Not the least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment.
—Theodor Adorno
THE EARLY CHURCH Father Tertullian called Saint Paul “the apostle of the heretics” for good reason. Ever since Marcion, the second-century theologian who appealed to Paul’s authority for his doctrine that the Christian God was a deity wholly distinct from and superior to the Hebrews’ Yahweh, the Pauline corpus has been creatively misread. It is hard to find much in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount to inspire such flights of fancy, but Paul’s epistles, with their powerful intimations about sin, grace, and imminent redemption, are another matter. As Monsignor Ronald Knox put it in his classic study Enthusiasm, “the mind of Paul has been misunderstood all down the centuries; there is no aberration of Christianity which does not point to him as the source of its inspiration, found as a rule, in his Epistle to the Romans.”
And one can understand why. Consider these extraordinarily pregnant formulations from the Epistle: “We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (3:28). Does this mean that pure interior faith trumps all law, whether Jewish, Roman, Greek—or modern? Or that works are without ultimate importance? “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is lord of all” (10:12). Does this mean the absolute universality of the new religious and moral precepts, abolishing all cultural particularity? “And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified. What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?” (8:30–31). Does this mean, following the previous verses, that those called by God are justified in tearing down the law and bringing the world universal truth even against resistance? These heretical interpretations may be philologically unsound, but what does philology matter when, as Paul himself put it, “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” (8:19)?
Throughout Christian history Saint Paul’s importance waxed and waned. But he has never been out of favor with those aching to escape an unbearable present and bring about our future redemption. One need not even believe in Christ’s divinity to believe that His most radical disciple shows us the way to a better future.
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If you wander into an American religious bookstore today you will find very few books on Paul’s epistles, and fewer still worth reading. But if you stroll the aisles of a secular university bookstore you will discover a surprising number of works about him, not devotional but political. There is a lot of thought being given to Saint Paul these days by those intellectually committed to critical theory, deconstruction, postmodernism, postcolonial studies, and the like. How the students of “theory” became amateur Bible scholars is an instructive story. It involves the disappointments with Marxism in the 1960s, the turn to deconstruction and identity politics in the 1970s, and the flirtation with Walter Benjamin’s messianic ideas in the 1980s. But it is the lingering enchantment with the former Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his notion of “political theology” that explains the Paul vogue on the European and American academic left.*
The first figure to promote Paul as a resource for the left was Jacob Taubes, a Jewish admirer of Schmitt’s who died in 1987. A generation younger than Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, Taubes was born in Switzerland in 1923 into a distinguished rabbinic family and was himself ordained in the 1940s. After the war, and after publishing his one book, a study of Western eschatology, he became a peripatetic professor and political gadfly moving restlessly between New York, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Paris. Anyone who encountered him came away with a Taubes story. In New York you learn that in the late 1940s he taught Talmud to some future neoconservatives; in Jerusalem you learn that he was involved with heterodox Christian monks; and in Berlin you find a photo of him addressing a demonstration of 1960s radicals while Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse sit admiringly at his side. The Berlin years made Taubes’s reputation. He was everything young Germans could possibly have wanted in a sage: an old left-wing Jew blessing their revolution, not with the stale scientific formulas of orthodox Marxism but with the biblical language of redemption. Taubes eventually soured on the radicals but he bequeathed to them a way of seeing politics through the crypto-religious lenses of Benjamin and Schmitt. A few months before his death he gave a set of informal lectures in Heidelberg on Saint Paul and Schmitt, which he intended as a kind of last intellectual testament. When the transcripts were published in Germany they found a large public, and by now translations have appeared in many European languages, including in English as The Political Theology of Paul.
Taubes made two large claims about Saint Paul. The first is that, far from betraying the Jews, he was a distinctively Jewish fanatic sent to universalize the Bible’s hope of redemption, bringing this revolutionary new idea to the wider world. After Moses, there was never a better Jew than Paul. “I regard him,” says Taubes dryly, “as more Jewish than any Reform rabbi, or any Liberal rabbi, I ever heard in Germany, England, America, Switzerland, or anywhere.” Mainstream Jews were baffled when Taubes declared himself to be a Pauline Jew; he would respond that while Jeremiah was a prophet from and to the Jews, Paul showed it is possible to be “an apostle from the Jews to the nations”—which is also how the immodest Taubes saw himself.
