HOW DOES AN awakening among those who have discerned the kairos make it possible to fulfill the command to love the neighbor? Or how does the eschatological faith professed in Romans 13:11–14 empower the political ethics enjoined in Romans 13:8–10? Or, once again, how does the messianic temporality of awakened-being liberate persons so that they may obligate themselves to mutual love?
Again, we start from features of the text. First, the capacity to obligate oneself to mutual love arises only when all other obligations have been renounced: “Owe no one anything (mēdeni mēden opheilete), except to love one another” (13:8a). The verb opheilō denotes financial, legal, or social obligation—so, indebtedness.1 But it would be a mistake to interpret Paul’s admonition as an extension of conventional advice against incurring debts.2 Paul’s injunction is sweeping: “owe nothing to anyone”—the force of the injunction intensified by the use of the present imperative form of the verb.3 The structure of obligation in the Roman world was patronage, “an asymmetrical personal relationship involving reciprocal exchange.”4 In practice, patronage was a means of social control through the manipulation of access to scare resources.5 The system of obligation even extended to slaves, through the institution of peculium, “property, in whatever form, assigned for use, within limits, to someone who lacked the right of property, either a slave or someone in patria potestas.”6 Roman society was organized as a pyramid of obligation, with the emperor as supreme patron.7 Paul’s admonition to unplug from the patronage system may seem a hopelessly utopian gesture, an impression reinforced by the fact that the closest parallels to Paul’s expression mēdeni mēden opheilete are found in comedy and on tombstones—the wish of a poor man, the praise of a virtuous wife.8 And yet, it is clear that Paul intends for his admonition to be taken seriously. Paul himself refused a gift, and thereby declined an offer of patronage from a wealthy believer at Corinth (1 Cor. 9; 2 Cor 11:7–11).9 How radical would Paul’s admonition have seemed to his Roman readers? Even if some of the Roman assemblies met in tenements (insulae), rather than houses (domus) with patrons,10 they would not have been free of the obligations imposed by various forms of economic, legal, and social dependency in their daily lives.
Second, the alternative to patronage is represented as a form of mutualism: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another (ei mē to allēlous agapan).” The particles ei mē designate an inclusive exception: a new and singular obligation is to replace social and economic dependency upon patrons.11 The articular infinitive to agapan is totalizing: not discrete acts, but a whole way of life is enjoined upon believers, the anaphoric reference of the article indicating that the command was already well known.12 Several scholars have recently and rightly argued that Paul advocated the practice of economic mutualism as a survival strategy among members of his messianic assemblies.13 Moreover, the collection for “the poor among the saints in Jerusalem” (Rom. 15:26), upon which Paul labored for many years, is best understood as an ecumenical extension of mutualism as an alternative to patronage.14 The challenge for Paul, as the agent of mutualism, was that the group designated by the reciprocal pronoun allēlous (one another) in Romans 13:8a was a diverse group, including slaves and free, Jews and gentiles, women and men, poor and rich.15 The practice of mutualism among the members of such a group would have entailed significant voluntary redistribution of resources.16 At least this was the case at Corinth, where a few wealthy believers, such as Crispus and Gaius (1 Cor. 1:14; Rom. 16:23),17 had joined a congregation whose majority consisted of the poor, the uneducated, and the lowborn (1 Cor. 1:26–28; 11:21–22).18 This was also the case in the partnership between the Corinthians, whose “abundance” Paul emphasizes, and the saints in Jerusalem, who suffered “lack” (2 Cor. 8:14).19 In advocating mutualism, Paul revived the old Greek ideal of “equality” (isotēs), and gave it a new theological basis in the self-impoverishment of Messiah Jesus (2 Cor. 8:9–15).20 Paul’s promotion of mutualism, like his injunction against patronage, seems wildly utopian. But, again, it is clear that Paul intended his admonition to be taken literally and applied practically. This is indicated, among other things, by Paul’s recurrence to the language of obligation in the rationale that he provides for the contribution of the Macedonians and Achaeans to the poor in Jerusalem in