3
For two hundred years one had watched Rome subdue one people after another, the circle had been drawn, any other future seemed foreclosed, all things were arranged as if forever.
(Nietzsche 2011: 51–2)
The attempt to think truth and world as other than given in the true world is why we are interested in the image of world as it appears in the writings of Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular. In their different ways, each of these connected figures of Western thought denied the existence of a true world, of an unchanging truth of the world, and instead struggled to conceive of a truth in the world. Indeed, inasmuch as they hold the true world to be nihilism, both Nietzsche and Heidegger are descendants of the Pauline break with cosmos. Badiou (2003) captures this aspect of Paul’s thought well, arguing that Paul’s ‘profound ontological thesis’ is that the subject of a truth cannot be thought as part of the cosmic Whole but as ‘in excess of itself, as that which is out of place’ (2003: 78). To be out of place or to exceed limits is to be at once acosmic and illegal, given the fundamental connection between the world viewed as a cosmos and life lived under the law. While cosmos is a picture of a world in which places are eternally the same, Paul’s new creature, coming out from under the law, can no longer be assigned to the Totality.1
Of course, Badiou is not the first to see Paul as a break with fixed metaphysical identity. Centuries earlier, Luther’s lectures on Rom. 8.19 (‘For the creation is eagerly awaiting the revelation of God’s children’) noted that:
The apostle philosophizes and thinks about the things of the world in another way than the philosophers and metaphysicians do [. . .] For the philosophers are so deeply engaged in studying the present state of things that they explore only what and of what kind they are, but the apostle turns our attention away from the consideration of things as they are now, and from what they are as to essence and accidents, and directs us to regard them in terms of what they will be. (Luther 1961: 235)
Paul, as the thinker for whom being awaits redemption, opens a way to a new conception of truth as no longer in conformity to the true world, but rather as indexed to becoming other. This, despite his hatred of Paul, will also be Nietzsche’s understanding of truth, and, in his own way, Heidegger’s too (truth is the event of the giving of being, not what is given). It is also, more recently, Badiou’s truth – truth as a creative process and not an illumination of some everlasting order.
Paul’s thought of world, as we shall see, is complex; but in no way is he a prophet of otherworldliness as in Nietzsche’s denunciations of him (to which we will return in the next chapter). The old scoundrel that Lucretius (1968: 114) denounces for desiring ‘Always, what isn’t there’, while ‘what is, you scorn’, is not Paul. A striking indication of this is Paul’s treatment of the great commandment that Jesus repeats twice in the gospels (Mt. 22.35-40 and Mk 12.28-34), and that must have been central to the teaching of the early communities of believers:
One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’” (Mt. 22.35-40)
But for Paul, this dual commandment must be reduced to one commandment alone. In Romans 13.9 we read: ‘whatever other commands there may be, [they] are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbour as yourself”’. Jacob Taubes, who apparently felt his identification of the significance of this Pauline reduction to be his most enduring contribution to scholarship on Paul (2004: 130–1), believed this to be ‘an absolutely revolutionary act’.2 The dual commandment ‘belongs to the primordial core of Jesus’s Christian tradition. And that Paul couldn’t have missed. This is why this is a polemical formulation. This [one commandant] and only this is valid’ (2004: 53). What this Pauline reduction of love of God to love of neighbour suggests is that Paul is not a thinker of an other-worldly kingdom; we must rather grapple with the worldliness of his thought. The kingdom of God, for Paul, is both now and not yet.3
Before we turn to Paul’s world, however, we need, first, to gain a better understanding of the world that he is negating. As one who rejects cosmos, Paul is the first to challenge the true world.
A genealogy of cosmos
In the Roman Empire of Paul’s time (c. 5 – c. 67 CE), cosmos as a timeless totality appeared to have found its political reality. Likewise, in cosmos the Roman Empire sought its idea of everlasting order. In this connection Foucault (2014: 1–5) recounted the example of Septimius Severus. The palace commissioned by this Emperor contained a representation of the heavens on the ceiling of the ceremonial room where he received his audiences and dispensed his justice. As Foucault suggests (2014: 2), the Emperor’s motives for officiating under a canopy of stars are not difficult to discern, being ‘that of inscribing his particular and conjectural judgements within the system of the world’. Septimius Severus must show that these judgements belong ‘to the same order of things as that fixed once and for all on high’. He must make it known that his position of power is in accordance with the very necessity of the world. ‘His reign, his seizure of power, which could not be founded by the law, was justified once and for all by the stars.’
This symbiosis of metaphysical cosmos and imperial power in the Empire (what Taubes, 2004: 23, called the ‘apotheosis of nomos’) is one reason why Paul’s attack on law is so significant. Throughout his letters, as we shall see in the next two chapters, Paul is responding to this nihilism of the Roman Empire, to an imperial violence that manifests in the cult of the pacifying warrior-king and the ‘religious’ preponderance of rank that this cult supports. This imperial structuring is given ontological expression in the idea of cosmos, which elevates the hierarchical ordering characteristic of empire into the first principle of the universe. The political determines the ontological, and vice versa, in a vicious spiral of imperial domination and cosmological determinism. This construct is then apotheosized, as in Cicero’s paean to cosmos in On the Commonwealth(1999: 96): ‘For nothing on earth is more agreeable to God, the Supreme Governor of the Universe [Kosmos], than the assemblies and societies of men united together by laws, which are called States. It is from heaven their rulers and preservers came, and thither they return.’ In this first part of the chapter our aim is to understand this diffuse sense of cosmos in Antiquity and, from there, to see better the break with cosmos that Paul accomplishes.
***
From the viewpoint of Nietzsche’s attacks on ‘Platonism’, it is in Plato that the contemplation of the order of beings decisively displaces the chaos of becoming. In the Timaeus (7.30) we read that the demiurge, ‘finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder, as he judged that order was in every way better’. And as Plato makes Socrates say to Adeimantus in the Republic (6.500c2-c6), the eyes of the true philosopher, ‘are turned to contemplate fixed and immutable realities, a realm where there is no injustice done or suffered, but all is reason and order, and which is the model which he imitates and to which he assimilates himself as far as he can’. Whether or not Nietzsche is right that Plato’s world is a static cosmos (and we have already seen plenty of evidence to the contrary), the philosophy of Roman Antiquity would certainly see cosmos as an enduring order. Middle Stoicism, for example, dropped its earlier notion of the world’s final conflagration (by which the world is reintegrated with the primordial fire from which it came) for the idea of the world’s eternity (Brague 2003: 132).
Rémi Brague has shown that the term, or series of terms, that in English we would translate as ‘world’ only appear quite late in Antiquity. Prior to the Greek concept of cosmos, the whole was referred to, if at all, by listing its component parts, often by using the very ancient formula of ‘the heaven and the earth’ (Brague 2003: 12). After Heidegger, Brague suggests that what the totality lacks that might make of it a ‘world’ is a subject for whom the all is fully comprehensible, as if from an independent viewpoint. It is this subject that Greek thought first posited, and it is in his eyes that world is constituted as cosmos. According to Heidegger (1977: 129–30), the destiny of this metaphysical subject that represents the world to itself reaches its fulfilment in the modern age, ‘the age of the world picture’:
Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture [Weltbild], when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.
In the world represented by and for a subject, that subject is necessarily outside of the world. Human being is separated out from the all, losing the immanence, the being-in-the-world, that had made ‘the world’ previously unthinkable. And it is for this very reason that, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s answer to the question of nihilism thereby makes the very mistake it is supposed to correct. For Nietzsche’s Overman, as source of new values, is as worldless as the metaphysical subject he is intended to displace. If values can be posited, then they can equally be un-posited; they cannot really matter, cannot be values at all. Something has to matter in a way that ‘values’ cannot, and this fundamental comportment, which is not a value posited by a subject, Heidegger (2004: 87) finds exemplified in Paul’s ‘primordial Christianity’. Paul does not project his own values, he is seized by a calling: ‘To have a foothold is always accomplished in view of a particular significance, attitude, view of the world, insofar as God is, in giving a foothold and in winning a foothold, correlative to a significance.’
