Hadley Arkes on Scalia

SCALIA CONTRA MUNDUM


Review Essay on ANTONIN SCALIA, A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION: FEDERAL COURTS AND THE LAW (1997).

Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (Fall 1997)

In The Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton noted the rule that guided the courts in dealing with statutes in conflict: The statute passed later is presumed to have superseded the law enacted earlier.[1] The same rule does not come into play, of course, with the Constitution, for a Constitution framed earlier would have to be given a logical precedence over the statute that came later. Were that not the case, the Constitution would lose its function, or its logic, as a restraint on the legislative power. But these rules for the interpretation of statutes are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. As Hamilton remarked, they were "not derived from any positive law, but from the nature and reason of the thing."[2] Somewhat later, in The Federalist No. 81, he went on to point out that the notion of "parliamentary supremacy" in Britain had never been taken to mean that the legislature was empowered to overturn a verdict rendered in a court.[3] The understanding seemed to be settled that the legislature might act instead to "prescribe a new rule for future cases."[4] But here, too, this understanding was not expressed anywhere in the positive law of the Constitution. And so what made it valid or authoritative as an understanding bound up with the Constitution itself?. As Hamilton explained, this understanding was simply anchored in "the general principles of law and reason."[5]

Blackstone had written in a similar way about "the law of nature and reason," and when jurists of the founding generation spoke in these accents, it seemed to be understood that they were pointing beyond the positive law to the principles of natural justice.[6] That kind of pointing has not exactly been part of the repertoire of conservative jurists in our own day. One even has the impression at times that these passages in Hamilton must have been expunged from the edition of the Federalist papers read by conservative judges. Some of the judges have proudly claimed their names as "positivists," or they have made their point, in the style of Justice Scalia, by engaging in a certain good-natured scoffing at natural law. But now, in his Tanner Lectures at Princeton,[7] Justice Scalia seems to have induced some confusion among his liberal adversaries by coming at the problem of our law from the angle of Hamilton. For he too finds himself writing here of rules of construction to guide the judge: rules that are found nowhere in the Constitution, but which clearly do not spring merely from the whimsy of the judges. Justice Scalia does not invoke "the laws of nature and reason," but it is evident that he regards these rules as, well, reasonable. We might even say, irresistibly reasonable. One of these rules, in fact, had been cited by Hamilton: expressio unius est exclusio alterius. The expression of one marks the exclusion of the other. "If you see a sign that says children under twelve may enter free, you should have no need to ask whether your thirteen-year-old must pay."[8] Or: noscitur a socis--that something is known by its companions or associates. It is known, that is, in context. As Justice Scalia explains, "If you tell me, 'I took the boat out on the bay,' I understand 'bay' to mean [something different from what it meants in the sentence] 'I put the saddle on the bay."[9]

Not all of these principles spring from the same logical core. Something more would be needed to explain that rule of construction, held firmly by judges in the 1920s and 1930s, that "statutes in derogation of the common law are to be narrowly construed." That rule of construction grew out of a commitment to a certain kind of regime, a regime in which judges wove a vast tapestry of law by expounding the principles of equity and natural justice. The rule of construction reflected an emphatic preference for honoring the kind of law shaped in that way, and leaving it as little disturbed as possible. Justice Scalia is far more skeptical about that law and its premises, but he takes that figure of the common-law judge as the irony that supplies his path of entry into these lectures: his principal lecture in this volume bears the title "Common Law Courts in a Civil Law System: The Role of United States Federal Courts in Interpreting the Constitution and Laws." The study of the law begins in America with the classic cases of the common law--the old English cases, crafted by judges when the law was spare. Those cases display the stringent clarity and wit of the judges, applying the "principles of law" in a series of cases, often before the advent of statutes. We may recall, for example, that doctrines on libel and slander were carved out by the judges before a legislature would codify that law in statutes. The mystique of the law may be imparted then to students in this way, in the example of the common-law judge, concentrating his genius within the field marked off by the maxims of the law, and annexing to his judgment the authority to command.

The majesty that attaches to the judges carries over from those fabled days of the common law; and yet we are now in the age of statutes. With the American Constitution, the legislature was supposed to take itself out of the business of acting in the style of a court, pronouncing judgments on parties in cases. And that shift has altered also the vocation of judging. As Justice Scalia points out, most of what the federal judges do is interpret the meaning of statutes and regulations and the text of the Constitution. But that enterprise is undertaken now in a profession that no longer has the same confidence that there are fixed rules of construction, anchored in the enduring principles of law. Justice Scalia has made his career as a legal skeptic, but plainly he wants to summon now to his cause the convictions that once imparted to the Constitution and the laws the sense of a fixed meaning, which would not alter with the political seasons. And a Constitution standing in that way, with its own integrity, would not be so open to the manipulation of judges. The liberals celebrate a "living Constitution," kept current with the times by judges, who are apparently more in tune with the times than ordinary politicians. For Justice Scalia, the "living Constitution" is a stylish title that covers a rather unlovely state of affairs: namely, a shift of power to the hands of judges, who become free then to project into the Constitution the ethic, or the peculiar politics, of the class that now dominates in the law schools and the universities.

[I]t is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than by what the lawgiver promulgated. ... It is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver. ... A government of laws, not of men. Men may intend what they will; but it is only the laws that they enact which bind us.

... When you are told to decide, not on the basis of what the legislature said, but on the basis of what it meant, and are assured that there is no necessary connection between the two, your best shot at figuring out what the legislature meant is to ask yourself what a wise and intelligent person should have meant; and that will surely bring you to the conclusion that the law means what you think it ought to mean. ...[10]

And yet, the understandings that once imparted more fixity to the Constitution, and discipline to the judges, could not be detached from the lingering attachment to natural law. Justice George Sutherland, as a youngster, used to copy into his commonplace book long passages from Burlamaqui on the natural law." But even where justices were not exactly versed in the bibliography, there were still certain convictions, settled among the judges, that there really were some anchoring truths in this profession they were practicing. One minor problem for Justice Scalia is that he cannot restore the law as it was without drawing again on that metaphysic still locked away in his soul, even though he cannot quite bring himself to pronounce its name.

On this point he was twitted by some of his critics, who were invited to fill out this volume by appending their commentaries to his lectures. In the conditions that prevail now in the American academy, the presence of a single conservative on the Faculty may be quite a disturbing event, which must be modulated through a firm policy of assuring that there will not be a second. In the case of Justice Scalia, it may be altogether too unsettling: for an academic place such as Princeton to give a prominent platform to a conservative scholar and jurist of his caliber, who annexes, to the force of his arguments, a certain personal dash and comes bearing, in addition, the authority of high Office. As the line goes, serious measures must be taken. Careful provision must be made for "hearing the other side"--in this instance, by offsetting Justice Scalia with a panel of worthies, of notable professors in the law, with a membership strongly tilted, of course, to the side of his adversaries. Princeton, as ever, would not stint, and so the panel of commentators gathered around Justice Scalia included: Ronald Dworkin, Laurence Tribe, Gordon Wood, and Mary Ann Glendon. The main gesture toward "balance" within the panel came with Professor Glendon, who managed to reinforce Justice Scalia through some angles that proved both novel and compelling.

Professor Dworkin would strike a posture of civility on a high plane--from which he could then condescend to instruct Justice Scalia in his own argument and offer some useful thoughts for his better ordering. With a comparable tone, civil on the surface, disparaging beneath, Professor Tribe could engage in some decorous twitting, though it must be said that this was twitting at a high level, touching points at the center of the argument. In that vein, Professor Tribe noted that Justice Scalia evidently follows certain rules as to when he would apply, or relax, the doctrine of stare decisis. Professor Tribe could properly ask then, "what is the origin of those rules?"[12] They were not in the Constitution, and so "they certainly are not derived from the 'original meaning' of the text of the Constitution."[13] Tribe was inviting Justice Scalia to recognize that he was standing on some ground outside the positive law, and to consider just where he might be placing himself in the universe of writers who found the anchor of their positions in one school or another of natural justice.

