Hey Morris--I don't think I saw that follow-up, so thanks for the reminder.
As I understand you, your question is how we can translate Paul's cosmological/metaphysical presuppositions, which give rise to his language about soma and pnevma, into a more modern idiom. I think there are two considerations here.
First, one must begin, I think, by asking whether and what exactly needs such translation. Surely we don't mean to suggest that simply because an ancient idiom is not modern, that the modern is therefore superior. That may indeed be often the case. But that will be a case-by-case judgment. For instance, we might well note that Paul's use of "nature" elsewhere is not really what we mean by "nature" typically today. But perhaps his use, while not replacing our modern sense, can also compliment ours. In other words, it must first be established why the main or only task is "translation" between idioms rather than mutual enrichment. In this case, I'm not sure why a modern perspective necessarily undercuts the second task and must fix upon the first. What, after all, is the body of a quark? If anything, I'd think the modern scientific view, which tends both to multiply physical dimensions and to blur our common sense distinctions (e.g. between "now" and "then," or between "wave" and "particle"), might serve to open us anew to certain acceptations of Paul's own idiom.
Second, insofar as a modern person concedes the possibility or actuality of personal identity persisting through bodily death, I'm not sure why Paul's idiom from soma to pnevma (or pnevmatikon soma) is less useful than an idiom that speaks of life before death to life beyond death. Is the latter really more readily conceivable? At any rate, were I to suggest a path of translation, I might suggest conceiving of pnevma as the perfection of self-consciousness, where the "self" really places a distinctive role as the principle that unifies subject and object, knower and known, and the identity-relation between these (always *in act*). From this perspective, the perfection of spirit will achieve a unity not merely of subject and object, or even of internal and external, but also of all oppositions we use to carve up the world--including more modern ones such as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd personal perspective, or 4-dimensional, organic, (self-)conscious life. Spirit perfected will encompass all these and yet be limited by the logic of none, considered in itself.
Loved it! Thanks for sharing. A few questions if you have a spare moment:
1. “Rectified”: how would you elaborate what this means? Is it the rightly ordered life of self-mastery under mind/spirit to be experienced now? Or is it the future life beyond this aeon where the problematic elements are removed and all is pneumatic (cf. ch 5 ‘awaiting rectitude’)? Or both, depending on context?
2. Love the use of italics in ch 2 with the I/me. Helpful for sure. Would you say that, for Paul, our fundamental “identity” (is that a bad concept to apply to Paul?) of a person can either be associated with the flesh/the elements or with Christ/spirit, and that we should seek the latter? It sounds like you’re saying the (italicised) ‘I’ that is associated with flesh dies and the ‘I’ that is Christ is vivified in salvation?
3. Is living by spirit / aligning our elements according to spirit determined by our minds? Like, how does one do this? It seems to be assumed knowledge to the audience.
4. Is it right to say that, for Paul, there’s one sense in which the flesh is dead and gone, and another in which it is still a thing we grapple with? The former being the flesh-me which is (mystically?) crucified with Christ in baptism (how?), and the latter being just the ‘stuff’ my body is still partly composed of (though now also infused with pneuma) that the pneuma/christ-me is not identified with and subdues?
Thanks for reading and for these thoughtful questions, Morris. I'll respond to each as concisely as possible:
1. I think it is both. For Paul, on my reading anyway, we can begin living the very re-alignment with spirit for which we also are awaiting. God has willed to deliver us from the "aeon of looming evil," has done so in Christ "already," and yet, precisely because it is spirit that we become, we must participate in the process of becoming spiritual. As with Ann Jervis's recent work, it's not so much that the aeons are "overlapping," but that they are qualitatively different spheres/ways of being--different cosmoses, if you will. The very process by which we become, in Christ, through faith, by grace, truly "spiritual ones," is the process by which we take our origin from spirit, re-align the elements in spirit, and thus become in a new cosmos, that cosmos wherein "the human being" is truly "a living being," the only cosmos God finally makes.
