Paul and political theology

Introduction

Interpretations of the apostle Paul in modern philosophy, starting with Nietzsche, could hardly be more divergent. Yet something significant is at stake in this range of readings, which I propose to illuminate through the categories of nihilism as understood by Nietzsche. Nihilism, for Nietzsche, at its most basic, is the nothingness that results from the devaluation of the highest values. We shall see that Nietzsche’s three types of nihilist – the reactive nihilist, the active nihilist and the post-nihilistic overman – frame nicely three of the most significant interpretations of Paul that we have: Nietzsche’s own (where Paul is viewed as a reactive nihilist); Jacob Taubes’ (where Paul is seen as an active, even revolutionary, nihilist driven by an eschatological nihilism); and Alain Badiou’s (where Paul is something of an overman in his positing of new values, specifically the value of universalism). ¹

Yet while they position Paul very differently in relation to nihilism, all three of these readings of course thereby continue to tie Paul to the problem of nihilism. That is, even if Taubes and Badiou release Paul from Nietzsche’s charge of reactive or resentful nihilism, they continue to insist that Paul should be understood in relation to the transvaluation of values itself, whether this is the destruction of old values (Taubes) or the creation of new ones (Badiou). Even in the latter case – the creation of new values as in Badiou’s reading – there must still first be a devaluing of the old values, in which case nihilism remains necessary as the passage to some beyond to nihilism, as it does also for Nietzsche, of course.

What values does Paul negate, then? There is general agreement with Nietzsche from both Taubes and Badiou that Paul is the great devaluer of the highest values of antiquity. First, Paul devalues hierarchy as an essential difference between freemen and slaves. Paul either inverts this hierarchy, as in Nietzsche’s charge that the Christianity that Paul invents is history’s great slave revolt, or transcends it, as in Badiou’s account of Paul’s universalism, where those who are one in Christ are no longer defined as slaves or freemen (Galatians 3:28). The spurious universalism of ancient cosmopolitanism is for Badiou exposed (as also its modern variants) by Paul’s egalitarian version. Cosmopolitanism is a hierarchical universalism which remains imperial, as in the figure of Marcus Aurelius, at once Roman emperor and Stoic citizen of the world. Taubes, too, sees Paul as first and foremost an anti-imperial figure whose eschatological theology is at once political and whose nihilistic politics is immediately theological.

Second, Paul devalues communalism as an essential difference between Jews and Greeks. Nietzsche argues that communalism is overcome by Paul as the ‘first Christian’ of the first ‘non-national’ religion, just as he bemoans the loss of these ‘national gods’. ² Badiou, who rather celebrates this accomplishment, agrees that the form of Paul’s universalism, being that of a universalizable singularity (the resurrection), belongs to everyone and therefore to no one in particular. Taubes and Badiou also concur that communalism is overturned in Paul by his repeated emphasis on the pas, the ‘all’, in contradistinction to those Jewish Christians who sought in some way to preserve Israel’s special election, if only through the continuation of Jewish customs and rites such as circumcision. ³

Third, Paul devalues law as the ordering principle of the cosmos. Paul’s critique of law in Taubes’ view attacks not just specific forms of law – for example, pharisaical Jewish law – but the generalized ‘apotheosis of nomos’ characteristic of late antiquity. ⁴ Badiou concurs that Paul’s deactivation of law is very profound, proposing as it does nothing other than a trans- or non-literal law of love where it is a matter of subjective fidelity to truths rather than being bound to objective norms (the laws of nature or of the universe). ⁵ This is an assault on the Greek cosmos itself in that it substitutes the law as that which is due (hence the law’s particular and partial character) for its opposite: that grace which comes freely, without being due (in other words: universally or for all). ⁶ Nothing other than a breaking of the history of the world in two results (something Nietzsche himself attempted but, in falling short of, was broken by). ⁷

Fourth, in devaluing law, Paul also devalues cosmos; and this indeed could serve as a heading for the first three devaluations named above. Cosmos is the conviction (recalling the etymology that would take cosmos back to the verb kosmein [to order or arrange]) that the order of things is an everlasting totality. ⁸ Against this, Taubes’ Paul is a Gnostic-apocalyptic who expects the imminent end of ‘the present form of this world’ (I Corinthians 7:29–31). Badiou’s Paul, meanwhile, establishes the event of the resurrection as a world-historical rupture with the allotting of places and orders characteristic of cosmos. It is the egalitarian ‘for all’ of the resurrection, rather than ‘the One’ of cosmos, where the latter is a matter of adapting oneself to the totality by knowing one’s place in it. ⁹ Thus the devaluation of cosmos is linked intimately to the overcoming of hierarchy, communalism and law, which also work, can only work, by finding distinctions (recalling that nomos derives from nemō [to divide or to assign]).

In sum, though they evaluate the rupture with antiquity that is Paul differently, both Taubes and Badiou, following Nietzsche, agree that Paul is a break with everything that the ancients held to be most true, that Paul’s teaching of the cross of foolishness (I Corinthians 1:20) ‘equals a slap in the face of the noble ethos of antiquity’. ¹⁰ In this sense all concur on one theme: Paul is, in Nietzsche’s sense of the term, a thoroughgoing nihilist.

Having established this much, we can now see the significance of the messianic Paul offered by Giorgio Agamben. Only Agamben’s Paul escapes the framing of nihilism – neither devaluing this world nor pronouncing a new one (the latter which, to repeat, first requires this same devaluation), but rather opening up this world for use. This messianic Paul would also deal in critique of the old and hope for the new, but this would not take the form of a linear operation in time but rather a mode of relation to the present. Such a messianic time sees openings in the time of the now [ho nyn kairos], rather than receiving openness from the future to come (pace Derrida). To be sure, even this messianic vocation in Agamben’s Paul requires that this world be passing away (hence the importance of the negation of the figures of this world, as in Paul’s use of the formulation hōs mē [‘as not’]). However, Agamben denies that this negation implies the nihilistic idea of another, better world in Paul, arguing that nothing in Paul’s messianic vocation tends towards the elsewhere.

