III.4
The third chapter continues with the spirited re-imagination
of allegory and takes up the interminable debate between Faith and Law.
Breton’s Paul is an antinomian with a difference, whose mission is to retrieve
the “pre-nomic” core of the Torah (94). The Law, according to Paul according to
Breton, confuses the believers not because of its precepts but because of its
limitations and effects and status as divine law (87-88); though not sinful in and
of itself, the Law nevertheless works against itself by becoming co-opted by a
“negative grandeur,” an anonymous power to which all people, Jewish and Gentile
alike, ultimately submit (89). Law must therefore be understood as a
“provisional establishment” (90). As Breton would be expected to argue based on
this declaration, Christ, whose name conceals an intractable mystery of
infinite depth, establishes a new covenant in which he plays the mediator and
re-closes the distance between God and humanity. In this way, “Unbound from
law, faith transgresses all regionalism…Distinctions therefore no longer have
the importance we have given them” (92-93). Central to Breton’s argument is his
holistic reading of Romans, which, with a shrug toward the rigorous demands of
historical-critical exegesis, takes faith as a “movement” and an “affirmation”
that “prolongs the shock and rupture of conversion” and confirms the depth of a
truth (85). To preserve this rupture ensures the integration of the Jews and
Gentiles, which brings the Jews to the present fulfillment of the Law in Christ
and moves the Gentiles into the past to the pre-nomic core of the faith of
Abraham in what can be summarized as a double movement within heterogeneous
a/temporality (94-95).
The fourth chapter moves from its discussion of Paul and
time, the subject of the previous two chapters, to a discussion of Paul and
space—“the Pauline Cosmos.”
Altogether, the series of chapters from two to four develops a dislocative
theory of spatio-temporality that asks the reader to understand space and time
as a continually transforming topology. Breton writes, “[C]osmos (Welt) means, for Paul, the passage from
an environment (Umwelt) to what
overflows to the infinite, to that openness in which all regional landscapes
are inscribed and fade away” (97). To pursue this, Breton understands the
Pauline cosmos as a function rather than a substance, one that is characterized
by “unlimited opening, insistent transit, and a permanent tension toward a
‘further-still’” (99). Breton develops his understanding of Pauline cosmology
through readings of a deutero-Pauline and a Pauline text. First, Breton
develops Pauline cosmology as a mirror to Paul’s Christology through a careful
reading of Col 1:15-20, the well-known deutero-Pauline hymn. Its first verse
describes Christ as “the Image” of God and “firstborn of all creation”; Breton
reads this as the “unifying function” of Christ, articulated by the three key
prepositions of this passage, in, by, and for (106-107). The second verse describes Christ as the “Beginning”
and “firstborn from among the dead”; Breton reads this as the “function of
gathering and reconciliation,” an enlargement of the “unifying function”
(110-111). Second and most fascinatingly, Breton provides a reading of Rom
8:18-25 that adds a materialist density to the eschatological indeterminacy of
the passage in order to emphasize the double bond that yokes humans to nature.
His reading investigates the “circular figuration of salvation history” (122),
which, somewhat like a Möbius strip, is a topological distortion, a coincidence
of alpha and omega in which humans and nature alike pass through the past and
the future without crossing over an “edge” of time. Breton’s reading
methodology is closer in spirit and practice to a close reading or explication
of poetry than to anything resembling modern exegesis, yet this allows Breton
to make daring “links” and interpretations that may escape the concerns of the
biblical critic.
