Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
MICHEL SERRES
Acadmie franaise and Stanford University
aint Paul combines in one singular person the three ancient formats, Jewish, Greek, and Latin, from which the Western World sprang. A devout Pharisee, he was born in Tarsus into a family of the Diaspora, and educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel; he observed Mosaic Law and constantly cited the Torah, both Psalms and Prophets, with erudition. It also seems likely that he knew Greek philosophy, at least by way of Philo the Jew, since he wrote and spoke the Greek language and cited some of its authors, saying that he admired its wisdom, practiced its elegance, and dreaded its reason. As a Roman citizen, like his father, he took pride in this status; he must have known Roman Law, since after being sentenced by the imperial courts, he addressed an appeal to them. Saint Paul not only symbolizes the cultural melting pot among Mediterranean sailors, port-merchants, and occasional scholars during the Pax romana; he above all embodies the integral man built by the Law, the Logos, and the Administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraic monotheism, Hellenistic rational Wisdom, and Roman Law, themselves respectively shaped by ritual in the Temple, harmony in the Cosmos, and the City-State in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, a systematic world, and an all-powerful god promotes excellent modes of conduct. Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, rose up out of the trinity of his belonging; he traveled the world over, and he invented the coming era. In so doing, he braved three disasters: the persecution of his fellows, the mockery of Greek philosophers on the Areopagus, and his trial and probable execution by Rome. In and through Paul, all the superior and lasting achievements of the Indo-European and Semitic traditions stem from this original bifurcation; the good news he proclaims is incarnated and grafted on him and through him; from him, the branch of a new creature springs forth. Although his ancient formats imply a belonging to three different communities, the new man identifies with none of them in order to create something entirely new. But what?
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Vol. 1213, 2006, pp. 111 ISSN 1075-7201
MICHEL SERRES
EGO CREDO
laws and adopts its reactive aggressiveness. The Epistles thereby illustrate what I have in the past called the libido of belonging. We commit the majority of the sins of the flesh because we have been mimetically trained by peer pressure and by our blind enthusiasm for group, national, tribal, team, and family solidarity, by special interests, favoritism, and corruption. Who has the courage to say I? We commit these sins more often than I does, since the sin concerns us collectively, which is to say the Law, rather than the personal I that frees us from the Law. When Saint Paul frees [us] from the Law, he first and foremost releases our own identity from any collective bonds.
MICHEL SERRES
announced the extinction of this ancient man defined exclusively by his groups and their genealogy, yet without ever, to my knowledge, saying Christian or Christianity, probably out of a desire not to create a new influence group or any other measure of collective reference. Forsaking these formats thus implied for him forsaking their respective belongings. And so he left behind the truths that made him what he was. What an extraordinary new project: to spread throughout the world a subjectivity that does not refer to any one culture, that is not linked to any one language (at least not since Pentecost), that is not attached to any one tradition or lineage, and that is not bound by contract. I do not mean to say that Saint Paul entirely controlled this project or that he was immediately successful in bringing concrete social and historical changes with it. I am simply saying that I perceive in his Epistles a first glimmer of this project.
STEPHEN
But even before the story Paul tells of his conversion, an event so widely commemorated by painters, musicians, and poets, there is another storyperhaps a darker, more historical account, since he himself clearly witnessed it, but a decisive one. Seated upon the robes of his companions, Paul sees the lynching of Stephen. As the stones fly, the victim cries out, I see the heavens opened, and, destroyed by the blows, he dies. The distance of his observer position allows Saint Paul to see the consequences of the Law. Forged as he was out of three powerful materialsritual, logos, and orderhe suddenly reflects upon that which these three ancient formats were founded: collective violence. From here onward, I will no longer analyze the historical Acts or legendary traditions, I will no longer cast my eyes upon this ghastly array of facts, but I will instead reread the Epistles. What is it that Saint Paul will soon write? That the Law creates Sin. Be released from the Law, he says, which is to say from the Flesh. This means (at least in part): be released from social affiliations. Deliver yourself from the Law, from the Flesh, which is to say from Sin. Abandon the Law, the Flesh, Sin, in other words, Death . . . resurrect yourself. . . . Now, let us put down these explosive texts, stop reading them, renounce their commentary, and return to the narratives. Let us look unflinchingly upon
EGO CREDO
the bloody act that I did not wish to describe. What do you see there but the execution of the letter of the Law: a group of persecutors united as one social body, with its libido of belonging, and, at the center of the group, another bodycrushed, set upon, subjective, and bloody? You see the unspeakable violence, yes, the sin, that brings together the group that commits it, and at front and center, an individual subject, isolated by Death. All gather around Stephen: this is the us, according to the Law, which the letter kills indeed. The deacon has been assassinated, buried beneath the stones; here is the subject, sub-jectus, thrown under. The I under the us. In this story we can touch the flesh of the future Epistles.
