Eventual Possession
While on pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul last year, I brought along with me as a reading companion the marixst philosopher Alain Badiou’s St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which was recommended to me by my friend Adam Wesselinoff. What better way to get into the spirit of a Pauline pilgrimage than to bring along an account of Paul by one for whom “the spirit” does not exist?
Badiou’s St Paul is a canvassing of the Pauline corpus of letters, which looks at these as not simply of supernatural significance (he reads the events told by St Paul as mere “fables”). Rather, Badiou’s interest in St Paul is the way he is constituted as a political subject. More to the point, what matters for Badiou is not that Christ rose from the dead, but that St Paul believed that Christ rose from the dead.
St Paul is read here as a revolutionary against the law, which as law is limited, particularist and thereby repressive. What Paul brings to a world under the law, Badiou argues, is a universalism whose underlying principle is love.
Such are the bare bones of the book.
While I could have spent my time on pilgrimage scoffing at Badiou’s atheism, in the spirit of pilgrimage I tried my best to go into the book with an open mind with an openness to surprises. After all, it was Badiou who I first encountered as someone who spoke of the great valence of Christ as “The Event”, characterised by what Giussani called an ontology of beginning (which I have written about elsewhere).
A number of surprises did come at me as I thumbed through the text during the long bus trips from site to site. Arguably the one that has stayed with me the longest concerned about how a person (in this case St Paul) who has encountered by such an Event should be poised vis a vis the world. Badiou’s proposed posture is as succinct as it was profound:
The Christian subject does not pre-exist the event he declares. Thus the extrinsic conditions of his existence or his identity will be argued against (14).
By this, Badiou means that Christianity at its heart is not an assertion made by the subject that possesses Christianity (very often, this comes under the guise of some variation of “Because I have the Christian Faith, I therefore have the fullness of truth and whatever I say is ipso facto is therefore true”).
By contrast, what Badiou suggests is that the Christians do not possess the Event. What Badiou argues for instead is akin to Thomas Aquinas’ dictum that truth is something one is possessed by. It is the Event that takes hold of the subject and nothing makes sense outside of the Event. More to the point, the Event so takes hold of the subject that the subject no longer can indulge in self-assertion.
Even more to the point, the Event is a moment where the self engages in an act of self-dispossession, subjecting all aspects of existence and identity to ongoing critique, from which comes a new subject. This then explains why Paul says to the Galations that “it is not I that live, but Christ who lives in me”.
Reading this gave me pause, because as someone for who makes a living in academic theology, I know I have the tendency to make assertions about the Event, which can risk becoming making self-assertions under the cover of “I hold the fullness of truth” so as to justify my next pay packet.
What reading this particular passage gave me pause is the extent to which I have put the cart before the horse, instead of allowing the Event to remind me that in truth nothing is mine, not even myself. Badiou reminded me of the dire need subject myself to the kind of self-dispossession that comes with self-critique, if only to make way for the Event’s identity to emerge.
For this passage alone, I am grateful to have read Badiou’s text.
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