The second claim was the really important one: that “for Paul, the task at hand is the establishment and legitimation of a new people of God.” This is an example of what Schmitt called “political theology,” a term he gave a special meaning. Political theology, in his sense, concerns the way in which legal and political structures acquire or lose legitimacy, a process that he argued depended on an arbitrary decision made by a “sovereign,” whether human or divine, and which revealed itself whenever those orders broke down in a “state of exception” (for example, when a constitution was suspended in an emergency). Every society, according to Schmitt, rests implicitly on a kind of political revelation from above that reflects no universal principle and recognizes no natural bound, just a will and capacity to make something be. Seen from a theological angle, God created a community devoted to Him by giving Moses the Ten Commandments; seen from a political angle, Moses was invoking God to legitimate his own act of state-creation. For Taubes as for Schmitt, all serious politics has this mysterious double character.
Taubes’s reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans offers a good example of this theological-political thinking. Taubes homes in on Paul’s antinomianism—his relentless attack on Jewish and Roman law as the enemies to be vanquished if the Bible’s messianic promise was to reach the whole of mankind. Paul’s declaration that “you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14) announces a double coup d’état against Moses and Caesar, a sovereign decision establishing a new world order. Jesus has virtually no part in this reading of early Christianity; he was just a martyr in the early years of the insurgency. The real revolutionary was Paul, who imagined a utopian order and brought it about through theological-political fiat. “Compared to this,” Taubes declared, “all the little revolutionaries are nothing.”
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With the publication of Taubes’s lectures in 1993 the Pauline moment on the European left had begun. Books and articles on Paul have been trickling out ever since, some interesting, most dreadful. And the most surprising was surely the one by Alain Badiou. A student of the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser in the early 1960s, a radical Maoist and defender of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, Badiou, now nearly eighty, still writes warmly about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It came as a shock in France, then, when Badiou published Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism in 1997, calling on the left to rediscover the radical universalism of Saint Paul and apply it to revolutionary politics. He had become an inspired Pauline fanatic.
“For me,” Badiou once told Le Monde, “May ’68 was a fall on the road to Damascus.” Whether he ever regained his sight can be debated. It is quite an experience to read through his political writings, most of which have now appeared in English. It is not every day that one finds a defense of Mao’s personality cult, and in quasi-theological terms no less. In one essay Badiou calls Mao an “aesthetic genius,” adding that “there are moments when for the revolutionary masses he is less the guarantee of the really existing party than the incarnation, all by himself, of a proletarian party that is still to come.” In another he puts the victims of the twentieth-century revolutionary movements in cold-blooded perspective:
What about the violence, often so extreme? The hundreds of thousands [sic] of dead? The persecutions, especially against intellectuals? One will say the same thing about them as about all those acts of violence that, to this very day, have marked the History of every somewhat expansive attempt to practice a free politics. . . . The theme of total emancipation, practiced in the present, in the enthusiasm of the absolute present, is always situated beyond Good and Evil. . . . Extreme violence is therefore the correlate of extreme enthusiasm, because it is in effect a question of the transvaluation of all values. . . . Morality is a residue of the old world.
After many thousands of the victims of the Vietcong escaped on their rafts into the South China Sea in the mid-1970s, and millions (not hundreds of thousands) were butchered in Cambodia, the French romance with revolution seemed to end. During the following two decades the last surviving Maoists like Badiou lived in interior exile while the political debate revolved around human rights, multiculturalism, and neoliberalism. In the new century, though, as a more radical leftism returned, Badiou made a comeback. Today he finds an audience when he denounces “capitalist-parliamentarianism, whose squalor is ever more poorly dissimulated behind the fine word ‘democracy,’ ” or mocks race-conscious multiculturalism for causing the “Pétainization” of the French state. He has given the notion of a “neo-communism” a certain allure.
