Attitudes to life: Saint Paul and contemporary philosophy

The remarkable attention to Saint Paul in continental philosophy today originates in the 1990s. In a period of less than 10 years, Jacob Taubes’ lectures on Paul from 1987 were published in 1993 under the title Die politische Theologie des Paulus; Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Paul from 1920 to 1921, were (only) published in 1995 as the first part of the volume Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens; Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme appeared in 1997, establishing him as one of the new key philosophers in continental thought; and Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans appeared in 2000, discussing the three aforementioned books. These four books together with other reflections on Paul’s letters, set continental philosophy on fire, opening up a fertile and intriguing conversation with theologians and ancient philosophers, as some volumes on the relation of Paul and continental thought attest to.¹

Confronted with the vast amount of literature that already appeared on Paul and present-day philosophy, it may not make much sense to add one more special issue on this particular topic. Yet, what is and remains important to do in our reflection on and appropriation of this remarkable turn to Paul is to understand why this turn has taken place. To this question, several answers have already been given. Especially the political–theological dimension of the readings of Taubes, Badiou, Agamben and others often push the answers to this question in the direction of political philosophical considerations. Answers in this direction are of great importance, but different answers may be given and different motives deserve our attention as well. In this special issue, we want to explore one of these alternative routes through the landscape of the philosophers’ Paul.

Our alternative route is concerned with the question of life and, in particular, with the question of the attitude or way of life that is at stake in the turn to Paul and that allows us to explicate some of the crucial connections with new testamentary and ancient philosophical concerns. The question of the attitude of life is first and foremost concerned with the question of ethos. The Hellenistic schools of ancient philosophy were mainly concerned with, as Foucault called it following Hadot, the care of the self: for these schools, philosophy was never a purely theoretical activity, but rather an activity by which humans redirect their attitude or ethos towards themselves and the world so that they may experience and live their lives differently. This particular attention to the attitude of life is also present in the letters of Paul. As the contributions of this special issue will show, the question of the attitude of life is one of the shared, fundamental concerns in contemporary readings of Paul. Moreover, the contributions connect the reading of these letters to the reading of ancient philosophical material, allowing one to connect, for instance, Agamben’s reading of Paul to Foucault’s reading of the Stoics. Finally, this philosophical attention to the attitude to life is mirrored in research that positions Paul among the ancient philosophers: the attention to the attitude of life is something that Paul indeed has in common with his own philosophical contemporaries.

The goal of this special issue is obviously not to exhaustively address the question of the attitude to life, but to show how this question may generate interesting ways of comprehending the relation between Paul and philosophy. More in particular, the essays presented here will address the question of the attitude to life along two lines of thought. First, the authors address questions pertaining to the sense of life that we may discern in some of the readings of Paul. This will guide us along questions on the temporality of life, but also on the Pauline understanding of the distinction between life and death as well as of parallel distinctions such as the ones between spirit and flesh, and faith and law. Second, the authors address questions pertaining to the way of life that this qualitative transformation of life evokes and requires. In this regard, the different contributions explore a number of concrete phenomena not only in relation to the reading of Paul, but also in the context of continental philosophy today, such as the phenomena of the importance of Paul’s notion of use (chrēsis) for philosophy today, as well as of the meaning and relevance of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love as Paul introduces it, or the significance of the notion of imitation as describing the relation between Christ and the believers’ attitude of faith. These two lines of thought are developed in and within the following contributions.

In ‘About Chronos and Kairos’, Ezra Delahaye investigates one of the key concepts in Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Paul, namely the concept of temporality. Agamben’s understanding of messianic temporality hinges on the opposition between kairos and chronos. This opposition, as the author shows, may be traced back to Heidegger’s account of Paul and, in particular, his attention to the temporality of Christian life as well as Heidegger’s more general account of time. In fact, Delahaye argues that the temporality of Agamben’s sense of messianic life can be understood as a variation of Heidegger’s idea of ecstatic temporality.

In ‘Agamben’s Political Messianism in The Time That Remains’, Antonio Cimino offers another perspective of Agamben’s sense of the messianic by reading it in terms of the question of life and the political dimension of this notion. To that end, this article first examines Agamben’s messianism in The Time That Remains by taking into account the question of political theology and by explicating a number of important concepts and ideas that are at the forefront of Agamben’s messianism. Subsequently, the author turns more directly to the question of life and assesses the innovative nature of Agamben’s political messianism by sketching out a comparison between Agamben’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Paul the apostle.

