serres - ego credo

© Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and CultureVol. 12–13, 2006, pp. 1–11ISSN 1075-7201

EGO CREDO

MICHEL SERRESAcadémie française and Stanford University

Saint Paul combines in one singular person the three ancient formats,Jewish, Greek, and Latin, from which the Western World sprang. Adevout Pharisee, he was born in Tarsus into a family of the Diaspora, and

educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel; he observed Mosaic Law and con-stantly cited the Torah, both Psalms and Prophets, with erudition. It alsoseems likely that he knew Greek philosophy, at least by way of Philo the Jew,since he wrote and spoke the Greek language and cited some of its authors,saying that he admired its wisdom, practiced its elegance, and dreaded its reason. As a Roman citizen, like his father, he took pride in this status; he musthave known Roman Law, since after being sentenced by the imperial courts,he addressed an appeal to them.

Saint Paul not only symbolizes the cultural melting pot amongMediterranean sailors, port-merchants, and occasional scholars during the Pax romana; he above all embodies the integral man built by the Law, theLogos, and the Administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraicmonotheism, Hellenistic rational Wisdom, and Roman Law, themselvesrespectively shaped by ritual in the Temple, harmony in the Cosmos, and theCity-State in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, a sys-tematic world, and an all-powerful god promotes excellent modes of conduct.

Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, rose up out of thetrinity of his belonging; he traveled the world over, and he invented the com-ing era. In so doing, he braved three disasters: the persecution of his fellows,the mockery of Greek philosophers on the Areopagus, and his trial and prob-able execution by Rome. In and through Paul, all the superior and lastingachievements of the Indo-European and Semitic traditions stem from this orig-inal bifurcation; the good news he proclaims is incarnated and grafted on himand through him; from him, the branch of a new creature springs forth.Although his ancient formats imply a belonging to three different communi-ties, the new man identifies with none of them in order to create somethingentirely new. But what?

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BELONGING AND IDENTITY

In a previous book, I wrote that my identity cannot be reduced to my belong-ing to certain groups. So do not call me “old man,” a male, or a writer, but putme, if you must, in whichever subcategory designates the corresponding age,sex, or profession. Apart from these characteristics, who am I? Me. All the rest, including what the government bureaucracy obliges me to write on myso-called “identity” card, merely indicates some of the subcategories to whichI belong.

If you confuse belonging and identity, you make a logical error that is cer-tainly serious, but, in the end, relatively benign. Moreover, you set yourself upto make a deadly mistake, that of racism, which consists precisely in reducinga person to one of his groups. We owe this distinction (which is so importantthat I like to repeat it) to Saint Paul. We owe it to him both in theory, becausehe elaborates it, and in terms of his life, because the Good News that he bringsbreaks with the three ancient formats, all three of which were associated withgroups.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek,” says Paul, “there is neither bond norfree, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). All he mentions here areclasses, sexes, languages, or nations—in short, all categories or groups. Whathe means is that there is no longer any belonging in the earlier sense, leavingonly the identity I = I: “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:10).For Paul, the only thing left is this “new creature”: I, the adoptive Son of God,through faith in Jesus Christ; I, full of faith and without works, without pride;I, empty, poor, and nothing: universal.

Who am I? I am I, and that is all. If we put aside the subcategorical defi-nition of belonging (x å A), the principle of identity becomes evident, not in aformal way, as in the Aristotelian sense of a = a, but as an individual singular-ity, whose ordinary, even minute aspect Saint Paul frequently emphasizes. (Iwill return to this idea of emptiness.) Better still, the principle of identitydefines this singularity, not arbitrarily but as God’s free gift. Transcendence hadpreviously granted, in its mercy, election to a group; now transcendence gives identity to the singular.

The first quotation above refers to the Greek, Jewish, and Roman commu-nities, to social classes and to sexually defined roles; the second refers to theinitial event that allowed the self to emerge: the incarnation of Jesus Christ, hisdeath and resurrection. In these two brief sentences, belonging and identityare distinguished for the first time. Identity breaks free from belonging. Inother words, Paul’s message breaks free from the formats.

