Affecting Corinth

Jaimie Gunderson, “Affecting Corinth: Grief and Other Feelings in 2 Corinthians” (Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2020).

Among Paul’s undisputed letters, 2 Corinthians is a particularly affect-intensive text. The letter fragments reworked into what we now know as 2 Corinthians exhibit an array of emotions within multiple social encounters between Paul and his assembly, in the context of a conflict with rival apostles over Paul’s authority in Corinth. My dissertation focuses on the role of thinking, feeling, and remembering in the relations between Paul and the Corinthians to demonstrate how social worlds, boundaries, and power structures are (re)produced. I argue that attention to affect prompts a rethinking of the production (or dissolution) of Pauline authority and the concomitant making (or unmaking) of social relationships in the Corinthian assembly. My focus primarily lands on grief (λύπη), one of the most prominent affects in the letter. Functioning as both an aversive and therapeutic affect, grief works on and through bodies with an immediacy that involves the un-forming and re-forming of bodily and social spaces.

My dissertation develops a “triangular conversation”[1] among ancient texts, ancient theories of emotion, and modern theories of affect and cognition in order to open up new dimensions of Paul’s letter. My primary framework for this study follows feminist and queer theorist, Sara Ahmed, who reads emotion as “a form of cultural politics [and] world making.”[2] I also build upon the work of scholars reading biblical texts via affect theory, particularly Maia Kotrosits and Joseph Marchal. The theorization of the passions within modern theory shares a common emphasis with Hellenistic moral philosophy: the materiality of emotion. Another major companion to this study is the enactivist model of perception within the cognitive sciences––a so-called “second-generation” model of embodied cognition used to emphasize the incorporated interactivity of reading and hearing.[3] Instead of thinking about the readerly imagination as shaped by mental representations (as in the “first-generation” model of a “computational mind”), the enactivist model stresses perception as an (inter)active registering of one’s environment through the entire body. Moving beyond representationalist understandings of Paul’s language grounded in a “theory of the mind,” the enactivist model emphasizes the embodied (or aesthetic) experience of a reader/auditor. In the context of 2 Corinthians, then, the combination of affect theory and enactive cognition shifts our focus to the bodies in the orbit of Paul’s letter––Paul’s body, the bodies of his opponents, and the bodies of the Corinthians. This shift prompts a re-examination of the ways in which these bodies interact with and are impacted by the affective and incorporating rhetoric of Paul’s letter (whether read or spoken). Paul’s rhetoric does not passively fall upon the bodies of his audience, who then passively register its meaning. Rather, Paul’s meaning is enactively perceived through readerly feelings, memories, and histories that implicate and involve the entire body.

After laying out my theoretical and methodological considerations in the Introduction, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. Part I (“Making Paul’s Moral World”), containing Chapters 1 and 2, lays the foundations for the study by sketching out the aesthetics of ancient rhetoric with an overview of scholarly approaches to the passions in Hellenistic philosophy. Part II (“2 Corinthians”), encompassing Chapters 3-5, closely examines 2 Corinthians.

In Chapter 1, I examine competing definitions of the passions through a survey of the history of emotions in scholarship extending from Aristotle to Descartes and Darwin. I focus especially on the role of the body in the experience of feeling. I then question traditional cognitivist models used to approach ancient theories of emotions. In their place, I offer the enactive model as a way to take seriously the centrality of the thinking-feeling body in discussions of both moral philosophy and affect. Finally, I address the physiology of emotion and the soul in the various Hellenistic philosophical schools, ending with their exposition on the dangerous implications of out of control passions, especially grief.

Chapter 2 explores the emotional aesthetics of ancient rhetoric. In particular, I cast a critical eye to ekphrasis and enargeia and their traditional position in the “pictorialist” or “representationalist” model of understanding “imagetexts”––images created with words, whether written or spoken.[4] I put the imagetexts of ancient rhetoric in conversation with affect theory and with the enactivist model of perception as a means of charting new ground in thinking about rhetoric as an embodied, tactile, and spatial experience that was able to shape individual and collective subjectivities through an imaginative experience of bodily perception. I then ground this discussion in Lucian’s, The Wisdom of Nigrinus as an illustrative case study. Following this discussion, I assess previous scholarly approaches to the aesthetic dimensions (primarily visual discourses) of Paul’s letters.