Anyone who has spent five minutes with Justice Scalia knows that the vocation of the law is absorbed in his character, and so he can hardly help himself: He cannot speak deeply and searchingly of the law without speaking the language of natural law, and the recognition hardly comes as news to him. But it does seem to unsettle his critics, who fancy, in their bafflement, that they have spotted the threads of contradiction running through his lectures. In point of fact, they have merely failed to grasp the design of his argument. Or as Jane Austen had Mr. Bennet say in Pride and Prejudice, they have not had the pleasure of understanding him. And so, Professor Dworkin arranged his critique of Justice Scalia to culminate in the conclusion--as portentous as it was understated--that there was, finally, an "inconsistency of [Justice Scalia's] lectures as a whole."[14]

[Justice Scalia's] most basic argument for textualism is drawn from majoritarian theory: he says that it is undemocratic when a statute is interpreted other than in accordance with the public text that was before legislators when they voted and is available to everyone in the community afterwards. His most basic argument for rejecting textualism in constitutional interpretation, on the other hand, reflects his reservations about majority rule.[15]

Professor Dworkin was evidently satisfied that he had distilled, in this manner, the fallacies running through Justice Scalia's lectures. But, to borrow a line from Henry James, Professor Dworkin might merely have made himself the victim of perplexities :from which a single spark of direct perception might have spared him. Justice Scalia's teaching has its turns and shadings, and yet there should not be much mystery about the main lines of that teaching. One version may be condensed in this way: The United States did not offer a novelty to the world in 1787 because it brought forth a novel form of oligarchy, managed by nine men, unelected, wearing robes. The new order for the ages, proclaimed in America, was the right of a people to govern itself. The decision in 1787 was for popular government, or government by consent, and it was not thought to be the least inconsistent with that scheme that a free people would place itself under moral restraint. As Plato taught, a man with self-control was not a weaker man, and the rule of the people did not become a weaker version of self-rule when the people came to acknowledge certain powers they had no right to claim, certain ends; they had no right to pursue, even in the name of their right to govern themselves.

As Justice Scalia understands the matter, that was precisely the purpose or function of the Constitution: A free people legislated for itself certain powers, and certain ends, that would be placed outside the reach of ordinary politics and ordinary majorities. To that extent, his notion of constitutionalism does contain a recognition of certain things placed beyond the rule of the majority. But that was of a striking exception that only brought out, even more dramatically, the character of that regime in which it stood as an exception. The decision in 1787 was for democratic government: a regime in which the people, or their representatives, would deliberate in public on the gravest questions, the questions of moral consequence that stood at the center of their public lives.

That sense of the matter stands in sharp contrast with the understanding expressed to me by a seasoned lawyer in Washington a few days after the Supreme Court, in 1986, refused to strike down the laws on sodomy in the separate States.[16] With some astonishment he asked, "Do you want politicians making decisions on matters of that kind?" In the estimate of this veteran of the law, decisions of moral consequence reposed more properly in the hands of judges---of people who had been trained in the best law schools, such as the school from which he himself had sprung. And implicit in this perspective was the most damning critique that one could offer of democratic government: that as people are elevated to positions of authority through the process of elections, they become, in that measure, impaired in addressing the most serious questions of justice.

In this contrast we find exactly what is at stake for Justice Scalia in the ongoing argument over our jurisprudence. To the extent that the Constitution can be altered in its critical passages--or even inverted in its meaning--through the inventiveness of the judges, the Constitution ceases to function as a restraint on political power. Even more plainly, it ceases to function as a restraint on the power of the judges themselves. And to the extent that the judges embark on a grand aesthetic project, a project involving nothing less than the remolding of the constitutional order, Justice Scalia has the most profound sense that they are changing the regime itself. For Dworkin, that prospect is overborne by the grand accomplishment of the judges over the past forty years in expanding the domain of "rights." But this cheery assessment becomes far easier to deliver if one happens also to screen from one's view of the landscape the casualties that have been produced by liberal jurisprudence. If there is ample reason, then, to think that human lives are being destroyed in abortions, a record of thirty million killings over the past twenty-four years hardly stands as a monument to the "rights" created under Roe v. Wade.[17] That point has not made an impression on Dworkin, but the unborn children killed in these surgeries evidently suffered the most notable contraction of their "rights."

For Justice Scalia, it seems plain that if judges modify the Second Amendment to bring it into consonance with the times---or with the sense of the times prevailing in liberal circles--there would be a serious erosion of the right of the people to bear arms. But then, of course, every articulation of a new "right" on the part of the courts for one class of litigants may be seen as a contraction of rights on the part of some other people. And so, was it too much to ask of Deborah Weisman that she merely sit in silent respect as others offered prayers of thanks at her commencement from high school? If Weisman had a "right" not to be burdened in that way, then she had a right also to deprive other students and families of the right to offer a prayer of gratitude in circumstances in which they thought themselves obliged to express that gratitude in public.

Professors Tribe and Dworkin seem at least aware that Justice Scalia is no enemy of rights. But, ever-helpful, ever-professorial, they are ever-willing to instruct Justice Scalia in the implications of his own argument, and to find, in his defense of rights, a confirmation of their own doctrines. After all, Justice Scalia voted to protect, under the First Amendment, the freedom to burn the American flag or to burn crosses outside the homes of black families.[19] Is it not clear then, asks Professor Tribe, that Justice Scalia is not "freezing a fixed set of rights into the constitutional ice"; that he is willing to bring under the First Amendment liberties that would not have been protected in the Eighteenth Century, or for that matter in the 1940s?[20] Is that not in fact an exercise of adapting the provisions of the Constitution to the circumstances of our own day? Has Justice Scalia not provided us then with living evidence of the "living Constitution"?

And yet, what seems to have slipped, quite curiously, from Professor Tribe are the properties of a "principle." Once we grasp the principle by which the ball rolls down the inclined plane, we understand that the principle is utterly indifferent to the color of the balls and the planes, and whether they are made of aluminum or wood. It is precisely because a principle is abstract that it can be applied, over time, to a limitless number of instances. Once we understand what is wrong in principle with discriminations based on race, we need no new principle to explain the wrongness of barring people, on the basis of race, from their access, say, to swimming pools, tennis courts, xerox machines, or marriage licenses. We would understand that these are all but instances in which the same principle is being manifested.[21] If we understand the principles behind the protection of "speech," then we would understand how those principles may be engaged in circumstances quite distant in time and quite varied in their technology, from quills to computers. In the case of the burning crosses and the burning flags, I happen to think myself that Justice Scalia made a grievous mistake, that he read into the First Amendment a moral relativism that forms no necessary part of the protections of speech.[22] But whether we happen to coincide with his judgments there or not, it should be clear that Justice Scalia did not need any novel principle in order to cover, with the First Amendment, the "expression" engaged in burning draft cards or burning crosses. There was no need for him to "update" the First Amendment. As Justice Scalia understands it, the principle that protects speech under the Constitution means now what it has ever meant, and the task of the judge now, as ever, is to apply the principles; of the Constitution to the novel cases that arise in our daily lives.

But then is it not also possible that we may draw out of those principles implications that have heretofore gone unforeseen? Indeed, the moral life itself may involve an ongoing effort to draw out of our principles--to bring to a new level of awareness--implications that had previously gone unnoticed. In 1971, in Cohen v. California, Justice Harlan announced that "one man's vulgarity [wa]s another's lyric," and with that move, he grafted onto the First Amendment a new relativism." With those new premises, it became harder for the law to justify restrictions based on the "content" of speech, and with the accumulation of cases, it became harder for the law to restrict the marching of Nazis and the burning of crosses.[24] Justice Scalia has clearly made himself part: of that project, emanating from Cohen v. California, for he has joined his colleagues now in finding, in the First Amendment, rights that were not there as recently as thirty years ago. But Justice Scalia himself has made it clear that he finds deeply uncongenial the results of his own decisions in protecting the burners of crosses and flags. If he has extracted these implications from the First Amendment, it is evidently because he finds them contained in the logic of that Amendment. And his own artful efforts, in summoning the reasons and making his case, should be enough to ward off any charges that his judgments in this field have been "arbitrary."

But in that event, why would he not be open to the plea, offered by Professors Tribe and Dworkin, that their own allies on the bench deserve quite the same presumption in their favor: why should we not begin at least by crediting their earnest claim that they too are seeking to extract from the Constitution the implications that have been there all along? Why would we be warranted in assuming that they are "making up the Constitution," any more than we would be warranted in making that assumption about Justice Scalia? On this matter, there is probably no more dramatic case in point than the problem of the Fourteenth Amendment and miscegenation. Senator Lyman Trumbull, one of the managers of the Amendment, had assured his colleagues that there was nothing in the Amendment that would overturn the laws on miscegenation in the separate States. As Trumbull reasoned, those statutes would not violate the "Equal Protection of the Laws" because they bore equally on blacks and whites: they barred whites from marrying blacks, as they barrett blacks from marrying whites.[25] We would not take that view of the matter today, and not merely because "times have changed." It might be as apt to say that times have changed precisely because we have come to understand, in a more demanding, rigorous way, the principle that bars discriminations based on race.