When he speaks of the sinful flesh from which only faith in theResurrection can deliver us, Saint Paul refers not only or necessarily to thebody and its habits, needs, or passions, but to the immersion of the indi-vidual in a group where, eager to feel its fusional warmth, he submits to its


laws and adopts its reactive aggressiveness. The Epistles thereby illustratewhat I have in the past called the libido of belonging. We commit themajority of the sins of the flesh because we have been mimetically trainedby peer pressure and by our blind enthusiasm for group, national, tribal,team, and family solidarity, by special interests, favoritism, and corruption.Who has the courage to say I? We commit these sins more often than I does,since the sin concerns us collectively, which is to say the Law, rather thanthe personal I that frees us from the Law. When Saint Paul “frees [us] fromthe Law,” he first and foremost releases our own identity from any collec-tive bonds.

THE NOVELTY OF THE I

Did the I ever exist in the eras that preceded Saint Paul’s Epistles? The demo-cratic citizens of Athens (“democratic,” in the sense that they were concernedwith distinguishing their elite group from slaves, foreigners, and other out-siders without any sort of work or profession) busied themselves with theaffairs of their city-state: they made sacrifices to their namesake Athena at des-ignated ceremonies; they warred from time to time with Sparta, Thebes, or the Persians; thus they organized, honored, and defended their us. As a group,they denounced both those who objectively observed the heavens, andSocrates, who subjectively advised one to know oneself. No Greek philosopherever says I. These political animals, to use Aristotle’s term, willingly excludedthe subjective and the objective. Their standards, norms, and formats derivefrom their belongings.

Similarly, ever since their covenant, the Chosen People have turned totheir Law: respecting it, revering it, and teaching their children its sacred history, fighting in its name when necessary, against the Philistines and theSamaritans, and throwing the ethnoi out of the Temple. The us manifests itselfin God’s covenant of election. God is the only one who states the principle ofidentity: I am that I am. I do not know if Rome, with its immortal invention,the Law, designated any other legal categories beyond male heads of house-holds, senators, tribunes representing plebeians, and citizens—always repre-sentatives of a group. In this sense, Rome was just as sparsely populated withindividuals as Greece.

So by the beginning of the first century AD, the notion and practice ofbelonging were widely disseminated throughout the entire Mediterranean.Greek culture taught one type of belonging, which was at once political andcosmic; the tradition of Israel transmitted a second type, holy belonging; andRome a third type, juridical belonging. Still another type, economic and socialbelonging, which separates slaves from those called free and born as such, waspracticed by civilizations the world over. And dominant males were convincedthat nature had inscribed in the body a final type: sexual belonging. Saint Paul

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announced the extinction of this ancient man defined exclusively by hisgroups and their genealogy, yet without ever, to my knowledge, saying“Christian” or “Christianity,” probably out of a desire not to create a new influ-ence group or any other measure of collective reference. Forsaking these formats thus implied for him forsaking their respective belongings. And so heleft behind the truths that made him what he was.

What an extraordinary new project: to spread throughout the world asubjectivity that does not refer to any one culture, that is not linked to any onelanguage (at least not since Pentecost), that is not attached to any one traditionor lineage, and that is not bound by contract. I do not mean to say that SaintPaul entirely controlled this project or that he was immediately successful inbringing concrete social and historical changes with it. I am simply saying thatI perceive in his Epistles a first glimmer of this project.

THE INITIAL EVENT: DAMASCUS

Both the Acts and the Epistles say many times that Saint Paul’s conversion tookplace on the road to Damascus. Serious historians have long disdained the stories of Archimedes’s bath and Newton’s apple. However, anecdotes often say more and say it better than explanations.

STEPHEN

But even before the story Paul tells of his conversion, an event so widely com-memorated by painters, musicians, and poets, there is another story—perhapsa darker, more historical account, since he himself clearly witnessed it, but adecisive one. Seated upon the robes of his companions, Paul sees the lynchingof Stephen. As the stones fly, the victim cries out, “I see the heavens opened,”and, destroyed by the blows, he dies.