Unlike Paul’s world, cosmos is not a world in which we could ever gain a foothold. Its signification as everlasting order means that our existence adds nothing to the world, just as our inexistence takes nothing from it. The Stoic idea of the wise man as the one who adapts himself to the universe, finding his rightful place in it rather than seeking to influence it in any way, arises from the contemplation of this implacable order.
Differently from this Graeco-Roman cosmology, most ancient civilizations seem not to have understood themselves to be passively imitating the order of the world. If the polis was thought to reflect the cosmos, then previously the order of determination was thought to move in the opposite direction: the cosmic order was understood on the model of the state (Brague 2003: 14). One implication of this reversal is that where once the order of the state remained an ongoing process – the heavens and earth must be periodically restored to good order by the administration of justice in the state – now the eternally good order of the cosmos must be reflected in a statically organized polity.
Research by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann (2001), for example, has demonstrated that, contrary to this cosmos-thinking, ancient Egyptians did not see human action as inserting ‘itself into the static order of things’, but rather believed that it is ‘the just practice of man that contributes to maintaining the world in movement’ (Brague 2003: 15–16). The Egyptian ‘earth and heaven’ is, in short, a process in which human society is dynamically embedded; it is not the predominantly spatial, and therefore atemporal and static, order of cosmos. Of course, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cosmologies still functioned as political theologies since, as Brague notes, without the state the cosmos itself could not endure on this model. And, in fact, it was precisely the agency-denying cosmology of the Empire that would later provide Paul with his opportunity: by negating cosmos, Rome itself could not stand. Paul was right about this, as Nietzsche conceded when he posed the question in The Anti-Christ of who is worshipped today in Rome: Caesar or Christ?
The Greeks did not always have a cosmos, either. Homer still refers to ‘the heaven and the earth’ (Brague 2003: 17). But as early as Hesiod, cosmos is what appears as chaos recedes. In Hesiod, the movement from chaos to cosmos is one of differentiation. Beings come loose from other beings, ‘as though all the eventual constituents of the cosmos had already been there from the beginning but concealed within one another or tangled together. As in a kit, the parts were present but not yet arranged usefully’ (Hansen 2004: 140). The Greeks named this proper arrangement of beings kosmos. This choice was not arbitrary, since, beginning with its appearance in the Iliad, cosmos denotes order, and specifically ‘in good order’ given that it is always found there in the fixed expression kata kosmon. This expression is used to convey the beauty arising from order as in the boss on a horse’s bit or Hera’s jewels (and survives in roughly this sense in the term ‘cosmetics’). This Greek sense of cosmos was obviously clear to the Romans, who, in translating it with mundus, sought to capture ‘its perfect and faultless elegance’, in the words of Pliny the Elder. The Church Father Tertullian similarly reflected on how the Greeks named the world after a term for ‘ornament’ (Brague 2003: 19).
To apply this term, with its connotations of the beauty of order, to world implied a decision on the Greeks’ part. Perhaps this decision is already visible in one of the earliest uses of cosmos as a name for world in Fragment 30 of Heraclitus, which Brague (2003: 20) translates as follows: ‘This world [Kosmon], the same for all, it is neither a god nor a man who has made it, but always it was, it is, it will be: an ever-living fire, kindling in measures, and being extinguished in measures.’ This is no longer an image of the world as that which responds, for good or ill, to human influence, as in Egyptian cosmology. Although it remains, for now, a dynamic cosmos, its good order is given for eternity.
An ancient source attests that ‘Pythagoras was the first to call “kosmos” the encompassing of all things, because of the order [taxis] that reigns in it’ (in Brague 2003: 19). Whether this was indeed Pythagoras’s doing, or whether a Platonic conception of cosmos was being projected back onto him, we cannot know. What we do know is that it is in Plato that cosmos as the goodness and beauty of order finds its established usage in the ancient world (Brague, ibid.). Plato concludes a late dialogue, the Timaeus, thus: ‘this world [hode ho kosmos]’ ‘is a visible living creature, it contains all creatures that are visible and is itself an image of the intelligible; and it has thus become a visible god, supreme in greatness and excellence, beauty and perfection, a single, uniquely created heaven’.4
It is also in the Timaeus that the creator god, the demiurge, is made guarantor of the knowledge that the human subject might obtain of the totality of beings now ordered and arranged as intelligible cosmos. We read (47b6-c2) that the cause and purpose of the demiurge’s ‘invention and gift to us of sight was that we should see the revolutions of intelligence in the heavens and use their untroubled course to guide the troubled revolutions in our own understanding’. That the highest ideal for human life consists in the imitation of cosmos, which, especially in Stoicism, was to become a commonplace of the piety of Antiquity, is first made explicit here. The Timaeus tells the story of how the world soul ensures the good order of the heavenly bodies and of how humans, although created by the secondary gods to whom the demiurge delegated the task, nonetheless contain a soul made from the same mixture as the soul of the world, only less pure in the sense of less ordered. In order to purify itself of disorder, then, the soul must come to copy the regularity of the movements of the world soul in its own motion, something that can only happen if the soul first attains knowledge of the order of the cosmos (Brague 2003: 33):
The motions that are akin to the divine in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. We should each therefore attend to these motions and by learning about the harmonious circuits of the universe repair the damage done at birth to the circuits in our head, and so restore understanding and what is understood to their original likeness to each other. When that is done we shall have achieved the goal set for us by the gods, the life that is the best for this present time and for all time to come. (Timaeus: 90c7-d7)
The Timaeus’ notion of the order of the cosmos as something that men should emulate as if themselves a mikros kosmos also exerted a lasting influence. Only one generation before Paul it was still true for Ovid that in the Golden Age of man: ‘Mankind listened deeply/ To the harmony of the whole creation,/ And aligned/ Every action to the greatest order/ And not to the moment’s blind/ Apparent opportunity’ (Hughes 1997: 10–11). And as late as the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (412–485 CE), ‘when the man below will be assimilated to the Universe, he will also imitate its model in the mode that is appropriate to him, for he will have become “ordered” [kosmios] by the fact of resemblance with the Order of the world [kosmos], and happy since he will be rendered like the Blessed God’. To be wise in Antiquity is to be worldly in the sense of imitating the order of the cosmos. As a Neoplatonist text of the fourth century asserted, ‘We who imitate the world [ton kosmon mimoumenoi], how could we be better put in order?’ (Brague 2003: 133–4).
Brague (2003: 134) notes that although calls to imitate cosmos from the Stoics, Neoplatonists and others propose the entire order of cosmos as worthy of emulation, concretely what they had in mind was the hierarchical aspect of cosmic ordering. ‘It is less a matter of imitating the totality as such than the ordering and layering that turn it, right through, into a kosmos’. In other words, cosmos is the total order that it is precisely because it is a hierarchical arrangement. Rank is what differentiates the intelligible beings of cosmos from the blind becomings of chaos.
Although the tiered stations of cosmos would later become the template for the Empire in the frozen imperial social relations of late Antiquity (relations characterized by hierarchical patronage rather than horizontal citizenship as in the classical polis), it was actually the idealized polis that first provided the image that was then applied to the world as a cosmos. In the Republic (4.431e8-432a9), Plato offers a description of the offices of his model polity that would come to serve as a description of the places of cosmos:
unlike courage and wisdom, which make our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, self-discipline stretches across the whole scale. It produces a harmony between its strongest and weakest and middle elements, whether you measure by the standard of intelligence, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding self-discipline as this unanimity in which there is a natural concordance between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual.
Plato summarizes this discussion of justice in the polity (4.434a4-c11) with a clear statement that the ideal polis works by everyone knowing their place in the whole and staying in it. Although we must take seriously Foucault’s startling assertion (2010: 253) that Plato intends his Republic as a myth rather than a blueprint (since Plato clearly conceives philosophy as a way of life rather than a set of doctrines), it remains the case that Platonism would find in this notion the very ordering principle of cosmos: ‘when each of our three classes (businessmen, Auxiliaries, and Guardians) does his own job and minds his own business, that [. . .] is justice and makes our state just’.
The principle of knowing one’s place and staying in it applies just as much to the individual as to the state (4.441d5-7). The just man must see justice done between the higher and lower elements that constitute the inner self. Otherwise there will be civil war between these elements as ‘they interfere with each other and trespass on each other’s functions, or when one of them rebels against the whole to get control when it has no business to do so, because its natural role is to be a slave to the rightful controlling element’ (4.444b2-6). Mirroring the state, justice is produced in the individual only ‘by establishing in the mind a similar natural relation of control and subordination among its constituents’ (4.444d7-9).
The importance of rank to the order of cosmos is an insistent theme in Antiquity such that, by Paul’s day, it is the highest beings, the celestial bodies, which are really the model for human life, rather than nature in general. While the valorization of the celestial bodies was already ancient (e.g. in Heraclitus fire is the loftiest phenomena in nature, which means that the celestial bodies, and not man, is what is highest5), the call to imitate the superlunary rather the sublunary, first evident in the Timaeus, took on particular significance from the first to the third century. The unperturbed movements of the heavenly beings became the very idea of ethics in late Antiquity (Brague 2003: 134). It is, for example, a staple of Stoicism: Seneca praises that part of the universe which, being closest to the stars, ‘does not bunch together in clouds, is not pushed into a storm, does not whirl around in a cyclone; it is exempt from all upsets; the thunder claps lower down’ (in Brague 2003: 134–5). It is also an abiding theme in Plotinus (1991: 6), where the souls of the stars ‘are far purer and lovelier’ than our own souls, being ‘not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens’. If for Seneca it followed that the soul of the wise man should model itself on the superlunary world where the weather is always fine, then for Plotinus (1991: 23) too we should ‘reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies’. Indeed, the souls of those ‘not able to comply with the larger order, are destroyed’ (1991: 10). Plotinus scoffs at the Gnostics who talk of the dangers of the celestial spheres, ‘which in reality provide all joys for mortal men’ (Plotinus in Hadot 1993: 61). The philosopher models himself on what is highest, which is also that which is most orderly. It is the celestial powers that are ‘bound forever to the ordering of the Heavens’ (Plotinus 1991: 27). These stars, ‘moving in their ordered path, fellow-travellers with the universe, how can they be less than gods?’ For ‘if men rank highly among other living beings, much more do these, whose office in the All is [. . .] to serve beauty and order’ (ibid.: 11, 19; see also 23).
The hierarchical order of cosmos is not only a model for the wise man but also for the polis. As we have seen, ancient ethics conceives the cosmos on the model of the polis only then to project this image of the universe back onto the state, lending a seeming naturalness to hierarchical political order in the process. That the polis is where the concept of cosmos originates is echoed in Marcus Aurelius’s invocations of the cosmos as a world city (Meditations, x.15, viii.23) and also in Philo’s assertion that: ‘For anyone who contemplates the order in nature and the constitution enjoyed by the world city whose excellence no words can describe, needs no speaker to teach him to practice a law-abiding and peaceful life and to aim at assimilating himself to its beauties’ (in Brague 2003: 135).
Ovid describes how God sorted out chaos by giving ‘to each its place’, thereby gaining ‘control of the mass’ (Hughes 1997: 3–4). Plutarch, too, in his commentary on the Timaeus, described cosmos subduing chaos in terms redolent of how virtue in the polis is understood as suppressing the surrounding anarchy in Plato’s Republic: ‘the Universe which was by nature anarchic found the principle of its metamorphosis into an organized world (kosmos) in a resemblance, a participation in the ideal virtue that belongs to the divinity’ (Brague 2003: 136).
Greek cosmos found its way into Christianity via the Fathers. In the City of God, Augustine (1963: 343) puts it succinctly: ‘The peace of the universe is the serenity of order. Order is the adjustment of like and unlike each to its own place.’6
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No consideration of cosmos can avoid the relation of cosmos-thinking to natural law. It is usually assumed that the concept of natural law, utilizing as it does the ideas of universal law and right reason, is primarily of Stoic origin (Troeltsch 1960). When Cicero repeatedly defines law as commanding what ought to be done and prohibiting what ought not to be, he uses a formula for law that was earlier used by Zeno to define ‘right reason’. The concept is included in Arius’s compendium of Stoic doctrines (Horsley 1978: 39). Natural law is no doubt prefigured in Aristotle’s discussion of a universal law or justice, which he contrasts with the particular laws of peoples (e.g. in the Nicomachean Ethics, 5:7). According to Plutarch, this was a distinction also found in Zeno’s Republic and used by him as a critique of humanity’s fragmentation by local laws. But it was the later Stoics that linked the law according to nature with a universal reason constitutive of the cosmos (Horsley 1978: 39).
Nonetheless, the phrase ‘law of nature’ is rare in Greek texts until Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BCE–c. 50 CE), from which point it appears frequently. ‘Common nature’ or ‘common reason’ are the usual Stoic formulations before this (Horsley 1978: 35). Since much the same idea is articulated by Cicero in Latin two generations earlier, it seems that the concept of natural law is central to the wider thought of Paul’s time. Horsley (ibid.) argues that in this moment, earlier Stoic notions are taken up more explicitly than before. This is the shared milieu that explains the remarkable similarities between Cicero and Philo’s conceptions of natural law, where both emphasize that the cosmos is a vast city-state with one, unchanging, constitution – a constitution which is the right reason, or the law, of nature. This law is then contrasted with the mere positive laws of the cities of men (1978: 36). There are numerous statements of this conception of natural law in both authors and also more widely: we can take it that it was standard and widespread at the time. This is also suggested by its use from this point on in a range of different schools, from the late Stoics (e.g. Marcus Aurelius) and the Neoplatonists (e.g. Maximus of Tyre) to the Christians (e.g. Origen) (1978: 38–9). To take just one example from Philo: ‘For this world is the Great City, and it has a single constitution and law, which is the reason of nature’; ‘since every well-ordered state has a constitution, the world-citizen enjoyed the same constitution as did the whole world [. . .] This state and constitution must have had citizens before man. Who should these be but the rational and divine beings’ (in ibid.).
We see in this passage from Philo, which matches Cicero’s view exactly, that if cosmos is the world imagined as a well-ordered state, then the law of nature is its constitution. Cosmos and natural law go together as order and ordering principle. Nomos rises from the polis to the cosmos and from cosmos it is then reflected back onto the Empire, now conceived as a natural order. In this case, Paul’s devaluation of cosmos could only be an attack on natural law also, and this indeed is what his antinomianism amounts to in Taubes’ estimation (2004).
The law of nature also needs to be located in the context of a revived Platonism. Neoplatonism gave to the law of nature a transcendent, rather than an immanent sense. The Stoics had pantheistically apotheosized law (as logos, or reason) as the first principle of cosmos, identifying God with nomos in the process (Horsley 1978: 41). Cicero and Philo, however, clearly introduce a division between natural law and God, using terms such as ordinance, which was deployed by Platonic philosophy to indicate the transcendence of the divine mind over the cosmos that it orders. Philo’s God is a divine legislator of the law of nature (1978: 53, 42). While the transcendence of God is to be expected in the Hellenized but still Jewish philosopher Philo, it is as much in Cicero that God is the lawgiver. In Ovid, too, we read that
Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask –
Since called Chaos. [. . .]
God, or some such artist as resourceful,
Began to sort it out.
Land here, sky there,
And sea there.
Up there, the heavenly stratosphere.
Down here, the cloudy, the windy.
He gave to each its place,
(Hughes 1997: 3–4)
Such imagery is familiar to readers of Plato’s late works such as the Timaeus (41E), where Plato talks of God having spoken the laws for the nature of the universe to souls. While Paul too knew a transmundane God, this was the God of the Israelites, not Plato’s demiurge. Paul would have well understood that the law of nature was a Greek notion. While natural law is not foreign to Paul, neither is it difficult to see that it might have aroused his suspicion. The ‘apotheosis of nomos’ characteristic of Roman Antiquity, a consensus that Taubes thinks Paul ‘clambers out of’, is expressed above all by natural law and its legislating of places and orders (Taubes 2004: 23).
Paul against empire
Having understood something of the imperial cosmology of Paul’s time, we will now show that his writings are shot through with imperial terms and concepts that are given a fundamentally new, this time non-metaphysical, sense. Paul struggles to overcome the very idea of empire.
