradition, which the poststructuralist milieu of Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida are seeking to rehabilitate:

The radical innovation animating Pauline faith has nothing in common with the announcement of a ‘superman’ or of a ‘supernature’ identified with the mythical subtley of antimatter.

Beyond all will to power, the ‘revelation of the Sons of God’ [the Pauline term from Ephesians for the apocalyptic eschaton] to a human face and to the ‘face of the world’ is a completely gratuitous work, a celebratory ‘praise’ to his ‘glory and grace’. It seems impossible to know anything about it. (122) [9]

Telos as eschaton remain immanent and imminent. Immanent because the eschatological desire remains embedded in the structure and experience of time that desperately wants a final end. Imminent because the eschaton is always ‘the one who comes’.

The eschaton, in other words, takes the temporal form of an ‘already that is not yet’. The Pauline innovation of faith is the ability to live in this dialectical interplay of freedom and slavery without seeking to resolve the resulting desire in the politics and theology of a superman who arrives with the final answer. It is to live in a continual transit as an ‘exception’ that exercises a profound power of suspension over the ideologies that interpellate us. To live a Pauline faith is to live in a hope that always seeks a beyond that it cannot and does not understand with clarity:

As we have seen, the hope in question has an ontological depth that disallows any reduction of it to a transitory unrest of the psychè or an accident of sensibility. We might say that it ‘imbibes’ the essence of beings and prevents them from being shut up within the borders of a defined nature. It secretes an impatience that moves them and destines them to a continual transit. (120)

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Footnotes

[1] Agamben’s reading of Paul is similar to Breton, but the emphasis is different. Where Breton focuses on Paul’s ability to suspend the weight of history on subjectivity, Agamben will focus on Paul’s use of katargeo (rendering inoperative) as a way of experiencing subjectivity in relation to the obligations of the law.

[2] Breton’s portrayal of this aspect of Paul will become central to Michel Serres Rameux. See in particular see his chapter ‘The Adoptive Son’.

[3] From Ward Blanton’s Introduction to Joseph N. Ballan’s translation published by Columbia University Press in 2011. See page 9.

[4] I do not wish my use of the term ‘incomplete’ with how a theoretical physicist such as Lee Smollen uses it. For Smollen, physics is incomplete because there remains a gap between the mathematical equations of Einstein (classical physics) and those of quantum physics. What is ‘incomplete’ according to Smollen is physics as a way of knowing. The universe itself is understood to be complete, i.e., explainable. In contrast, my use of incomplete here refers to the cosmos itself as being incomplete. Thus knowledge and experience are also inherently incomplete.

[5] Paul Bishop has recently written on this from the perspective of a Catholic theologian. See Nietzsche’s Writing Against Religion and the Crisis of Faith.

[6] Here the Athusserian debt to causality as ‘overdetermination’ should be clear. Causality does not unfold as a line where the present is linearly constructed by prior causes. Overdetermination emphasizes the constant presence of a network where each strand of the network continently effects the entanglement at any given node. See ‘Contradiction and Overdetemination’ in For Marx.

[7] See Henri de Lubac Surnaturel for his unraveling of this movement that put the human capacity for its own salvation at the center of Christian theology and doctrine. To be sure, Breton seems to find the threads of this movement in Saint Thomas whereas de Lubac rescues Thomas from the later readings — starting with Cajatan’s — that set this trajectory in accelerating motion.

[8] Echoes of Immanuel Levinas should not be lost here. His emphasis on an orientation to otherness that does not start with reason and knowledge that would reduce the other to ‘the same as me’ was a significant part of the reconsideration of religion at this time in continental philosophy. Its lineage can be traced through the semi-formal gatherings hosted by Gabriel Marcel attended by the likes of Levinas and Sartre.

[9] As the great Pauline scholar E.P. Thompson repeatedly argued, Paul’s theology did not start with solution looking for a problem. It was thoroughly improvisational and focused on the problem of extending the ‘soteriological scheme’ to a population whose salvation was supposed to come after the salvation of the Jews. See Paul and Palestinian Judaism and, for a shorter version of the arugment, see his Paul: A Very Short Introduction in the Oxford University Press series of ‘Very Short Introductions’.

[10] In his use of ‘supernature’ we also hear the echoes of Henri de Lubac who sought, in a similar vein, to return Christianity to a humility with respect to human nature’s capacity to save itself.