The distance of his observer position allows Saint Paul to see the conse-quences of the Law. Forged as he was out of three powerful materials—ritual,logos, and order—he suddenly reflects upon that which these three ancient formats were founded: collective violence. From here onward, I will no longeranalyze the historical Acts or legendary traditions, I will no longer cast my eyesupon this ghastly array of facts, but I will instead reread the Epistles. What isit that Saint Paul will soon write? That the Law creates Sin. Be released fromthe Law, he says, which is to say from the Flesh. This means (at least in part):be released from social affiliations. Deliver yourself from the Law, from theFlesh, which is to say from Sin. Abandon the Law, the Flesh, Sin, in otherwords, Death . . . resurrect yourself. . . .

Now, let us put down these explosive texts, stop reading them, renouncetheir commentary, and return to the narratives. Let us look unflinchingly upon

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the bloody act that I did not wish to describe. What do you see there but theexecution of the letter of the Law: a group of persecutors united as one socialbody, with its libido of belonging, and, at the center of the group, anotherbody—crushed, set upon, subjective, and bloody? You see the unspeakableviolence, yes, the sin, that brings together the group that commits it, and atfront and center, an individual subject, isolated by Death. All gather aroundStephen: this is the us, according to the Law, which the letter kills indeed. Thedeacon has been assassinated, buried beneath the stones; here is the subject,sub-jectus, thrown under. The I under the us. In this story we can touch theflesh of the future Epistles.

THE THREE CONTINGENCIES OF UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS

In order to construct this subject, the Epistles give a new meaning to threeterms: a verb, a substantive, and a subject.

Credo no longer means “to believe,” in the sense of opinion, confidence,or conjecture (pistis). I write these words in Greek and in Latin, to better showthat the verb “to believe” does not translate them. Instead, their meaning is thefollowing: assume that “1” represents the objective truth (or from a subjectivestandpoint, the certainty or conviction that this truth entails), and let “0” rep-resent, on the other hand, objective falsehood and the subjective refusal ofsuch an error. Henceforth, “to believe,” newly defined, means to trace one’swhole life—hesitating, trembling, and shaking—along the axis that separatesand unites them. Faith ventures forth in this contingent trembling. Paul says:“For we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7).

Fides no longer means good faith or contractual confidence in a promisemade by or to others; it is no longer a term of anthropology or Roman Law,nor is it the revered bona fides of the Roman religion, but rather a contingencythat combines certainty and doubt, conviction and its negation, light andshadows, knowledge and ignorance, yes, faith, this simmering folly, unknownto previous ages. Who could thus doubt more than the Son who, at themoment of death, cries that his Father has forsaken him?

As an act that cannot be reduced to any collective reference, this new faithcreates the ego that becomes its subject. Ego is the implied first word of theChristian Credo—as if it were still buried beneath the stones—(ego) credo—andin the end, it defines the universal subjectivity induced by the trembling, per-petual motion of faith. Who am I? The contingency of my faith. I am the onethat faith justifies, sustains, and saves. Again, who am I? The opposite of cer-tainty; a fear that wavers between existence and nonexistence; in short, I am a consciousness. I am thus the exit and ending of all belonging.

Thus modern consciousness is born: unique, double, multiple, trem-bling, thrown into both time and eternity. It undoes mastery. In a single stroke

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Saint Paul thus invented, as a writer, the tradition of recognizing the timid andmodest self, of confessing one’s life (long before Saint Augustine), and the tradition of the autobiographical novel (in the company of one or two of his contemporaries). The self derives its existence from the three theologicalvirtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity—but which actually describe in detail thethree contingent axes that structure the New Man. Faith constructs him first.