Paul’s context, after all, is the Empire, and yet Roman rule has not featured much at all in discussions of Paul, whether theological or philosophical. Of the philosophers, only Taubes emphasized Paul’s ‘declaration of war on Caesar’ in his letter to the Romans, yet in a discussion that was more philological than historical. However, in New Testament studies over recent years, precisely the significance of the Empire for Paul has come to light, especially his highly political ambition to replace faith in Caesar with faith in Christ. Indeed, Paul’s term for his movement as a whole, as for its individual communities, is the political term ekklesía, the assembly of citizens in the polis.
Richard Horsley has been central to this rethinking, and, as he argues (1997), the Caesar cult of Paul’s Antiquity was no mere religious sideshow, but central to the political, social and economic life of the Roman world, especially in the Greek East of the Empire where most of Paul’s communities were based. The Caesar cult went beyond a legitimizing function to constitute the primary mechanism for the operation of the Empire itself in Paul’s day. The patron–client relations that structured imperial power relations were often indistinguishable from the devotion to the cult whereby provincial elites (themselves imperial clients) patronized their social inferiors in the form of city festivals, games, public buildings (temples, shrines) and the like. Without understanding the importance of the Caesar cult in Paul’s day, how else to explain the lack of any Roman military presence, or even an imperial bureaucracy, in Greece and Asia Minor? When we bear in mind that Corinth, for example, had been brutally suppressed by Rome only a century and a half before Paul, this cohesiveness of the Empire requires some explanation (Horsley 1997: 11).
Augustus’s revitalization of traditional Roman civil religion as an Empire cult focused on the deified person of Caesar goes a long way to providing an answer to this conundrum. Religion and politics had never been separable in Rome, and Cicero, for example, lists mostly religious statutes in his account (De Legibus) of the laws that should govern the state. For Cicero, the founding and preservation of states is the human art that comes closest to the divine power of the gods (Horsley 1997: 14). Within this framework of understanding, Octavian’s decisive victory over Mark Anthony at Actium (31 BCE) was, at least for the Roman elite, a god-like restoration of civil peace and order after decades of devastating civil war. The Greek cult to Augustus (Octavian) expressed this widespread sentiment as follows:
The providence which divinely ordered our lives [. . .] produc[ed] Augustus and fill[ed] him with virtue for the benefaction of mankind, sending us and those after us a saviour who put an end to war and established all things [. . .] The birthday of [this] god marked for the world the beginning of good tidings through his coming. (cited in Price 1997: 53)
A similar proposal to start the new year on Augustus’s birthday read: ‘It would be right for us to consider him equal to the Beginning of all things [. . .] for when everything was falling and tending toward dissolution, he restored it once more and gave to the whole world a new aspect’ (in Horsley 1997: 14). The Caesar is here heralded as a divine warrior-king. As Horsley notes (ibid.), understanding the unprecedented (at least in Rome) emergence of the divinized power of the emperor under Augustine has to do with his success as an orderer, one who, after the manner of the Hellenistic emperor cults, brought cosmos out of chaos. As one contemporary wrote of the Emperor’s birthday: ‘Justly would one take this day to be the beginning of the Whole Universe’ (cited in Horsley 1997: 21). Octavian the man had become Augustus the god:
Augustus alone has a name that ranks with great Jove.
Sacred things are called august by the senators,
And so are temples duly dedicated by priestly hands.
From the same root comes the word augury,
And Jupiter augments things by his power.
May he augment our leader’s empire and his years,
And may the oak-leaf crown protect his doors.
By the god’s auspices, may the father’s omens
Attend the heir of so great a name, when he rules the world.
(Ovid, Fasti 1.587–616)
The divinization of Augustus went furthest in the Empire’s Greek territories, where it ‘pervaded the urban ethos’ in cities such as Corinth and Ephesus (Horsley 1997: 20). The imperial cult in these cities built on traditional Greek religion and was driven not by the imperial family but by the competitive local urban elite, who often practised their patronage in the guise of imperial priests. Sacrifices to Augustus and donations to the community during imperial festivals brought the donor ongoing prestige since his descendants thereby won the right to be included in the procession at the festival. In these festivals, the Emperor was depicted in mythical guises modelled on the Greek myths and, as such, became a god among the traditional gods. Indeed, he was often identified with Zeus himself given that his order-producing acts ranked him alongside the king of the Olympian gods, who had similarly produced cosmos from chaos (Price 1984: 233). His statue or image was added to temples devoted to leading Greek deities and new shrines and temples were constructed in city centres to the Emperor. Sacrifice to a god became the primary way of relating to a Cesar that now ‘permeated public space’ (Horsley 1997: 21).
Although the emperor cult built on earlier Hellenistic royal cults, it diverged from them in a significant way. While the Hellenistic cults, as city cults, arose from a specific royal intervention in the polis, Augustan cults severed this tie to place, as can be seen by the fact that establishing Augustus’s birthday as the start of the new year applied not to an individual city but to the whole province of Asia. Augustus was not the patron of a polis but benefactor of the whole world (Price 1997: 54). The cities of this Augustan world competed among themselves to be the most pious in their observance of the Imperial cult (Price 1977: 56). Having first surrendered their autonomy to the Hellenistic kings, the Greek cities now had to make sense of Roman rule, and it seems that they did so largely through this cult, which represented the Emperor in familiar terms and which allowed urban elites to continue to dominate their populations as the cult’s priests (Price 1977: 71). The Caesar cult was a major means of the once self-governing Greeks accommodating themselves to, and profiting from, the Empire. Cult and Empire were not ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ as in the modern mind, but rather one and the same thing.
Paul opposes this whole milieu intensely, and this means that his discourse, though voiced positively in the terms of an alternative ‘good news’ of another saviour, is both highly political and anti-imperial. As classics scholars such as Hopkins (1978) and Deissmann (1910) had already noted, Paul does not shy away from appropriating terms that were central to the political theology of the Caesar cult and that had no ‘religious’ meaning in the modern, privatized, sense of the word. These terms included, but were not limited to, euangelion (gospel), which is ‘proclamation’ as both the act and its content, and pistis (faith), as in the loyalty of Caesar, to be repaid with that of his subjects. This is the use of pistis in the gospel of the Caesar religion, the Acts of Augustus (Georgi 1997: 149). Paul’s dikaiosynē (justice), meanwhile, is Caesar’s justice in the cult and Paul’s eirene is likewise the peace of the Pax Romana (Horsley 1997: 140).
Paul’s political theology goes much further than a counter-hegemonical use of imperial terms, however. His letters are often explicitly anti-Roman. In his earliest surviving letter, 1 Thessalonians (5.2–3), Paul looks to the coming day of the Lord, when the faithful in Christ will avoid the destruction that awaits those who put their faith in ‘peace and security’. This is clearly a swipe at the repeated claims, not only by Augustan ideologues but even by subject peoples such as the Jewish Philo (Legatio ad Gaium), that such was the gift of Caesar to the world; a condemnation of all those who offered gifts at the altar of the peace of Augustus on the Hill of Mars, god of war (Elliot 1997: 169). In the first letter to the Corinthians (2.6–8 and 24), the Emperor’s claim to have put an end to war is also contradicted with the stark warning that the rulers of the age are doomed to perish when Christ destroys every rule (archē), authority (exousia) and power (dynamis) (Horsley 1997: 142). In Philippians (3.20–21), meanwhile, Paul, who is entirely aware that the saviour of the world is supposed to be Caesar (Philippi was a Roman colony dominated by army veterans), talks rather of those who follow Christ as having their true citizenship in heaven, from where the real ‘saviour’ will soon return (Horsley 1997: 6). Given that Paul nowhere else uses the term saviour (sōtēr), his meaning here seems clear enough.
But it is Paul’s elevation of the cross that is perhaps the most blatant aspect of his critique of the Empire, since the cross was the very symbol of the violence that Rome reserved for those that disturbed its peace. Josephus (Antiquities 17, Book 10) mentions that two thousand Judeans were crucified following the uprisings that accompanied the death of Herod in 4 BCE, so Paul would clearly have shared in the horror that the cross symbolized for Rome’s subject peoples. The cross also represented the hierarchies of Empire: it was almost never used on the higher class honestiores, only on the humiliores (Hengel: 1977: 125). The cross was imperial shame. And yet it is in the cross that Paul glories (Gal. 6.14).
