We begin with the idea of a force that is positive, full, and undialectical; a force without any gaps or negativity. Its being is not distinct from its effects or its becoming. It is and it acts; it is an active force. It acts through direct causality. For it being and becoming, self-preservation and effectivity, acting and being acted upon are all the same. In the realm of ethics, it present itself as a will devoid of resentment and reaction, as an active self-fulfilling desire without any trace of repression or suppression. But since it admits no distinction between being and acting or ‘is’ and ‘ought’, for it ethics and ontology are one. This force, which exist by becoming active, that is by repeating its self-affirmation through acting, can not simply affirm itself, for this would be equal to accepting a limit and reacting negatively to what lies beyond it. This immanent force has many names: substance, nature, life, power…So here we have Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze; of whom at least the first two do show the signs of a complete or partial relapse into pure naturalism or romantic naturalism. It seems that the choice is between naturalism and some version of immanent vitalism. But the latter, despite its closeness to truth on many points, still carries the defects of the former inside itself; and we can not get rid of them as long as we remain inside the vitalist position. The introduction of two new names can help us see these defects more clearly. These two names are : William Blake and St.Paul.
I n many ways Blake is more Nietzscheian than Nietzsche himself; for example when He says “ One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.” He too considers distorted, reactive desire as the root of evil: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” And in his harsh criticism of ‘protestant ethics’ he goes as far as saying: “Sooner Murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” His praise for Reason, Body, And Imagination as “the bound or outward circumference of Energy” is un-bounded. Yet Blake’s thought is much more political and politically radical than Nietzsche’s and one can not ignore the possibility that this is somehow related to the traces of Dialectics present in his thinking:" Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” As a matter of fact, Blake’s dialectics is closer to the Lacanian ( or post-structuralist ) rather than the ‘orthodox’ Hegelian version; i.e. It is a dialectic of void/excess rather than one of subject/object. It is “the road of excess”, that in his view, “leads to the Palace of wisdom.”(all quotations from W.Blake; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).
But it is when we come to Saint Paul that everything suddenly becomes clear; for the truth is that he anticipated this whole line of thinking. His work not only contains the ‘ foundation of universalism’ but the very idea of an active desire, free from repression and resentment, goes back to him ( indeed, Nietzsche’s bitter attack on Paul, which is clearly resentful in tone and factually misleading in content, makes sense only when it is read as Nietzsche’s reaction to his own past.) It is through Paul’s invention of the idea of Grace that the concept of positive, active force becomes meaningful for the first time. According to him, Grace is nothing but God’s acceptance of us with no regard to our good or evil acts. And all we have to do is to freely accept this acceptance. This is the true meaning of faith and salvation through faith. We choose our being chosen and consciously become what we already are. Here there is no talk of ‘election’, ‘atonement, ‘divine sacrifice’ or anything resembling some kind of ‘symbolic debt’. God’s Grace, or love, is given to all, freely and excessively. Marx says the same thing when he describes the last phase of communist society as a community in which everyone gets what he or she wants, with no consideration of need, equality, or a just return. Here Justice doesn’t imply equality or the leveling of differences, on the contrary it gives free rein to all individual differences by being totally indifferent to them. The economy of Grace, as the economy of gift, changes the very nature of exchange by being free and Excessive. Only an excessive Grace can answer, or ‘fill’, the infinite void of desire.
So everyone receives as much as he wants or is capable of receiving; no desire remains unacted or incapable of fulfillment and there would be no occasion for hatred, resentment, and self-hatred. Another reason for the excessiveness of God’s Grace is the creative nature of active forces. Such a force can not be limited to its own reproduction, It has to ask for more and become more than itself; that’s why Nietzsche, instead of ‘will To life’, called it ‘will to power’, that is will to ‘more life’. However, the most important, and paradoxical, consequence of this ‘ethics of fulfillment’ Is the eradication of evil and, therefore ethics itself- which shows that Paul wasn’t ignorant of ‘the genealogy of morals’. Why should anyone commit evil in a situation where there is No scarcity, no unfulfillment, indeed no conflict? Paul’s theory of Grace provides an answer that goes beyond the naivety of this question. The life of spirit, the undistorted force of desire, as Paul says, is creative in the sense that creativity is the being of its becoming. For it loss of creativity is a loss of becoming; and that’s why it can’t commit evil, for evil is a loss of becoming – the Catholic concept of ‘evil as a loss of being’ is a derivative of this Paulian idea and almost always leads to conservatism (Tolkien). So those who are saved by faith do not commit sin, and therefore do not ‘die’, because they are free from guilt, self-hatred and self-destruction. But how is their creativity, their becoming, related to other creativities? Paul was faced wit the ‘eternal’ question of the relation between faith and love, between being loved by god and loving others. The same question was raised (by Hanna Arendt and Marshal Berman among others) about the interaction of individuals or the ‘political’ structure of community in the communist society. The Marxian idea of ‘free association of free producers” is simply too vague. The picture Marx depicts of ‘fishing in the morning and reading Hegel in the evening’ remains too individualistic and bourgeois to act as a basis for any kind of free interaction. Like the Anarchistic negation of state, it doesn’t go beyond abstract, indeterminate negation, because it leaves the other pole of the relation, i.e. the individual, unchanged; it leaves the door open to silly musings about ‘ people killing each other out of sheer boredom’ which certainly is a relapse to Schopenhauer’s petty-bourgeois ideology of suffering/boredom as the basic ontological duality. Compared to this, Kant’s semi-legalistic idea that since love “as an inclination can’t be commanded” so “loving our neighbor” must be commanded as practical or non-pathological love, is truly advanced. Badiou is certainly right in emphasizing that for Paul self-love is a pre-condition for loving others. But the Paulian idea of ‘loving oneself’ takes us beyond psychologistic, bourgeois individualism. For Paul self-love implies freedom from sin, guilt, repression, resentment, and Law. So the tangled question of ‘loving the others’ and its relation to ‘loving one self’ can’t be dealt with if it is posed from the limited point of view of ‘ individual as a psychological atom’. Without dealing with the questions of body (among bodies), Law, and the social, all we can get is the Schopenhauerian pity and the immeasurable filth hidden behind it.