What explains Badiou’s turn from Mao to Paul? We get clues from his most substantial philosophical work, Being and Event, which he published in 1988. Its subject is ontology (the theory of being) but it is also an earnest if abstract meditation on the idea of revolution. Though there is no God in Badiou’s ontology, there are miracles, which he calls “events.” Events break unpredictably into human history and establish new truths that rearrange the world and us. This sounds something like Schmitt’s sovereign “decisions” except that Badiou is more of a populist, seeing a tradition of revolutionary events surging up from below, creating a chain over time. Each new event announces a new truth, but it also fulfills and justifies earlier ones in the chain. One of Pascal’s enigmatic Pensées states that the prophecies in the Old Testament were actually false until Christian revelation made them true. Badiou, in a chapter on Pascal, makes a similar point about the history of political revolutions, suggesting that 1968 revealed and fulfilled the promise of 1917, which in turn justified 1848 and 1789, and so on. Revolution is never finished, which is why we must maintain “fidelity” to the chain of revolutionary “events,” even in the darkest of times. That kind of fidelity is difficult, though, since it runs up against the evidence of our eyes. Which in turn explains why fidelity to the cause of revolution is “always the affair of an avant-garde” that understands that “what is at stake here is the militant apparatus of truth.”
Like Jacob Taubes, Badiou wants to find a place for Saint Paul in the revolutionary pantheon, calling him a “poet-thinker of the event”—like the hero of 1917:
There is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure . . . called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century. . . . Whence this reactivation of Paul. I am not the first to risk the comparison that makes of him a Lenin for whom Christ will have been the equivocal Marx.
For a Maoist-Leninist, Badiou is remarkably open-minded about Christianity, as long as it is seen as a revolutionary movement that upset “the previous regime of discourses.” Against the Greek philosophers’ pedantic demand for reasons and evidence, Jesus performed miracles and made prophecies; against Roman and Jewish law he proclaimed a universal gospel of justice and redemption based on interior faith. Jesus, for Badiou, was certainly not the Messiah, though the myth of his incarnation, crucifixion, and especially resurrection reminds us that salvation depends on “a lawless eruption.”
So Badiou, like Taubes, finds the real Christian “event” in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, not in the life and teachings of Jesus. The revelation on Sinai was also a revolutionary event in history. But like a long, disreputable line of Christian theologians Badiou maintains that Jewish legalism and ethnic particularity became aggressively counterrevolutionary after the death of Christ. Real “fidelity” to the Jewish “event” demands acceptance of the new, more universal Christian event. Here Badiou’s and Taubes’s readings of Saint Paul diverge, to say the least. For Taubes, Paul universalized the messianic promise first given to the Hebrews, he did not abolish it. Thanks to him, we are all children of Sinai. For Badiou, Paul’s militant universalism gives us a foretaste of what Kant, in a regrettable phrase, once called “the euthanasia of Judaism.” The apostle, like Kant, understood that “it is imperative that universality not present itself under the aspect of a particularity,” so he set out to “drag the Good News (the Gospels) out from the rigid enclosure within which its restriction to the Jewish community would confine it.”
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When Alain Badiou criticizes “particularity” in the context of the Epistle to the Romans, one might assume he is attacking the traditional barriers to his revolutionary ideal—bourgeois individualism, private property, ethnic attachment. Which he is. But in his journalistic essays one starts to see that the Jews play a larger, and much darker, role in his political imagination. In 2005 Badiou published a collection of essays titled Circonstances 3: Portées du mot “Juif”—“Uses of the Word ‘Jew’ ”—which immediately set off heated polemics. In it he expresses annoyance that the word “Jew” has become a “sacred signifier . . . placed in a paradigmatic position with respect to the field of values,” adding, “that the Nazis and their accomplices exterminated millions of people they called ‘Jews’ does not to my mind lend any new legitimacy to the identity predicate in question.”
The proximate target of this outburst is contemporary Israel, which is charged with exploiting the Holocaust to justify its treatment of the Palestinians and to demand reparations from Western governments and individuals. Circonstances 3 includes a wild essay on this theme by Badiou’s sometime collaborator Cécile Winter, titled “The Master-Signifier of the New Aryans.” Winter angrily informs us that “today, in perfect continuity with Hitler’s invention, the word ‘Jew’ has become a transcendental signifier, an inversion by which the powerful of the day turn in a profit, a word brandished to reduce one to silence on pain of sacrilege.” Badiou agrees, adding, “I propose that nobody any longer accept, publicly or privately, this type of political blackmail.” In the French debate surrounding this volume Badiou claimed to be looking out for the Jews’ best interests by criticizing Israel, given that “the principle threat to the name of Jews comes from a state calling itself Jewish.” In fact, he thinks Israel may still have a universal world-historical mission, which would be to dissolve itself into a “secular and democratic Palestine” where there is “neither Arab nor Jew,” and thus to become “the least racial, the least religious, and the least nationalist of states.” (Apparently this is the one spot on the globe where Badiou thinks parliamentary democracy would be acceptable.) He admits, though, that this would require the rise of a “regional Mandela” in the Arab world and that the rest of the world “forget the Holocaust.” In other words, a miracle.