Anti-cosmos
There is a whole book devoted to Paul’s cosmological language (Adams 2000). In this study, Adams establishes that Paul uses the term kosmos thirty-seven times in his undisputed letters and that the term is well distributed throughout these, though with a heavy concentration in 1 Corinthians where it appears twenty-one times. Paul is no stranger to cosmos, but what does it mean for him?
The first volume of Rudolf Bultmann’s influential Theology of the New Testament reads Paul’s cosmology through the lens of the early Heidegger’s existentialism, which had been formative for Bultmann, his pupil.7 For this reason, Bultmann’s Paul is perhaps too interiorized, but illuminating nonetheless. Bultmann (2007: 254) takes kosmos in Antiquity to denote ‘a totality bound together by rationally comprehensible relationships of law into a unified structure containing heaven and earth and all living beings, including gods and men’. Bultmann argues that no such conception of the all is present in the Old Testament; if ‘heaven and earth’ are mentioned, it is always in such a manner that God is treated separately from it as the Creator. It is this delimited, created order that Bultmann suggests Hellenistic Judaism adopted kosmos to describe.
Bultmann notes that although Paul does not know the providence of the Stoa’s natural theology (in which God’s governance of the world is expressed through the law-like order of natural phenomenon), he does adapt the Stoic concept of ‘nature’ in the phrases ‘according to’ or ‘contrary to’ nature. Here, Paul reflects the Stoic’s vision of man ‘as a being fitted into the totality of the cosmos’ (Bultmann 2007: 9). For example, in Rom. 11.36 (‘for in him and through him and to him are all things’) Paul is deploying a formula familiar to Stoic pantheism. However, it is just as clear from this passage that Paul’s world is not the Greek cosmos, since, as the closing words of Romans 11 show, this Stoic formula is now related to the salvation of the nations, in other words to history as it is divinely preordained rather than to providence in its immanent ordering (Bultmann 2007: 229). In shifting the signified of ‘cosmos’ from an eternally providential and fully legible order in space to the mystery of salvation unfolding in a time that draws to an end, Paul turns cosmos from a ‘space-concept’ into a ‘time concept’ (Bultmann 2007: 256). Bultmann draws from this and other such evidence the following conclusion:
For Paul, the word cosmos has in the great majority of cases a meaning different from that of the Greek conception of the world. As the created world, here and now existing, Paul calls it ‘creation’, with reference to its Creator (Rom. 1.25). When the world is so regarded, man is excepted from it, even though as ‘mortal man’ (Rom. 1.23) he belongs to it. But as a being endowed by God with special dignity and responsibility (cf. 1 Cor. 11.3,7, ‘he is the image and glory of God’), man stands between God and creation and must decide between the two. (ibid.)
This arena of struggle, which is the arena of human history constituted in relation to the divine plan, is cosmos: ‘the world which is at man’s disposal, giving him the possibility to live from it and to be anxious about it’ (Bultmann 2007: 235).
Bultmann’s student Günther Bornkamm, a noted New Testament scholar in his own right, agreed with his teacher that Paul’s use of cosmos means both ‘humanity in general’ and also that ‘in which man lives his life, the embodiment of his concerns’ (Bornkamm 1971: 129). Cosmos is an order of existence rather than of nature, and what is natural is only a ‘stage’ and a ‘life condition’ for the care characteristic of human existence. If cosmos was not for Paul ‘the world of men’, of their ‘conditions of life’ and ‘earthly possibilities’, then how else to explain that sin entered into cosmos, or the foolishness of cosmos, in Paul (Bultmann 2007: 254–5)? This rendering of cosmos as a human rather than natural world is straight from Heidegger (1998b: 112), for whom, in On The Essence of Ground, the ‘irruption’ in Christianity of a new experience of existence led to a fundamental redefinition of cosmos:
Kόσμος οὗτος [this world] in Saint Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians and Galatians) means not only and not primarily the state of the ‘cosmic’, but the state and situation of the human being, the kind of stance he takes toward the cosmos, his esteem for things. Kόσμος means being human in the manner of a way of thinking that has turned away from God [. . .] Kόσμος οὗτος refers to human Dasein in a particular ‘historical’ existence, distinguished from another one that has already dawned.
The most important thing of all about Paul’s use of kosmos for Bultmann (2007: 255–6), again following Heidegger, is that it ‘contains a definite theological judgement’:
Kosmos constitutes the implicit or explicit antithesis to the sphere of God or ‘The Lord’, whether ‘kosmos’ denotes the totality of human possibilities and conditions of life (1 Cor. 3.22, 7.31), or whether it implies persons in their attitudes and judgements (1 Cor. 1.20, 27) or in their sinfulness and enmity towards God (Rom. 3.6; 19; 11.15; 2 Cor. 5.19). But this is especially true where Paul says ‘this world’.
Bultmann’s argument that, contra the Greek view, Paul sees cosmos negatively is widely shared. Bornkamm (1971: 129), for example, also holds that Paul’s cosmos is ‘man’s overlord [. . .] blinding him, it is the realm of Satan, the god of this aeon’. While the darkness of ‘this world’ in Paul is not dualistically counterpoised (as it is in the Gnostics) with an entirely other world of light, it remains the case that the powers of ‘this world’ in Paul are demonic. However, for Bultmann (2007: 256), these dark powers in Paul are constituted by nothing other than a decision by man against God; they have no ontological, only an existential, meaning: ‘ultimately, it is from men that they derive their power, and for the Christian they are already “dethroned” (1 Cor. 2.6)’.
Most commentators would now reject the decisionistic emphasis that Bultmann, influenced by the early Heidegger, places on Paul. Bultmann believes that cosmos in Paul is a sort of mythological precursor to existentialism in that, just as man, though ‘thrown’ into the world, must decide between it and God in Paul, so also modern man, although not master of his own destiny, must still choose his lord (Adams 2000: 15). This theme is passed on to Bornkamm, who argues (1971: 130–1) that man, for Paul, ‘never belongs to himself, but always has a master set over him: sin, death, or the Lord. [Man] is always asked: To whom do you belong’? Bultmann’s and Bornkamm’s reading of cosmos in Paul as the anti-godly power into which individuals have fallen and which suppresses their existential need to decide – a sort of Heideggerian ‘they’ – is clearly a deliberate ahistoricism, as can be seen in the claim that the modern equivalent of Paul’s cosmos is ‘the atmosphere to whose compelling influence every man contributes but to which he is always subject’ (in Adams 2000: 14). Yet despite these now unfashionable tropes, few would dispute Bultmann’s view that cosmos was not for Paul what it was for the Graeco-Roman culture around him. Indeed, if one of the things that Bultmann is trying to capture in Paul is his difference from the Greek ethos of individual attunement to the cosmos, then his anachronism of individual decision in the face of cosmos in Paul at least highlights this much.