Paul came across the question of love through his concrete historical experience rather than any theological musing. This historical dimension, sadly neglected by Badiou, covers almost every issue in Paul’s letters. The fact that Paul distinguishes love from the two other virtues of hope and faith(in god) proves that he is aware of the importance of this problem and the necessity of dealing with it as an integral part of the more general question of salvation. In Paul’s view salvation is a process concerned with the body in all the senses of the word. The frail ghosts of ancient Greeks in Hades longed for physical existence and companionship. They wanted to have both a body and a social body; they wanted to be embodied both as individuals and as members of a community. This longing was so strong that even a king and a hero such as Achilles was ready to be reincarnated as a lowly shepherd boy( though perhaps not as a woman!) which shows that the idea of a bodily life after death is somehow related to the theme of justice in all times and places. Plato’s spiritualist eschatology—not satisfactory even for the pre-Christian Greeks—is an other proof of the inseparability of the body and the bodies, the individual and the social body; giving up one, Plato had to give up the other. Even the fact that Hell has always been the most popular volume of Dante’s Dvine Comedy is partly due to the reality of all those bodies in hell and their participation in a ‘community of torment’, both of which are acutely lacking in Paradise.
The materialist, anti-Gnostic moment of Paul’s theory of redemption involves not only a redeemed body, distinguished from ‘flesh’ as the reality of ‘unacted desire’, but also the church as the body of the believers. Christian salvation has a physical as well as a democratic dimension, in opposition to the spiritual and elitist transubstantiation of man in all Gnostic sects. However, as was said earlier, the real historical experience of salvation presented Paul with many problems, the most important of which was the possibility of relapsing into sin and receiving its wages: death. This was a very distressing possibility. No one can definitely prove that Paul’s understanding of salvation was totally free from any trace of apocalyptic beliefs, that he didn’t experience his time as the time between the two comings of Christ, that he didn’t believe in the imminent end of the world and the actual overcoming of physical death through the power of faith. But even if we assume that for him the salvation was a ‘symbolic’ matter and he did expect the believers of his time, and the times to come, to die before the ending of the world, still the possibility of a relapse into sin, or a ‘symbolic death’ remained as a cause for distress. More than any external pressure, it was this internal turmoil that brought out the problems inherent in the idea of Christian salvation. Not having any Divine Law to cover or suppress these questions, Paul had to find an answer to them; or at least some of them. Some questions were unanswerable in the context of Roman Empire as the only possible form of social life. For Paul the Empire was the earthly context of his mission, prepared by god for this very reason; so unable to ask for redeemed political reality, neither he nor any of his followers have answered these questions. However Paul knew that faith in itself was not enough, that ‘love of god’ could not be immediately identified with ‘love your neighbor’, that self-love, made possible by freedom from Law and sin, was not sufficient for generating love for others. So after preaching Justification by Faith alone so forcefully for so long, he had to proclaim:
“I may be able to speak the languages of men and even of angels, but if I have no love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell. I may have the gift of inspired preaching; I may have all knowledge and understand all secrets; I may have all the faith needed to move mountains-but if I have no love, I am nothing…[M]eanwhile these three remain: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love"( Corinthians, I. 13. 1-3, 13.)
Paul distinguishes love from faith and hope and yet he doesn’t consider it as a third element or force that has its own realm, for love can enter the realms of the other two; it constitutes the power and affectivity of faith and hope. That’s why without love they are nothing. Unlike Eastern Religions, here love is not the unity of all three, The One that contains others and itself; it remains a separate and a separating force. Perhaps one can say that love is the becomingbec of faith and hope; the excessive power through which they can become what they already are: active, creative, forces. Without love they are inert, empty beings waiting to be filled ( and as the histories of all positive religions show, they can easily be filled with hatred and resentment, and turn into fanaticism and fatalism.) But this proves the close affinity between the Paulian concepts of Love and Grace. In this way love too gets involved in a dialectic of void and excess; it acts as a power, freely given, that constantly overcomes, not the void, but the evil that is going to fill it and present it as a plenum. As a power that constantly overcomes evil through its own becoming, love is a negation of negation that never reaches the positive, but eternally returns to itself, i.e. to the risk, passion, and torment of love, to the imbalance and yearning and challenge that it introduces into the world, to the shock of the ‘event’ and the pain and joy of remaining faithful to it. As such love is the concrete becoming of a negative dialectic. This love is unknown to both Nietzsche and Spinoza. At his worst, in his naturalistic myths, Nietzsche succumbs to the worst kind of resentment in the shape of social Darwinism, praising and justifying hatred under the title of science; and at his best he has to appeal to a transcendent force to break history into two parts and let man become something more than himself. As for Spinoza, his concept of ‘intellectual love of god’ simply denies the possibility of any difference or gap between Faith and love, between the Grace as the given ness of god’s gift and the human labor of love in accepting and sharing this gift. Despite their dynamism, Spinoza’s Potentia and Nietzsche’s Overman are closed to the becoming of love; the former as immanent and positive and the latter as negative and transcendent both are incapable of the immanent negativity of Paul.