MICHEL SERRES
Saint Paul thus invented, as a writer, the tradition of recognizing the timid and modest self, of confessing ones life (long before Saint Augustine), and the tradition of the autobiographical novel (in the company of one or two of his contemporaries). The self derives its existence from the three theological virtuesFaith, Hope, and Charitybut which actually describe in detail the three contingent axes that structure the New Man. Faith constructs him first. Fortunately, Hope moves the New Man. No one has understood this better than Charles Pguy, who represents Hope as a little girl darting and hiding behind the skirts of grown-ups on a walk, tirelessly going from one to another, and covering twice the distance. Adults, you have the firm intention of reaching your destination, whereas she blindly and merrily comes and goes, back and forth, along the limits of your journey, full of youthful energy. Hope is a motivator; it leads and drives. Where to? Who can say? Does Hope guarantee access to triumphant life beyond all doubt? No, it merely promises and anticipates, but without ensuring. The plowman should plow in hope (1 Cor. 9:10). Does he know if he will harvest? Like Faith, Hope trembles and doubts of Paradise, trying to live eternity in the present moment. Hope molds time; it models and stretches it. Time, as both Faith and Hope experience it, is saturated with arrivals, happenings, events, and beginnings. They both plunge the self into this time of coming events. They strip it of all of its formats and immerse it in newness. Faith is what happens when the self, without any certainty, settles down and lives intensely in and through contingency. Hope is movement without certainty, and lives, held in and from contingency. Thus modern consciousness is shaped and molded. Finally, Charity fills relations with others with love. Inverting the contractual, political, and juridical relations of ancient communities, this total connection with others is forged in a complete uncertainty of reciprocity. However one responds to itwith aggression, disrespect, insults, blows, indifference, disdain, hostility, or mockeryit remains a Love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor. 13:7). Charitys wholeness integrates Faith and Hope and plunges, without any guarantees, into the shifting and dangerous contingency that is specific to relationships. This integration is adventurous and generous. This integration allows the new I to join in relations with the universality of mankind, whatever the origin of ones belonging may be. The new self is built on a triple contingencyon faith and doubt; on hope for an indefinite period of time; and on bonds of unconditional lovethree weaknesses and three strengths. Less than two millennia after Saint Paul, Descartes tried to reframe the question, by seeking certainty. I am not convinced that he succeeded, since contingency and the lack of certaintyin short, doubtpresided over the birth and formation of his subject. Montaigne grasped this desperate trembling much better.
EGO CREDO
Only faith, hope, and charity remain, removed from all virtue; they describe with precision the nonontology of this new subject: this word clearly signifies its noninstallation, its noncertainty, its nonbeing, its nothingness.
MICHEL SERRES
traveler, a drifter, Paul forsakes the power and the truth of Fathers. To my amazement, I hear in Saint Pauls Epistles the language of a philosopher-son, spoken for the first and perhaps the last time ever. Everyone before him prophets of Israel, the wise and learned of Athens, the juris-consults of Romehad played the role of the father on the stage of the universal. Think of Platos zeal in rushing before the tyrant of Sicily and of Aristotle before Phillip, then of Descartes at the palace of the Queen of Sweden, Voltaire with Frederick, and Diderot with Catherine the Great. And after them, philosophers and scholars, critics and interpreters, writers and professors, intellectuals and instructors have all competed to adopt the power and the role of the Father as soon as possible, even after their own is dead, carelessly murdered by their own hand. It is a question of being right, seizing power, judging, dominating knowledge, changing the course of history, understanding everything, elaborating global systems, advising, never being mistaken, commanding; of destroying and criticizing until every text has been reduced to ashes. It is always a question of power, never of knowledge. I have never read anything but Fathers, either from the Church, the University, or Science; and they were all saints, heroes, or geniuses. I was raised from childhood by people and words that were never wrong. And so I was grateful to meet the outcast and the orphan. I am like him, at least in his weaker points. Paul, the Son, is not always right; he does not know everything; he does not command or advise; he seeks; he hesitates; he stumbles; he drifts; he makes mistakes; he turns back; he risks error, transgression, whippings, lapidation, storms and shipwreck, hunger and thirst, imprisonment, solitude, the descent down a prison wall in a basket. He is a fragile clay vessel, pressed on all sides but not broken; unsure what to hope for but not in despair; persecuted but not forsaken; beaten, but not shattered. Saint Paul lives like a Son, thinks like a Son, and acts like a Son at least three different times, toward his three different FathersJewish, Greek, and Roman before whom his failures inevitably accumulate: he is persecuted, ridiculed, and tried. The Sons faith replaces the fathers truth and law; the Sons hope replaces the fathers assurance and certainty; the Sons charity replaces the fathers power and glory. But far from killing him, he prays: For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, Abba! Father! it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:15). We all live, suffer, think, drift, and invent as sons. Such is the universality of the ego-son, which Descartes himself would not have understood, because it makes one tremble with faith, hope, and love. The philosopher-son haunts the tent of contingency whose walls shudder in the wind. I could not understand why we lived in the era of the Son, I could not make sense of the theology of the Son, before grasping this philosophy, whose very difficulty lay
EGO CREDO
in the fact that its author does not present himself as a Father. Paulos means slight or small: a son.