Reading Paul within the framework of nihilism is helpful because nihilism is frequently pronounced to be a very contemporary problem, and ‘Paul’ is thereby rendered our contemporary. For Badiou, the radicalism of nihilism today is such that there is no longer any ‘world’ at all. ¹¹ The exclusive reign of the sign of enjoyment involves either a libertarian de-linking from the world, where the world is nothing but a system of links, or the liberal attempt to purchase enjoyment, which is strictly impossible since enjoyment is forever without an equivalent in the manner of the commodity. If Nietzsche is to be believed, the Christianity founded by Paul masked its own nihilism by displacing all value onto the world to come, thus devaluing this world in spectacular fashion. But with the death of God, itself an inevitable outcome of the Platonic-Christian will to truth, the highest values of Christendom have, in turn, been devalued (in truth, have devalued themselves), which is both the predicament and opportunity of European modernity. If we accept Nietzsche’s history of nihilism, then there is no way out of its predicament, no way of seizing its opportunity, other than via the overman, who is the other side of the rope over the abyss of nothingness that is man in his dangerous crossing away from his animal origins. ¹² Only this joyfully creative creature, this bringer of new values, can be an answer to the nothing; and he will be a long time coming.

But if Agamben is right that the Pauline messianic vocation enables a creative new relation to the present time and to the subjectivities that we already find there, must we wait? Must we understand our predicament in terms of the need for destruction–creation, namely in terms of nihilism, at all? The implications of this question for our conception of the political, indeed for all practical philosophy, are very extensive indeed. For example, rather than understanding the political in terms of the possibilities for revolutionary new times and new subjects, with all the destitution of the ‘old’ that this presumes, it would become possible to see the political as an ongoing deactivation of all worldly figures of power which operates not in the name of some new figure of power, but rather as the profanation of existing ones.

I will now deal briefly with Nietzsche’s distinction between active and reactive nihilism before turning to the three readings of Paul as, respectively, reactive nihilist (Nietzsche), active nihilist (Taubes) and overman (Badiou). I will then introduce Agamben’s messianic Paul as a way to sidestep the trap of nihilism that Nietzsche has laid for us and which the two earlier readings, despite their many merits, will not enable us to avoid. Finally, I will argue that while Agamben’s construction of the Pauline messianic vocation does indeed break with Nietzsche’s categories of nihilism, nihilism remains an irreducible part of the genealogy of Paul’s messianism. This argument will require consideration of the ‘Gnostic’ Paul. In his attempt to identify Paul’s messianism with the here-and-now, Agamben largely ignores Gnostic aspects of Paul’s teaching. Agamben’s reasoning here seems to be that Gnosticism nihilistically tends towards the elsewhere, but I will suggest that the Gnosticism of late antiquity shared significant features with Agamben’s reading of Paul’s messianic vocation as involving the negation of worldly powers and so need not be excluded in this way. I also point out that such negation, even if it is interpreted ‘messianically’ rather than Gnostically, is genealogically inseparable from the eschatology that was inaugurated by apocalypticism. In this way, nihilism, in the form of apocalypticism, is seen to be necessary to a genealogy of Paul’s, and indeed Agamben’s, messianism,

Nietzsche’s active and passive nihilism

In an instructive section of his Late Notebooks (notebook 9, autumn 1887), Nietzsche sets out the difference between active and passive nihilism. ¹³ Nietzsche admits that nihilism as the condition under which ‘the highest values are devalued’ is, in itself, ‘ambiguous’. ¹⁴ To be sure, nihilism can be a sign of weakness and weariness at life, of the ‘decline and retreat of the spirit’s power’. ¹⁵ Such passive nihilism, finding that traditional values have become inoperative, seeks solace in soothing, even benumbing, balms such as religion and morality. But there is an active nihilism, too. This nihilism is rather ‘a sign of the increased power of the spirit’, of strength, in that it does not passively find itself lacking the old values, but rather actively outgrows them. ¹⁶ Active nihilism is not yet strong enough to proactively posit new goals or beliefs, in which case it would no longer be nihilism at all. It thus remains a ‘pathological intermediate state’ in which the inference that there is no meaning at all always threatens and in which: ¹⁷

It achieves its maximum of relative force as active force of destruction: as active nihilism. The opposite would be the weary nihilism that no longer attacks: its most celebrated form Buddhism, as passivist [sic] nihilism. ¹⁸

Nonetheless, as the second sentence of this passage hints, active nihilism, despite its incompleteness and its dangers, remains an intermediate, and therefore necessary, stage in the overcoming of nihilism. As Nietzsche had admitted a short time before in a note (8[2]) from the summer of 1887, hatred of a world in which we suffer takes the form of the imagination of a different and valuable world, and here ‘ressentiment towards the real is creative’. ¹⁹

The reactive Paul

Nietzsche gets on to Paul in the first book of his mature work, Daybreak (1881), where he identifies him as the founder of Christianity, as the ‘first Christian’ (since, without Paul, Jesus would have remained the property of an obscure Jewish sect). ²⁰ Nietzsche seeks to portray Paul as tormented and self-lacerating, but also as cunning and ambitious. The source of this deformed character? That Paul, enforcer of the strict observance of Jewish law, found that he himself could not fulfil it, and thus came to hate it, seeking now for ways to destroy, rather than observe, the law. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus is, for Nietzsche, the moment when Paul sees a way to revenge himself on law by identifying the risen Christ as law’s destroyer. From this moment, and Nietzsche cannot hide his jealousy here, history will revolve around Paul as the one who announces the death of law in life with Christ. The latter part of this equation, in Nietzsche’s eyes, is what reveals Paul’s true intentions: ‘[W]ith the idea of becoming one with Christ all shame, all subordination, all bounds are taken from it [Paul’s soul], and the intractable lust for power reveals itself as an anticipatory revelling in divine glories.’ ²¹

