By the late nineteen-eighties, after launching a fairly successful literary career, French intellectual Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re had become depressed and unproductive: \u201cI could no longer write, I didn\u2019t know how to love, I knew I wasn\u2019t particularly likable. Just being me became literally unbearable.\u201d Influenced by his eccentric godmother Jacqueline, who was a mystic, a poet, and, above all, a devout Catholic, he read Augustine\u2019s \u201cConfessions\u201d and the Gospel of John. That gospel spoke to him so powerfully that he began to read a daily extract and write commentary on it. Broken, vulnerable, and stripped of his intellectual pride, he \u201cbecame accessible to my Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n
He became a committed Christian, but for only three years. What shocks him now is the extremism of his faith. He was drawn to theological stringency, melodramatic all-or-nothings, and obnoxiously proud circularity. He is appalled to find in his old notebooks such remarks as this: \u201cThe sole argument that can allow us to admit that Jesus is the truth and life is that He says it, and since He is truth and life, He must be believed.\u201d And this: \u201cAn atheist believes that God does not exist. A believer knows that God exists. One has an opinion, the other knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n
It has become exceedingly rare to encounter crises of faith as experienced by a secular intellectual, and Carr\u00e8re\u2019s oscillation between orthodox fervor and wistful agnosticism holds undeniable fascination.<\/p>\n
The figure who is chiefly responsible both for the spectacular growth of Christianity and for the kind of fierce moral atmosphere that might have led to Tacitus\u2019 gibe is Paul, who lies at the center of this book \u2014 far more so than Jesus does. For several reasons, perhaps. We know more about Paul than about Jesus. Paul is Christianity\u2019s great and early ideologue, the man who shaped its legacy, who took a cluster of strange parables and sometimes gnomic statements and, emphasizing the apocalyptic, built them into a theology. And Paul\u2019s fanaticism draws Carr\u00e8re\u2019s religious admiration, even as it repels and alienates his French humanism.<\/p>\n
Jesus was an event within Judaism; it was not especially scandalous that a young Jewish radical went about proclaiming himself the Messiah, ambiguously calling himself \u201cthe son of Man,\u201d and quarrelling with the rabbis about aspects of the law. But it was another thing entirely to claim \u2014 as Paul did \u2014 that Jesus came to earth to wash away an original sin contracted by humans in Eden; that this Jesus was crucified by the Romans, was buried, and rose from the dead; and that he would soon come again, in a rescue mission that would usher in a new eternal kingdom. In place of the intimate, familial struggle of the Jews and their God, Paul invokes a strict theology of sin and salvation. Kierkegaard, at his most Protestant-masochistic, says that Christianity\u2019s singularity lies in its understanding of sin; if that\u2019s true, it was Paul\u2019s singularity rather than Jesus\u2019. The new theology transfers Judaism\u2019s healthy involvement in this life onto a palpitating anticipation of the next; the present becomes eternity\u2019s duller portal.<\/p>\n
Paul was born Saul, in Tarsus (now in Turkey), perhaps a few years after the birth of Jesus, whom he never met. He was a devout student of Judaism, and was sent to Jerusalem for schooling with one of the most eminent rabbis of the age. Filled with piety, Saul became an eager persecutor of the early Christians, who were known at this time as \u201cthose who follow the Way.\u201d As Luke relates in Acts, Saul was on his way to Damascus, to arrest those blasphemers he could find and bring them back to stand trial in Jerusalem, when a light blinded him, and he fell to the ground. Jesus\u2019 voice asked him, \u201cWhy are you persecuting me?,\u201d and then told him to go into the city and await his orders. Paul\u2019s conversion was momentous. During the next twenty years, this incandescent missionary visited Christian churches and communities from Corinth to Antioch; and when he could not reach them he wrote to them, setting down the epistles that form (with the Gospels) the core of the New Testament.<\/p>\n
The terror of the split self, the self who has turned from one pole to its opposite, was largely unknown in the ancient world, Carr\u00e8re maintains, until Paul\u2019s conversion. But because violent, sudden conversion had happened to Paul, \u201che must have dreaded, more or less consciously, that it could happen to him again.\u201d Carr\u00e8re is not afraid of Paul\u2019s reconverting from Christianity to Judaism (what might be considered the orthodox anxiety) so much as fearful of conversion generally. We are hardly surprised when he adds what we have all been thinking: that he is really talking about himself. He quotes a friend, who tells him, \u201cWhen you were a Christian, what you feared the most was becoming the skeptic that you\u2019re only too happy to be now. But who says you won\u2019t change again?\u201d Once a convert, always convertible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By the late nineteen-eighties, after launching a fairly successful literary career, French intellectual Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re had become depressed and unproductive: \u201cI could no longer write, I didn\u2019t know how to love, I knew I wasn\u2019t particularly likable. Just being me became literally unbearable.\u201d Influenced by his eccentric godmother Jacqueline, who was a mystic, a poet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[987,991,391,989,990,988],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}