Chapter 3 marks my transition to a close reading of 2 Corinthians by addressing the epistolary issues that plague the letter. I consider evidence for composite letters in antiquity and the reasons why 2 Corinthians is considered a composite letter. I also examine the epistolary genres of 2 Cor 10-13 and 2 Cor 1-7 (the two letter fragments under investigation in this dissertation) to understand how scholars have variously applied the epistolary types/styles found in the ancient epistolary handbooks of Ps.-Demetrius and Ps.-Libanius. My aim here is to rethink the connection(s) between affect and genre by giving weight to feelings rather than epistolary/rhetorical forms. I conclude the chapter by assessing the affective history latent in the Corinthian correspondence, especially the way that rising tension sets the stage for Paul’s rhetoric in 2 Corinthians.

In Chapter 4, I investigate 2 Corinthians 10-13, the “letter of tears.” Paul’s language is sarcastic, angry, and biting as he attempts to win his assembly back from his rivals’ influence. Paul’s impassioned tone is what has attracted scholars to the letter, but the models invoked to explain Paul’s emotions (i.e., “Paul the theologian” or “Paul the rhetorician”[5] ) have not given attention to the sociality of emotion or to how bodies are shaped by contact with other bodies. I therefore offer a new model of Paul––Paul-the-body-in-feeling––as a way to explore the affects that stick to Paul’s body. I invoke Joseph Marchal’s paradigm of “attraction-revulsion” to frame my discussion of the relational dynamic between Paul and the Corinthians.[6] Within this paradigm, grief is intimately linked with disgust. It both assumes a central position as a way to redirect the wayward souls of the Corinthians through rebuke and acts as an affect of evaluation that undoes and (re)creates the boundaries between bodies. Grief also serves as a deliberative affect, one that prompts the Corinthians to question their social allegiances and bodily positioning in the world.

Having established 2 Corinthians 10-13 as the “letter of tears,” I transition in Chapter 5 to an examination of how 2 Corinthians 1-7 depicts the unfolding reconciliation between Paul and the Corinthians. In these chapters, Paul provides an exegesis of the grief he caused the Corinthians and uses his own body as a model for how the Corinthians should properly manage their grief. In doing so, Paul demonstrates the transformative potential of grief. Whereas 2 Cor 10-13 was governed by the paradigm of “attraction-revulsion,” I suggest that Paul’s rhetoric in 2 Cor 1-7 works within an affective paradigm of burden and bliss––a circuit whereby reconciliation and joy are always mediated by grief and affliction. As a result of its transformative capacity and its mediation of positive affects, grief has temporal implications for the unfolding future of the Corinthian assembly. With the temporal implications of grief in mind, I assess the futurity of Paul’s assembly by thinking about grief as a queer affect––an affect that resists a fixed binary categorization as sadness or melancholy. Instead, grief weaves together vulnerability and pain with pleasure and joy into a unique bodily orientation toward the future. What Paul promises his Corinthian assembly is not so much an overcoming of grief, but their empowerment through grief––an embodied state that generates new possibilities and imaginaries.

In the Conclusion I step back from the close readings of 2 Corinthians in Chapters 4 and 5 to consider how the dynamism of affect changes the way we think about Paul’s letters. Following new materialist insights about the power of things, I reflect on the affective resonances of two particular things: the figure of Paul and his letters. Homing in on ideas of presence (physical, epistolary, or otherwise), I discuss how affective analyses prompt us to move beyond conceptualizing Paul’s letters as nouns (fossilized objects) toward thinking of them as verbs (dynamic goings-on). Ultimately, I demonstrate that affective analyses emphasize Paul’s letters as processual relationships between bodies and text(s) in which meaning is negotiated continuously rather than simply attributed. Using affect in this way means feeling out the ways that bodies experience and interact with things: words, images, physical letters, other bodies. If we turn our understanding of perception away from cognition as a passive mental activity toward an inter-agentic, interactive embodied experience, we gain new insights into the ways that affects animate meaning in the interactions between the culturally embedded bodies of Paul’s assemblies.

[1] I borrow this phrase from Jonas Grethlein, Luuk Huitink, and Aldo Tagliabue, “Introduction: Narrative and Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Greece,” in Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece: Under the Spell of Stories (ed. J. Grethlein, L. Huitink, and A. Tagliabue; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 6.

[2] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed.; New York: Routledge, 2015), 12.

[3] For an introduction to the enactivist model of perception Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).

[4] W.J.T. Mitchell coins this term in Iconology: Images, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

[5] Ryan S. Schellenberg devises these categories in Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education: Comparative Rhetoric and 2 Corinthians 10-13 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013) to characterize traditional scholarly approaches to Paul in 2 Cor 10-13.

[6] Joseph A. Marchal, “The Disgusting Apostle and a Queer Affect between Epistles and Audiences” in Reading with Feeling: Affect Theory and the Bible (ed. F.C. Black and J.L. Koosed; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019), 130.

Jaimie Gunderson is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Teaching and Research in the Religious Studies Department at George Mason University.