Nietzsche does not return to Paul until his last writings, where Paul is taken up again in his late notebooks (notebook 10, autumn 1887). Here Nietzsche argues that ‘Paul’s genius’ was to have recognized that the Jewish diaspora’s nay-saying to Roman power and magnificence was itself a form of power that could be exploited. ²² Soon thereafter, Paul becomes the chief target of Nietzsche’s polemic in The Anti-Christ (written in the second half of 1888). As in his recent notebook entry, Nietzsche resumes where he left off in Daybreak, arguing that Paul, as an archetype of ‘the priestly kind’, had an interest in ‘making mankind sick’ through the inversion of concepts such as good and evil, which now denigrated what is noble and strong and elevated that which is decadent and weak. ²³ What was this interest? To ‘attain power’. Such power was attained – man was made sick – primarily through the de-emphasizing of Christ’s teachings, which Nietzsche sees as preaching a guilt-free union between man and God in the here and now, and instead shifting the emphasis to Christ’s death, which was now interpreted as a guilt sacrifice the reward for which is eternal life in the hereafter. ²⁴ Nietzsche’s claim is clear: Paul has devalued this world in the name of the world to come in the interests of establishing (his) priestly power. The driver of this will to power is, in Paul’s case, ressentiment; ‘Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge’: ²⁵

One sees what comes to an end with the death on the Cross: a new, an absolutely primary beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an actual and not merely promised happiness on earth … On the heel of [these] glad tidings came the worst of all: those of Paul. In Paul was embodied the antithetical type to the ‘bringer of glad tidings’, the genius of hatred, of the vision of hatred, of the inexorable logic of hatred. What did this dysangelist not sacrifice to his hatred! The redeemer above all: he nailed him to his Cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel – nothing was left once this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth! … His requirement was power … ²⁶

Although the will to power undoubtedly burns brightly in Nietzsche’s Paul, it is important to see that the form that this will takes is one of ressentiment, and in this sense Paul’s nihilism is of a reactive, if not strictly passive, kind. This ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche in the Anti-Christ as a symptom both of personal weakness – Paul is made angry and revengeful at his impotence before the law – and also ‘national’ or political weakness – Paul is a member of a Jewish nation defined by its historical experience of exile and, in Paul’s day, by its subordination to the mighty Roman Empire:

This was his vision on the road to Damascus: he grasped that to disvalue ‘the world’ he needed the belief in immortality, that the concept ‘Hell’ will master even Rome – that with the ‘Beyond’ one kills life … Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme [in German], and do not merely rhyme … ²⁷

The active Paul

Jacob Taubes was a philosopher of religion whose Political Theology of Paul (taken from a series of lectures given in 1987, just before his death) was a significant spur to the recent Paul revival in philosophy. Taubes admitted that Nietzsche was his greatest teacher on Paul. ²⁸ Yet for Taubes, Paul is not the reactive nihilist that Nietzsche describes, but an active, even revolutionary, opponent of imperial power: ‘[M]y thesis is that … the Epistle to the Romans is a political theology, a political declaration of war on the Caesar.’ ²⁹ The distinctly political ambition of this Paul is not a matter of seeking personal, priestly power by devaluing the values of the Roman world, as in Nietzsche, but rather to found and legitimate a new people of God. ³⁰ Taubes’ Paul is an active, ‘eschatological’ nihilist.

Taubes believed that Nietzsche was really on to something in identifying Paul’s nihilism towards this world, and specifically towards the Roman Empire. ³¹ This world decays, is passing away, and so world politics, contra the timeless order of empire, is nihilism. This equation of world politics with nihilism is Walter Benjamin’s, from the last line of his ‘Theological-Political Fragment’, but Taubes sees an ‘astonishing parallel’ between Benjamin’s text and chapters 8 and 13 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. ³² Benjamin writes:

For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.

To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism. ³³

Taubes finds evidence for his thesis that Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is nothing less than a political declaration of war on Rome from the letter’s opening salutation. Taubes seizes here on Paul’s announcement of his ‘calling’, which asserts that he, Paul, is ‘called to proclaim the gospel of God’ since this gospel concerns God’s son, who ‘was descended from David according to the flesh’ (Romans 1: 1–3). Taubes asks: Why this emphasis on Jesus as the son of David? This is not repeated anywhere else in Paul’s letters. It is as the son of David that Jesus is elected to rule, which is a natural quality, but ‘Son of God’ is rather ascribed, as in Psalm 2, the psalm of coronation. Taubes concludes:

This is an act of enthronement. So we are dealing with a conscious emphasis of those attributes that are imperatorial, kingly, imperial. They are stressed before the congregation in Rome, where the imperator is himself present, and where the center of the cult of the emperor, the emperor religion, is located. ³⁴

Taubes returns three times to this theme over the course of his lectures, stressing that Paul’s Epistle to the Romans needs to be understood as a ‘political declaration of war’ and as carrying a ‘political charge’ which is ‘explosive to the highest degree’. ³⁵ When a letter is introduced in these terms, here and nowhere else, and to be read aloud to the congregation too, a challenge is being laid down. This is a piece of anti-Caesarism that is being made eminently public, and the Romans have censors who are not idiots.

