Paul in Athens
When Paul arrives in Athens in Acts chapter 17, he is explicitly presented as inhabiting the very center of Greek philosophy. He is debating Stoics and Epicureans who are curious as to this “new teaching.” They bring him to the Areopagus to say more about this new teaching. Paul’s few words at this moment, standing at an Athenian landmark having been brought there by the two dominant modes of philosophy, immediately speaks of deisidaimon, translated in the NRSV as “religious” but could equally mean “devout” and therefore assiduous in the observance of rituals and practices focused on the gods of the city.
At the heart of this short exhortation, we find an inscription to “an unknown God” (17:23), a quote from Epimenides (or Posidonius?) about esmen (17:28, translated as “being” but could also be more simply “existence”), metanoein (17:30, poorly translated as repent), and the imminent eschaton (17:31). This passage can come off as a standard admonition to not worship idols as the basis for religious practices. This misses so much of the literary setting that makes this passage stand out as a concentration of early Christianity’s relationship to philosophy and religious practices, which is mediated through the terms I just cited.
Standing at the Areopagus, Paul’s message does not center on worshipping idols; it is about a change in the nature of time and issues a new command — metanoein — that is inseparable from this change in time. The command metanoein is found Mark 1:15, which uses the same word (metanoiete) as the command and pairs it with kairos as the change in time. Poorly translated as “repent,” metanoein literally means to perceive something in the future. It is a turning of attention away from the given categories of the present to be open to new possibilities in the future. Repent is the opposite: to perceive something in the past that now requires your ongoing conformity. As in Mark 1:15, metanoein is paired with a statement about the imminence of the eschaton:
While God has overlooked times of human ignorance [chronous tes agnoias], now he commands all people everywhere to repent [metanoein], because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by rasising him from the dead. (Acts 17:30-31, NRSV translation, my emphasis)
Thus standing at the Areopagus, explicitly occupying the joining of religion and philosophy, Paul draws a hard boundary within historical time. God has “overlooked times of human ignorance,” but that time is over. The resurrection changed the nature of time. We need to be clear on the configuration of time that is announced in Paul’s statements to the Athenians. This configuration of time is contained in the phrase translated as “times of human ignorance”: chronos tes agnoias. Here we have an explicit qualification of agnoia (not knowing) with chronological time. We should also not miss the explicit use of agnoia, which is grammatically similar to metanoia: “From a (as a negative particle) and noieo; not to know (through lack of information or intelligence); by implication, to ignore (through disinclination) -- (be) ignorant(-ly), not know, not understand, unknown” (Strong’s Concordance, 50). Both metanoia and agnoia pair a prefix (meta and a) with noieo, to perceive something as true. For metanoia, the perception is suspended until a future time; for agnoia, the perception is a lack of understanding. We should also wonder why it was necessary for the translators to add “human” into the phrasing. This has a tendency to homogenize time such that “human” has a stable and continuous connection with chronous that lasts into the present kairos. This is not a passage about humanity moving from ignorance to a realization of itself. This would make humanity somehow responsible for its ignorance, which completely ignores the importance of pairing chronous with agnoia. If we translate this phrase more properly as “times of not knowing,” then we have de-psychologized the translation to restore a more perspicuous and accurate sense of what Paul is announcing: the nature of time has changed because God has revealed a truth about the imminence of the eschaton. In this announcement, humanity must move from agnoia to metanoia — from not knowing to knowing how to activate metanoia as an opening to the revelation.
The temporality is important. Paul is not calling for a denigrating look back at agnoia as a human failure. Rather, chronous tes agnoias makes agnoia a function of God having not yet revealed this truth to humanity, which means that this use of agonia cannot be an accusation or a judgement. It is simply the drawing of a boundary between a pre-revelation chronous and a current kairos as the time that remains before the end of time.
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At this intersection of Greek religion and philosophy, Paul does not offer an alternative that is symmetrical to both. The religious and philosophical practices cited in chapter 17 assume a very different concept of time than the early Christian kairos as the imminence of the eschaton. To be sure, Stoicism famously saw a world that destroyed and renewed itself periodically, but this cycle had nothing to do with the redemptive action of a creator God sorting sheep and goats at the conflagration. Over the long arch of history, time was relatively stable, which made it possible to treat philosophical questions in terms of long term contemplation about the nature of things — happiness, suffering, et cetera. Philosophy, in other words, could ground itself in questions about the nature of being.
Paul also addresses the emptiness at the heart of the intersection of religion and philosophy — an inscription to “an unknown God” (in all caps, AGNOSTO THEO). Paul fills up this AGNOSTO (unknown or unknowable) not with a proclamation about human nature or even about the nature of human being. In fact, he uses this AGNOSTO THEO as an opportunity to assert the limits of religion as a human practice. Humanity cannot save itself through its own godlike creations. The AGNOSTO THEO signifies the limits of human philosophy and religion to save itself through its own love of wisdom (philosophy, philosophon) or its own acts of worship (religion. deisidaimon).
He uses this moment of AGNOSTO THEO to provide yet another example of rendering something inoperative: by quoting Posidonius (or Epimenides) and Aratus, he suspends the given meaning of those sentences to open them to a new meaning about existence in the time that remains.
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Early Christian theology, especially Paul’s, is not systematic but algorithmic, to use Michel Serres thought. Theology does not erect a system that it imposes on the world as a given Law. It undoes the Law to fulfill the Law as Spirit. In other words, theology moves by solving spiritual and ethical problems. E.P. Sanders made this clear in his lifelong study of Paul’s theology — the solution does not precede the problem. Rather Paul’s theological solutions emerge from solving particular questions and problems as they arise within his ekklesia. Again, the imminence of the eschaton made matters urgent for salvation, and did not demand the creation of long-term systems that stablize themselves around concepts and prescriptive statements about being.
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This is the opposite of what Descartes will do in the Meditations, which is the expression of a system tightly aligned with his Method. He will inhabit the form of St. Ignatius’ primary spiritual exercise, the meditation, and turn it into the foundational statement of self-sufficient humanity. To be sure, there is no blame here. The Christian institutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were perpetrating violence across the continent. Something needed to be done to find a way out of the utter and complete breakdown of institutional Christianity. Descartes did so by turning inward to find the self-sufficiency of the cogito as the home of thought and human will. In the process, he equated the human will with God’s will with the only difference being scope of God’s power.