Jewish Greek culture, Paul de Tarsus posed the basics of Christianity. In a recent trial, the philosopher Olivier Boulnois shows how this double culture has shaped deeply “the essence of Christianity”.
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Paul of Tarse, born at the beginning of the i century and died around 67, is known for his epistles who have established certain foundations of Christian theology. These texts, prior to the Gospels, have fascinated many thinkers (Augustin, Luther, Nietzsche, Heidegger …). Likewise his figure, haloed of mystery, plot still today.
How will the Judeity of Paul, his Greek culture and his Christian faith? What relationship does it maintain with philosophy? What kind is the wisdom that Paul proposes to bring up in the world? In Saint Paul and philosophy. An introduction to the essence of Christianity (PUF, 250 pages, 22 euros), Olivier Boulnois, Director of Studies at the Practice Ecole of the High Studies (Paris), specialist of medieval philosophy, sees in the “apostle of the Gentiles “A paradoxical embodiment of the essence of Christianity.
You write that your book aims to identify” the essence “of Christianity. In what sense does this word be heard?
Olivier Boulnois: I propose to read Paul as an introduction, a path of access to Christianity, among others. Speaking of “essence of Christianity”, I try to approach the heart of Christianity from a key figure of its origin, Paul of Tarsus. But I do not want to present the system of Christian doctrine. It’s not about defining “from above” Christianity, from his dogmas and history. It’s about understanding Christianity as a form of life.
Here, the essence of Christianity, it is “the Christian being”: what is the own Christian existence? What does it change, for a Jew of the century and for its correspondents, to believe in Jesus Messiah? How does it change its relationship to the world, to others and to itself? What concept of time, logos, does it imply?
Taking Paul as a starting point, a Judean of Greek culture, you assume the paradoxical character of such an essence …
Absolutely. We tend to read Paul A posteriori, an anchronic way: since Christianity has emerged as a distinct religion of paganism and Judaism, we interpret Paul as if it was neither Jewish nor Greek. But it is the opposite: Paul is on behalf of the Jewish and Greek. Paul is simply a Jew who adheres to the Messiah, a “messianist” (it is the meaning of the Greek Christianos).
It writes before Christianity comes off from Judaism. Of course, justifying the integration of Greeks into the community, it contributes to this separation. But he does not know it. If Paul and the first apostles are Jewish, the heart of the Christian being, the center of Christianity, is not in itself: it is in Judaism.
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