Taubes then moves from philological reflections to a much broader thesis that the central function of law in the Epistle to the Romans (recalling that, in this letter, Paul seeks to describe law as somehow deactivated or rendered inoperative in Christ) is itself a piece of political theology, since the concept of law is being used by Paul as ‘a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum’. ³⁶ In a memorable phrase, Taubes describes Paul’s period of late antiquity as suffused with an aura of ‘an apotheosis of nomos’. ³⁷ This Hellenistic nomos aura could take a Greek, Roman, or Jewish form, but, while everybody understood law in their own way, ‘everybody participated equally’ in generalized nomos theology. ³⁸ Taubes believes that Paul himself reflects this aura, such that ‘law’ for Paul is not simply the Torah, nor the law of the universe, nor natural law, but ‘all of these in one’. ³⁹ But while Paul’s sense of ‘law’ echoes his context, his treatment of law is anything but contemporary. For Taubes, Paul ‘clambers out’ of the nomos consensus of his day and in this sense is a fanatic, a zealot whose protest against ‘law’ proposes an incredible transvaluation of values:

It isn’t nomos but rather the one who was nailed to a cross by nomos who is the imperator! This is incredible, and compared to this all the little revolutionaries are nothing. This transvaluation turns Jewish-Roman-Hellenistic upper-class theology on its head, the whole mishmash of Hellenism. Sure, Paul is also universal, but by virtue of the ‘eye of the needle’ of the crucified one, which means: transvaluation of all the values of this world. This is nothing like nomos as summum bonum. ⁴⁰

Taubes’ Paul, like Nietzsche’s, is a nihilist. But where Nietzsche’s Paul is reactively bent on exploiting existing resentment at Rome for his own, destructive, purposes, Taubes’ Paul actively creates opposition to the Roman Empire almost out of nothing. And he does so for that most constructive of political motives – to found a new people. That this people, occupying a demonic world structure that is passing away (I Corinthians 7:29), should in no way seek a revolutionary confrontation with its equally transitory imperial superstructure, does not make Paul’s intentions, or his methods, any less radical. ⁴¹ To the contrary, they indicate just how nihilistic Paul really is with regard to this world. ⁴² Neither Taubes’ Paul, nor Taubes himself, see anything in history other than crisis. Historical time is distress, and therefore Benjamin is right in seeing politics, ‘whose method must be called nihilism’, as capable only of destroying the old order. ⁴³ For a Paul capable of traversing such destruction, giving values necessary for the creation of a new order, we must turn to Badiou.

Paul the overman

He who demanded Dionysian affirmation, him who, like Paul, believed himself to be breaking the history of the world in two, and to be everywhere substituting life’s ‘yes’ for nihilism’s ‘no’, would have found better inspiration by citing this passage: ‘For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you … was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes’. (II Corinthians 1:19) ⁴⁴

For Badiou, nothing in Nietzsche’s attack on Paul fits its target. Paul does not detest Rome, being on the contrary proud of his Roman citizenship. ⁴⁵ Neither does he condemn this life, since ‘the world’ that is crucified with Paul’s Jesus is nothing other than the Greek cosmos as a totality that puts everyone in his place. ⁴⁶ He does not even mention hell. ⁴⁷ Nietzsche’s hate-filled nihilist who preaches eternal life hereafter as a curse on this life is more accurately described as completely uninterested in immortality, emphasizing rather the trinity of affirmation, life and the new man (‘the overman’?) over negation, death and the old man. ⁴⁸ Where Nietzsche criticizes Paul for the falsification of the gospel accounts of Jesus, saying that Paul wants only Christ’s death and ‘something in addition’, Badiou points out that this ‘something’, the resurrection, is in fact Paul’s entire focus. ⁴⁹ It is Nietzsche who is falsifying Paul, argues Badiou, since in shifting attention from the life of Christ to his death and resurrection, Paul is not nihilistically moving the centre of gravity from this life to the nothingness of the beyond, as Nietzsche claims, but rather is teaching ‘a principle of overexistence on the basis of which life, affirmative life, was restored and refounded for all’. ⁵⁰ Badiou’s Paul thus shifts the centre of gravity in an opposite direction to Nietzsche’s, from death to life – from life in the flesh, which perishes and dies, to life in the spirit, which takes revenge on death by enabling us to live affirmatively here and now; and from life under the law, which kills, to a life of grace, which knows nothing of death. ⁵¹ Against Nietzsche’s judgement that Paul would seek to ‘kill life’, Badiou has a simple rejoinder from Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians (15:55): ‘O death, where is thy victory?’ ⁵²

Badiou thinks that Nietzsche should in fact have seen Paul as his ally, rather than his opponent, in the overcoming of ‘contemporary nihilist decadence’. ⁵³ For if Nietzsche were to have been successful in such an overcoming, he would have had to echo (which he in fact did), rather than to oppose, the three themes ‘of which Paul is the inventor’, namely:

… that of the self-legitimating subjective declaration (the character of Zarathustra), the breaking of History in two (‘grand politics’), and the new man as the end of guilty slavery and affirmation of life (the Overman)? If Nietzsche is so violent toward Paul, it is because he is his rival far more than his opponent. ⁵⁴

For Badiou, we can understand Nietzsche’s hatred of Paul only if we see how much Nietzsche loathes universalism. ⁵⁵ Indeed, Paul is where the bug gets into aristocratic history for Nietzsche, such that nobility is transferred into weakness, with all the democratic ‘levelling’ that results. ⁵⁶ For Badiou, too, Paul is undoubtedly the one who devalues ancient hierarchy, though Paul’s responsibility for this is even more direct in Badiou’s account than it is in Nietzsche’s – Paul is, quite literally, the ‘inventor’ of universalism in the sense that, until Paul, the thought of the universal remains only implicit. If Paul is indeed the founder of universalism, then this act of foundation gives us a better, or at least a more psychologically pertinent, explanation for Nietzsche’s hatred of Paul than Badiou’s second argument (which focuses on Paul’s universalism). In accordance with Badiou’s first argument, it could more plausibly be claimed that Nietzsche is simply jealous of Paul’s status as the overman of antiquity who succeeds not only in devaluing the values of the ancient world (which, as nihilism, is all that Nietzsche will allow him) but also in positing new values (which, in his jealousy of such overcoming, Nietzsche is not able to admit).