To put the matter another way, it is possible for jurists and legislators in our own day to find, in the principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment, an understanding that was not shared by the men who had enacted the Amendment. And yet, that reading of the Fourteenth Amendment would be quite plausible--quite in accordance with the deep principles contained in the Amendment--and judges and legislators who extracted this implication could not be accused merely of "making up" their own version of the Fourteenth Amendment. But if that understanding has become plausible for us, there should be nothing implausible in the prospect, set forth by Professor Dworkin, of judges drawing out the implications embedded in the very logic of the American Constitution. On the other hand, one could hardly fault Justice Scalia for a certain worldly skepticism. After all, the judges who practiced a jurisprudence of natural rights in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries understood that their judgments were indeed grounded in "the laws of nature and reason." But where is the discipline that now confines those judges who soar grandly beyond the text, and yet acknowledge no moral truths that could possibly provide a tether for their judgments? Professor Tribe has helped articulate new constitutional rights to privacy and abortion, but he insists at the same time that there are, behind these rights, no moral truths that make them truly "rightful." In place of truths, Professor Tribe can offer merely convictions "powerfully held."[26]

But the obvious retort has been that if these judgments are traceable in the end to no truths, there is no reason why we should be ruled by the convictions "powerfully held" by judges, rather than by the sentiments, firmly held by the people who are ruled by the judges. And yet, even if the judges had detached themselves from the relativism of Professor Tribe--even if they found the anchor of their jural reasoning in moral truths--there is still something that must be said on the side of Justice Scalia, and the occasion for saying it has been provided by Hawaii. There, the courts have been arranging the unsolicited gift of gay marriage. In two separate phases of litigation, the courts have been preparing to extract this novelty in the law from Hawaii's version of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).[27] That Amendment barred discriminations based on sex or gender, and the argument played out in this way: The State issues a license of marriage only to a couple composed of a man and a woman. But it will not issue such a license to two people of the same sex. There is a discrimination made then in the laws, and that difference turns entirely on the gender, or sex, of the people composing the couple.

On its own terms, this argument may be plausible, unless there are compelling reasons for connecting marriage to the "N"-word [nature]--the inescapable fact that it requires two persons, not more than two and not less, a man and a woman, to beget a child. Not all loves require marriage for their completion, but marriage does have a distinct rationale as a framework of lawfulness to envelop the begetting and nurturing of children. The purpose of marriage is connected then to the purpose that is marked, in our natures, by the very presence of gender.[28] "Male and female created He them."[29] If the enterprise of jurisprudence could be detached, on this question, from "nature" and the natural sense of a marriage, then the decision churned out by the judges in Hawaii might be an arguable rendering in the current state of the American law. But one flaw in this construction is that this "implication" of the ERA is regarded as bizarre by the people of Hawaii. Even in a State legendary for its tolerance, the surveys reveal that more than seventy percent of the public remain quite opposed to the notion of "gay' marriage."[30] It appears now that this opposition will finally be felt in the laws, or even in the amending of the Hawaiian Constitution. But until that amendment is voted on in November, we are faced with a neat problem in the debate between Justice Scalia and his adversaries. The question may be posed in this way:

The people of Hawaii voted, in an act of sovereign judgment, to amend their constitution and install an Equal Rights Amendment. 'the judges of Hawaii, armed with their juridical science, now find in that Amendment an implication that had not been noticed or advertised when the Amendment had been passed. It would appear that the people who voted for the Amendment never had any reason to suspect that they were voting also to install "same-sex marriage" as part of their fundamental law. Still, the judges advise the public that these implications are indeed contained in the principle that the public had placed in the constitution, and those implications are there quite regardless of whether the public happens to find them congenial.

Fair enough, on both sides: the judges are doing their jobs according to the requirements they find in their profession, and the people, for their part, are now exerting their influence to change the law. But as it was remarked in one of the briefs submitted to the Supreme Court of Hawaii, the judges in the State had taken it upon themselves to impose a judgment that "transforms the oldest institution in organized society in a manner that no civilization since the dawn of recorded history has accepted."[31] The judges were willing to order these changes, in the very matrix of the law, on the strength of a constitutional amendment that never mentioned gay marriage. The public that voted for the amendment never had any inkling that it was voting to establish gay marriage, and it is evident even to the dimmest onlooker that the amendment never would have passed if the public: had any reason to suspect that it was voting for gay marriage. In the presence of these points, I suppose that a judge might be determined nevertheless to "expound" the law with a respect for its own integrity and let other people worry about the fallout. But a willingness to persist marks a willingness on the part of judges to use their leverage, in effect, against the people who form the political community of Hawaii. There must be a willingness to impose on the people the burdens of summoning extraordinary majorities and jumping through a series of legal hoops, simply for the sake of preventing judges from imposing on them an arrangement they find deeply repugnant, deeply at odds with the moral grounds of the law. There must be in all of this a quotient of chutzpah that should make even the most confident judge pause and reflect. He might well consider at that moment whether a sense of propriety in a democracy should induce him to hold back. Is there not at least that lingering respect for a democratic regime that would induce a judge to leave, to the people themselves, the fight to deliberate in public and reach their own judgment on a matter that runs to the very roots of the law in family, marriage, and nature?

But an appeal of this kind to prudence may itself be a tacit admission that there is something tenable in the persuasions on either side, and that the problem can yield only to a sense of moderation. And yet, in the interplay between Justice Scalia and his critics, there is a curious omission of that moderating device in the Constitution itself that was applied in the most compelling way by Lincoln. Judges might indeed be free to expound the law in the style of Professor Dworkin, but that prospect may seem far less threatening if we understand that any extravagant decision by the courts could readily be limited or confined by the political branches. Presidents Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln reminded us that presidents and members of Congress bear their own, necessary responsibility to interpret the Constitution, and they may confine or limit the power of the courts through the simple expedient of confining the judgments of the courts to the parties in litigation. "We do not propose," said Lincoln, "that when Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the court, we, as a mob, will decide him to be free."[32] But Lincoln and his party would

oppose that decision as a political rule which shall be binding on the voter, to vote for nobody who thinks it wrong, which shall be binding on the members of Congress or the President to favor no measure that does not actually concur with the principles of that decision.[33]

Lincoln would respect the judgment of the Court as it settled the case of the litigants. But the broader principle articulated in the case he would not be obliged to accept until he was persuaded of its rightness. And with that understanding, the Lincoln Administration proceeded to reverse decisions taken in the Buchanan Administration, as different parts of the executive branch showed a willingness to apply the principle of the Dred Scott case even to circumstances quite remote from the situation of former slaves litigating over their freedom.[34] In my own reckoning, I cannot see how Lincoln could possibly have been wrong, and if Lincoln's understanding remains immanently legitimate--and perfectly shaped to the American Constitution--then it gives rise to this possibility: A conservative presidential administration could make it clear that it accepts the disposition of the case in Roe v. Wade, but that it will not adopt the principle articulated in that case in the decisions that come under the hand of the executive. That reach of the executive may be far wider than we suppose, even on the matter of abortion. It may encompass, for example, the question of whether the National Institutes of Health would be free to use in their research and therapies the tissue drawn from fetuses who have been killed in elective abortions. The executive may also have to determine whether abortion should be regarded as a surgery fit to be performed under the authority of the United States in the diplomatic and military outposts abroad.

A turn of that kind might be quite startling in our current politics, and yet it would not be in the least novel, and it would require no changes in the Constitution. That Professors Dworkin and Tribe are not drawn to this solution can hardly be a surprise. But the curious point is that even conservative jurists such as Justice Scalia and Judge Bork have not been drawn to that modulated scheme, taught and practiced by Lincoln and other presidents and judges both before and since. Judge Bork has flown instead to a plan of having decisions by the Supreme Court overturned by the vote of a majority in both houses of Congress.[35] But a plan of that kind is bound to be seen as radical and threatening, and one must wonder why even conservative jurists would rather leap to a measure so unlikely to be enacted or used, rather than a far more modest measure that requires not the least change in the Constitution, and promises to yield a far more dramatic result. An old saying has it that the silence of a wise man is always instructive. In this situation, the notable silence of conservative judges may be a telling sign that even they have accepted a certain preeminence for the judges in fixing the meaning of the Constitution without the interference of the political branches.

What could be said, however, on behalf of Justice Scalia is that the "interference" of the political branches is already incorporated in his understanding of jurisprudence and the vocation of judging. When judges work under a discipline of restraint, they leave power in the hands of others. When they show the gravest reluctance to remold the meaning of the Constitution, they manifest their willingness to be governed by the design and understanding of the Founders. At the same time, they would preserve for the people themselves the main authority to decide just when that design will be amended. And when the judges show a certain fastidious concern to stay close to the statute as it was written, they show a willingness to be guided by the legislators who drafted and enacted the law.