Fortunately, Hope moves the New Man. No one has understood this bet-ter than Charles Péguy, who represents Hope as a little girl darting and hidingbehind the skirts of grown-ups on a walk, tirelessly going from one to another,and covering twice the distance. Adults, you have the firm intention of reach-ing your destination, whereas she blindly and merrily comes and goes, backand forth, along the limits of your journey, full of youthful energy. Hope is a motivator; it leads and drives. Where to? Who can say? Does Hope guaran-tee access to triumphant life beyond all doubt? No, it merely promises andanticipates, but without ensuring. “The plowman should plow in hope” (1 Cor. 9:10). Does he know if he will harvest? Like Faith, Hope trembles anddoubts of Paradise, trying to live eternity in the present moment. Hope moldstime; it models and stretches it.

Time, as both Faith and Hope experience it, is saturated with arrivals,happenings, events, and beginnings. They both plunge the self into this timeof coming events. They strip it of all of its formats and immerse it in newness.Faith is what happens when the self, without any certainty, settles down andlives intensely in and through contingency. Hope is movement without cer-tainty, and lives, held in and from contingency. Thus modern consciousness is shaped and molded.

Finally, Charity fills relations with others with love. Inverting the contrac-tual, political, and juridical relations of ancient communities, this total con-nection with others is forged in a complete uncertainty of reciprocity. Howeverone responds to it—with aggression, disrespect, insults, blows, indifference,disdain, hostility, or mockery—it remains a Love that “bears all things, believesall things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). Charity’s whole-ness integrates Faith and Hope and plunges, without any guarantees, into theshifting and dangerous contingency that is specific to relationships. This integration is adventurous and generous. This integration allows the new I tojoin in relations with the universality of mankind, whatever the origin of one’sbelonging may be.

The new self is built on a triple contingency—on faith and doubt; on hopefor an indefinite period of time; and on bonds of unconditional love—threeweaknesses and three strengths. Less than two millennia after Saint Paul,Descartes tried to reframe the question, by seeking certainty. I am not con-vinced that he succeeded, since contingency and the lack of certainty—inshort, doubt—presided over the birth and formation of his subject. Montaignegrasped this desperate trembling much better.

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Only faith, hope, and charity remain, removed from all virtue; theydescribe with precision the nonontology of this new subject: this word clearlysignifies its noninstallation, its noncertainty, its nonbeing, its nothingness.

CREDO AND COGITO

I do not really know what I mean when I say, I think. But I do not know anymore at all what I mean when I say, I am. The cogito starts in uncertainty andends in obscurity.

When the first Christians said, I believe, they suddenly knew that theywere no longer either slaves or senators, foreigners or women, Jews or Greeks,sailors or farmers. They were for the first time singular individuals, alonebefore God and by the grace of Jesus Christ. Moving in this way from cate-gories into universal subjectivity, they were resurrected. Overcome with char-ity, they had hope and faith in Him who recreated them.

The rigorous credo engenders the vague cogito. The credo precedes the cogito like an ancestor. The former says more than the latter.

PAUL, THE SON

Let us come back to relationships. Who makes Jewish Law? Who speaks theGreek truth? Who declares Roman Law? Who makes this faultless Law withhundreds of articles monitoring every gesture and every minute of the day?Who speaks this unfailing truth underlying daily thought and behavior, theuniverse, and the global system of things and men? Who righteously declaresthis jurisdiction and these policies to be applied from the Capital to the veryends of the Earth? Who can demand of others what is Just, True, and Powerful,if not He who is just, true, and all-powerful: the Father prophet, the Fatherphilosopher, and the Father judge. God the Father, the Wise Father, theEmperor Father. Paul bears a Trinity of Fathers on his shoulders, a universaltrinity of universal Fathers. All of the ancient formats refer to a father figure.

It is significant that right before saying “I am what I am,” Paul speaks of himself as “one untimely born” (1 Cor. 15:8) and as an adoptive son (Gal. 4:5)—not as a figure of speech, but as the pure truth. For he himselfleaves his respective Fathers when he delivers us from Jewish and Roman Lawand from Greek Wisdom, and he wants us to do the same. The contingency ofgrace and faith thus replace the necessity of the Law. Insanity and Weaknessreplace Wisdom and Force. Has the father figure failed?