In one sense, Badiou’s Paul is simply Nietzsche’s, with the difference that Badiou pronounces Paul’s breaking of history in two, namely his devaluation of the highest values of antiquity, to be a positive, rather than a catastrophic, event. Badiou celebrates what he sees as Paul’s novel exclusion of communalism, of the ‘national gods’, the passing of which Nietzsche rather laments. Badiou sees this break as possible because, at the level of thought, Paul understands that the event (which for Paul, though not for Badiou, is the resurrection) is that which, being indifferently ‘for all’, breaks with the conjoined themes of law and cosmos, with the assigning of places and the order of things respectively. Badiou’s Paul, in short, enacts a rupture with ancient particularisms in the name of a singular universal. This Paul is the first to see that the universal has the structure of an absolutely unique event which finds no differences in the ‘all’ it addresses, and that genuine universalism therefore cannot be the universalization of any particularity, which is ultimately what the ‘One’ of cosmopolitanism (of the Pax Romana in Paul’s case and global capital in ours) consists of.

Throughout Badiou’s account, we get a strong sense of Paul as a creative (rather than cunning) genius. Thus we read that, contra identitarian communalism, ‘Paul is, strictly speaking, the inventor’ of ‘a subject devoid of all identity’; ⁵⁷ that, to those who ‘know the rules of the ancient world’, Paul’s statement to the Galatians (3:28) that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, is ‘genuinely stupefying’; ⁵⁸ and that, in deploying the underlying structure of Paul’s thought, which is its universalism, we should give ‘credit to him who, deciding that none was free from what a truth demands and disjoining the true from the Law, provoked – entirely alone – a cultural revolution upon which we still depend’. ⁵⁹ As Badiou himself hints on a couple of occasions, should we not see Paul as an overman? Yet if we adopt this perspective, then although we release Paul from Nietzsche’s charge of passive, reactive nihilism, we continue to tie Paul to the problem of nihilism itself. And this is something that Badiou’s reading lends itself to, given that, for Badiou, it is true, first, that nihilism is the figure both of Paul’s age and of our own, and, second, that Paul, who overcomes the nihilism of his own age, is our contemporary. ⁶⁰ Though the nihilism of the Roman Empire is different from our ‘capitalist-parliamentarian’ nihilism, it shares the same form of de-politicization; ⁶¹ and though Paul’s passage through nihilism (the resurrection) cannot be our passage, its form (the truth of the event, addressed universally) remains the only way to confront nihilism in our own time: ⁶²

Every age … has its own figure of nihilism. The name changes, but always under these names … we find … an obscure desire for catastrophe. It is only by … affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. ⁶³

Yet if Paul is our model in the creative overcoming of nihilism, it is important to be precise that this is not in the Dionysian sense of Nietzsche’s destruction–creation. Badiou concedes that ‘terroristic nihilism’ of the destructive–creative kind has a creative, rather than a consenting, relation to the nothing, and is thereby preferable to the passive nihilism that abounds today, where the best that can be hoped for is the avoidance of evil. ⁶⁴ As Badiou points out, this contemporary ‘humanitarian’ nihilism, in ideologically refusing any contact with the nothing, collapses even deeper into it. In other words, having suppressed the ‘terrorism’ of active nihilism, we do not escape nihilism itself, since we have only substituted its reactive for its active form. ⁶⁵ But in more recent works, starting with Being and Event, Badiou has offered a self-criticism of his earlier emphasis (for example, in Theory of the Subject) on destruction, which he now identifies as too close to a ‘blind imperative’ to purify. ⁶⁶ In place of the terroristic charms of destruction–creation, Badiou now proffers subtraction–creation, where subtraction thinks the nothing or negativity as a gap rather than as primordial identity. This shift in emphasis, Badiou suggests, avoids the pitfall of the search for authenticity (exemplified in the case of Heidegger), which loses itself in the destructive quest for the origin (Being). Although many things do indeed deserve to be destroyed, this passion for destruction can never be fulfilled since purification is fated to remain incomplete. ⁶⁷ Subtraction, by contrast, is committed to the construction of a ‘minimal difference’ from the nothing, which is what a truth procedure does by providing its own axiomatic. ⁶⁸ While destruction–creation can never actually begin creating (since the destructive project of purification will always recede over the horizon), subtraction–creation knows it must invent content and is therefore the only true passion for the new. The ‘new man’ is produced rather than restored in his Heideggerian authenticity. ⁶⁹

The difference between destruction and subtraction notwithstanding, Badiou continues to tie Paul to the question of nihilism – as Nietzsche understood it – by making him the first prophet of the possibility of ‘new worlds’ (truth procedures that, in pronouncing the event, break with the order of things). It is rather in Agamben that we find the most sustained attempt to write a non-nihilistic Paul, though it will be interesting to see that Badiou’s passion for the ‘minimal difference’, which is his own attempt to exit the cycle of destruction–creation, is close to the ‘messianic vocation’ that Agamben finds invaluable in Paul. ⁷⁰

Beyond nihilism? Paul and the messianic vocation

It is no omission that leads Agamben to make only passing reference to Nietzsche in his book on Paul. Agamben’s Paul, precisely because he is a thinker of the messianic, cannot be grasped through the categories of Nietzsche’s nihilism – he is neither the giver of new values, nor the one who tears down the old values, but rather the one who announces the possibility of using existing vocations (callings). ⁷¹ The messianic vocation, which is the deactivation of law, is thus neither a militant revolutionism with regard to ‘this world’, nor a nihilistic iconoclasm, but a profaning of worldly identities which enables them to be operationalized without in any way transcending them in some beyond. This world remains in place, but is no longer experienced as it was before. The ‘before’ is therefore not temporal in the sense of the experience of chronological time, but rather an existential experience of closure, to be replaced in the ‘after’ of messianic time by the negation (the Pauline hōs mē, ‘as not’) which enables these same worldly vocations to be experienced as open by those who live in the Messiah.

