1 Word, identity and the relational form of the individual in Paul’s Letter to the Romans Timothy Rogers Timothy.rogers@mail.utoronto.ca; April 8, 2017 Abstract: An exploration of the formal logic of identity in the semiotic process of creation. Introduction Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One [Deut 6.4; Mark 12.29] If God is One, then nothing else in creation is one except through participation in God, neither things, neither ideas, neither persons. So how are we to speak of one and how are we to understand unity in the things of our world or the thoughts of our minds? A false mental image of unity—a false idea—is as dangerous an idol for us as were the embodied idols in the time of Moses. This is the troubling motivation for the exploration. In Letter to the Romans, Paul describes a journey or path from the one man Adam—through whom sin and death entered into the world—to the one man Jesus—through whom grace and salvation comes. This journey, the way of the Cross, will be the light illuminating our exploration of mental images of unity. Paul’s letter will be interpreted by overlaying a Patristic reading with contemporary methods of literary criticism. The intention of the overlay is to both enable and disrupt analytical, rational thinking, which in itself is “like some labyrinth or puzzles which have no end to them any where, and do not let the reason stand upon the rock, as having their very origin in vanity” [Chrysostom, II:1.17]. If successful, the disruption will also be an opening in which a false image of unity is unmasked and orientation to the transcendent illumination of Truth is disclosed. Specifically, through a close reading of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans [1861] we will trace formal contours or figurations of individuation in Paul’s writing, with a focus on the tropes of typology, analogy and anagogy. These tropes, through which identity is formally announced by likenesses, will be re-read through the contemporary literary tropes of metaphor and symbol. With metaphor, two things are said to be the same when they manifestly are not the same and it therefore involves a logical contradiction [Frye 1992, 71-2]. A metaphor is a meta-image, “a way of showing how patterns of meaning in the world intersect and echo one another” [Zwicky 2003, 6]. A symbol is something that “may be of limited interest or value in itself, but points in the