Who henceforth is full of grace, lawless, insane and unwise, weak andpowerless? The Son. He was once born of a Pharisean father and Roman citi-zen; once ill-born for having collaborated in the stoning death of Stephen;once reborn at the feet of Gamaliel; and once again reborn in the middle of theroad to Damascus, where he saw the Son. Aborted, adopted, a prodigal Son, a

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traveler, a drifter, Paul forsakes the power and the truth of Fathers. To myamazement, I hear in Saint Paul’s Epistles the language of a philosopher-son,spoken for the first and perhaps the last time ever. Everyone before him—prophets of Israel, the wise and learned of Athens, the juris-consults ofRome—had played the role of the father on the stage of the universal. Thinkof Plato’s zeal in rushing before the tyrant of Sicily and of Aristotle beforePhillip, then of Descartes at the palace of the Queen of Sweden, Voltaire withFrederick, and Diderot with Catherine the Great. And after them, philosophersand scholars, critics and interpreters, writers and professors, intellectuals and instructors have all competed to adopt the power and the role of theFather as soon as possible, even after their own is dead, carelessly murderedby their own hand. It is a question of being right, seizing power, judging, dom-inating knowledge, changing the course of history, understanding everything,elaborating global systems, advising, never being mistaken, commanding; ofdestroying and criticizing until every text has been reduced to ashes. It isalways a question of power, never of knowledge. I have never read anythingbut Fathers, either from the Church, the University, or Science; and they wereall saints, heroes, or geniuses. I was raised from childhood by people andwords that were never wrong.

And so I was grateful to meet the outcast and the orphan. I am like him,at least in his weaker points. Paul, the Son, is not always right; he does notknow everything; he does not command or advise; he seeks; he hesitates; hestumbles; he drifts; he makes mistakes; he turns back; he risks error, transgres-sion, whippings, lapidation, storms and shipwreck, hunger and thirst, impris-onment, solitude, the descent down a prison wall in a basket. He is a fragileclay vessel, pressed on all sides but not broken; unsure what to hope for butnot in despair; persecuted but not forsaken; beaten, but not shattered. SaintPaul lives like a Son, thinks like a Son, and acts like a Son at least three differ-ent times, toward his three different Fathers—Jewish, Greek, and Roman—before whom his failures inevitably accumulate: he is persecuted, ridiculed,and tried. The Son’s faith replaces the father’s truth and law; the Son’s hopereplaces the father’s assurance and certainty; the Son’s charity replaces thefather’s power and glory. But far from killing him, he prays: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bear-ing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15).

We all live, suffer, think, drift, and invent as sons. Such is the universal-ity of the ego-son, which Descartes himself would not have understood,because it makes one tremble with faith, hope, and love. The philosopher-sonhaunts the tent of contingency whose walls shudder in the wind. I could notunderstand why we lived in the era of the Son, I could not make sense of thetheology of the Son, before grasping this philosophy, whose very difficulty lay

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in the fact that its author does not present himself as a Father. Paulos meansslight or small: a son.

THE ADOPTIVE SON

He is a son then, not by blood, so to speak, but by adoption. This destabilizesgenealogy: content with his role as guardian, Saint Joseph never has children,and Jesus invokes his and our Father in Heaven. Father and son forsake theirroles, their bonds, and, I’m tempted to say, their rivalry. Likewise, Jesus’s fraternal relation to James, whether metaphorical or biological, is hardly men-tioned in the Bible, and its significance is for historians an endless subject oferudite speculation. As for Jesus’s mother—whose existence is biologicallyunavoidable, but who remains a virgin after childbirth (to the disbelief ofmany)—her innocence partly erases her motherhood. The age-old scenario of procreation, replayed and modified, turns into adoption, in which affectionreplaces blood ties (Serres 2001, 174–78). Indeed, genealogy had to bereworked in order for a philosopher-son to be conceivable. It goes without say-ing that this deconstruction of blood relations through adoption, legalized byRoman law, favored the universalization of humankind that God promisedAbraham. In order for all men and women to become members of the elect,they could not come from Sarah’s bosom alone.