Romans 15:27: “Indeed, they owed it to them (kai opheiletai eisin autōn); for if the gentiles have partaken in their spiritual goods, they are obligated to render them services also in material things (opheilousin kai en tois sarkikois leitourgēsai).”21 Once again, we may ask how radical Paul’s advocacy of mutualism would have seemed to his Roman readers. Most of the Christian assemblies at Rome comprised slaves and the poor, as their location in the harbor district of Trastevere and in the damp and heavily trafficked valley of the Porta Capena suggests.22 But more affluent Christians may have assembled in other districts, such as Mars field and the Aventine, regions that show evidence of a Christian population at a later period.23
Third, the object of love is described as the embodiment of difference: “for the one who loves the other (ho gar agapōn ton heteron) has fulfilled the law” (13:8b).24 Paul’s choice of the term heteros (other) to designate the object of love is surprising.25 The expected object of the verb agapaō is either “brother” or “neighbor,” given the citation of Leviticus 19 to which Paul’s formulation looks forward.26 In Leviticus 19:17–18, the neighbor is “your kinsperson,” one of “the sons of your people.”27 But in the term heteros a clear nuance of difference resides.28 Embraced within this difference are differences in ethnicity, status, and gender that characterized the membership of Paul’s messianic assemblies (Gal. 3:28; cf. 1 Cor. 12:13).29 The obligation of mutual love not only traverses these distinctions,30 but embraces “the other” as the embodiment of difference. Paul’s choice of the word “other,” rather than “neighbor” or “brother,” was no doubt intended to short-circuit the widespread assumption in Greco-Roman society that true love depended upon sameness, affinity, and familiarity, and that the true friend was a “mirror of the self.”31 The sweeping nature of Paul’s formulation suggests that Paul had in mind not just particular cases, but the ethic of the community: a community that practices love of “the other” can never be a totality—that is, a group closed upon itself. A people that practices love of “the other” is perpetually incomplete.32
Fourth, Paul asserts that love of the other accomplishes the law’s original purpose: “for the one who loves the other has fulfilled the law (nomon peplērōmen)”. The nomos under consideration here is the best and highest law known to Paul, the Mosaic Torah, as demonstrated by the four commandments from Deuteronomy 5:17–21 and Exodus 20:13–17 (LXX) cited in 13:9.33 The fact that the word nomos is used here without the article may suggest that Paul also wishes his readers to think of “law” in a generic sense.34 In any case, the echo of the Jesus tradition in the verb plēroō is crucial: as in Matthew 5:17, to “fulfill” the law is to penetrate to its root.35 And, Paul asserts, we come closest to the original intent of the law in the one “word” that “summarizes” or “recapitulates” all the commandments: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (13:9).36
These observations prepare us to address the final question: how does an awakening among those who have grasped the full import of the Messiah’s death and resurrection make possible the execution of the command to love the neighbor? The signpost to the right path is found in the command itself: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (agapēseis ton plēsion sou hōs seauton). All love is directed toward an object, even if that object is the self.37 But the kind of love varies with the object: libidinal love seeks the object of desire; spiritual love is evoked (or enforced) by the divine, even if God is conceived psychologically as the superego or the apex of the symbolic order.38 The third love, love of neighbor, is the most difficult of the three, because it requires the highest degree of resolve. Rabbinic commentators on Leviticus 19:18 were already familiar with this distinction and saw it embodied in a peculiarity of the biblical text, where the Hebrew verb ’ahab, “love,” takes the preposition le, rendered “to, for, on behalf of, for the sake of.”39 Love of a woman or love of God, by contrast, is denoted by ahab plus the object marker (nota accusativi) ’t.40 The immediacy of attraction that a man feels for a woman whom he sees on the other side of the road or the rapture with which a person finds that he or she has been singing kadosh (holy, holy, holy!) in a morning dream just before waking are not operative in the case of the neighbor. There is a gap that requires resolve, a motion of the will, a conscious choice—a gap denoted and covered by the preposition le.