2. Very nearly so. But the italics do something else to trouble our common conceptions of "identity": the very "I' which "was crucified" with Christ is *also* the "I" or "me" that "now lives by the faith of the Son of God," who also lives *in* Paul. Hence too Paul's peculiar expression in Chapter 1: God "marked him out from his mother's womb" (which, by the way, is being born "according to the flesh," as was Ishmael in Chapter 4) to reveal "the Son *in* me," and thence make known that same Son--the one in him--to "the nations." So the process of transformation, the "spiritual life" (with its fruit from Chapter 5, the highest of which is love), is a process that includes the simultaneous destruction of the "I" which seems to be total, the "I" born according to flesh, and the creation/formation of the "I" which actually is total, the "I" born according to spirit, through faith and in Christ.
3. Paul seems to think it requires baptism, and that it definitely requires our own intentions/actions in the Spirit. Hence the dig in Chapter 3--"Oh mindless Galatians!"--isn't just a dig, but a specific diagnosis of the sort of life they are seeking: one without intention, without mind, without spirit, merely in conformity to the rigid "elements" and categorizations that they uncritically absolutize as the true cosmos. Love--or "faith being activated through love"--especially undoes this illusion and perfects the mind, the spirit.
4. It seems highly significant that while Paul uses "flesh" (sarx) throughout this whole letter, he uses "body" (sôma) only one time, in the penultimate verse of the letter. And there he says that he is "taking on the marks of Christ in his *body*," as if taking on Christ's marks transforms flesh into body. Then in the next and final verse he speaks of "the Spirit" (with an article) "of you all," that is, of the Galatians. So while flesh and spirit vie throughout, the final synthesis is of spirit and body--I would call this the Body of Christ from elsewhere in Paul. That we identify ourselves ignorantly with mere givens--the elements themselves, law itself, seasons themselves, the letter itself--renders these givens lethal for us: they cannot "make things live," as he says of the Law here. They cannot *be our true origin*, in other words. They are not bad. But we have badly configured them. We need to re-align such elements "in spirit," and Christ shows us how to do that: be crucified to them, that you *and them* might be resurrected, and thereby transfigured (flesh to body). It's ultimately a radical claim, I think: those things by which we must "begin" are so easily thought to be absolute *as our beginnings*, because we absolutely needed them at the beginning. But Christ has transcended such beginnings and has thereby become our true beginning, in spirit. We too, if we are "in Christ," are in our true beginning. From that specific vantage, then, we must re-align the beginnings we once needed and thus thought absolute for us. Now, this does *not* mean erase particularity. In fact, if we erased the elements, that would still grant them a status of absolute beginning, even if to negate that status. No: we can remain in them--Jews can live Jewishly, nations can live nation-ly--if only we wed them to the spirit of Christ and thus "make them live." But this is also a personal process, as Chapter 2 makes known. In becoming Spirit in Christ, and thus transforming elements to spirit and flesh to body, we are already beginning to co-create the one and only true cosmos of God, "new creation."
So good! Thanks for taking the time to reply! That definitely helped me to draw together some more of the diverse threads of the letter.
My only follow up question—if you have the time—is about how we convert/apply/use Paul’s expansive perspective as seen here as contemporary Christians theologising the mystery of salvation with very different philosophical (and physiological and cosmological) presuppositions. I appreciate that much of the discussion has (fruitfully) danced between historical reconstruction and more developed theological implications—and I also appreciate that, in themselves, such perspectives are still very powerful and inspiring in pursuing the spiritual life of love—but I am often unsure how to ‘translate’ a schema like Paul’s into my contemporary world.
E.g. I don’t think I can authentically see my ‘body’ as undergoing a physical/substantial metamorphosis from sarx to pneuma, just because of our modern ‘worldview’. I can certainly take that as a symbol of the moral and noetic growth that I progressively experience as I try to imitate Christ’s love, but it seems it’s a lot more ‘physically actual’ to Paul (which is totally fine, given his context… no problem with that).
Hey Morris--I don't think I saw that follow-up, so thanks for the reminder.
As I understand you, your question is how we can translate Paul's cosmological/metaphysical presuppositions, which give rise to his language about soma and pnevma, into a more modern idiom. I think there are two considerations here.