The real weakness in Bultmann’s analysis, then, would rather be his methodological individualism, which really does do violence to Paul, who knows only ‘we’. As Adams notes (2000: 15), if cosmos signifies opposition to God in the Pauline letters, then the antithesis of this opposition is not the authenticity of individual belief, but rather the faith of a community of believers (Adams points to 1 Cor. 1–3 in this regard, especially to 1.26–8; 6.1–2; and 7.29–31). Even when Paul writes that the cosmos was crucified to me (Gal. 6.14), the context (vv. 12–13, 15–16) reveals Paul’s words as directed towards messianic community. As Taubes (2004: 148), who set his historical-political Paul against Bultmann’s ontological-existential one, said: ‘Bultmann and all this modern exegesis whose thinking is completely besides the point, which thinks in terms of the individual’.8
Although it is undoubtedly influenced by Bultmann’s reading, Bornkamm’s study of Paul (1971) reflects on Paul’s sense of the time of faith in ways that go beyond the faith of the individual believer. For Bornkamm, there is a tension in Paul’s letters between his emphasis on the imminent return of Christ (Phil. 4.4), the passing away of the world (1 Cor. 7.29), and his seemingly contradictory insistence that the present time is fulfilled (Gal. 4.5), that the ‘new creation’ is present reality in Christ (2 Cor. 5.17) and that, for believers, ‘the end of the ages’ has already come (1 Cor. 10.11) (Bornkamm 1971: 196). For Bornkamm, this tension should not mask the radicalism of Paul’s difference from Jewish apocalypse. Despite sharing the apocalyptic view that the world will end, indeed that Christ’s return is close enough that many of his own generation will see it (1 Thess. 4.15), Paul’s temporality is not apocalyptic. What apocalyptic awaits in the future is, for those who are in Christ, already come: ‘the old has passed away, behold the new has come’ (2 Cor. 5.17). Bornkamm quotes Luther approvingly: ‘It was not the time that occasioned the sending of the Son, but the reverse: the sending of the Son brought the time of fulfilment’ (1971: 198–9). Bornkamm believes this to have been Paul’s message, too. ‘Man’ has been released by Christ in time, he does not have to wait until the end of time. But this dawning of the day of salvation does not mean that man is released from the provisional nature of his existence, from humiliation and suffering. Paul rejects such Gnostic ‘enthusiasm’ in the name of a ‘still continuing temporality’ that, far from being a relic of this world that believers hurry to escape, is rather the very condition of salvation. ‘Time and history are the field in which faith exercises and verifies itself’ (1971: 200). ‘Thus while all Paul’s utterances go beyond the individual’s human experience in time and refer to the divine “beyond”, they serve the purpose of pinning believers down within the confines of the “here”, “this side”, the “not yet” of their temporality and historicity’ (1971: 223).
However, although Bornkamm sees Paul’s Christian life as having nothing to do with flight from the world, he takes issue with the idea that it is compatible with Heideggerian fallenness into it (1971: 205). Faith releases the Christian to an independence from the world even while he must ‘stand up to its testing’. Paul is clear that the believer no longer belongs to this world, or at least to its ‘powers and entanglements’ (Gal. 1.4), and that the cross of Christ is that by which the world is crucified to the apostle himself (Gal. 6.14).
The influence of Heidegger in these interpretations of Paul is shared in Brague’s discussion of Paul’s cosmos. Brague (2003: 55) too, after Bultmann and Bornkamm, sees kosmos in Paul’s letters as ‘above all’ that which ‘designates human life’. As in 1 Corinthians (7.31), ‘to live, for man, is to “deal with the world”’. This world, as cosmos, ‘is constituted by the concerns of fallen man (“the flesh”)’, which turn against him and enslave him. Bornkamm (1971: 133) sees ‘flesh’ in Paul as man in the attitude of opposition to God, or as ‘the powers to which he has fallen victim in his heady urge to assert himself’. To comport oneself in accordance with the order of the world as given in cosmos is, negatively, to conform to the ‘wisdom of the world’ as Paul puts it (1 Cor. 1.20, 1.27–28; 2.6–8; 3.18–19). Since the form (skhema) of this world is passing away, the cosmic attunement of the wise man of Antiquity is transvalued as foolishness. In a similarly Heideggerian way to Bultmann, Brague (2003: 55) sees skhema in Paul’s use not as an abstract representation of the world but rather as a practical idea of the world that enables one to ‘have a hold on life’.
For Brague, Paul’s good news of salvation history is a direct rejection of the cosmos-piety of Antiquity. The wise man, modelling himself on the ordered movements of the heavenly bodies, reads the signs of the cosmos in a spatial way. But the real knowledge of God demands a temporal reading of cosmos; one must understand the signs of the times. The death and resurrection of Christ in history establish contact between man and God that no longer passes through the elements of the world (Eph. 2.18). For these elements are under the control of ‘worldly’ powers that renounce their dependence on God – Paul’s ‘powers of the air’ (Eph. 2.2) are no longer the perfect celestial bodies of the Greek cosmos but agencies that, being ignorant of God’s plan of salvation (Eph. 1.21, 3.10, 6.12), have been dethroned by Christ (1 Cor. 15.34). To be under the influence of the celestial beings, then, is to be slave to that which is most cosmic in cosmos: ‘When we were children we were slaves to the elemental spirits (stoikheia) of the universe (kosmou)’ (Gal. 4.3); ‘Now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits (stoikheia), whose slaves you want to be once more?’ (Gal. 4.9); ‘If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits (stoikheia) of the universe (kosmou), why do you live as if you still belong to the world (kosmo)?’ (Col. 2.20–21) (Brague 2003: 55)
Stanislas Breton’s ‘Pauline Cosmos’ also appears to be influenced by Heidegger’s thought, this time by his account of the importance of calling (kleisis) in Paul. For Breton, Paul’s experience of world, being a function of the missionary vocation of his life, is ‘prior to all speculation’. Unlike the wise man, Paul’s vocation is determined not by knowledge of the world, but his world is rather an outworking of vocation. Heidegger (2004: 55–6) makes this point as follows: ‘in [proclamation] the immediate life-relation of the world of self of Paul to the surrounding world [. . .] is able to be comprehended’. For Breton, this means concretely that because Paul’s calling is his mission to the nations, thus also his world (unlike Greek cosmos with its allotted places and orders) is a world without borders. If Paul’s vocation makes it impossible for him to stop anywhere, to put down roots by finding his place in the whole, then his world is also ‘the passage from an environment to what overflows to the infinite, to that openness in which all regional landscapes are inscribed and fade away’ (Breton 2011: 97). World in Paul is not the all but only a function of opening; a ‘world-function’ (Breton 2011: 98). As function of a vocation, neither is Paul’s world a metaphysical substance. It is calling rather than being, and this calling radically devalues the things that are:
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ. [. . .] Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3.7–8 and 12–14, emphases added)
Paul devalues cosmos by levelling all its places and orders as equally nothing before the ‘call’; it is vocation, and not station, that is at stake. And yet it is also the case that the universality of the call in Paul, its summons to wander indifferently throughout the earth, would likely not have been possible without the Greek cosmos. As Breton reminds us (2001: 102), Paul is Paul of Tarsus, a Greek city of some renown, and it is questionable whether Paul could have enlarged his messianic view of history to include the entire world without the Greek contribution. Thanks to cosmos, salvation history in Paul would no longer be the destiny of a chosen nation, but a veritable cosmology in which all beings are submitted to the lordship of Christ.
Yet despite his dependence on cosmos, for Breton Paul decisively puts it in its place. The primacy of Christ both in and to the cosmos is not deployed as the solution to a philosophical problem; it is not a matter of bringing the one and the many together into a well-balanced and beautifully proportioned whole. Paul rather seeks to break the spell of the Whole itself:
A Hellenized Jew but a Jew nonetheless, Paul did not forget that ‘everything was created, the heavens and the earth’, according to Genesis. This is why, rising up in thought above the immensity of creation [. . .] Paul takes the liberty of putting the totality into question [. . .] The primacy of Christ, as an echo of the creative origin, is at once that which gives substance to the world and that which grants courage to the thought that thinks it. (Breton 2011: 108)
By shifting between Paul’s cosmism and anti-cosmism, Breton illuminates that Paul’s relation to cosmos is subtle. Paul puts cosmos in its place, but he does not make it anathema, as the Gnostics would later attempt to do with the knowledge (gnosis) that the creator of this world is not the true God, who is above and beyond the heavens. Basing his discussion on the hymn-like passage in Colossians (1.15–20) where Christ is described as the ‘firstborn of all creation’, Breton notes (2011: 108) that in this hymn Christ takes up the function typically assigned to the ‘world soul’ in Greek discourse.9 Christ is described as the ‘firstborn of all creation’ by whom and for whom all things were created and subsist. Cosmogonically, Christ is the generative principle, which therefore invests cosmos with value, even if from without. Cosmologically, Christ plays a function analogous to the ‘great organism’ or ‘living being’ of Greek philosophy which, by its spirit (pneuma), animates the world from within. The totality has reality only in Christ, and yet it is not thereby nothing, since his spirit moves throughout it.