Conversely, more recent returns to blood ties represent a dismal throw-back to ideas that are sick and outdated. From the very beginning, Westernthought has marked time according to this new adoptive genealogy that goesbeyond blood ties. Ever since, we have not been born and will not be bornfrom either earth or flesh and blood, but instead from grace or free will—indeed, from adoptive bonds, which is to say, love. Thus were established anew measure of time, a new way of thinking, a new conscience, a new era, and probably Science as well. But we must still adopt humankind, since, inthis long and perhaps never-ending process of hominization, we have yet to define it.

THE MURDER

Did the son then go and take the place of his father? He became a father, mostlikely because of his age and his responsibilities, as others become fathers outof the love of a woman. He had children out of charity in Corinth and inPhilippi, and among the Galatians and the Romans; the fatherly love he felt forthem made him shed real tears when they faltered in turn. He had become afather. Does this mean that he forsook the role of the Son?

No, because he never tried to kill the Father. Neither Jesus nor Paul—whowere both sons, the one in flesh and blood, and the other in theory, although

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both were in some sense adopted—advise parricide, like Plato againstParmenides and Oedipus against Laios, making us believe that this act isindelibly inscribed in our subconscious. But both Jesus and Paul teach us tolove the Father as he loves the Son. “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in theform of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emp-tied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedientunto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him”(Phil. 2:6–9). Through their pardoning of one another, the Son and the Fatherlove one another. Seated eternally face to face, they mutually honor and paytribute to each other.

DEATH

Paul thus departs from the fundamental format that sums up all others, theformat that says to become a father, one must kill his own and follow there-after in his footsteps. Before reading Saint Paul, I did not cognitively under-stand how a philosopher-son thought, nor did I understand the meaning ofthe religion of the Son. The entire West descends from this son and finds itselfin him

Forced into reason’s format, we repeat the roles of the Master. An exam-ple of this is the Master/Slave dialectic. Both Master and Slave function inaccordance with dialectical motion like mechanical dolls; they appear to be atodds, but in reality they both respect the Empire of Death, each acting asDeath’s slave. The Master only acquires power through death and only domi-nates through the terror it inspires. Saint Paul saw death under the Law, heuncovered this truth and desired life instead; he never wanted to reign like aMaster. Like his divine model, he suffers death, but does not impose it.

If there is a Lord, Paul is a Son, like me, like you, like us all. If a Fatherdoes exist, He is not here, but in Heaven, transcendental and eternal. The realworld knows only Sons. Here, they renounce power, repetition, format, andnecessity. By undoing these laws, they forget death. They are thereby resur-rected. How do you become a Son? By abolishing the Law of Death.

When this happens, the reconciliation of Father and Son will come topass. The Father will love the Son and the Son will love the Father. At last,each will be in his place: the Son to the right of the Father. Resurrection:death’s reign will end.

The Acts of the Apostles tell how Paul escaped from Damascus by beinglowered down the city walls in a wicker basket; how he fled safe and soundfrom countless cities throughout Asia and Europe; how he was persecuted,judged, occasionally lapidated, frequently whipped, struck, exiled, and pur-sued; how an earthquake freed him from prison; how he arrived in Malta

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despite storm and shipwreck. These are all stories in which the Apostle of the Gentiles escapes death. Thus the story of his life conveys, in action and on a smaller scale, what Saint Paul declared in words: the Resurrection. Life, his and ours, is a struggle against death. His faith tells him that this struggle is won. “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?”(1 Cor. 15:55). Does the story in the Acts stop without warning in order to avoid announcing Paul’s martyrdom and his final disappearance? I think so.The lack of an ending fits so perfectly with his repeated announcements of ever-new beginnings that it is almost inevitable that the Acts and Paul do not end.

NOTE

The author used the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in preparing this article.

REFERENCE

Serres, Michel. 2001. Hominiscence. Paris: Le Pommier.

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serres - ego credo

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