First, one must begin, I think, by asking whether and what exactly needs such translation. Surely we don't mean to suggest that simply because an ancient idiom is not modern, that the modern is therefore superior. That may indeed be often the case. But that will be a case-by-case judgment. For instance, we might well note that Paul's use of "nature" elsewhere is not really what we mean by "nature" typically today. But perhaps his use, while not replacing our modern sense, can also compliment ours. In other words, it must first be established why the main or only task is "translation" between idioms rather than mutual enrichment. In this case, I'm not sure why a modern perspective necessarily undercuts the second task and must fix upon the first. What, after all, is the body of a quark? If anything, I'd think the modern scientific view, which tends both to multiply physical dimensions and to blur our common sense distinctions (e.g. between "now" and "then," or between "wave" and "particle"), might serve to open us anew to certain acceptations of Paul's own idiom.
Second, insofar as a modern person concedes the possibility or actuality of personal identity persisting through bodily death, I'm not sure why Paul's idiom from soma to pnevma (or pnevmatikon soma) is less useful than an idiom that speaks of life before death to life beyond death. Is the latter really more readily conceivable? At any rate, were I to suggest a path of translation, I might suggest conceiving of pnevma as the perfection of self-consciousness, where the "self" really places a distinctive role as the principle that unifies subject and object, knower and known, and the identity-relation between these (always *in act*). From this perspective, the perfection of spirit will achieve a unity not merely of subject and object, or even of internal and external, but also of all oppositions we use to carve up the world--including more modern ones such as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd personal perspective, or 4-dimensional, organic, (self-)conscious life. Spirit perfected will encompass all these and yet be limited by the logic of none, considered in itself.
Fortuitously, Morris, I just happened to come across this passage from David Hart's forthcoming Christology book (The Light of Tabor). It's close to my last point:
"Inasmuch as Paul seems to speak of a transformation of the resurrected body from a 'psychical' or 'animal' to a 'spiritual' condition, rather than the shedding of one body for another, it is not unreasonable to think that he used the term 'body'...to indicate something inseparable from personal identity, or at least from whatever constitutes a continuous 'local' self."
Thanks again! Really made me think 🤔 haha. I suppose we’re grasping at articulating what the most fundamental ‘stuff’ is that makes created beings created beings, assuming this is what the self—singular and continuous before and after death—is ‘made up of’, so to say. And given this mystery exceeds our reach, it’s fair to say both quantum mechanics and stoic cosmology, for example, can be mutually enlightening. (Could be missing many of your points but that’s where I’m at!)
That does, however, make me wonder if the more daring deification language that almost transcends the creator-creation distinction in the end (eg Maximus talking of us becoming unbegotten/uncreated) doesn’t also imply that we might become incorporeal, transcending even the ‘stuff’ of createdness. ???
It’s easier to digest if God is pneuma (as per stoicism), but not if deification is becoming an incorporeal God 🤔
No idea… haha just putting it out there! Thoughts? Thanks again!
Intrigued by your translation of 'the verse to end all verses' in Galatians:,"since we know that a person is not rectified from works of law unless through the faith of Jesus" The faith of Jesus makes much better sense of course, and puts the onus of rectification back into hands of God (where supposed 'justification theories' attempt to put it all into ours), but wondering what's the thinking behind "unless through", is this a nod to Messianic Jews and a way of not denigrating 'the law' as though it were something intrinsically evil?
My sense is that “unless through” here means that Jesus’ faith is itself not just the “beyond” of law, but its perfection. I find that Paul is consistent in this type of judgement: the letter *alone* kills, the law *alone* kills, the elements *alone* kill. Each needs Spirit, which Christ makes available as the actual completion of “the living being” (Gen 2.7), and which we access through faith that transfers us “in” Him, indeed makes us “out of” him instead of out of these other things that are dead in themselves. So the pattern is a fulfillment that doesn’t nullify, but rather vivifies what in itself is death.
Probably just means "for ever and ever." But a deeper theological reading--and thus a still truer meaning--is that the very glory of God is comprised of all the aeons/ages, themselves comprised of all the good that we are to "do towards all" (6.10), by which the Father delivers us, through Christ and as Spirit, out of "the aeon of looming evil" (1.4).
I want to flag History & Dogma's latest episode, which was inspired by this endeavor: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/paul-within-cosmic-elements/id1702741919?i=1000671752295
A lovely translation. A bit unsettling in places, but that’s a mark of a job well-done, I suppose.
You are AMAZING and a great scholar!