The small but all-important difference between negation as the ‘as not’ and as the ‘as if’ is the difference between messianism as already realized eschatology and as merely a point of view on another possible world. The ‘as if’ that reduces redemption to a point of view is, in Agamben’s view, characteristic of Adorno’s negative dialectics, which Agamben sees as ‘an absolutely non-messianic form of thought’. ⁷² The messianic vocation, as far as Agamben is concerned, does not give us a viewpoint on another, redeemed, world. ⁷³ The ‘as not’ is not an ideal in the way that the ‘as if’ is, and is indeed the latter’s abolition, in the sense of its realization. ⁷⁴ Crucially, the ‘as if’ (presumably inasmuch as it assumes the uselessness of existing vocations) is also an outcome of every nihilism, a point that draws Agamben into one of his few references in his Paul text to Nietzsche, this time in agreement with him. ⁷⁵ The messianic subject, on the other hand,

… no longer knows the as if … He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer’s words, he must now really live in a world without God. This means that he must not disguise this world’s being-without-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons him, and the fact of representations (the fact of the as if) cannot pretend to save the appearance of salvation. The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as if it were saved. In Benjamin’s words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved; this is how difficult it is to dwell in the calling. ⁷⁶

The tensions with Nietzsche’s thought of the death of God here are striking. In Agamben’s version, the realization that ‘this world’ is all there is tempts us nihilistically to opt for the ‘as if’ where we should rather attempt messianically to maintain ourselves in the ‘as not’. The ‘as not’ is itself clearly a form of negation of the world, but it is not a nihilistic one in the sense that it neither seeks, nor even contemplates, some ‘beyond’. On this radicalized reading, even if one refrains from positing another world, but rather, as with Nietzsche’s artist, creates new forms, one is still caught up in nihilism. ⁷⁷ Messianic life, in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s artistic life, is assimilation to the world even to the extent of involving those it has called in becoming ‘like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things’ (I Corinthians 4:13). ⁷⁸ Nietzsche too, of course, sought the utmost affirmation of everything that has been with his ‘abyssal’ thought of eternal recurrence, his amor fati. Yet Agamben’s messianic vocation (with strong echoes of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return as the return of difference, of that which differs from itself) does not want the return of the same. ⁷⁹ Rather, redemption, though it is firmly of this world, is this world rendered graspable and therefore used ever anew. The hōs mē is what offers up this world for use.

For Agamben, this ‘as not’ is therefore the fundamental messianic term in Paul. ⁸⁰ The hōs mē is not a matter of ‘eschatological indifference’ (the world is ending; what does it matter!), nor does it have any specific content. ⁸¹ We remain as we were when we were called (I Corinthians 7:20). The nullification wrought by the hōs mē therefore attaches itself to that which is, it ‘does not tend towards an elsewhere’. ⁸² But since neither does it induce a fatalistic indifference towards that which it nullifies, what exactly does it do? Agamben here highlights Paul’s conclusion to his passage on the hōs mē, which declares that ‘the present form of this world is passing away’ (ibid.: 7:31). In accordance with this passage, which Agamben translates somewhat differently as ‘passing away is the figure, the way of being, of this world’, the hōs mē itself is what makes the figure of this world pass by preparing its end. ⁸³ ‘This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing of the figure of this world.’ ⁸⁴ The hōs mē is negation, not dialectics, where the latter, in sublating that which is negated in a universal and teleological process, tends towards the elsewhere, the other world. ⁸⁵ Politically, this means revealing the fundamental contingency, the arbitrariness, of each and every social condition or identity. ⁸⁶ Given that it is law that apportions these identities, this revelation is at once an unveiling of underlying lawlessness and of the powers that hide this lawlessness. ⁸⁷ Unveiling is what the messianic vocation does: ‘bringing to light the inoperativity of the law and the substantial illegitimacy of each and every power in messianic time’. ⁸⁸ In the precise sense of anarchy as an-arche, that which is without origin, the messianic vocation is anarchistic – showing the absence of foundation beneath all profane power without in any way offering the foundation for a new, redeemed power. ⁸⁹

Agamben finds further support for his thesis that the messianic vocation negates this world without positing a world to come (or, more precisely, that the world to come is already here) in the Pauline notion of messianic time. Agamben argues that messianic time is neither this eon (world) nor the coming eon; neither chronological time nor the apocalyptic time of the eschaton (the end of time). ⁹⁰ Messianic time is rather an ‘operational time’, ‘the time that time takes to come to an end’. ⁹¹ It is seized kairos [occasion or opportune moment], which is itself nothing other than seized chronos [sequential time], and this is its relation to the ‘as not’, which, as revocation, as deactivation, is nonetheless active, a vocation. ⁹² This operational time is not to be added as a supplement to chronological time (as, for example, in Marxism, which, following Hegel, views redemption as the final result of a historical process), which is why Paul’s parousia [presence] should not be understood as ‘second coming’ but rather as the relation of the Messiah to each instant of chronological time. ⁹³ This relation is one of recapitulation, as in the Epistle to the Ephesians 1:10, where Paul writes that ‘all things are recapitulated in him, things in heaven and things on earth’. ⁹⁴ In this sense, suggests Agamben, the messianic is wrongly described as future-orientated, since it rather involves memory, a thoroughly unnostalgic remembering which allows what was accomplished in the past to be unaccomplished and, conversely, what is unfulfilled in the present to be fulfilled. ⁹⁵ Paul’s messianic vocation is thus an immanent rather than an imminent transcendence, or, in Agamben’s own words, ‘a zone of indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world’. ⁹⁶ While this world is negated, it is brought thereby to fulfilment. There is no place for nihilism here in any of its Nietzschean moments: ‘this world’ is neither a source of ressentiment, nor a target for destruction, nor an opportunity for overcoming. ⁹⁷

The Gnostic Paul

While I find Agamben’s account of Pauline messianism compelling precisely for its break with the categories of nihilism, in this section I will argue that, genealogically, such a strong exclusion of nihilism from Paul’s thought, and indeed from Agamben’s too, is not possible. I will suggest that Agamben is able to portray Paul as non-nihilistic only by downplaying the Gnostic aspects of Paul’s thought and that, moreover, Gnostic apophasis – the negative theology that first makes worldly negation possible – is part of the genealogy of Agamben’s own messianic vocation, which also turns on the power of negation.