Paul’s Christ is then both for and against cosmos. As that from which cosmos comes, he denies the totality of cosmos, but as that which upholds cosmos, he constantly affirms it. The Christ has a dual nature as mediator of cosmos. He is the one who both transgresses and yet also shares in ‘the cosmic and human vicissitudes of universal becoming’ (Breton 2011: 110). For Breton, this is seen in that, while Christ is firstborn of all creation, he cannot escape death, but must instead become, as the author of Colossians (1.18) puts it, the ‘firstborn from among the dead’. Given that this second birth reconciles ‘all things’ in heaven and earth to God (Col. 1.20), the Pauline stance on cosmos seems clear enough to Breton (2011: 111): ‘the cosmos of nature has neither meaning nor existence except in and by its integration into human history’, a history which itself lacks meaning outside of the economy of salvation. Although cosmos lacks value considered on its own, it is nonetheless capable of redemption.
In the letter to the Romans, Paul also indicates that his hope for cosmos is that it might be subject to transfiguration rather than to a final conflagration. Paul writes (8.19–25) of the creation being ‘subjected to futility’ and of ‘groaning with the pains of childbirth’ whereby the entire cosmos waits in expectation for redemption. Breton (2011: 115) calls this a cosmology of hope whereby nature is placed ‘under the sign of a desire that pushes it beyond itself, a desire that would be the unconscious form of a hope’:
The ontological depths of the real are defined not by an ensemble of properties, but by the sigh of a slave shaking off his chains, powerless to rid himself of them, yet animated in his impatience by the expectation of his future liberation. From the highest point to the lowest on the ontological ladder, a single groaning, transmitted from one level to another, proclaims that the essence of the world is simply freedom. (Breton 2011: 117)
Paul does not so much reject Greek cosmos as subject all of its stations equally to futility. From this standpoint of a shared slavery, the hope for liberation is common to all beings. And, as Breton notes (2011: 117), the remarkable thing about this is that Paul is thereby using the language of the apocalypses, which also spoke of a new heaven and a new earth, while radically changing their context from eschatology – the end of the world – to ontology – the very being of the world: ‘It seems that the Pauline originality consists in the transfer of the apocalyptic eschaton onto the genesis and the very structure of things. Thus inverted into a “proton” of hope, the eschaton is inserted into the very fiber of the universe.’
Paul finds a way of taking nihilism and transforming it into hope; the obscure desire for the destruction of this world is transformed into faith for its renewal (2 Cor. 5.17: ‘all things have become new’). And in the process, the very ‘being of things is merged with the dynamism of their becoming’, something that Nietzsche’s eternal return also seeks to think. For that impulse which subjects the cosmos to futility such that it might be transformed inhabits all beings, preventing them ‘from being shut up within the borders of a defined nature’ by secreting an ‘impatience that moves them and destines them to a continual transit’, a ‘permanent metamorphosis’ (Breton 2011: 120). As also in Nietzsche, this Pauline becoming is not a tranquil Heraclitean river that never stays the same while neither really changing. It is characterized instead as a groaning akin to the agonies of a woman’s labour, where frustration at the painful transition is mixed with joyous expectation of new life.
But there is a difference from Nietzsche’s becoming. Paul’s cosmic metamorphosis is not the play of forces within a closed system, and in this sense at least it is no longer cosmos at all. The forces being arranged are constituted only through their integration within a history that is human through and through. Breton (2011: 121) therefore suggests that Pauline becoming is the active principle by which cosmos comes to coincide, for better or worse, with human history, which itself is nothing other than the divine plan of salvation. Natural and human history are intertwined not as equally immanent processes but in their relation to a higher mystery which is being revealed. That cosmos requires human history in order to find its meaning should therefore not be interpreted as a humanism since human history itself is but the outworking of divine grace. Paul, in Breton’s view (2011: 124), therefore celebrates a ‘beyond’ to human willing. Breton here echoes Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche (as well as Heidegger’s critique of his own work prior to ‘the turn’), as he does also when claiming that, for Paul, it is human mastery of nature that subjects creation to slavery (to sin and death) in the first place. Human history, as the unfolding of God’s plan of salvation, is then also a liberation of nature from human domination. With the redemption of humankind, creation will also find its freedom.
Badiou’s anti-cosmos
The contemporary thinker most closely aligned with Paul’s anti-cosmic impulse is Badiou. Badiou’s entire oeuvre is oriented by the attempt to think through the implications in ontology of the absence of the One and, more recently, in phenomenology of the inexistence of World – namely of the category of world understood as the Whole, or cosmos. In Logics of Worlds (2009a), Badiou argues that there are only worlds and no World to subsume them all. Each and every being is manifest only locally, in a world, according to the transcendental – or ‘logic’ – of that world, and in this sense Heidegger’s ‘beings-as-a-whole’ is wrong, as also his famous being-in-the-world, which Badiou rather calls ‘being-in-aworld’ (2009a: 118, emphasis added). As in Heidegger, the appearing of the being of beings for Badiou is being-there (2009a: 102), which is the same as being-thus (2009a: 326). Without this ‘there’ there is no appearing of being, but this is also why there can be no being of the Whole, which could have no ‘there’ of its own without thereby being less than the Whole. From the other side, having established that there is no World we have also established that there is more than one world, since if there was only one it would be that World.
Badiou’s proof (2009a: 109–11) of the inexistence of the Whole is formal and can be summarized as follows: if the Whole is the set of all there is, thus the set of all sets, it must also include itself in its set, in which case it is a reflexive set that presents itself. However, given that it is the set of all sets, the Whole must also include all the sets that do not include themselves (the set of pears in the fruit bowl is not itself a pear, for example). But what is the status of the set of all these sets (that do not include themselves)? Is it a reflexive set, like the Whole, or not? If yes, then it is certainly able to present itself except for the fact that, being a set of all the sets that do not present themselves, we immediately have a fatal inconsistency. So perhaps it is a non-reflexive set? But inasmuch as it is subsumed in the Whole that is reflexive, it does present itself. Inconsistency arises again. Yet if the set of all sets that do not present themselves is inconsistent, then so immediately is the Whole, since this ultimate set must contain the lesser one. ‘Therefore, the Whole has no being.’
Is this formal exclusion of the Whole really necessary?, Badiou asks (2009a: 111). Yes, because it is ‘being as such’ that cannot form a whole, ‘and not the world, nature or the physical universe’. As also for Heidegger, Badiou’s being is something other than the totality of beings, although for the French philosopher this is not because being is always a question but, to the contrary, because, as established in Cantorian set theory, ‘every consideration of beings-as-a-whole is inconsistent’ (ibid.).10
That there is no Whole means that there can be ‘no uniform procedure of identification and differentiation of what is’ (2009a: 112). Badiou here formalizes Paul’s insight that, in Christ (i.e. as appearing in a different world), the slave is free and the freeman a slave. The thinking of any being whatever is always local, never universal. This is why, although truths are ontologically universal (trans-worldly), the appearance of a truth requires a body of that truth – the subject of its event – which, as a being, must always be in a world. Truths are universal but appear singularly. To illustrate using one of Badiou’s own conditions: love is a universal but its appearing as this One of love is always dependent on the being-there of two in a singular world.
That there is no World but only worlds enables Badiou to articulate a profoundly anti-cosmic anthropology: ‘man is the animal that appears in a very great number of worlds’ (2009a: 113; see also 513). If other beings also inhabit different worlds, then it is man that ‘appears most multiply’. Contrary to man in the context of cosmos, who is positioned once and for all in the Totality, Badiou’s ‘human animal is the being of a thousand logics’ (ibid.). Is Badiou now saying that multiple-appearing is what is decisive? After all, to be able to appear in innumerable worlds is to have the possibility of appearing differently. As Badiou himself puts it (2009a: 514), playing on the word grace: ‘The infinite of worlds is what saves us from every finite dis-grace.’ That there is no World would then itself be the liberation, as it was for Nietzsche. This would clearly be in some tension with the emphasis in Being and Event (2007a) on the universality of truths. Badiou (2009a: 113) seeks to bring these positions together with the argument that the human is traversed by a capacity to include itself in the move back from appearance in multiple worlds (as a being) towards universality (being). Human beings can thereby contribute the universality of truths to all the worlds that they find themselves appearing in. In the process, and here the Cynic comes to mind, the human animal can point to the void of being, a void which can only appear in a world but without which no world could be. Maybe it is this ‘worldly ubiquity’ of the void that humanity desires above all else as the ‘elusive One of its infinite appearances’ (2009a: 114).