Although thinking and writing in Greek rather than Hebrew, Paul was familiar with the different kinds of love and the greater sacrifice required in order to love the neighbor. In a foundational text, Paul explains: “For while we were still weak, the Messiah died at the kairos on behalf of the ungodly. Scarcely on behalf of a righteous person will someone die, though perhaps on behalf of a good person someone might dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love (agapē) toward us, in that while we were still sinners the Messiah died for us” (Rom. 5:6–8).41 Paul can imagine, with difficulty, cases where a righteous person or a good person might evoke love sufficient for a self-sacrificial act. But Paul is unable to speak of death for the weak, ungodly, and sinners without reference to the love of God. Taking this passage as the messianic foundation of the ethic enjoined in Romans 13, we may now draw an inference: one who has awakened to the messianic nature of his or her own existence is empowered to do the most difficult thing—the thing that Freud, as Paul’s spiritual heir, rightly judged to be unreasonable and impossible in human terms: to love the neighbor. But we should bear in mind that, according to Paul, there is no unmediated access to the strength to love the neighbor. The passage to such an extraordinary love leads through messianic suffering (Rom. 5:3–5).42
If the commandment, in the context of Paul’s messianic faith, furnishes an index to the means of its fulfillment, we have nevertheless discovered that the subject of the awakening is not the individual in isolation, however intense and genuine his experience may be, but the community of those who have been “called,” the ekklēsia. Just as in Romans 13:11–14, where the personal pronouns and the verbs of address are plural, so in 13:8 the imperative (opheilete) is plural and the pronoun (allēlous) is a reciprocal plural. How, then, does a collective subject, awakened to its messianic life, put into practice the ethic of neighbor-love?
As a heuristic, we may compare Paul’s idea of awakened communal consciousness with another vision of collective subjectivity that has inspired political action in the modern period—the Marxist idea of class consciousness. Here we must proceed cautiously, with due attention to historical circumstances, so that our comparison should not be superficial, but differential. Once again, we have Giorgio Agamben as predecessor, since he contemplates the comparability of the Pauline and the Marxian concepts of “class” in his discussion of the messianic vocation (klēsis) in Romans.43 However, for us, the point of comparison is not the concept of class, but of class consciousness.
We take it as established that classes existed in Paul’s world, insofar as “class” is defined as an economic relation that separated one’s mode of life, interests, and culture from those of other groups and placed them in opposition to one another.44 But it is a legitimate question whether, and how far, class consciousness existed among the subelite in antiquity.45 Of this there are only sporadic glimmerings: for example, the social revolution in the Achaean town of Dyme in 116–114 B.C.E.,46 the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73–71 B.C.E.,47 the protest of the plebs of Rome against the mass execution of the slaves of Pedanius Secundus in 61 C.E.;48 perhaps we should also include the “conspiracy” at Cibyra (on the border of Phrygia and Caria) in 23 C.E., in connection with which 107 public slaves escaped from their condition.49 These tremors of “awakening” were vigorously suppressed by the authorities: two of the leaders of the revolt at Dyme were immediately condemned to death by the proconsul, while another was sent to Rome for trial;50 six thousand captured followers of Spartacus were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome;51 Nero suppressed the riot of the plebs against the execution of four hundred slaves of Pedanius Secundus by lining the whole length of the road along which the condemned were marched to their deaths with detachments of soldiers.52
The sources, produced almost entirely by the elite, are no doubt partly to blame for the paucity of evidence of class consciousness among the poor in antiquity. For example, our only evidence for the events in Dyme is an inscription recording a letter of the proconsul Q. Fabius Maximus to the city of Dyme, which complains bitterly of the cancelation of debts and of the enactment of legislation “contrary to the constitutions granted to the Achaeans by the Romans”53—a reference to the oligarchical governments imposed upon the cities of the Peloponnese by Lucius Mummius, after crushing the revolt of the Achaean League in 146 b.c.e.54