In their fully developed forms in late antiquity, the various Gnosticisms identified the saving god with the alien god of light who comes from without this world, in some accounts from the ‘eighth heaven’. The power of this heaven, called Ogdoas (the number 8), is above and ‘beyond the reach of the other seven heavens comprising the cosmological schema’ of the Hellenistic world. ⁹⁸ The reverse side of this identification of divine light with the beyond was a tendency towards a Manichean condemnation of the material world and its creator god, the demiurge. Agamben downplays the ‘Gnostic’ Paul (Gnosis is not mentioned once in his study) because he seeks to emphasize the messianic in Paul, a non-nihilistic Paul for whom the ‘elsewhere’ is a distraction and who thus refrains from condemning this world, reserving his judgement only for its powers and principalities. ⁹⁹

Yet it is this very Paul, it is worth recalling, who states that demonic powers are the ‘rulers of this world’ (Ephesians 6:12), not only of the powers and principalities in it. Thus Marcion, whose early Christian heresy was precisely an extreme form of the Gnostic judgement of this world as demonic, selected only Pauline epistles and the gospel of Luke for his Christian canon. ¹⁰⁰ For Marcion, the creator God of the Old Testament, as demiurge, is an entirely different God from the Father of Jesus Christ, who is the redemptive alien God. ¹⁰¹ Marcion believed Paul to be the only authentic apostle and himself to be the true disciple of Paul. ¹⁰² In Taubes’ view, it is indisputable that the Gnostic tendency in Christianity begins with Paul; it is not without reason that the Valentinians argued that their fundamental concepts were to be found in him. ¹⁰³ Even if he himself resisted the Gnostic valorization of sophia [wisdom] in his dispute with the Corinthians, Paul is nonetheless a ‘pneumaticist’ who draws a strong distinction between the flesh and the spirit and who attaches no salvific significance to the earthly life of Jesus. ¹⁰⁴ This view of a strongly Gnostic tendency in Paul is shared by Badiou, who describes Marcionism as ultra-Pauline: ‘By pushing [Paul] a little, one could arrive at Marcion’s conception: the gospel is an absolute beginning.’ ¹⁰⁵ Another influential study of Paul, this time from Daniel Boyarin, also agrees that Paul is a ‘moderate “Gnostic”, somewhere between the monadic corporeality of the Jerusalem church and the extreme spirituality of the later true Gnostics’, who posited a radical dualism of soul and body. ¹⁰⁶ In sum, there are good reasons to suppose that, inasmuch as it is present in the Christian tradition, the Gnostic condemnation of this world enters Christianity primarily through Paul, and in this sense Nietzsche’s reading of Paul is correct. ¹⁰⁷

Agamben has himself commented negatively on the ‘Gnostic legacy in modern politics’. ¹⁰⁸ For Agamben, the need to overcome the Gnostic heresy was the principal driver of the Trinitarian paradigm. But despite its attempt to heal the rift in Gnosis between the God who is foreign to the world and the God who governs it, Trinitarianism remained within an ‘economical’ articulation (a division of labour) of Father and Son that did not fully break with Gnostic dualism. As a result, argues Agamben, orthodox Christianity has not left behind ‘the fundamental extraneousness of the world’ in Gnosticism. ¹⁰⁹ Given that Agamben’s genealogy of modern governmentality runs back to the Trinitarian economy (the opposition between Father and Son in Trinitarianism gives us that between kingdom and government in today’s governmentalized societies), this has contemporary consequences. ¹¹⁰ These can be seen in cases as varied as US foreign policy, which seeks to govern whole swathes of the world while remaining extraneous to them, and in the phenomenon of the tourist, who is ‘the planetary figure of this irreducible extraneousness with regard to the world’. ¹¹¹

Agamben draws too strong a contrast between Paul’s messianic vocation and Gnosticism. In his later writings, Taubes makes clear that the Gnosticism of late antiquity is not far from the purely this-worldly negation celebrated by Agamben as the properly messianic vocation. For Taubes, Gnostic dualism is not eschatological at all, since Gnosticism in the first few centuries of the Christian era is precisely what emerges when apocalypticism fails, as indeed apocalypticism had earlier been a response to the failure of prophecy. ¹¹² Just as Jewish apocalypticism responded to disappointment at prophetic pronouncements of the coming of a new kingdom by anticipating the end of the kingdoms of this world, so also Gnosticism emerged to cope with the refusal of this world to end given the delay of parousia which confronted the early Church. Gnosticism after Paul therefore transcended the nihilistic intent of apocalypticism, transposing the ‘beyond’ from an imminent future in time to the voyage of the soul out of time. The drama of salvation was decisively displaced from the stage of history to that of the human soul; from external-political to internal-spiritual liberation. ¹¹³ In this sense, Gnosticism for Taubes, as a ‘revolution in consciousness that exceeds the boundaries of ancient experience’, is both deeply historical and irreducible to its historical manifestations in that it consists in something like the perennial power of negation of worldly powers that Agamben identifies with the messianic vocation: ‘The transworldly god, degraded to demiurge, vacated the scene for the anti-worldly God’: ¹¹⁴

The Gnostic divine predicates: unrecognizable, unnameable, unsayable, boundless, nonbeing, are negative predicates They are to be understood as a negation of the world. ¹¹⁵