Hey Morris--I don't think I saw that follow-up, so thanks for the reminder.
As I understand you, your question is how we can translate Paul's cosmological/metaphysical presuppositions, which give rise to his language about soma and pnevma, into a more modern idiom. I think there are two considerations here.
First, one must begin, I think, by asking whether and what exactly needs such translation. Surely we don't mean to suggest that simply because an ancient idiom is not modern, that the modern is therefore superior. That may indeed be often the case. But that will be a case-by-case judgment. For instance, we might well note that Paul's use of "nature" elsewhere is not really what we mean by "nature" typically today. But perhaps his use, while not replacing our modern sense, can also compliment ours. In other words, it must first be established why the main or only task is "translation" between idioms rather than mutual enrichment. In this case, I'm not sure why a modern perspective necessarily undercuts the second task and must fix upon the first. What, after all, is the body of a quark? If anything, I'd think the modern scientific view, which tends both to multiply physical dimensions and to blur our common sense distinctions (e.g. between "now" and "then," or between "wave" and "particle"), might serve to open us anew to certain acceptations of Paul's own idiom.
Second, insofar as a modern person concedes the possibility or actuality of personal identity persisting through bodily death, I'm not sure why Paul's idiom from soma to pnevma (or pnevmatikon soma) is less useful than an idiom that speaks of life before death to life beyond death. Is the latter really more readily conceivable? At any rate, were I to suggest a path of translation, I might suggest conceiving of pnevma as the perfection of self-consciousness, where the "self" really places a distinctive role as the principle that unifies subject and object, knower and known, and the identity-relation between these (always *in act*). From this perspective, the perfection of spirit will achieve a unity not merely of subject and object, or even of internal and external, but also of all oppositions we use to carve up the world--including more modern ones such as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd personal perspective, or 4-dimensional, organic, (self-)conscious life. Spirit perfected will encompass all these and yet be limited by the logic of none, considered in itself.
Loved it! Thanks for sharing. A few questions if you have a spare moment:
1. “Rectified”: how would you elaborate what this means? Is it the rightly ordered life of self-mastery under mind/spirit to be experienced now? Or is it the future life beyond this aeon where the problematic elements are removed and all is pneumatic (cf. ch 5 ‘awaiting rectitude’)? Or both, depending on context?
2. Love the use of italics in ch 2 with the I/me. Helpful for sure. Would you say that, for Paul, our fundamental “identity” (is that a bad concept to apply to Paul?) of a person can either be associated with the flesh/the elements or with Christ/spirit, and that we should seek the latter? It sounds like you’re saying the (italicised) ‘I’ that is associated with flesh dies and the ‘I’ that is Christ is vivified in salvation?
3. Is living by spirit / aligning our elements according to spirit determined by our minds? Like, how does one do this? It seems to be assumed knowledge to the audience.
4. Is it right to say that, for Paul, there’s one sense in which the flesh is dead and gone, and another in which it is still a thing we grapple with? The former being the flesh-me which is (mystically?) crucified with Christ in baptism (how?), and the latter being just the ‘stuff’ my body is still partly composed of (though now also infused with pneuma) that the pneuma/christ-me is not identified with and subdues?
Thanks Jordan!!
Thanks for reading and for these thoughtful questions, Morris. I'll respond to each as concisely as possible:
1. I think it is both. For Paul, on my reading anyway, we can begin living the very re-alignment with spirit for which we also are awaiting. God has willed to deliver us from the "aeon of looming evil," has done so in Christ "already," and yet, precisely because it is spirit that we become, we must participate in the process of becoming spiritual. As with Ann Jervis's recent work, it's not so much that the aeons are "overlapping," but that they are qualitatively different spheres/ways of being--different cosmoses, if you will. The very process by which we become, in Christ, through faith, by grace, truly "spiritual ones," is the process by which we take our origin from spirit, re-align the elements in spirit, and thus become in a new cosmos, that cosmos wherein "the human being" is truly "a living being," the only cosmos God finally makes.