THE MURDER
Did the son then go and take the place of his father? He became a father, most likely because of his age and his responsibilities, as others become fathers out of the love of a woman. He had children out of charity in Corinth and in Philippi, and among the Galatians and the Romans; the fatherly love he felt for them made him shed real tears when they faltered in turn. He had become a father. Does this mean that he forsook the role of the Son? No, because he never tried to kill the Father. Neither Jesus nor Paulwho were both sons, the one in flesh and blood, and the other in theory, although
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MICHEL SERRES
both were in some sense adoptedadvise parricide, like Plato against Parmenides and Oedipus against Laios, making us believe that this act is indelibly inscribed in our subconscious. But both Jesus and Paul teach us to love the Father as he loves the Son. Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him (Phil. 2:69). Through their pardoning of one another, the Son and the Father love one another. Seated eternally face to face, they mutually honor and pay tribute to each other.
DEATH
Paul thus departs from the fundamental format that sums up all others, the format that says to become a father, one must kill his own and follow thereafter in his footsteps. Before reading Saint Paul, I did not cognitively understand how a philosopher-son thought, nor did I understand the meaning of the religion of the Son. The entire West descends from this son and finds itself in him Forced into reasons format, we repeat the roles of the Master. An example of this is the Master/Slave dialectic. Both Master and Slave function in accordance with dialectical motion like mechanical dolls; they appear to be at odds, but in reality they both respect the Empire of Death, each acting as Deaths slave. The Master only acquires power through death and only dominates through the terror it inspires. Saint Paul saw death under the Law, he uncovered this truth and desired life instead; he never wanted to reign like a Master. Like his divine model, he suffers death, but does not impose it. If there is a Lord, Paul is a Son, like me, like you, like us all. If a Father does exist, He is not here, but in Heaven, transcendental and eternal. The real world knows only Sons. Here, they renounce power, repetition, format, and necessity. By undoing these laws, they forget death. They are thereby resurrected. How do you become a Son? By abolishing the Law of Death. When this happens, the reconciliation of Father and Son will come to pass. The Father will love the Son and the Son will love the Father. At last, each will be in his place: the Son to the right of the Father. Resurrection: deaths reign will end. The Acts of the Apostles tell how Paul escaped from Damascus by being lowered down the city walls in a wicker basket; how he fled safe and sound from countless cities throughout Asia and Europe; how he was persecuted, judged, occasionally lapidated, frequently whipped, struck, exiled, and pursued; how an earthquake freed him from prison; how he arrived in Malta
EGO CREDO
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despite storm and shipwreck. These are all stories in which the Apostle of the Gentiles escapes death. Thus the story of his life conveys, in action and on a smaller scale, what Saint Paul declared in words: the Resurrection. Life, his and ours, is a struggle against death. His faith tells him that this struggle is won. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? (1 Cor. 15:55). Does the story in the Acts stop without warning in order to avoid announcing Pauls martyrdom and his final disappearance? I think so. The lack of an ending fits so perfectly with his repeated announcements of ever-new beginnings that it is almost inevitable that the Acts and Paul do not end.
NOTE
The author used the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in preparing this article.
REFERENCE
Serres, Michel. 2001. Hominiscence. Paris: Le Pommier.