29

Saint Paul is regularly present throughout Paul Ricœur’s writings on the symbolic. In the aftermath of the Second World War, he is a figure who suits the thought which takes upon itself the task assigned to philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular by Karl Jaspers in The Question of German Guilt [ Die Schuldfrage]. In 1949, this work brought Ricœur to confess that “we have not yet incorporated terror into an anthropology, nor seriously considered the historical and political dimension of man.” Within the political realm, the celebrated chapter thirteen of the Epistle to the Romans comes, for its part, to illustrate three stages of Ricœur’s thought. They frame “the political paradox,” namely that of the political as problem, the political as enigma, and the political as utopia. With Romans 13, one thus witnesses a resumption of the political, one which “proceeds centrally from a reflection upon evil” (Monteil) in order to progressively displace and attempt the wager of an affirmation of the political as progress devoted to the institution.