Whatever limitations are imposed by the sources, it is clear that the constitution of sovereign power in Rome depended upon the maintenance of a system of distinctions between classes that was both symbolic and frighteningly real.55 Citizens were distinguished from noncitizens, free from slaves. Certain persons were categorized as infames—actors, prostitutes, gladiators; thus, they did not enjoy inviolability of the body, and might be beaten or killed with impunity.56 Seneca reports the diverse means of torture that he had seen masters use against their slaves: “some hang their victims with head toward the ground, some impale their private parts, others stretch out their arms on a fork-shaped gibbet.”57 In those places where the populace came together, the theater and the amphitheater, the segregation of seating reinforced stratification.58 The Augustan Lex Julia Theatralis,59 a law renewed by Claudius and Nero,60 rigidly segregated spectators into different social groups, each with a preassigned seating area, accessible via a specific entryway,61 a hierarchical arrangement also adopted in civic arenas in Roman colonies.62 The entertainment offered in the amphitheater—beast fights, executions of criminals, gladiatorial combats—ritually reconstituted the order of power.63 In all these ways, Roman authorities suppressed the development of an ideology that might bind elements of the populace together and sustain a program of action.64
As is well known, the Marxist theorist of class consciousness, according to Georg Lukács, argued that class consciousness was unable to achieve complete clarity in antiquity because the various sectors of society remained unaware of the economic basis of the problems and conflicts with which they were afflicted.65 Instead, individuals and groups assumed that their conflicts had a natural, legal, or religious basis, depending on the circumstances.66 Economic, legal, and religious categories were so tightly interwoven as to be inseparable.67 Hence, “there was no possible position within such a society from which the economic basis of all social relations could be made conscious.”68
The surviving literature of the early Empire validates Lukács judgment. Wherever something like a liberating counterideology appears, consciousness is mediated by a divine agent. An instructive example is the Life of Aesop, a genuine folk-book pervaded by an anti-Hellenic bias: here the claims of the educated elite to have a monopoly on wisdom are subjected to vulgar and witty criticism.69 Aesop is a mute, ugly, deformed slave, who, like other slaves, is beaten and tormented, and is powerless to retaliate.70 The reversal of Aesop’s fortunes is brought about not by resistance and revolt in concert with his fellow-slaves,71 but by the goddess Isis and her daughters the Muses.72 As a reward for Aesop’s kindness to a priestess of Isis who has strayed from the highway and become lost, Aesop is granted the power of speech and the ability to conceive and elaborate tales.73 The priestess petitions Isis: “O crown of the whole world, Isis of many names, have pity on this workman, who suffers and is pious, for the piety he has shown, not to me, O mistress, but to your appearance. And if you are unwilling to repay this man with a livelihood of many talents for what the other gods have taken from him, at least grant him the power of speech, for you have the power to bring back to light those things which have fallen into darkness.”74 The goddess subsequently appears to Aesop in a dream, and not only restores his voice, but asks each of her daughters, the nine Muses, to bestow on him something of her own talent too.75 The author’s point in making Isis’s miracle the inaugural event in the Life is to assert the necessity of divine intervention in order to alleviate Aesop’s plight. On this basis, the priestess of Isis makes her appeal: only with the help of the goddess can a poor workman, who labors under every disability, experience a liberated consciousness.
Obviously, Paul’s epistle to the Romans construes awakening as mediated by a divine agent—the Messiah. So we may stipulate that the collective subjectivity whose awakening Paul summons is not an instance of class consciousness, as the latter is defined by orthodox Marxism.76 Nor is it clear, in any case, that the Pauline ekklēsia was coextensive with a single class.77 To be sure, the majority of believers in the communities founded by Paul were poor. Paul emphasizes “the abysmal poverty” (hē kata bathous ptōcheia) of the assemblies in Macedonia (2 Cor. 8:1–2).78 Even in “wealthy Corinth,” the majority of those who responded to the “calling” of Messiah Jesus were poor—uneducated, powerless, lowborn (1 Cor. 1:26).79 Some, perhaps many, were slaves (1 Cor. 7:21; 12:13).80 Yet, Crispus and Gaius at Corinth were persons of more than modest surplus resources.81 And Paul commends Phoebe of Cenchreae as the “patroness of many” (prostatis pollōn) in Romans 16:1–2.82 The formation of a community out of persons of different social classes would have necessitated a collective subjectivity that transcended class consciousness. Lukács judged a transcendence of immediate class interest for the sake of a totality to be impossible: “No class can do that—unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely.”83 Paul insists that precisely such an abdication of class interest is not only possible but necessary for a community that has grasped the full import of the event of the crucified Messiah.