Sentiments like these about Israel are increasingly common in Europe, but for Badiou the real problem is Jewish particularity as such. This is how he puts it in one especially distasteful passage:
What is the desire of the petty faction that is the self-proclaimed proprietor of the word “Jew” and its usages? What does it hope to achieve when, bolstered by the tripod of the Shoah, the State of Israel, and the Talmudic Tradition—the SIT—it stigmatizes and exposes to public contempt anyone who contends that it is, in all rigor, possible to subscribe to a universalist and egalitarian sense of this word?
Translation: a petty faction stands in the way of the universal revolution, insisting on its rights and identity, setting a bad example and serving the forces of reaction. If universal truth is to shine forth, something must be done about the Jews.
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Anti-Semitism, like other forms of scapegoating, is fed by historical pessimism. A certain kind of European left, which has sympathizers in American universities, has never gotten over the collapse of the revolutionary political expectations raised in the 1960s and 1970s. Anticolonial movements turned into single-party dictatorships, the Soviet model vanished, students gave up politics to pursue business careers, the party systems in Western democracies rest intact, the economies have produced wealth (unevenly shared), and the entire world is mesmerized by connectivity. There was a successful cultural revolution—feminism, gay rights, the decline of parental authority—and it has even begun spreading outside the West. But there was no political revolution and no prospect of one occurring now. What would it aim at? Who would conduct it? What would happen afterward? No one has answers to these questions and hardly anyone thinks to ask them anymore. All one finds on the (almost exclusively academic) left today is a paradoxical form of historical nostalgia, a nostalgia for “the future.”
Hence the somewhat desperate search for intellectual resources to feed it. First there was the embrace of Hitler’s “crown jurist” Carl Schmitt, un mariage contre nature if ever there were one. His idea of a hidden “sovereign decision” was borrowed to argue that liberal ideas—including ideas of neutrality and toleration—are arbitrary constructs that provide a structure for the forces of domination, aided by institutions like schools and the press. Marx’s critique of ideology reached the same conclusion in the nineteenth century. But it had a fateful weakness: it depended on a materialist theory of history that could be falsified by what happens or doesn’t happen in the world. After the left lost confidence in that theory, it sought support in what Marx would have called (and rightly dismissed as) idealism: an account of political domination that depended on what was not evident to the naked eye. Michel Foucault’s theory of a “power” that, like ether, is invisible but omnipresent was a first step in that direction. The rehabilitation of Schmitt was the next: his unabashed defense of the friend–enemy distinction as the essence of “the political” helped to recover the conviction that politics is struggle, not deliberation, consultation, and compromise. Add to these notions the half-understood eschatology of Saint Paul, and faith in a miraculous redeeming revolution almost seems possible again. Not a revolution that issues from the forces of history, or the hard work of arguing and organizing. A revolution that arrives when you least expect it, like a thief in the night.
It is doubtful that Saint Paul’s new postmodern enthusiasts would recognize that allusion to the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. Bible study is hard and requires devotion, and the new Paulines want things to be easy and exciting. And so long as one remains in an armchair there is an undeniable frisson to be had in reading a clever defense of Lenin or Mao or Pol Pot, and a satisfaction to be found in discovering sophisticated reasons for singling out the Jews. One can even feel active again by signing an online petition calling for a boycott of Israeli academics and their institutions. But these are literary experiences, not political ones. They provoke a very old political romanticism that longs to live life on more dramatic terms than those offered by bourgeois society, to break out and feel the hot pulse of passion, to upset the petty laws and conventions that crush the human spirit and pay the rent. We recognize this longing and know how it has shaped modern consciousness and politics, often at great cost. But its patron saint is not Paul of Tarsus. It is Emma Bovary.
* See my The Reckless Mind, chapter 2.