St. Paul among the Philosophers

2 From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton

39 The standard notion that Paul created Christianity as we know it is fully justified: it was Paul who shifted the center from Christ’s acts and teachings to the redemptive quality of his death. Today, two thousand years later, this death of God is still an enigma: how to read it outside the pagan-mythic topic of divine sacrifice or the legalistic topic of exchange (payment for sin)? What exactly dies on the cross? In the history of Christianity, it was Protestantism which was “Paulinian,” focusing on the death of God, in contrast to “Johannine ” Orthodoxy and “Petrine” Catholicism. No wonder, then, that the most interesting moments in Catholic theology occur when it unexpectedly comes close to Protestantism. Such was the case with Jansenism, which gave a unique Catholic twist to the Protestant notion of predestination; and such is the case of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who thought through the notion of the “death of God” to its radical conclusion: only in Christianity, God himself has to go through atheism. Chesterton first formulated this vision of the traumatic core of Christianity in his religious thriller The Man Who Was Thursday, the story of Gabriel Syme, a young Englishman who makes the archetypal Chestertonian discovery of how order is the greatest miracle and orthodoxy the greatest of all rebellions. The focal figure of the novel is not Syme himself, but a mysterious chief of a super-secret Scotland Yard department who is convinced that “a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilization”: He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a Two From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton Slavoj Žižek 40 · Slavoj Žižek controversial sense. . . . The work of the philosophical policeman . . . is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.”1 As cultural conservatives would put it today, deconstructionist philosophers are much more dangerous than actual terrorists. While the latter want to undermine our politico-ethical order to impose their own religious-ethical order, deconstructionists want to undermine order as such. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s. . . . The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them.2 This provocative analysis demonstrates Chesteron’s limitation, his not being Hegelian enough: what he doesn’t get is that universal(ized) crime is no longer a crime—it sublates (negates/overcomes) itself as crime and turns from transgression into a new order. He is right to claim that, compared to the “entirely lawless” philosopher, burglars, bigamists, even murderers are essentially moral: a thief is a “conditionally good man.” He doesn...