Agamben deserves credit for having called attention to a passage in Marx that appears to be a secularization of the Pauline idea of a community whose collective subjectivity transcends class.84 In “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx attributes a redemptive function to the proletariat as the agent of a collective universalism:
Where, then, is the possibility of . . . emancipation? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering; . . . a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man, and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.85
Agamben comments: “The ekklēsia . . . permits more than just one analogy with the Marxian proletariat. Just as he who is called is crucified with the Messiah and dies to the old world (Rom. 6:6) in order to be resuscitated to a new life (Rom. 8:11), so too is the proletariat only able to liberate itself through autosuppression. The ‘complete loss’ of man coincides with his complete redemption.”86
But if we now ask what conclusion Agamben draws from this analogy, with respect to Paul’s understanding of collective subjectivity, we are disappointed. The problem is not that Agamben questions whether one can really speak of a “classless society” in Paul.87 Agamben knows that class conditions are null and void of meaning for Paul, even if Paul advises believers that “each should remain in the state in which he was called” (1 Cor. 7:20).88 “Circumcision is nothing,” Paul insists, “and uncircumcision is nothing” (1 Cor. 7:19). “Were you a slave when you were called?” Paul asks. “Never mind. For in the Lord, the one who was a slave when called is now a freedman of the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:21–22). Agamben knows that the Messiah has “redeemed” believers from every condition of existence (1 Cor. 7:23), embodying this insight in the paradoxical formula “the messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation.”89
The problem is that Agamben’s notion of the collective subjectivity to which Paul summons seems to be devoid of content, that is, of identity: the worldly vocations are never replaced by a new vocation. Agamben insists: “The messianic vocation separates every klēsis from itself, engendering a tension within itself, without ever providing it with some other identity.”90 According to Agamben, the Pauline ekklēsia is a “remnant” produced by a “division of divisions,” a “not-all” that dwells in “a zone of absolute indiscernibility between immanence and transcendence.”91 Agamben concludes: “The [messianic] people is neither the all nor the part, neither the majority nor the minority. Instead, it is that which can never coincide with itself, as all or as part, that which infinitely remains or resists each division. This remnant is the figure, or the substantiality assumed by a people in a decisive moment, and as such is the only real political subject.”92
But of what sort of political action would Agamben’s remnant be capable without a new identity, a new vocation? Perpetually in tension with itself, inhabiting a zone of indiscernibility between immanence and transcendence, the ekklēsia, as Agamben conceives it, seems to dwell within its vocation as an exile, in dispossession.93 The political ethics appropriate to such a remnant would seem to be nonpossessive, kenotic waiting.94 As a collectivity without identity, Agamben’s ekklēsia is a space hollowed out within the power structure,95 a space of messianic anticipation and perhaps even conspiratorial resistance. But as a collective immanence that is not fully aware of itself, Agamben’s ekklēsia seems incapable of the “tiger’s leap” of revolution.96 One is tempted to characterize the spirit of passionate, messianic resignation that permeates Agamben’s politics with Kafka’s dictum: “[there is] plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”97
In the end, the collective subjectivity to which Paul summons, and from which he demands the revolutionary practice of neighbor-love in the form of economic mutualism, seems better understood by Alain Badiou, who insists that Paul was advocating a collective universalism.98 In the face of the collapse of Leninism, the party of the proletariat, and the socialist state, Badiou calls for “the evental opening of a new sequence of the communist hypothesis,”99 which would consist in a “revolution of the mind,”100 through the discovery of “a point that stands outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth.’”101 Toward the renewal of a collective consciousness, Badiou offers, as an experiment, a declaration: “There is only one world.”102 Badiou is fully aware that such an affirmation flies in the face of the “evidence” of capitalism’s triumph all around us. Indeed, Badiou offers his affirmation as a deliberate counter to the “false” and “empty” universality of capitalism,103 which has achieved its sovereignty by configuring the world as a homogeneous market of subjected and territorialized selves, so that nothing might impede the circulation of capital.104 Badiou’s utopian declaration, “There is only one world,” “is not an objective conclusion; it is performative: we are deciding that this is how it will be for us.”105 Badiou concludes: “The political consequences of the axiom, ‘there is only one world,’ will work to consolidate what is universal in identities.”106
