Class and Calling

Agamben ( The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans ) makes an intriguing connection between the Pauline notion of calling and the Marxist theory of class. He takes a clue from the improbable etymology that links the Greek klesis to the Latin classis . Whether that etymology works or not, the analogy is there.

For Marx, the emergence of the bourgeoisie is decisive, a messianic moment in history, because it reveals for the first time the “accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual” (30). The proletariat incarnates the split between the individual and his social figure, which becomes apparent only when the bourgeoisie undermines the taken-for-granted status system that precedes it. The proletariat, Marx says, is “the dissolution of society as a particular estate” (quoted on 30). Somehow, the proletariat is also the class that alone is capable of abolishing the division and healing the class divisions of society.

Agamben draws this comparison: “The ekklesia, inasmuch as it is a community of messianic klesis – that is, inasmuch as it has become aware of [the arbitrariness marking each social condition] and lives under the form of the as not and usage” is comparable to the Maxist proletariat. Whoever is called by the Messiah dies to the old world and receives a new life, “so too is the proletariat only able to liberate itself through autosuppression. The ‘complete loss’ of man coincides with his complete redemption” (31).

Whatever the value of the specific comparisons, two suggestions follow: First, that Marxism was a secularization of the messianic. Second, that the church, the community where the divisions of the old are dissolved, puts the taken-for-granted status of society as much into question as Marx did. The church is called to be the social embodiment of that questioning.