III.5
Over and against the objections that Paul was an
(inadvertent or otherwise) apologist for social order and the Pax Romana, the final chapters of
Breton’s book argue for an interpretation of Paul’s mission that pursues his
radical, utopian impulse. Chapter 5 focuses on Paul’s views of communion, community,
churches, and the Church. To retrieve the original sense of “communion” in
Paul, which, as his readers will be well aware, entailed much more than simply
partaking of the Eucharist, Breton redefines the (Pauline) Christian as a
creature of prepositions—the with of
participation and, most importantly, the in
of “being-in,” which “insinuates a more profound relation: the relation of a
living being in the milieu of life where he is rooted, where he moves, in which
he dwells, and where he remains, free
to breathe in the native air” (128-129; italics original). The believer is in Christ, and, in the inversion, Christ
is in the believer. This in turn
founds a relationship and a communion through forms of abstract co-dependency
rather than resemblance or authoritarian identification.
The function of community, which Breton summarizes as the
“operant existence of communion” (130), makes this clear. Community is defined,
above all, by a freedom from needing to be the same, whether because of
external compulsions or internal anxieties that might produce a
will-to-resemblance in some and a will-to-power in others (132). Community is
an “unsupervised horizon” in which total dispossession, willful redistribution,
and sharing are the authenticating marks (133). However, with the introduction
of more converts from increasingly diverse socio-economic and ethnic
backgrounds comes the increasing complexity of internal organization and the
ascendency of authority. For Breton, the construction of the Pauline church is
an exemplar of a more general, perhaps inevitable, historical process: “The
more a given group grows in volume and qualitative diversity, the more the
menace of centrifugal forces and internal dissentions intensifies, and the
more, consequently, the weight of an indisputable authority imposes itself as
an intervention, putting an end to the peril” (134). To safeguard the community
from collapsing into sects, Paul must maintain a universal vision through
rigorous “unicity” (135) that allows the churches to form part of the Church, a non-institutional,
non-hierarchical non-structure that ensures the equality of all its
participants.
But what is the unicity that undergirds the Church’s
universality? It is, of course, the “body of death” (140). The brief final
chapter radicalizes this insight into a call to arms—or, more precisely, to disarm—that provides a profound
meditation on the sublime nothingness of the cross, in the non-face of which
humans cease to be humans and God ceases to be God. This folly, this openly
praised scandal upon which the Greeks and the Jews alike look with bafflement
and contempt, is the absolute negation of society that comes to cause community
and becomes the center of communion; it is the revocation of all identity so
that humans, who now share in Christ’s own kenosis,
might become slaves to a symbol of failure and servants of the world that they
negate. One is called, in other words, to serve while rejecting the glory of
service (149), or to serve without serving. For Breton, Paul makes possible
something like the “true gift,” the unqualified gift of oneself to the world.
In this formula, the gift of oneself is the gift of nothing—a weight without
density for a time without duration.