In ‘Imitation in Faith’, Suzan Sierksma-Agteres intervenes in an ongoing debate in New Testament scholarship on the correct interpretation of Paul’s pistis Christou formulations: are we justified by our own faith/trust in Christ, or by participating in Christ’s faith and faithfulness towards God? The author argues in favor of the position of purposeful or sustained ambiguity by reading Paul’s imitation- and faith(fulness)-language against the background of the Greco-Roman thought and practice of imitation. In particular, the mimetic chain between teachers and students training for a philosophical disposition, and the philosophical topos of ‘becoming like God’ (homoiōsis theōi) offer material valuable for comparison. Since pistis, fides and cognates are used in these settings as both a quality to imitate and as attitude towards a model, and since, conversely, imitation is very much involved in Paul’s pistis-vocabulary, it makes sense to read pistis Christou as shorthand for a mimetic movement of faith(fulness) via Christ towards God. Thus, we see how the notion of pistis is concerned with developing an ethos by imitating the Christ.

In ‘Ratio Est Fides’, Erik Meganck explores the theological virtues we find in Paul’s letters. He examines why they are of the utmost importance to philosophy today and why the so-called ‘end’ of metaphysics may be melting down the boundaries between philosophy and theology. To this end, the author first discusses the appearance of the three theological virtues in contemporary continental philosophy through Nietzsche and present-day French philosophy. Yet, in order to attain the philosophical meaning of the virtues beyond the mere condition of possibility of their ‘extra-theological’ relevance, the author aims to reopen what he calls the religious nature, element or register of philosophy. He does so by introducing the notions of eschatology and desecularisation. He argues that desecularisation can only be understood within the frame of an ‘open world’. World then becomes the event of meaning, and the thought that thinks this opening is philosophical charity. The effect of all this is precisely philosophy turning into virtuous thought. Philosophy becomes, in ‘fact’, hope, faith and charity.

In ‘The Dialectics of Paul’, Gert-Jan van der Heiden investigates how and why the philosophical present-day turn to Paul is preoccupied by the particular role played by the famous distinctions that structure Paul’s rhetoric such as the distinction between faith and law, life and death, and spirit and flesh. These distinctions lead to the question of whether Paul (or the philosophers’ Paul) endorses a dualism or not. To discuss this question, the author explores Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul and asks whether we cannot find a form of dialectics rather than a mere dualism in these readings. The concept of the exception seems to corroborate this suggestion, although in a different sense of Badiou and Agamben. The author first discusses Badiou’s focus on the antidialectics of death and resurrection, and he points out some dialectical remnants in Badiou’s reading of Paul. Subsequently, the author analyses Agamben’s dialectical account of the Pauline terms katargein (to deactivate), chrēsis (use) and charis (grace), of which the latter two are concerned with the attitude of life beyond property and prescription, respectively.

Finally, in ‘Ungovernable’, Morten Sørensen Thaning, Sverre Raffnsøe and Marius Gudmand-Høyer offer an interpretation of Foucault’s lecture series from the 1980s and their conception of ethics in light of Agamben’s criticism of Foucault as it springs from his Pauline conception of use. Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and, therefore, it also remains a strategic conception of ethics. The author investigates how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality. He then shows how the methodological foundation for Foucault’s approach to ethics is developed in an interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and gives an overview of the most important analyses of so-called alethurgies. On the one hand, Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics and thereby intrinsically connects ethics and governmentality. On the other hand, Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality such that ethical practices whose logic cannot be captured in strategic terms are made possible. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach articulates a dimension of ethics which remains, in Agamben’s term, profoundly ‘ungovernable’ and therefore genuinely creative. Thus, as the author argues, Foucault’s approach allows him to re-evaluate his analysis of Stoic ethics.

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Notes on contributors

Gert-Jan van der Heiden

Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Professor of Metaphysics at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is working mainly on hermeneutics and contemporary French thought. He published Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy (2014).

Notes

1. See, for example, Caputo and Alcoff, Paul among the Philosophers; “The Apostle Paul in Modern Philosophy”; special issue on the philosophical reception of Paul; Blanton and de Vries, Paul and the Philosophers; Frick, Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers.