Life Beyond Death, Life Beyond Law:

Paul's Theology and the Political Crisis of Our Time

by: ​Nicholas Bergen

Thinkers like Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin have highlighted the ‘biopolitical’ character of modern politics and the social contract tradition. Politics is an instrument for controlling the excesses of human life—for warding off the (supposed) violent and aggressive tendencies of life in its natural condition. Hobbes called this condition the ‘war of all against all.’ It is the situation that arises when the state is dissolved, the rule of law loses its power, and all that remains is the right of each individual to try and survive however they can, using violence if necessary.

In order to avoid such a dismal situation, the story goes, people assemble and give up their individual right to violence for the sake of the law. They constitute themselves as a unified political body, agreeing to submit to the rule of law and to shared social norms. No longer does an individual have the right to (violently) appropriate whatever they need to survive; they must obtain their livelihood through the proper legal channels. From here on out, the only legitimate violence is violence exercised by the state for the sake of defending society and the rule of law against any threats they might encounter.

Occasionally, a state may fail to provide the basic means of life to its people. Or, it might perpetuate intolerable injustices, failing to deliver the mutual benefits it promised by overcoming the ‘war of all against all.’ In this case, it is natural that the people should overthrow the state and constitute a new one—one that will allow all people to live together peacefully, one that will overcome once and for all the violent tendencies of human life in its natural condition.

In a sense, the whole political history of the last few centuries has been a search for the mode of government that could achieve just that. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the triumph of American-style liberalism as the dominant form of government, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared that this search was essentially complete. The world had reached the culmination of political history, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”1

The 21st century has shown Fukuyama’s proclamation to be anything but a triumph. Western liberal democracy has been the dominant mode of government across the globe, but every day we are reminded of its failure to create a world in which people can peacefully live together, and it has certainly failed to overcome the violence (supposedly) endemic to natural human life. Instead, it has ravaged the globe with never-ending crises (e.g. the environmental crisis, refugee crises, economic crises, crises of political legitimacy, and public health crisis, all of which, I will note in passing, are related).

On the one hand, these crises reduce whole swaths of the global population to a precarious existence, compelling them to seek the means of survival outside the proper legal channels. The effects of industrial capitalism—climate change and the political instability that follows—have devastated the homes of millions, forcing families to attempt dangerous (and often illegal) escapes to other countries. The effects of American militarism and foreign policy have inflicted terror on countless communities and deprived millions of the hope for a dignified life, leading many to extremist organizations.

​On the other hand, the people affected by these crises are stripped of their political privileges. States respond to them not on the basis of legality or respect for their political rights but on the basis of the threat they present to the wavering order. Consider U.S. drone policy in the Middle East: in the name of security, bombs are dropped indiscriminately and without respect for international norms of war. Consider the detention facilities on the U.S.-Mexico border or the shanty-town migrant camps in southern Europe: people are herded like animals and forced to live in grotesque conditions, often with little recourse to legal representation. Consider Guantanamo Bay: prisoners are denied both the rights of due process afforded to citizens and the rights afforded to prisoners of war by the Third Geneva Convention.

Instead of overcoming the chaos of the ‘war of all against all,’ the fragmenting Western liberal democratic order actually precipitates it at the margins. Instead of overcoming the violence of natural human life, the state perpetuates it and participates in it. And as the crises deepen, this fact just becomes clearer and clearer. In emergency situations, the state’s only imperative is to do what it needs to do to survive, by any violent means necessary. To paraphrase the Invisible Committee, in a world where the state of emergency has increasingly become the rule, the police appear to be nothing more than a gang, and the justice system nothing more than a criminal association.2

Furthermore, this is all that we are left with in the so-called “end of history.” The collective political imaginary is bereft of alternative models for society and government. It is as if constitutive political organizations have exhausted their possibilities. Even if the people were to assemble to draw up a new political order, one gets the sense that nobody would even know where to begin.

This is a feeling that resonates within the social and political movements of the 21st century. Take for example the George Floyd Uprising of 2020. Many poor black communities in the U.S. have been devastated by economic crises, capital flight, and gentrification—but the people left behind by the movements of capital are treated as threats: huge sums of money are invested in police forces that, for years, have exercised violence in these communities with near impunity. In the first days of the revolt against this violence, the masses showed little interest in demanding police reform or alternative models of policing. They simply wanted to abolish the irrational violence, to defeat the lawless police forces perpetuating it, to destitute the society that sanctions it. To many people, the current institutions are intolerable, yet a coherent vision for the institutions of the future is nowhere to be found. Taken together, these facts are enough to lead one down the path of despair and nihilism.

Nobody gave a more pointed description of this feeling of despair than Nietzsche when we wrote of the death of god. With a sense of apocalypticism, Nietzsche describes the void left by the decline of the old ‘gods’ that united people, providing their shared political and spiritual lives with a sense of direction:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us?3

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Nietzsche is not the first to speak of the death of god. Centuries earlier, the death of god was already narrated in the New Testament. There, of course, the message is not one of despair, but of resurrection, of the new life that is revealed beyond the aimlessness of this one.