That this anti-worldly God of Gnostic negative theology is, as far as this world is concerned, strictly nothing, means that Gnostic transcendence cancels itself, finding instead its ‘correlate in the pnuma, the self of man’. ¹¹⁶ This ‘inner-human transcendence’ establishes both a new idea of freedom and a new man ‘for whom law and worldly wisdom are not binding’. ¹¹⁷ What appears as the ‘beyond’ in Gnosticism is thus neither a beyond in linear time, nor a beyond in heaven, but rather a ‘beyond’ in ‘man’ himself which is really ‘the depth’, as the Gnostic Valentinus called it, or ground, of being. ¹¹⁸ That this being is nothing reminds us that Gnostic apophasis is part of the genealogy of Heidegger’s project, and from here finds its way to Agamben (given the former’s significance to the latter). ¹¹⁹ Agamben’s messianic vocation (negation), which he finds in Paul, is also in the Gnosticism that he excludes in Paul.

Indeed, a reading of Taubes’ earlier work suggests that Agamben’s Pauline messianism is genealogically linked to Gnosticism in a more primordial way still. Agamben is right that Paul’s eschatology should not be reduced to apocalypticism – Paul is not a thinker of the apocalyptic end of time but rather of the messianic end times (the eschaton) as the time of the now. ¹²⁰ But, in his Occidental Eschatology, Taubes shows that it is apocalypse that inaugurates eschatology itself, whether Gnostic or ‘messianic’ in intent. ¹²¹ The God of ancient Jewish apocalypticism, in challenging the world, makes it begin to end while also promising new things. ¹²² Without this temporalization of cosmos there can be no eschatology because ancient cosmology, as Nietzsche saw, knows only eternal return – there is not yet any history, only the circle of life.

The messianic opening-up of this world in Paul is linked to the eschatological possibility of this world’s being not all. Agamben would no doubt concur with this, arguing that potentiality is never exhausted in the act – that the world as it is can always, and infinitely, be other (such that Paul can messianically see the form of this world as passing away rather than nihilistically seeking the form of this world to pass). Taubes, however, has demonstrated that, genealogically, the new messianic order is inextricable from the apocalypse of the old. ¹²³

Conclusion: The power of the ‘eighth heaven’

Agamben’s construction of Paul’s messianic vocation as transcendence in immanence, as a new relation to this world, nicely separates Pauline messianism from nihilism. Yet I have argued that such a separation, while heuristically helpful, is not genealogically defensible. While Agamben is right that Paul’s eschatology is not apocalyptic (nihilistic) in intent, Taubes’ shows that it is apocalypticism that first enables eschatology itself. Nihilism, it seems, is irreducible to the messianism even of Agamben’s non-nihilistic Paul.

I have also argued that Agamben’s attempt to read Paul’s messianism as tending, non-nihilistically, towards the here-and-now does not require the radical exclusion of Gnosticism in Paul. The Gnosticisms of late antiquity, which of course was also Paul’s epoch (even if these Gnosticisms developed mostly after Paul as the parousia he anticipated failed to arrive), seem in fact to have been primarily a force for negation in Agamben’s sense of the term – that is, rather than tending towards the elsewhere, for their adherents they worked to de-legitimate this-worldly powers. Rather than positive knowledge of the ‘beyond’, which is strictly impossible for apophatic theology, what the Gnostic knew related her differently to this world: she knew that it is governed by a lesser divine being (demiurge) who gives the law and judges those who break it as lord; she knew also that this claim to power (along with all those built on it) is illegitimate, based as it is on the creator god’s ignorance of his lower-order status. ¹²⁴ Coming to gnosis was thus the revelation that the candidate had been released from the demiurge’s power, as stated in the redemption ritual, a declaration of independence addressed to the demiurge himself:

I am a son from the Father – the Father who is preexistent … I derive from Him who is preexistent, and I come again to my own place whence I came forth. ¹²⁵

The threat that this posed to any constituted authority whatsoever was understandably not lost on Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, for whom the Gnostics ‘maintain they have attained to a height above all power’. ¹²⁶ The transformation of the Gnostic initiate’s relationship to the demiurge simultaneously transformed his relationship to all earthly authorities, including bishops of the orthodox Church.

The veracity of this account of the Gnosticism of late antiquity, as popularized by Elaine Pagels, is a matter for ongoing debate. This is not Taubes’ problem, however, since his ‘Gnosticism’ is not reducible to any of its historical moments but rather signals a generic form of inward-directed negation of the world that avoids the abyss of violence threatened by externally directed apocalypticism. Yet despite being alert to the dangers of apocalypticism, Taubes, echoing Nietzsche on active nihilism, does not exclude it, contesting that it was apocalypse that broke the hold of ancient cosmos by making it begin to end, and that this termination of cosmos was at once the beginning of the end of law, as first principle of cosmos, too. ¹²⁷ The antinomianism that devalues the powers and principalities is first an idea of the destruction of cosmos; pure nihilism. Taubes does not erase nihilism from Paul as Agamben does because, in his view, the antinomian Paul is also and necessarily an anti-cosmic Paul.

Agamben’s messianic vocation, as deactivation of law and thus also of each and every worldly power, therefore shares with Taubes’ Gnosticism the space opened up by apocalypticsm. Messianism and Gnosticism should not be treated as if a gulf separates them but rather be seen as kindred spirits in the art of negation. If Gnosticism is more explicitly nihilistic than Pauline messianism, and I think Agamben is right that this difference of emphasis is important (whether or not it can be found in Paul is another question), then this is perhaps because Gnosis first devalues the world (through revealing the true nature of the demiurge who created it) while worldly powers are devalued by default. Agamben’s Pauline messianism, by contrast, devalues worldly powers while refusing negation of this world in toto. This distinction makes all the difference if we are trying to avoid nihilism, but both Gnosticism and messianism can negate only thanks to the annihilating thought of the coming apocalypse.