A judge who constitutes himself in this way may not cultivate a reputation for inventiveness or originality, but he will be positioned to see several "home truths" quite clearly. For one thing, he will be utterly clear, along with Justice Scalia, that what is enacted is the statute and not the legislative history. In our own time, as Justice Scalia has pointed out, a virtual industry has sprung up to write legislative histories.[36] Speeches may be planted in the congressional record, reports may be spun out by staffs, sounding themes that can be cited later by judges as they are invited, in effect, to remold the statute by choosing the meaning they prefer. But we do not know who has read these reports or been moved by the speeches. We know only the language which the legislators were finally willing to vote upon. Justice Scalia, anchored as he is, can see remarkably past the fashions that have distracted many Washington hands and recognize that legislators legislate only the law. At the same time, he can draw the simple but telling corollary that "[t]he legislative power is the power to make laws, not the power to make legislators. It is nondelegable."[37] It is not within the power of legislators to shift the legislative power to others--to councils of businessmen and unions (as in the days of the New Deal), to staffs, to administrative agencies--in short, to people who bear no direct responsibility to the public. Under those conditions, small clusters of groups may be freer to vote their interests--and impose those interests .on the rest of the community with the binding force of law.[38]

Justice Scalia recalls one lawyer artless enough actually to say, in a brief, that the legislative history of a certain statute was rather murky, and so he would turn instead to consider the statutory language.[39] That state of mind may explain why Justice Scalia can survey the field and find, in the profession, no settled canons for the interpretation of statutes. The application of statutes forms the work of most lawyers, most of their days, and yet it has become clear that lawyers do not take their main bearings these days from the language in the statute. If this situation were suddenly viewed from the outside--from a "comparative" perspective on law--the conventions that have grown familiar to us might be seen more truly as striking. Or to put it another way, they may be seen for what they are.

That perspective was supplied in A Matter of Interpretation by Professor Mary Ann Glendon, who has encompassed in her own work the comparative study of divorce and abortion in Europe.[40] From the angle of the comparativist, Professor Glendon weighs in with the most powerful reinforcement for Justice Scalia: America was supposed to be the land in which the rule of judges would be supplanted by the rule of statutes. Instead of judges wielding vast discretion, inventing the law from case to case, the judges would be guided by statutes, enacted by legislators, elected by the people, and more sensitive then to the range of interests in the community. Yet the study of statutes and their drafting has nearly vanished from the training of lawyers, along with the study of canons of interpretation, just as the study of the Constitution itself, in its text and structure, has receded into the background in the study of constitutional law.[41] In a curious inversion, the new legal ethic, promised in the New Land, has been cultivated more fully in the Old World, or the Continent. There, the tradition has been dominated by the code law, with judges fixed on the reading of statutes.[42] But now, judges on the Continent are trying to flex some new-arts, in expounding the principles that lie behind the code.[43] In the meantime, in America, the professors of law fly from one affectation of "theory" to another, to schemes even more exotic: from Marxism to deconstruction and "literary theory," and then onward to "feminist epistemologies" and "critical race theory." As the professors soar beyond the world that most of us inhabit, they well understand that the purpose of their flight is to detach themselves from those "laws of reason and nature" that provided the anchors of our law in the past. But the practitioners of the new law may not entirely understand that they detach themselves at the same time from the protections that the law used to provide. In her culminating lines, Professor Glendon warns, with Tocqueville, that "[t]yranny ... need not announce itself with guns and trumpets. It may come softly--so softly that we will barely notice when we become one of those countries where there are no citizens but only subjects."[44] And as Justice Scalia warns now, judges swollen with the most benign motives, animated by the most tender sentiments, determined to open vast new regions of rights, may nevertheless have acted, unwittingly, to convert a nation of citizens into a settlement of subjects. In order to create new, unpopular rights in the days of the Warren Court, the judges had to detach their decisions from the text of the Constitution and from the discipline of fixed jural truths. Indeed, the judges had to take it as part of their mission to detach the public itself from any lingering reverence for the truths that used to stand behind the Constitution and confine the power of judges. Justice Scalia now registers his own lament for a public that may be detached from these ancient, wholesome prejudices. That may be a public less suited now in temperament, less disposed now in conviction, to accept the moral restraints of a Constitution. After all, the judges have fashioned a new law, in the image of an "autonomous" man, who trumps, with his autonomy, the claims of traditional morality. A public tutored in these new maxims may will that same autonomy for itself; it may be less inclined now to indulge a naive reverence for a Constitution that would cast up barriers to its wants. Justice Brennan and his colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s were no doubt bent on improving the republic, but the project may have run quite beyond them, until it changed the regime itself. And along the way, the judges managed to cultivate a people far less willing to abide the constraints of lawfulness.

1. See THE FEDERALIST NO. 78, at 468 (Alexander Hamilton) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961).
2. Id.
3. THE FEDERALIST NO. 81, supra note 1, at 484.
4. Id.
5. Id.
6. 4 WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND *67.
7. See Antonin Scalia, Common-Law Courts in a Civil-Law System: The Role of United States Federal Courts in Interpreting the Constitution and Laws, in A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION: FEDERAL COURTS AND THE LAW 3-47 (Amy Gutmann ed., 1997) [hereinafter A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION].
8. Id. at 25.
9. Id. at 26.
10. Id. at 17-18.
11. See ARKES, GEORGE SUTHERLAND, supra note *, atvi.
12. Laurence H. Tribe, Comment in A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION, supra note 7, at 65, 83.
13. Id.
14. Ronald M. Dworkin, Comment, in A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION, supra note 7, at 115, 127.
15. Id.
16. See Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) (holding that there exists no constitutionally-protected right to engage in sodomy).
17. 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (holding that there exists a constitutionally-protected right to have an abortion). Regarding the number of abortions that have occurred in the United States since Roe v. Wade, see ALAN GUTTMACHER INSTITUTE, FACTS IN BRIEF: INDUCED ABORTION 1 (1997) (stating that over 31 million abortions occurred in the United States between 1973 and 1994); NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE EDUCATIONAL TRUST FUND, ABORTION IN THE UNITED STATES: STATISTICS & TRENDS (1997) (estimating 35.3 million abortions in the United States between 1973 and 1996).
18. See Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992) (holding that the First Amendment prohibits public schools from including clergy who offer prayers as an official part of graduation ceremonies).
19. See United States v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990) (striking down an anti-flag burning statute on First Amendment grounds); Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989) (holding flag burning is "speech" protected by the First Amendment); R.A.V.v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992) (holding unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds a city ordinance prohibiting the display of symbols, including swastikas and burning crosses, that one knows or reasonably should know arouse anger, alarm, or resentment on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender).
20. Tribe, supra note 12, at 81.
21. That must also stand as the telling sign of a certain obtuseness in Chief Justice Warren when he remarked, at the beginning of Loving v. Virginia that "[t]his case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment." 388 U.S. 1, 2 (1967). The Court had never addressed discriminations based on race? Or restrictions on marriage? The observation, offered by Chief Justice Warren, becomes comprehensible only with the recognition that in the host of cases dealing with racial discrimination--and including, most famously, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)--the Court never did manage to explain what was wrong "in principle" with segregation, or with discriminations based on race. On this matter, see HADLEY ARKES, THE PHILOSOPHER IN THE CITY 223-58 (1981) [hereinafter ARKES, PHILOSOPHER].
22. One of my own students expressed puzzlement over this point: Justice Scalia had found no such lurking principle of moral relativism in the First Amendment when it came to protecting people who engaged in nude dancing or lewd entertainments. In Barnes v. Glen Theatre, he thought that the legislature could properly "enforce the traditional moral belief that people should not expose their private parts indiscriminately, regardless of whether those who see them are disedified." 501 U.S. 560, 575 (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring). In that respect, there did not seem to be much question for him that the legislature could act, not merely for the sake of dealing with the "secondary effects" of lewdness, but for the sake simply of conveying a moral understanding--that certain acts were "contra bonos mores," or immoral. Id. But in that event, my student was moved to wonder just why a local legislature might not find something comparably "immoral" in an attempt to terrorize black people through the burning of crosses, a gesture that was long understood in our common usage as a gesture of assault and threat. Under the traditional doctrine of 'fighting words," it had been possible, after all, to recognize certain forms of expression that constituted assaults, and it was possible to restrain those modes of expression without interfering in any way with the freedom of people to make substantive arguments. For an extended treatment of this problem, see ARKES, PHILOSOPHER, supra note 21, at 23-91.
23. 403 U.S. 15, 25 (1971).
24. See, e.g., Skokie v. Collins, 439 U.S. 916 (1978) (denying certiorari and allowing a Nazi parade to march in the village of Skokie, Illinois); R.A.V., supra note 19; ARKES, PHILOSOPHER, supra note 21, at 63-74.
25. See CONG. GLOBE, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 505 (exchange among Senators Trumbull, Fessenden, and Johnson during the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1866); id. at 600 (exchange between Senators Trumbull and Davis). This early understanding was also incorporated in some early cases testing the laws on miscegenation under the Fourteenth Amendment. See In re Hobbes, 12 Fed. Cas. 262 (C.C.N.D. Ga. 1981); State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389 (1871); State v. Hariston and Williams, 63 N.C. 451 (1869); Lonas v. State, 50 Tenn. 287 (1871).

