"Box the Compass": Paul at Sea with Melville and Serres

Abstract: "Three times I was shipwrecked," Paul of Tarsus wrote. "I spent a night and a day in the open sea," he continued. In this reading of Paul, influenced by Michel Serres and Herman Melville, the "openness" of the sea refers to its vast indistinguishable expanse. It also refers to the ways the sea opened Paul to understand the "interior" as part of the infinite of the exterior, as Pip experienced during his time adrift in Melville's Moby-Dick . Paul's formats (as law) were threefold: divine order, linguistic designation, and political identity. Paul saw the watery part of the world, and it taught of the inescapable disorder splashing around these formats, as ways of establishing being and ontological specificity in a turbulent world. The sea taught the indistinguishable nature of distinctions; it taught the newness of life. Traveling through water, even in baptism, signified a freedom from law and sin, for Paul. It was an entrance into a less singular body. This essay argues that this open body, unboxed from the law, provides a way to live with the planet and its warming waters.