2. Very nearly so. But the italics do something else to trouble our common conceptions of "identity": the very "I' which "was crucified" with Christ is *also* the "I" or "me" that "now lives by the faith of the Son of God," who also lives *in* Paul. Hence too Paul's peculiar expression in Chapter 1: God "marked him out from his mother's womb" (which, by the way, is being born "according to the flesh," as was Ishmael in Chapter 4) to reveal "the Son *in* me," and thence make known that same Son--the one in him--to "the nations." So the process of transformation, the "spiritual life" (with its fruit from Chapter 5, the highest of which is love), is a process that includes the simultaneous destruction of the "I" which seems to be total, the "I" born according to flesh, and the creation/formation of the "I" which actually is total, the "I" born according to spirit, through faith and in Christ.
3. Paul seems to think it requires baptism, and that it definitely requires our own intentions/actions in the Spirit. Hence the dig in Chapter 3--"Oh mindless Galatians!"--isn't just a dig, but a specific diagnosis of the sort of life they are seeking: one without intention, without mind, without spirit, merely in conformity to the rigid "elements" and categorizations that they uncritically absolutize as the true cosmos. Love--or "faith being activated through love"--especially undoes this illusion and perfects the mind, the spirit.
4. It seems highly significant that while Paul uses "flesh" (sarx) throughout this whole letter, he uses "body" (sôma) only one time, in the penultimate verse of the letter. And there he says that he is "taking on the marks of Christ in his *body*," as if taking on Christ's marks transforms flesh into body. Then in the next and final verse he speaks of "the Spirit" (with an article) "of you all," that is, of the Galatians. So while flesh and spirit vie throughout, the final synthesis is of spirit and body--I would call this the Body of Christ from elsewhere in Paul. That we identify ourselves ignorantly with mere givens--the elements themselves, law itself, seasons themselves, the letter itself--renders these givens lethal for us: they cannot "make things live," as he says of the Law here. They cannot *be our true origin*, in other words. They are not bad. But we have badly configured them. We need to re-align such elements "in spirit," and Christ shows us how to do that: be crucified to them, that you *and them* might be resurrected, and thereby transfigured (flesh to body). It's ultimately a radical claim, I think: those things by which we must "begin" are so easily thought to be absolute *as our beginnings*, because we absolutely needed them at the beginning. But Christ has transcended such beginnings and has thereby become our true beginning, in spirit. We too, if we are "in Christ," are in our true beginning. From that specific vantage, then, we must re-align the beginnings we once needed and thus thought absolute for us. Now, this does *not* mean erase particularity. In fact, if we erased the elements, that would still grant them a status of absolute beginning, even if to negate that status. No: we can remain in them--Jews can live Jewishly, nations can live nation-ly--if only we wed them to the spirit of Christ and thus "make them live." But this is also a personal process, as Chapter 2 makes known. In becoming Spirit in Christ, and thus transforming elements to spirit and flesh to body, we are already beginning to co-create the one and only true cosmos of God, "new creation."
So good! Thanks for taking the time to reply! That definitely helped me to draw together some more of the diverse threads of the letter.
My only follow up question—if you have the time—is about how we convert/apply/use Paul’s expansive perspective as seen here as contemporary Christians theologising the mystery of salvation with very different philosophical (and physiological and cosmological) presuppositions. I appreciate that much of the discussion has (fruitfully) danced between historical reconstruction and more developed theological implications—and I also appreciate that, in themselves, such perspectives are still very powerful and inspiring in pursuing the spiritual life of love—but I am often unsure how to ‘translate’ a schema like Paul’s into my contemporary world.
E.g. I don’t think I can authentically see my ‘body’ as undergoing a physical/substantial metamorphosis from sarx to pneuma, just because of our modern ‘worldview’. I can certainly take that as a symbol of the moral and noetic growth that I progressively experience as I try to imitate Christ’s love, but it seems it’s a lot more ‘physically actual’ to Paul (which is totally fine, given his context… no problem with that).
Thoughts???
Hey Jordan, I know this is an old thread now but I’d so love to hear your thoughts on my last questions if you can spare a moment!
Hey Morris--I don't think I saw that follow-up, so thanks for the reminder.
As I understand you, your question is how we can translate Paul's cosmological/metaphysical presuppositions, which give rise to his language about soma and pnevma, into a more modern idiom. I think there are two considerations here.