It is worth noting that we would not have discovered, in our own time, an understanding of the principle that was not already grasped in the Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, this more exact implication of the principle in the Fourteenth Amendment was drawn out by legislators who had sought to resist a sweeping principle of racial equality in the laws. And so Maryland's Senator Johnson pressed this argument in the face of Senators Trumbull and Fessenden: "Now there is a State law which says to the black man, 'You shall not marry a white woman.' and so to the white man, 'You may.'" Id. at 505. It seemed to Johnson that this arrangement ran afoul of a new law that barred discriminations based on color. Senators Trumbull and Fessenden appeared not to credit that argument. Whether they were sincere or not, it could hardly be argued that our own generation discovered a principle that was not evident to legislators even at the time.

* 26. See LAURENCE H. TRIBE, CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICES 5, 6, 8 (1985).
* 27. See Baehr v. Lewin, 852 P.2d 44 (1993) (remanding case questioning constitutionality of prohibition of same-sex marriage with instructions to decide using strict scrutiny standard); Baehr v. Miike, CIV. No. 91-1394, 1996 WL 694235 (Haw. Cir. Ct. Dec. 3, 1996), appeal docketed, No. 20371 (Haw. 1997) (holding that a prohibition on same-sex marriage fails strict scrutiny under the Equal Rights Amendment to the Hawaii Constitution).
* 28. For the way this ancient understanding had to come into play recently in the argument for the Defense of Marriage Act, see Defense of Marriage Act: Hearing on H.R. 3396 Before the Subcomm. on the Constitution of the House Comm. on the Judiciary, 104th Cong. 87 (1996) (statement of Hadley Arkes); Hadley Arkes, Odd Couples, NAT'L REV., Aug. 12, 1996, at 48.
* 29. Genesis 5:2 (King James).
* 30. See David Orgon Coolidge, Same-Sex Marriage: As Hawaii Goes. ... FIRST THINGS, Apr. 1997, at 33; Hadley Arkes, Gay Marriage in 1996?, AM. ENTERPRISE, May/June 1995, at 57; Hadley Arkes, Questions of Principle, Not Predictions: A Reply to [Stephen] Macedo, 84 GEO. L.J. 321 (1995).
* 31. Brief for Defendant-Appellant at 1, Baehr v. Miike, appeal docketed, No. 20371 (Haw. Apr. 27, 1997).
* 32. Abraham Lincoln, Sixth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas, at Quincy, Illinois (Oct. 13, 1858), in 3 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 255 (Roy P. Basler ed., 1953).
* 33. Id.
* 34. For a discussion of these cases and Lincoln's understanding of them, see HADLEY ARKES, FIRST THINGS 416-22 (1986).
* 35. See ROBERT H. BORK, SLOUCHING TOWARDS GOMORRAH: MODERN LIBERALISM AND AMERICAN DECLINE 117 (1996).
* 36. See SCALIA, supra note 7, at 34 ("One of the routine tasks of the Washington lawyer-lobbyist is to draft language that sympathetic legislators can recite in a pre-written 'floor debate'--or, even better, insert into a committee report.").
* 37. Id. at 35.
* 38. For a fuller statement of this problem, arising from the litigation and controversies of the New Deal, see ARKES, GEORGE SUTHERLAND, supra note *, at 103-10, 159-75.
* 39. See SCALlA, supra note 7, at 31.
* 40. See generally MARY ANN GLENDON, ABORTION AND DIVORCE IN WESTERN LAW (1987).
* 41. See Mary Ann Glendon, Comment, in A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION, supra note 7, at 95, 96-97, 111.
* 42. See id. at 97.
* 43. See id. at 102-03.
* 44. Id. at 113-14.

~~~~~~~~

By HADLEY ARKES

HADLEY ARKES, Hadley Arkes is the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. His most recent book is THE RETURN OF GEORGE SUTHERLAND (1994) [hereinafter ARKES, GEORGE SUTHERLAND].

Make Love to the Wind: the limits of subjectivism

Hadley Arkes critiques Justice John Marshall Harlan II's opinion in Cohen v. California (1971)

"Liberalism and the Law", New Criterion (Jan. 1999)

Harlan assumed that the speech emblazoned on Cohen's jacket had a claim to constitutional protection because it was "political"; it conveyed a sentiment dealing with a matter of public controversy. According to Harlan, what Cohen was doing with his jacket was "asserting [a] position on the inutility or immorality of the draft." There was a point to be made by taking Harlan at his word and asking just which one, exactly, he thought Cohen meant. Was "F*** the Draft" merely a shorthand expression for: the draft is "inutile"? Or that the draft was "immoral"? It is worth pointing out that the message did not mean either. The profanity on the jacket was meant to mock with its grossness; it conspicuously lacked the precision of analytic prose, particularly when applied to matters of public policy.

Nevertheless, Harlan's reading was in one respect correct, but on grounds that contradicted his argument at the root. What we knew of Cohen's message was that it condemned or denounced the draft, and we knew that mainly because he had drawn upon a word that was established in ordinary language as a term of condemnation, derision, insult. We knew it, that is, because the meaning of words was not subjective and arbitrary. And in the same way we knew that he was referring to the military "draft." Someone who had taken Harlan's argmnent literally might have turned around and insisted that all the words were entirely "subjective" and asked how we could know that Cohen was not referring to a "draft" in the sense of wind? How did we know then that Cohen was not enjoining us, perhaps in a spirit of paganism, to "make love to the wind"?

An Unsettling Hallelujah

Read this interesting interpretation of Handel's Messiah as a glorious response to deism and Jewish unbelief in 1700s England. Read into the Hallelujah Chorus a lenten celebration of Christ's justice in using Rome to "dash [Jerusalem] to pieces like pottery" (Ps. 2), foreshadowing his ultimate judgment of all the nations and his universal, omnipotent reign. Of course, the actual words of the Hallelujah Chorus come out of Revelation 19 etc., celebrating the ruin of Babylon and the bloody defeat of all the nations that rebelled against the Kingdom of God. Can we then stand up and wear it like a badge, sing it like a madrigal until we hear the chorus swell... and still weep for the Jews like Jesus did?

Is God's justice on the dead even a motivation and tool for witnessing to the living?

Michael Marissen, New York Times, Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’ April 8, 2007

HT: Jonathan Edwards, History of the Work of Redemption, for mentioning Richard Kidder's Demonstration of the Messias, which the libretto for Handel's Messiah was based on.

Virtue through irony

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, p. 63

The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

To get lost is glorious

I wrested the title from Deng Xiaoping's slogan: "To get rich is glorious." Navigation is a tricky subject. When I am riding in a car with someone else, I slouch down and read a book. My dad says, "pay attention to the landmarks... you always should know where you are." But if someone else can do that for me, I can use my mind for other things.

On the other hand, I despise GPS. When I am driving, I can sometimes glaze over on the highway, but on the streets I am always following my nose. If I have extra time, I don't hesitate to try a different way that seems it would logically take me to the same place. I use a combination of maps and logic, because experiencing the route or hearing the directions doesn't cut it for me. That's just my form of intelligence.

And when I'm walking in a new city, it's a lot of fun to walk as far as I can, lose myself, and find my way back. The refrain on my teaching team in Taiwan was "where's Nathan?" And at Costco, I could always be found either in the book section or stalking around to find the people I came with.

Now for the article: "This is your brain on GPS"
Our navigational gadgets, says journalist Alex Hutchinson, could actually be damaging our sense of direction.

G.K. Chesterton once sent a telegram to his wife Frances... "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" She wired back: "Home."

'Tis wrote against the spleen: Tristram Shandy 4.22

C H A P. XXII.

ALBEIT, gentle reader, I have
lusted earnestly, and endeavoured
carefully (according to the measure of
such slender skill as God has vouchsafed
me, and as convenient leisure from other
occasions of needful profit and healthful
pastime have permitted) that these little
books, which I here put into thy hands,
might




[ 143 ]

might stand instead of many bigger books
-- yet have I carried myself towards thee
in such fanciful guise of careless disport,
that right sore am I ashamed now to en-
treat thy lenity seriously -- in beseeching
thee to believe it of me, that in the
story of my father and his christen-
names, -- I had no thoughts of treading
upon Francis the First -- nor in the affair of
the nose -- upon Francis the Ninth -- nor in
the character of my uncle Toby -- of cha-
racterizing the militiating spirits of my
country -- the wound upon his groin, is
a wound to every comparison of that
kind, -- nor by Trim, -- that I meant the
duke of Ormond -- or that my book is
wrote against predestination, or free will,
or taxes -- If 'tis wrote against any thing,
---- 'tis wrote, an' please your worships,
against the spleen ; in order, by a more
3 frequent




[ 144 ]

frequent and a more convulsive elevation
and depression of the diaphragm, and
the succussations of the intercostal and
abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive
the gall and other bitter juices from the
gall bladder, liver and sweet-bread [pancreas] of
his majesty's subjects, with all the inimi-
citious passions which belong to them,
down into their duodenums [small intestines].

_______________________________________


A particularly fine strain of humor, with the punchline drowned in medical terms. Perfect for bathroom reading, which is where I stumbled on this chapter. Scroll up and click on the link in the chapter title, and it will take you to a very cool digitization of the text.

Joe Rigney: Stages of idolatry and Staying two months pregnant

Joe Rigney, a professor at the Bethlehem Institute, wrote two articles on stages of idolatry, earlier this year. He explains how we worship God and receive his gifts, then value the gifts for their own sake, then worship other gods while still enjoying the gifts, and finally rebel against God so far that he takes the gifts and idols away. Then we long for the good old days, when we could worship the idols and enjoy the gifts, and we go to God, begging for him to return the idols. In the second article, he links the early stage of idolatry with Red-states and the later stage of idolatry with Blue-states. The trouble is, when you're pregnant with evil, you can't stay pregnant forever. You have to either give birth to death or miscarry.

