Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme (1997; English translation 2003) is one of the most provocative and influential philosophical readings of the New Testament in contemporary thought. Written by a committed atheist and Maoist thinker, it treats Paul's letters not as theological documents but as philosophical treatises that contain the founding logic of political universalism - a logic that Badiou argues is urgently needed for contemporary radical politics.
The Thinker and His Work
Alain Badiou (born 1937) is a French philosopher, playwright, and political activist whose major works - Being and Event (1988), Logics of Worlds (2006), and The Immanence of Truths (2018) - constitute one of the most ambitious philosophical systems since Hegel. His central philosophical concern is the question of the event: how does genuine novelty - something genuinely new, irreducible to the existing situation - enter the world? And what does it require of those who encounter it?
Badiou turned to Paul not as a religious figure but as what he calls a 'militant' - someone whose entire existence is reorganized around a singular, unprecedented event (the resurrection) that ruptures the existing order of things. The book emerged from his seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie and represents his effort to find in Paul's letters a philosophical template for the kind of radical political subjectivity he had been seeking in secular revolutionary traditions.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Galatians 3:28 - 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus' - is the text that most directly expresses what Badiou calls Paul's universalism. He reads this as a philosophical declaration: that the truth-event (the resurrection) creates a new subject position that is genuinely universal - making equal demands on everyone, regardless of identity, origin, or social position. This is not, for Badiou, a religious claim; it is a claim about the structure of truth: that truth is indifferent to the differences that constitute the existing social order.
1 Corinthians 1:27-28 - 'God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are' - is central to Badiou's argument about the anti-philosophical character of the event. Paul's 'foolishness' (moria) of the cross is not irrational; it is the name for a truth that exceeds the existing order of what counts as wisdom (Greek sophia) or power (Jewish sign-seeking). The event reveals the contingency of what seemed necessary.
Romans 10:12 - 'For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him' - confirms that the universal subject position Paul announces is not the sublation of particular identities into a higher synthesis (as in Hegel) but their suspension: the universal truth-event does not abolish difference but renders it indifferent to truth.
Core Argument
Badiou's reading of Paul turns on four philosophical concepts. The event is the resurrection: for Paul, the fact that Christ was raised from the dead is an unprecedented occurrence that ruptures the existing order of Jewish law and Greek wisdom alike. It cannot be predicted, derived, or verified by the existing frameworks; it simply happened.
The subject is created by the event: Paul does not believe in the resurrection as a pious Jew or a Greek philosopher but as someone whose entire existence has been reorganized around this singular occurrence. The subject is constituted by fidelity to the event - by the ongoing work of drawing out its consequences for every aspect of life.
The universal is constituted by the event's indifference to difference. Galatians 3:28 does not say that Jewish and Greek identities are abolished; it says they are irrelevant to the truth-event. The universal is not the negation of the particular but the truth's indifference to all existing particulars.
For Badiou, contemporary politics suffers from the absence of this logic. Postmodern 'identity politics' fetishizes difference and thereby abandons universalism; liberal universalism is abstract and empty, reducible to market relations. Paul's model - a genuine universal truth that emerges from a singular event and constitutes a new subject through fidelity - is the philosophical template that radical politics needs.
Intellectual Context
Badiou's Paul should be read alongside two other contemporary readings: Agamben's The Time That Remains (2000), which reads Paul through Benjamin's concept of messianic time, and Zizek's The Fragile Absolute (2000), which reads Paul through Lacanian psychoanalysis. All three are responses to the perceived exhaustion of secular revolutionary politics after 1989 and the discovery that Paul's letters contain philosophical resources that contemporary theory needs.
Badiou explicitly distances himself from theology. The resurrection is, for him, a 'fable' - not a historical claim he accepts or rejects but a narrative vehicle for the philosophical structure he is analyzing. This distinction has been sharply contested: New Testament scholars and theologians argue that Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 15 depends entirely on the resurrection being a real historical occurrence, not a philosophical posit.
Reception and Critique
The book has generated extensive response. Theologians including NT Wright and Douglas Campbell have engaged its reading of Paul, arguing that Badiou misses the specifically Jewish apocalyptic context that gives Paul's universalism its content. Feminist philosophers have noted that Badiou's emphasis on Paul's anti-identitarian universalism risks erasing the political significance of particular identities - precisely the criticism he directs at identity politics. Marxist political philosophers have debated whether the 'event' structure is genuinely materialist or covertly theological.
Legacy
Badiou's Paul reopened the question of the relationship between biblical theology and radical politics at the highest philosophical level. It demonstrated that Paul's letters, read philosophically, contain some of the most powerful thinking about truth, subjectivity, and universalism in the Western tradition - and that this thinking cannot be neatly categorized as either 'religious' or 'secular.'
Key Passages
'Paul's unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the community and juridical register, in order to deliver it over to the universal and the immeasurable.' (Chapter 4)
Contemporary Relevance
Badiou's question - what is the philosophical basis for a genuine universalism that is neither empty liberal proceduralism nor the sum of identity-group interests? - is among the most urgent in contemporary political philosophy. His reading of Paul suggests that the biblical tradition contains resources for this question that secular political theory has not yet fully processed.