Badiou’s proposal has an uncanny similarity to the mature Paulinism of Romans 13:8–14, both in its commitment to the collective well-being of others and in its insistence that such a political commitment is possible only for those who “can connect to another temporality than that assigned to us by the dominant order.”107 Except that the collective subject that Paul seeks to awaken, and from whom he demands unconditional love, is not a universal subject, but a singular one, whose identity and ethics are determined by the Messiah. “We the many are one body in the Messiah” (hoi polloi hen soma esmen en Christō), Paul instructs believers, “and according to one, members of one another (to de kath’ heis allēlōn melē)” (Rom. 12:5).108 The singular subject who confers unity, identity, and mission upon the many is the crucified Messiah, the one who died for all (2 Cor. 5:14), for the weak, for the ungodly (Rom. 5:6–8), for the nothings and nobodies (1 Cor. 1:26–28). Thus the “communitarian particularisms,” against which Badiou rails as impediments to a universal truth,109 are not erased in the Messiah, but embraced and affirmed. “The one who loves the other,” the other as the very embodiment of difference, is the one who “fulfills the law” (Rom. 13:8b).110
We may summarize. By the time that Paul wrote his last epistle, his eschatology had undergone significant development—I would suggest, intensification. Paul no longer speaks of the parousia; whether he still believed in a “second coming” may be irrelevant. In any case, Paul had come to stake all upon the possibility of an “awakening.” The awakening would occur when believers, who had been roused from the “sleep” imposed by the dominant order, grasped the full import of the messianic event for their present existence. This constellation is the “now time” that believers must discern. The awakened “sons [and daughters] of God” take full charge of their lives, casting aside the behaviors that have previously ensnared them. The awakened “sons [and daughters] of God” are the militants of the messianic event, capable of unplugging themselves from the patronage system and devoting themselves entirely to mutual love, expressed concretely in the practice of economic mutualism. In the broader context of Romans 12–15, Paul spells out the implications for life in the messianic community. Because the measure of communal identity and ethics is now the self-sacrificial love of Messiah Jesus, there is no longer any basis in law or custom for judging one another (Rom. 14). Radical hospitality, welcome without conditions, is the law of the new life in the Messiah: “Welcome one another,” Paul concludes, “as the Messiah welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:7).111
The awakening to which Paul summons is a “revolution of the mind,” to use the potent slogan of May 1968.112 If the political consequences of the awakening are the practice of economic mutualism and radical hospitality within the community of believers, then must we speak of a revolution without a revolt? Or of a revolution that is indistinguishable, in its long-term consequences, from revolt?113 In any case, it should be evident that the ethical commitment demanded by Paul in Romans 13:8–10, with its eschatological rationale in 13:11–14, is incompatible with the acquiescence and obedience to governmental authorities preached in Romans 13:1–7, as this passage has traditionally been interpreted.114 Helmut Koester once questioned “if Rom. 13:1–7 is indeed Pauline and not a piece of Hellenistic-Jewish parenesis interpolated at a later date.”115 The thought and vocabulary of Romans 13:1–7 have more in common at key points with that of the quisling Josephus than with the language of Paul’s authentic epistles.116 If this passage is an interpolation, it has had a disastrous result: the interpolator has successfully diverted the attention of generations of interpreters from the revolutionary ethics and intense eschatology of Romans 13:8–14.117 And there is worse: generations of the powerful have “cashed the blank check” that the interpolator wrote them by enjoining strict obedience to the governing authorities.118