Go read it.

Stages of Idolatry
Become Two Months Pregnant and Stay There

Pelosi visits Seattle

Scott St. Claire reports for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's press conference at Sweedish Hospittle in Seattle. Washington congressmen Jay Inslee and Jim McDermott were also present. This was Pelosi's first public appearance since passing the House version of the health care reform bill Saturday night.

Choice quote:

Cong. Inslee... said that the number one benefit of the Pelosi plan will be increased wages for health care workers in the Pacific Northwest. Who knew? No more, he said, would they lag behind those paid in other parts of the country – everybody gets a raise!

Chao Yuenren: Life With Chaos

Click to read about Chao Yuenren, another Chinese linguist. His autobiography is called Life With Chaos. Before he wrote it, his wife wrote her story in Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, and said (in a chapter entitled "The repatriation of an expatriate"), "I want to borrow a chapter from Chao Yuen-ren's autobiography. But he has not written any."

They both had wit.

How could I help thinking of "her"?

I found this man's entry in Wikipedia while reading about his friend Chao Yuenren, who wrote A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (U. California, 1968) and invented Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the geeky Chinese romanization scheme that represents the five tones with variant spellings.

Notice that Liu invented the Chinese feminine pronoun... what an accomplishment! I thought the feminine pronoun would have been more organic. I guess Chinese was even less inflected than I thought.

What a way to die, too.

Liu Bannong
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Liu Bannong (Chinese: 劉半農) or Liu Fu (劉復) (1891 - 1934) was a Chinese linguist and poet.

A native of Jiangsu, he was an important contributor to the influential magazine La Jeunesse during the May Fourth Movement. He began writing poetry in vernacular Chinese in 1917, and was credited with having coined the Chinese feminine pronoun ta (她), which he made use of in his poems. The usage was popularised by the song Jiao Wo Ruhe Bu Xiang Ta (教我如何不想她 "How could I help thinking of her"), a "pop hit" in the 1930s in China. The lyrics were written by him and the melody by Yuen Ren Chao.

In 1920, he left China to study linguistics abroad, first in London, then in Paris. He gained his PhD at the University of Paris, with research done on Chinese tones. During his time in Paris, he compiled Dunhuang Duosuo (敦煌掇瑣 "Miscellaneous works found in the Dunhuang Caves"), a pioneering work about the Dunhuang manuscripts.

He returned to China in 1925, and began teaching in colleges. He collaborated with Li Jiarui (李家瑞) to compile Songyuan Yilai Suzi Pu (宋元以來俗字譜 "The vernacular characters used from the Song and Yuan dynasties onwards"). Published in 1930, it was a key work in the standardisation of simplified Chinese characters. He died of acute illness after a linguistic field-trip, at the age of 44. Lu Xun wrote a short memoir about Liu (憶劉半農君) after his death.

Vindit to self

You're a man, not a victim.

If you were a victim, you'd be a sacrifice.

But if you are a sacrifice, you've long since stepped off the altar.

[equivocation on the meaning of victim]

In Memoriam: William Empson

I picked up Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson off the shelf again today. I got the book a year ago after I first read about him in a survey of modern literary critics. He wrote it at age 22 while studying at Cambridge… it's a "niggling" account of double meanings in all kinds of classic English poems. Sort of a virtuosic experiment in semantics, half factual, half creative.

The way he teases out the things about a piece of writing that give it an ironic effect on certain readers endears Empson to me, especially the care with which he examines so many facts.

There on the flyleaf I read his short biography:

___________

William Empson, born in England in 1906, was educated at Cambridge University. Associated with the Auden group of young poets, he published several volumes of poetry in the 1930s and then turned his interest to literary criticism. He is best known for… etc.

Before World War II he taught English in Tokyo and Peking, and during the war years he was Chinese Editor for the BBC. In 1947 he returned to a teaching post at Peking National University and since 1953 has held a professorship at Sheffield University in England.

_____

Can you imagine my excitement? A young brainy literary hack, who went to China. And during the war years, too… such an interesting time. Could he be a role model for me?

Well, he turned out to be a dogged antichristian, and an enthusiastic bisexual… two things that I have to guard myself against.

What a bummer.

How do I characterize him but as an interesting, gifted, fanciful man, whose life. was. futile?

I dread reading the racy parts in his two-volume biography, but look forward to the parts about typing out a play from Shakespeare for his students from memory during the siege of Peking. How did he do it?

He jostled elbows with Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and C.S. Lewis. When the Queen of England came to see him at the University of Sheffield, he wrote a masque to be performed in her honor.

You won't see his like again. And my paperback copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity even has sewn binding.

See:

John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (vol. 1)

William Empson: Against the Christians (vol. 2)

Selected Letters of William Empson

Abraham's faith: eternal or temporal?

Soren Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling:

By faith Abraham received the promise that in his seed all races of the world would be blessed. Time passed, the possibility was there, Abraham believed; time passed, it became unreasonable, Abraham believed....

...Abraham became old, Sarah became a laughing-stock in the land, and yet he was God’s elect and inheritor of the promise that in his seed all the races of the world would be blessed. So were it not better if he had not been God’s elect? What is it to be God’s elect? It is to be denied in youth the wishes of youth, so as with great pains to get them fulfilled in old age. But Abraham believed and held fast the expectation.

If Abraham had wavered, he would have given it up. If he had said to God, "Then perhaps it is not after all Thy will that it should come to pass, so I will give up the wish. It was my only wish, it was my bliss. My soul is sincere, I hide no secret malice because Thou didst deny it to me" -- he would not have been forgotten, he would have saved many by his example, yet he would not be the father of faith.

For it is great to give up one’s wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up, it is great to grasp the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up....

"And God tempted Abraham and said unto him, Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountain which I will show thee."

So all was lost -- more dreadfully than if it had never come to pass. So the Lord was only making sport of Abraham! He made miraculously the preposterous actual, and now in turn He would annihilate it....

And yet Abraham was God’s elect, and it was the Lord who imposed the trial. All would now be lost. The glorious memory to be preserved by the human race, the promise in Abraham’s seed -- this was only a whim, a fleeting thought which the Lord had had, which Abraham should now obliterate.

....Yet Abraham believed, and believed for this life. Yea, if his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong. But Abraham’s faith was not of this sort, if there be such a faith; for really this is not faith but the furthest possibility of faith which has a presentiment of its object at the extremest limit of the horizon, yet is separated from it by a yawning abyss within which despair carries on its game.

But Abraham believed precisely for this life,
that he was to grow old in the land,
honored by the people,
blessed in his generation,
remembered forever in Isaac, his dearest thing in life, whom he embraced with a love for which it would be a poor expression to say that he loyally fulfilled the father’s duty of loving the son, as indeed is evinced in the words of the summons, "the son whom thou lovest." Jacob had twelve sons, and one of them he loved; Abraham had only one, the son whom he loved. Yet Abraham believed and did not doubt, he believed the preposterous.

Now that you've skipped down to my commentary, go back up and glance at the words in bold.

Good.

Can you explain to me why Kierkegaard's idea of Abraham's faith sounds like the opposite of that in the book of Hebrews?

Hebrews 11:8-19

⁸By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. ⁹By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. ¹⁰For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

¹¹By faith Abraham, even though he was past age—and Sarah herself was barren—was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. ¹²And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

¹³All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. ¹⁴People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

¹⁷By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, ¹⁸even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." ¹⁹Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.

This was troubling to me: why is there such an emphasis in the Torah about the worldly benefits of believing and obeying God? The Ebal blessings and Gerizim curses in Deuteronomy 28 are the quintessential expression of this philosophy. If the patriarchs were really looking forward to a heavenly city, then why did God give them all kinds of livestock and servants?

Moses never said anything about eternal life... he only talked about enjoying long life in the land of one's own inheritance.

Here's the key, I think.

Hebrews 11:39-40

³⁹These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. ⁴⁰God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

In earlier chapters in Hebrews, it mentions that we have inherited promises better than they had under the old covenant. Could it be that eternal life is only guaranteed in the New Testament, so that only together with us would the patriarchs be made perfect?

Then, the promises of worldly prosperity were types and shadows of the real things which Christ won for us.

But where does that leave Kierkegaard's analysis of Abraham's faith?

Let me look back a second....

