Chapter 1 - Augsburg Fortress

28 | Eros and the Christ
precisely because he was absent and the letters would not allow her to forget
it—Pliny’s body was longed for. Seneca, preferring ideas to bodies, provided his
dear Lucilius no such protection. And Paul, sticking with letters to house his
Christology, reminds his readers of his absence (Phil 1:12) and confesses pothos.
He will not let Christ or the believers in Philippi suffer Lucilius’s fate.
Reading through Pothos
In this chapter I have wondered about the difference longing makes for the
reading of Philippians. Hundreds of letters written in the first thousand years
of the common era raise intriguing questions, such as the relative value of
emotion and reason in our understanding of Pauline Christology. My purpose
in reviewing this literature, however, is not to argue that Philippians reflects
an established epistolary form called “the letter of longing”; the handbooks do
not mention such a type, and categorization for its own sake is uninteresting.
Rather, in preparation for the next chapter I wanted to place Paul in the
company of those who deepened friendship by confessing pothos, who verified
this desire with an oath, characterized readers as “longed-for ones,” and
acknowledged the heart as host, visitant, scripted surface, and space for carrying
about the absent beloved. Enhanced friendship came at a cost: when erōs is
in play separation hurts all the more. Letters bring both delight and torture.
How then do we think about Christology when the Jesus we have available
for examination and logical exposition is delivered in such an emotionally
conflicted medium?
Letters are usually thought simply to convey information. They re-present
the writer and simulate his or her voice. It has not been my intention in this
chapter to call into question the veracity of either of these two claims, only
their completeness, since letters are also objects like photographs or locks of
hair that bring loved ones into presence only then to reiterate their absence.
In the ancient world, letters were reread, wept over, kissed, and placed in bed
in order to soothe the longing desire they never failed to rekindle. Modern
scholars, however, have approached Philippians as if the letter were only Paul’s
παρουσία and ὁμιλία, and they read his writing as only the expression of his
ideas or the contents of his commands. This is insufficient, because the very
persons some of us want to know (Paul, Euodia, Jesus, Syntyche, Timothy,
Epaphoditus, and the Philippian community) are entangled in Philippians’
vicious circle of comfort and affliction, in the letter’s delivering the writer and
abducting this fictive presence.