What Badiou calls the ‘egalitarian consequences’ (2009a: 143) of this absence of the Whole are drawn out by way of a comparison with the ultimate thinker of the Whole – Hegel. For Hegel the axiom of the Whole leads thought always in the direction of conceptual determination – from the outside towards the inside, from exposition to reflection, from form to content – until, finally, ‘fulfilled being’ is achieved in the figure of thought ‘comprehending itself’ (ibid.). For Badiou, by contrast, it is ‘impossible to rank worlds hierarchically’ in this way since a world only is a world ‘to the extent that what composes its composition lies within its composition’ (ibid. and 307). It is therefore ‘of the essence of the world not to be the totality of existence, and to endure the existence of an infinity of other worlds outside of itself’ (2009a: 146–7). There is, in short, an ‘egalitarian indifference of an infinity of worlds constructed on distinct transcendentals’, with no meta-transcendental above them all (2009a: 328–9). While being and thought are the same for Badiou as much as for Hegel, this identity is purely a ‘local occurrence’ in Badiou and could never be the ‘totalized result’ it is for Hegel (2009a: 143). This is also why ‘the True’ for Badiou, though as universal as it is for Hegel, takes the form of absolutely singular truth-events rather than the Totality thinking itself.
Badiou shows how any thinking of the Whole ends up finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place in the manner of cosmos. For while a being can fail to appear in one of many worlds, it is unthinkable for it not to appear in the Totality. To not appear in the Whole is not to be at all, whereas to in-appear in a world does not prevent appearing in another. The judgement of the Whole on a being that in-appears is that it is not, but its judgement on a being that appears weakly is still damning: to barely appear in the Whole is barely to be. When it comes to the Whole ‘there is always a fixed determination which affirms the thing as such in accordance with the Whole’ (2009a: 147). The thought of the Whole cannot but lead to a hierarchy of beings.
Indeed, Hegel is incapable of admitting the absolute difference of beings (i.e. their real equality outside of any common measure) for very good dialectical reasons. It is only because of the relative inequality that exists between any two things that we can ‘derive the immanent equality for which this inequality exists’ (2009a: 148–9). Each thing finds its identity only by differentiating itself from the other, thereby being, from the perspective of the Whole, finally the same as this other. Although Badiou himself rejects the idea that there can be an absolute difference between beings, this is so because, for him, beings can only appear within a determinate world that submits them both to a common measure. But to the extent that beings appear in many worlds – and human beings in innumerable worlds – this is in no way a final measure: ‘Existence stems solely from the contingent logic of a world which nothing sublates’ (2009a: 152). To the contrary, having ditched World, Badiou is able to posit the radical equality, which is at once the real difference, of beings qua beings. Only in their appearing (namely in a world) are beings put in relation, a relation that allows some to shine more brightly than others.
Beyond Hegel, Badiou finds the trace of the cosmos-thinking of the One also in the vitalist philosophies running from Nietzsche and Bergson to Deleuze (2009a: 267–70). The axiom of these philosophies of life, for Badiou, is the term (‘life’) that transcends the singular states that deploy it – each being can be thought, finally, only by referring it back to the One of which it is an evanescent mode. But to be referred back to the One is, of course, to be nihilated. The infinite creativity of the One means, as far as each existent is concerned, death. Being’s dependence on this chaotic, formless One is revealed in the return to it of every being. Existence is precarious and reveals its constitutive limit – its finitude – never more than in its cancellation. ‘Death alone is the proof of life’ (2009a: 268). Badiou thus finds in these philosophies of life (not to mention the Heideggerian thought of finitude) rather the spectre of the dead God. ‘One may call Him Life, or – like Spinoza – Substance or [as in phenomenology] Consciousness. We’re always dealing with Him, this underlying infinite whose terrestrial writing is death’ (2009a: 268). To conceive of existence without finitude is the task of thought; that there is no World, rather an infinity of worlds, is itself the great liberation.
***
The similarities of Paul’s way of being in the world to Cynicism – the wandering, the poverty, the militancy, the universalism, the affirmation of suffering – should not hide an essential difference. Cynicism levels the pretensions of rank by unveiling that being that is common to all. Paul rather reveals a new being that is given by a time that is being redeemed. The Cynics call for change at the level of individual existence and, given their universalism, thereby effectively (as Foucault emphasizes) for another world. Yet for all this, world for the Cynic is not a complex of becoming, instead that phusis which is the same. Paul rather thinks world as becoming-other, which enables him to mount a new critique of the timelessness of imperial cosmos. Paul really has no true world. His ontology points to nothing substantial but only the time that remains. As we shall see in the next chapter, this makes it very difficult to give credence to Nietzsche’s claim that Paul was the greatest of the nihilists.
1Agamben’s Paul (2016: 56) is no different at this point: Paul’s ‘“new creature” is only the capacity to render the old inoperative and use it in a new way’.
2Although it has to be said that the same point had already been noted by Spinoza (2007: 173) in his Theological-Political Treatise.
3The dual commandment, along with the two worlds to which it belongs, is reinstated in the Church Fathers, for example in Augustine’s City of God (1963: 345) in which the dualism of the earthly and heavenly cities is the organizing theme: ‘God, the Instructor, teaches two main laws: love of God and love of one’s neighbour.’
4Yet Plato elsewhere (Philebus, 28c6-8) appears to admit that this vision of the world as cosmos, this decision to value the world as ordered, could be seen as the veneration of the intellect that finds it so, that is, of the wise man, the philosopher, himself. If this is correct, then Plato is not blind to the point made by Nietzsche when he suggests that philosophers vainly imagined God after their own image, thereby creating a ‘God-monster of wisdom’ (Brague 2003: 24)!
5According to Diogenes Laertius (1991: 417), Heraclitus’ view was that ‘The moon, which is nearer to the earth, traverses a region which is not pure. The sun, however, moves in a clear and untroubled region, and keeps a proportionate distance from us’. This accords closely with the Pythagorean view that, ‘The air about the earth is stagnant and unwholesome, and all within it is mortal; but the uppermost air is ever-moved and pure and healthy, and all within it is immortal and consequently divine’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 343). Like Heraclitus, Anaxagoras answered the question as to why human existence has value: ‘Because it allows me to view the heavens and the whole order of the cosmos’ (in Nietzsche 1962: 113).
6For all this, Augustine’s thinking of truth and world is not reducible to Platonism. As he writes in his Confessions (1961: Book 7.20): ‘By reading those books of the Platonists I had been prompted to look for truth as something incorporeal, and I “caught site of your invisible nature, as it is known through your creatures” [Rom. 1.20] [. . .] [Thus] I should be able to see and understand the difference [. . .] between those who see the goal that they must reach, but cannot see the road by which they are to reach it, and those who see the road to that blessed country which is meant to be no mere vision but our home.’
7Although as early as 1930, Heidegger was clarifying (1988: 13): ‘It was never my idea to preach an “existential philosophy”. Rather, I have been concerned with renewing the question of ontology [. . .] the question of being.’
8Bornkamm (1971: 147) thinks that salvation in Paul is for the individual since this is what sets Paul apart from the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, where it is rather a matter of the salvation of the world.
9Although not attributed to Paul by most scholars, Breton believes this epistle to be directly inspired by Paul.
10Despite Badiou’s characterization (2000) of Deleuze as a thinker of the One, Deleuze (1991: 104) in fact excludes the Whole as something given. We must ‘be delighted that the Whole is not given’. Not everything is calculable according to a state or determinable by way of a programme. The ‘Whole of duration’ is only virtual and never actual and differentiated actuality in no way resembles the virtual that it actualizes. In Deleuze’s Bergsonism, then, the classical conception of cosmic totality acquires a new meaning: ‘it is not the whole that closes like an organism, it is the organism that opens onto a whole’ (ibid.: 105). But this whole that is opened onto is ‘a Whole in which there is nothing to see or contemplate’ (ibid.: 112).