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Conclusion
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Conclusion I end this book wishing to express gratitude to two groups of writers whose deaths long ago preserve them from the embarrassment, consternation, or perplexity that my thankfulness might otherwise occasion. One group illustrates for me the sufficiency of an intermittent courage of conviction: a few fourthcentury Christians and a few more middle- and late-Byzantine authors and Latin writers of the Middle Ages sometimes allowed themselves to hear echoes of ancient amatory poetry in the language of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. They confirmed a figure I had glimpsed in the letter—an erotic Paul—but was hesitant to speak about until others within the Christian tradition first took the risk. They paved the way for construing the apostle’s emotion as the erōs of secular literature, even though they knew such readings were unsuitable and offensive to theologians of sovereignty, before whose critical gaze these pages now, apprehensively, give themselves to viewing. To the other group, to Sappho and her many admirers/imitators who shared with her, and with Homer’s Penelope, a strangely mixed erōs, a desire for communion combined with the dangerous experience of heating, melting, and finally emptying of one’s body—to these writers I owe an even greater debt. The poetry I have appealed to throughout this book, culminating in the amazing epigram on infinite longing by Paulus Silentiarius, confirms that my Christian co-conspirators, John of Ford, Gilbert of Hoyland, Baldwin of Ford, and the rest, were on the right track when they read Paul in light of longing desire. And thanks are due to these love poets for a reason beyond the writing of their poetry, and this is perhaps the most important reason for my gratitude: their troubling of the too-tidy commonplace, which admittedly they often also promoted, that erōs is love when the beloved is present and pothos is love when the beloved is absent. They teach us that there is no escape from the vulnerability to loss and to grief written inside of love. That is to say, there is no dichotomy that can insulate love from longing. For coming to know that awe-filling truth I am grateful. To project it into God is why I wrote this book. Such a projection of longing desire into God has been made difficult, however, by the many interpreters of Paul’s letters who protect divine equilibrium by encircling God with three rings of defense. The outer ring is the illusion of epistolary presence. Then comes Paul’s authoritative apostleship. Finally, scholars have erected a version of Paul’s Christology, whether 151 intentionally or not I cannot say, the effect of which has been to ward off self-consuming desire from ever infecting the Godhead. God appears to be unassailable. Yet, in the first four chapters, I tried to show how these three lines of defense rebel against the prophylactic use to which scholars and theologians have attempted to put them and, in spite of themselves, actually welcome longing and seek to pass it on from one ring to the next and finally to the center, to God, who then of course becomes decentered as anyone one who has lost a love would be. In the last two chapters, in a very preliminary way I attempted to describe what difference a god in mourning might make for the politics of the Philippian community. The outer ring: epistolary presence. There is a view widely held today that Paul’s letters were instruments of apostolic control—itself a faint copy of divine sovereignty. Even though recent emphasis on Philippians as a letter of friendship lends warmth to Paul the teacher, theologian, and moral director and softens the portrait of a domineering Paul and, by implication, the impressions we have of Christ and of God, the underlying structure of the letter as a platform for authority remains in contemporary criticism. In conformity to ancient epistolary theory, Philippians is taken to be a substitute for Paul’s presence and voice through which he effects change in readers. Although I affirm the insight that Philippians is a friendly letter, I nevertheless want to challenge the idea that this letter, or any letter for that matter and least of all a letter full of expressions of longing, delivers the presence of the author and nothing more needs to be said about its emotional effects on readers. Many letter writers in the first thousand years of the common era were, in...