Ah, he errs in making eternity with God seem far away. For anyone, though, death could be imminent.

He also errs in making eternity with God seem small. It does seem small and irrelevant, but according to Hebrews, it was the thing that motivated him in all his wanderings. Lest it seem small, compare your perspective on eternity with your perspective on the sky when looking up through a skylight. You might only see 40 degrees of angle, but at night with a high-powered telescope you could see thousands of stars in that 40-degree sweep. Then realize that if you stood on the roof you could see 180 degrees of horizon in all directions. Then realize that it's only half of the dome, since the other half is facing the other hemisphere of the world. So... open your mind.

Third, he is too vague with the idea of "believing in the preposterous". Abraham did have tremendous faith, and he was expecting something preposterous, but only because he considered faithful the One who promised.

But Kierkegaard does get one thing right when he talks about faith for this life. If God promises something tangible, we ought to expect that tangible thing, even when it appears absurd. If not, we are kidding ourselves to think we have really believe the intangible promises.

John 3:12

I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?

I want to go to Malaysia. Especially when I hear songs like this. You'll notice some people holding up a sign, "We the Rakyat lah". The Rakyat is the people of Malaysia. Lah is a delightful intensifier originally from Chinese that hops onto the end of every sentence. Also, the three languages rapped are Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, Tamil, and English.



Thanks to Malaysian Artistes for Unity for free downloads.

Playlist

Felix Mendelssohn - Elijah Oratorio, Is not his word like a fire?
Monkey Majik - Change
Ralph Vaughan Williams - English Folk Song Suite
Guang Liang - Tong Hua
Orson Welles, The Mercury Theatre on the Air - The Man Who Was Thursday

A kingdom of priests

1 Peter 2:9

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

This fulfills the mission statement of the nation of Israel.

Exodus 19:1-6

On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God.

The LORD called to him out of the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself.

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel."

Submit your suggestions for the new NIV

Here is your chance to offer suggestions for the new 2011 revision which will replace the NIV and TNIV Bible translations. My family has used the 1984 NIV Bible for as long as I can remember, so this is mildly earth-shattering to me. Have you found a verse that doesn't make sense, or is poorly worded? Post a comment here.

Courtesy of Better Bibles Blog.

Are his riches exhaustible?

Speech is the channel of relationships
Language is the study of speech.
Does analyzing language demythologize relationships?
Does it make them any safer? Does it unsheathe those events that we look on with wonder, and pull the meat off of them until we wonder how anyone could fall for those cheap tricks we called love and hate? Is that why I adore linguistics? From now on, any emotional or relational reductionism will come back to bite me. Rats.

Does critical study of the Bible demythologize revelation?
In both language and God's word there remains plenty of mystery for us all. But is it atomistic, emergent, or multi-faceted? If the mystery were atomistic, we'd study phrase by phrase, sniffing out every connotation, and tracing the relations between each phrase. If the mystery were emergent, we'd have to recognize it as it arises from simple parts that emit complex meaning when brought together. If the mystery were multi-faceted, it would be in every aspect, every relation, and then in the discourse styles, and the relations between different texts... in short, everywhere in abundance of complexity, visible tangles or no.

But -- treat your subject arrogantly and you'll be sent away empty, thinking there was nothing there in the first place.

Aaron was whose uncle?

Yes, Aaron the high priest and brother of Moses was uncle to Rahab's husband.

And while we're at it, how do you think Amram, Moses and Aaron's father, reacted when he heard that God disapproved of marrying one's aunt? It's possible that Amram was there at the foot of Mount Sinai when the law was given. He lived 137 years, and supposing he had Aaron at age 27 and Moses at age 30, Moses would have been 81 when the law was given and Amram would have been 111.

Lev 18:12 'Do not have sexual relations with your father's sister; she is your father's close relative.'

Life as Art

C.S. Lewis said, "No art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist." (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 124)

By Art I take a category far wider than painting and music. It includes any human expression that puts meaning into the physical world, for our senses on display.

This is a constructionist view, that art does not exist apart from man and his creativity. Also, even when it does exist, the meaning, the key must be maintained. Maybe there is a universal affinity from expression to receiver, so that any viewer of art, at any time in history will "get it". Maybe there is a cultural affinity. Maybe it's even idiosyncratic, so that anyone of the same temperament will "get it".

While all we share the same passions, we don't express them in the same way. Some even have passions that defy transmission because of the uniqueness of the experience. But we all have language to pass along the key.

Now, can our lives be art? G.K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday commented on an artsy, Bohemian neighborhood that if those who lived there were no artists, at least they were works of art. But are we our own artists? To what extent do we exercise the freedom and creativity built in us by God almighty to cultivate meaning through our physical existence? Do we recognize it when we do? What message do we send? Doing your makeup, dreaming up and planning events, shaving or not, relational diplomacy, correspondence, finance -- giving -- it's all Art.

Does it stand opposed to the Potter's work in our lives?

Is it more important to make meaning, or to yield obedience in faith, to be made meaningful?

It's so small -- maybe the art we make of our lives will end up like the molecule of oxygen that receives the spent electron at the end of cellular respiration. A leftover, minuscule leftover, but so good at taking out the trash in a grander scheme. For without it the chain reaction that makes energy usable to our cells would stop. But in every respect, all the oxygen molecule does is receive and move out.

Back to the nature or foundationalist versus constructivist argument: all nature sings, but what do we hear? When we hear it is good, we praise a good God -- and when we hear it's not quite right, arrhythmic or out of tune... deatheningly bad, we mourn our sin that brought nature to such a state with us. Such is the message of nature for those who listen. Need we add more with our art?

And what might we add? Art or order? There's no room here to write about how order is both found and imposed, both in dominion before the Fall and in survival after the Fall. But order is at last a gradient of Art, aligning meaning like points on a snowflake, in the physical world on display before our senses... order differs from art in which passions it seeks to express and satisfy.

For life as art, by receiving, giving, enjoying, and expecting the impossible from the Potter who can do all things, return with me to reading Soren Kierkegaard's meditation on Abraham's faith in Fear and Trembling.

Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God

Here's a snip-review I wrote for Facebook's Visual Bookshelf. I have three more chapters to go before I'm through, and I'm growing more sick of it than I was at first. Still, there is a high power of human description.

Review of Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

A blend of perceptive author-speak with vivid negro-speak. She tells of awful lifechoices and lingering dreams, pioneering from hopeless setting to tragic setting but with a gentle imagination. Is the boss-man's wife really proud or is she stifled? Is the low-life really that low? Should death have to come bef...ore empathy? Of stereotypes made and dissolved, the one debunked is the black victim as a stooping, scraping monolith. Choice and passion make it so individual. Which is why Zora was too radically conservative for the New Deal.

"She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed."

Book collecting

Went to Goodwill with part of my family tonight to look for Halloween costumes. It's the first Halloween we're hitting the streets, ever, and the reason for the change is "Tract-and-Treating". We're going out tomorrow night with armloads of Bible-laced candy to reach neighbors in their houses. Only I never settled on a costume. Instead, I made off with some new books:

The NY Public Library Science Desk Reference (1995)
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

I could have got the new verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but I thought I might already have it in my Norton Anthology. I'll have to check. For Whom the Bell Tolls is copyright 1940, but it's a reprint by Blakiston, not the first edition by Scribners. Oh well... I hope it's good, anyway. Andrew Pudewa once said it's a clever title for a dull book. Lesson: the value of a book is in its content, not in its covers.

Digression: how far can I go in writing like Tristram, and how far should I?

Doctrine Challenge: Original Sin 2

I fell off the band wagon. (This means I didn't post yesterday.) Last night was apologetics meeting; before I was reading whatever traces remained online of Shane Claiborne's scurrilous book Jesus For President... and also mining newspaper editors' email addresses for sending out the Come What May press release. I was kicking myself for not checking the deadlines weeks ago. Then after apologetics, I zonked out on the floor in front of the fire... and then woke up and went to bed at 12:30. No lesson, except that making excuses is as old as the original sin. "This woman you gave me..."

This morning I unknowingly slept in till 7 something. I came down at the call to "take care of email x for person y"... and found Dad making soup for breakfast. It was my job, but he bailed me out.

Today I sent out press releases to 13+ newspapers in the Portland area. Not bad once you get into a routine. Made arrangements for this, that, and the other thing related to the CWM event. Went to choir practice in the evening. Did some more editing, since we need to get an email blast out for an organization tomorrow morning.