First, one must begin, I think, by asking whether and what exactly needs such translation. Surely we don't mean to suggest that simply because an ancient idiom is not modern, that the modern is therefore superior. That may indeed be often the case. But that will be a case-by-case judgment. For instance, we might well note that Paul's use of "nature" elsewhere is not really what we mean by "nature" typically today. But perhaps his use, while not replacing our modern sense, can also compliment ours. In other words, it must first be established why the main or only task is "translation" between idioms rather than mutual enrichment. In this case, I'm not sure why a modern perspective necessarily undercuts the second task and must fix upon the first. What, after all, is the body of a quark? If anything, I'd think the modern scientific view, which tends both to multiply physical dimensions and to blur our common sense distinctions (e.g. between "now" and "then," or between "wave" and "particle"), might serve to open us anew to certain acceptations of Paul's own idiom.
Second, insofar as a modern person concedes the possibility or actuality of personal identity persisting through bodily death, I'm not sure why Paul's idiom from soma to pnevma (or pnevmatikon soma) is less useful than an idiom that speaks of life before death to life beyond death. Is the latter really more readily conceivable? At any rate, were I to suggest a path of translation, I might suggest conceiving of pnevma as the perfection of self-consciousness, where the "self" really places a distinctive role as the principle that unifies subject and object, knower and known, and the identity-relation between these (always *in act*). From this perspective, the perfection of spirit will achieve a unity not merely of subject and object, or even of internal and external, but also of all oppositions we use to carve up the world--including more modern ones such as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd personal perspective, or 4-dimensional, organic, (self-)conscious life. Spirit perfected will encompass all these and yet be limited by the logic of none, considered in itself.
Fortuitously, Morris, I just happened to come across this passage from David Hart's forthcoming Christology book (The Light of Tabor). It's close to my last point:
"Inasmuch as Paul seems to speak of a transformation of the resurrected body from a 'psychical' or 'animal' to a 'spiritual' condition, rather than the shedding of one body for another, it is not unreasonable to think that he used the term 'body'...to indicate something inseparable from personal identity, or at least from whatever constitutes a continuous 'local' self."
Thanks again! Really made me think 🤔 haha. I suppose we’re grasping at articulating what the most fundamental ‘stuff’ is that makes created beings created beings, assuming this is what the self—singular and continuous before and after death—is ‘made up of’, so to say. And given this mystery exceeds our reach, it’s fair to say both quantum mechanics and stoic cosmology, for example, can be mutually enlightening. (Could be missing many of your points but that’s where I’m at!)
That does, however, make me wonder if the more daring deification language that almost transcends the creator-creation distinction in the end (eg Maximus talking of us becoming unbegotten/uncreated) doesn’t also imply that we might become incorporeal, transcending even the ‘stuff’ of createdness. ???
It’s easier to digest if God is pneuma (as per stoicism), but not if deification is becoming an incorporeal God 🤔
No idea… haha just putting it out there! Thoughts? Thanks again!
Intrigued by your translation of 'the verse to end all verses' in Galatians:,"since we know that a person is not rectified from works of law unless through the faith of Jesus" The faith of Jesus makes much better sense of course, and puts the onus of rectification back into hands of God (where supposed 'justification theories' attempt to put it all into ours), but wondering what's the thinking behind "unless through", is this a nod to Messianic Jews and a way of not denigrating 'the law' as though it were something intrinsically evil?
My sense is that “unless through” here means that Jesus’ faith is itself not just the “beyond” of law, but its perfection. I find that Paul is consistent in this type of judgement: the letter *alone* kills, the law *alone* kills, the elements *alone* kill. Each needs Spirit, which Christ makes available as the actual completion of “the living being” (Gen 2.7), and which we access through faith that transfers us “in” Him, indeed makes us “out of” him instead of out of these other things that are dead in themselves. So the pattern is a fulfillment that doesn’t nullify, but rather vivifies what in itself is death.
into the "aeons of aeons"
What does this phrase mean?
Probably just means "for ever and ever." But a deeper theological reading--and thus a still truer meaning--is that the very glory of God is comprised of all the aeons/ages, themselves comprised of all the good that we are to "do towards all" (6.10), by which the Father delivers us, through Christ and as Spirit, out of "the aeon of looming evil" (1.4).
That almost sounds like "All is One in Christ" on a metaphysical level?
Yes. Cp. Col 3.11.