Return to Paul

Many were surprised when the Pope, in opening the Pauline Year in celebration of the 2,000th anniversary of the Apostle's birth, made an explicit reference to the Apostle's shipwreck in Malta. He had surely not been engaged to do it by the Malta Tourist Authority as part of their advertising campaign. Why do you think that Paul's coming to Malta is given such universal importance?

The Pope has certainly read the fairly recent works of at least three major contemporary philosophers who have written on the revolutionary and still relevant political implications of Paul's action and writings. It is within that general context that the significance of the Shipwreck emerges.

The first of the three is the leading Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes, who dedicated his 'testament', recorded when he was almost dying, to The Political Theology of Paul and the way in which it inspired such influential modern thinkers as Nietzsche and Freud.

Taubes, who is best known as a historian of culture at the time of the birth of Christianity and for his exchanges with the great philo-Nazi political theorist, Carl Schmitt, analyses Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

He argues that when Paul spoke of the Law (Nomos) he was using an umbrella-term which covered Roman law and the moral principles of Greek philosophy as well as the Torah of Moses. This 'Law' had allowed a soft compromise to be reached between the religious cult of the Emperor and the Jews who recognised no other god but Yahweh.

It was to confront this situation that Paul told the 276 people on board the ship in danger of sinking that "it was necessary" that he reached Rome.

One question that arises is this: If everything was happening, as the Book of Acts clearly implies, according to God's own plan, why did the deviation to Malta, that delayed Paul's arrival in Rome by several months, occur?

Maltese preachers often answer: Because of God's special love for the Maltese.

But the second of the major contemporary philosophers who, I am sure the Pope has read, Alain Badiou, devotes his book to show that Paul's greatest contribution to philosophy is to deny that God divides humankind into the "chosen" and the "excluded". As Paul says most clearly in the Letter to the Galatians, neither Jews, nor Greeks, neither men nor women are privileged. So there must have been some other reason for the complicated story of the Shipwreck.

Do you have any idea as to what the reason could be?

Everybody knows that Paul's whole life and thought were dominated by his belief that on the road to Damascus, the Risen Christ called him to a unique mission: to carry the "good news" to all nations, i.e. beyond the Jewish people. In fact, Paul preached throughout the world where Hellenistic culture prevailed. There were differences in the religious practices of the Athenians and the Corinthians and the Ephesians and the rest, but they were all variations of the same basic cult of the Heaven-centred pantheon that had replaced the earlier essentially earth-centred cult prevalent in the Mediterranean with the Mother-Goddess and Fertility at its heart.

It is striking that in the account of the Shipwreck, it is stressed that the Maltese were barbaroi i.e. neither Greek nor Roman-speaking. Clearly, despite the fact that Malta had fallen under Roman rule two centuries before, there is ample archaeological evidence that sanctuaries - in which Phoenician or Punic cults essentially of female deities associated with fertility and the earth, such as Ras il-Wardija in Gozo - continued to be built. Thus, the prevalent popular culture in Malta seems to have been that of a radically different type of religion from that prevalent in all the areas to which Paul's missionary journeys had taken him.

It might be therefore that the Shipwreck in Malta served the historical purpose of making it clear that Paul's extra-Judaic mission was not just to the Greek world with the culture of which he had grown up to be familiar together with Hebrew tradition from the time of his upbringing in his native city of Tarsus. The 'good news' was to be proclaimed also to those whose culture was equally alien to the Jewish and the Greek. This motivation would plainly not be valid had Paul been shipwrecked on an island the historic culture of which was not Phoenician/Punic.

Who is the third major contemporary philosopher to whom you referred at the beginning for his Pauline writings?

It is the Italian philosopher, among the most popular today, Giorgio Agamben. Like Badiou, who was a Maoist at the time of May '68 and is still an atheist, Agamben comes from a Leftist background. He builds his reading of Paul on that of Taubes. Among other ideas relevant to contemporary politics Agamben's book called The Remaining Time gives particular attention to Paul's phrase, "Let those who make use of the world, do it as if they were not making use of it" (1 Corinthians, 7,32). According to Agamben, Paul was here affirming the distinction between the right to use and the right to own things.

In the present phase of history, human beings had the right only to manage earthly goods. They did not have the right of property over them, in the sense given to the word "property" in Roman Law. Agamben finds Paul propagating here the style of life that the environmentalists urge upon us nowadays.

I remember discussing this moral injunction of Paul's with Arvid Pardo when we were exploring both the political and the theological foundations of the common heritage of humankind. It is also plainly relevant to such other political theories as those of the Dialogue Society and self-managing productive organisations that I have been recalling in the context of current political developments in Malta.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.