St. Paul gives a particularly rich metaphysical account of this new life—and it remains increasingly relevant in today’s uncertain political climate. According to Paul, life itself undergoes a radical transformation in Christ’s death and resurrection. The body of Christ that dies is substantially different from the body of Christ that rises from death. Christ dies as a soma sarkikon (a fleshy body) and as a soma psychikon (literally a psychical body—a body animated by an organic life principle, a psyche or a soul); he is raised a soma pneumatikon, a spiritual body.4

What does Paul mean by this distinction? First and foremost, he is concerned with the relationship between life and death. Both the flesh and the individual soul are corruptible, ephemeral, and ultimately succumb to oblivion. They are always involved in an oscillation between natality and mortality; death is the most certain inevitability. Paul also suggests that the soma psychicon need not be restricted to the life-principle that animates an individual body, but can also refer to the life-principles that animate a nation.

Paul calls these the thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers that rule over the Earth.5 They are the ‘gods’ of the nations that unite and give life to a nation of people. Of course, these political forces do not overcome death, but rather economize the relationship between life and death. As we have seen, the modern state understands itself as an instrument to manage and overcome the violence and death that defines natural human life, in the absence of the state. However, the threat of death always creeps in from the periphery, and in times of crisis, we are reminded that even the souls of great nations are corruptible and eventually wither away. In the transformation of life enacted by the resurrection, Christ has conquered every Earthly power that economizes violence and death, and he reveals a life that is beyond their sway—and indeed, beyond death itself.

This is the life in the soma pneumatikon--the spiritual body—as Paul calls it. How should we understand this spiritual life? David Bentley Hart has convincingly argued that it would be a gross misreading of Paul to suggest that the pneuma is something supernatural, residing in a heavenly realm beyond this Earth; this is certainly not how Paul’s contemporaries would have understood him. On the contrary, the pneuma is not confined to any single cosmic sphere, and it involves a real transformation in the material world no less than it promises everlasting life in heaven.6

Nevertheless, the life of the pneuma knows nothing of the oscillation between individual lives and death. On the contrary, it is an inexhaustible wellspring of vital energy, expressing and manifesting itself in an infinity of forms. It is transindividual, something we can only experience in communion with the world and with others, and it surpasses the passing away of individual bodies. In this life we find the truest expression of the beings that we are: we are not alienated, transiently existing creatures, tragically abandoned to temporality and inevitable death. Rather, we find our true life in each other, in the community which is a manifestation of a vital and eternal life that knows no death. As John Milbank describes it:

Life as such knows no death, is more original than death, and survives every death; indeed, as Leibniz argued, life as process knows only metamorphoses, not extinctions, such that of a dead creature we can only really say that it has ceased to appear as living, not that its life, its share in life, has ceased ‘to be’.7

Therefore, the pervasive crisis of political institutions should not be a cause for despair, but an opportunity to destitute them, to elaborate a new kind of life beyond them. It is our faith that this life will ultimately prevail. Such faith is not an ideology that we argue for but something that can only be experienced in the life we share together and in the love we have for one another. The Invisible Committee described it well when they wrote that it

doesn’t stem from an ideological fixation but from a basic, immemorial, lived experience: that of community--which nullifies all the axioms of economy and all the fine constructions of civilization. There is never community as an entity, but always as an experience of continuity between beings and with the world. In love, in friendship, we have the experience of that continuity. In my calm presence, here and now, in this familiar town, in front of this sequoia sempervirens whose branches are stirred by the wind, I experience that continuity...There is no myself and the world, myself and the others, there is me and my kindred, directly in touch with this little piece of the world that I love, irreducibly.8

This is the other experience of life, this experience of the vital force that flows through all of us, that manifests itself and expresses itself in an infinite number of ways and yet is simple, immutable, and timeless, irreducibly one. It is this potential that new struggles are trying to elaborate as they turn away from new constituent political mediations, new schemes that must always rely on violence to defend themselves from the chaos of life that they exclude, and as such, simply represent new configurations of the economy of death. Most certainly the years ahead of us will be tumultuous, but let us keep the faith, remembering Paul’s words:

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.9

Notes:

1.  Francis Fukukama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989), 4.
   
2.  Invisible Committe, To Our Friends, trans. Robert Hurley (Pasadena: Semiotext, 2015), 76.
   
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press 2001), 120
   
4. 1 Corinthians 15 (all references to the NSRV)
   
5.  Colossians 1:16
   
6.  Cf. David Bentley Hart, “Everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong,” Aeon, and especially “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients.” Church Life Journal.
   
7. John Milbank, “Paul Against Biopolitics.” Theory Culture and Society 2008, Vol. 25(7-8): 142.
   
8. Invisible Committee, Now, trans. Robert Hurley (Pasadena, Semiotexte, 2017), 131.
   
9. ​1 Corinthians 15:56-58.
   

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Nicholas Bergen

is a graduate student at Georgia State University, studying history of philosophy and political thought.