And I made orange peel granola. It's in the oven right now. Laura and Teresa will be proud of me.

Lesson: Adam sinned and we suffer the consequences. He slept on his watch, and we all wake up dead in sin. Even while we were oblivious, though, Christ died for us. His life-sustaining power enables us to sustain others.

Doctrine Challenge: Original Sin 1

This morning I got a surprise IM from Jon Winslow, with a challenge to meditate on and live out just one doctrine for one week. He badgered me so, that after thinking it over, I remembered signing up to teach about Original Sin at next week's apologetics meeting. That gives me eight days to learn it and apply it.

My first thoughts on original sin:
"To remain in Adam all die, so in Christ, eternal life is nigh." If Adam didn't represent us all in bringing sin into the world by his disobedience, then how could Jesus represent us all in bringing salvation by his perfect obedience? Why would he need to bring it to us all, if our inherent badness wasn't so universally inherent?

My sister Teresa recommended I read Shane Claiborne's book Jesus for President. I ordered it from the library, so I should be reading it in a few days. In the meantime, though, I read his four appendices off of http://jesusforpresident.org. Eventually I found an excellent response/review/critique to that book and Claiborne's previous book The Irresistible Revolution by Tim Ragsdale.

Ok, the guy's a nut. He's a hippy, a liberal, near-Marxist peace-and-love radical non-resistant Christian. I suppose his stuff is related to Original Sin because he thinks true disciples have to fight poverty on systemic levels and individual levels, as an evil. What's really missing, though, is personal responsibility. Everybody has to find out that they are spiritually bankrupt before they enter the kingdom of heaven. Until that happens, you can tear down the rich all you want and it will still be a zero-sum game.

Yesterday I needed to find out the legality of drawing chalk art on public sidewalks in Portland. According to the Portland Porcupine site, it's usually ok because it's not permanent. It can be a great tool for education or protest when used against abortion. I did hours of research, compiling laws upon regulations upon guidelines upon news articles. It has been done before, but technically it could fall under the definition of graffiti. I called the official in charge; her name was Marcia. She confirmed that the city considers sidewalk chalk to be graffiti unless one has authorization from the property-owner adjacent. They're not so strict about kids drawing in front of their own houses. When I asked for further clarification, she suddenly got suspicious. "What do you want to know for? What are you planning to do?" I told her I was writing a story. "For what?" Uhh, my blog. Which is pretty much why I'm writing this now. "And you said your name was David who?" Nathan... Straub….

From this I gather that knowledge of Original Sin, and experience with its universal effects, makes people quite suspicious of others. Marcia just didn't want me to cost her extra time cleaning up graffiti because of the information I got from her. Well… outlines of infants on the sidewalks of an abortuary will at least give you something cute to look at as you scrub them away.

In review:
1. Adam's Original Sin established all of humanity in a state of spiritual and moral destitution.
2. In the same way, Christ's obedience established all (redeemed) humanity as beneficiaries of grace and righteousness.
3. Original Sin means your problems are inside you, not in the system. You could have the perfect conditioning, and still be a fool, just because of inherited sin nature.
4. Experiencing the universal effects of Original Sin makes us mistrust others.

I just broke out some books that might help on this topic:

Jonathan Edwards, The Doctrine of Original Sin... in Works V.1
John Piper, When I don't Desire God
John Piper, The Justification of God

Hopefully, I'll get some answers from these.

The Woman's Cause is Man's

Tennyson wrote a long, epic poem called The Princess. Within it, there is a section where the prince is trying to woo the princess, after she had failed in her experiment at starting a feminist girls-only school. The prince made this speech. I came across it while I was studying for the GRE Lit. in English exam in the Norton Anthology of E. L. (major authors one-vol. edition). It represents a high-flown but well-conceived view of male-female complementarity and points out that the way to stop sexist oppression or victimization in society by either gender, is through a harmonious marriage. Marriage is where one supports the other, the other protects the one. And together, because they are different, their union makes more progress than they could on their own. This kind of lifestyle means more than feminist or chauvinist theorizing, protesting, litigating, or book-writing (although Tennyson did write a book).

'Blame not thyself too much,'I said, 'nor blame
Too much the sons of men and barbarous laws;
These were the rough ways of the world till now.
Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know
The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free:
For she that out of Lethe scales with man
The shining steps of Nature, shares with man
His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal,
Stays all the fair young planet in her hands--
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow? but work no more alone!
Our place is much: as far as in us lies
We two will serve them both in aiding her--
Will clear away the parasitic forms
That seem to keep her up but drag her down--
Will leave her space to burgeon out of all
Within her--let her make herself her own
To give or keep, to live and learn and be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood.
For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words;
And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each,
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other even as those who love.
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:
Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm:
Then springs the crowning race of humankind.
May these things be!'
Sighing she spoke 'I fear
They will not.'
'Dear, but let us type them now
In our own lives, and this proud watchword rest
Of equal; seeing either sex alone
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies
Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils
Defect in each, and always thought in thought,
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,
The single pure and perfect animal,
The two-celled heart beating, with one full stroke,
Life.'
And again sighing she spoke: 'A dream
That once was mind! what woman taught you this?'

Notes from Church campout

Here's my first post here in a long time... this Sunday my family and I went to the HoFCC church campout at Metzler park somewhere down by Molalla. It's an hour and a half drive and it was hard to sleep in the van. Anyway, Nathan Garvey preached from the story of how Absalom met his death at the hand of Joab and his men in 2 Sam. 19.

Nathan focused on the consistent pride and arrogance of both Absalom and Joab.

"Pride is rebellion against, and unbelief in, God's sovereign will.
Humility is obedience to, and trust in, God's sovereign will."

"Until we understand the effect and consequences of our pride, we'll never understand the value and significance of the cross."

Books I've added to my library recently:

Ibsen, Henrik. Four Major Plays
Cawley, A.C. (ed.) Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays
Willey, Basil. The Seventeenth Century Background
Albee, Ernest. A History of English Utilitarianism
O'Neill, Eugene. The Later Plays of Eugene O'Neill
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: the American West as symbol and myth
Marlow, Christopher. The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress

Latest theological reading:

John Calvin, Institutes 3.19 "Christian liberty"
Institutes 4.13 "Vows"

Martin Luther, "Introduction to Romans"
Treatise on Christian Liberty

Futility

Psalm 78 has a terrible warning. Speaking of the Hebrews in the desert of Zin, it says,

32 In spite of all this, they kept on sinning;
in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.

33 So he ended their days in futility
and their years in .

Futile days pass when no great purpose commands them. The years they constitute are terrifying when they are ended and nothing left but God's wrath. Save me from them. Remove the back-brace of unbelief.

Genesis 16 - Hagar

Since returning from Journey to the Heart in early April, I have had a project. The project is to scrawl out the "book of the Law" (Genesis through Deuteronomy) in composition notebooks. Today's chapter was Genesis 16, about Sarai's maidservant Hagar, whom she gave to Abram to produce a child, since God had closed up Sarai's womb.

1 Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, "The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her."

Abram was the man who believed God's promise of a son from his own body, so that God credited his faith as righteousness, in chapter 15. He, at age 85, went along with the idea.

Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

Hagar got 'uppity' around Sarai, because even though her was to build a family though her son, Sarai herself would be the last of her line, supplanted by Hagar.

When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her . 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, "You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the LORD judge between you and me."

6 "Your servant is in your hands," Abram said. "Do with her whatever you think best." Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.

So Hagar fled. I don't know what Sarai wanted (except a child), but she is ruining one thing after another.

7 The angel of the LORD found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, "Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?"
"I'm running away from my Sarai," she answered.

9 Then the angel of the LORD told her, "Go back to your and submit to her." 10 The angel added, "I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count."

One question has been rolling around in my brain like a rock since dinner-time: Why did God have pity on Hagar?

You might say God was showing his kindness and faithfulness to Abram's descendants (Ishmael). But it shows me that God is not a petty tribal deity in the book of Genesis. He takes note of the helpless everywhere, and -- reveals himself. Does he always? I don't know, because I only have my own experience and what's recorded in the Bible. God must somehow show his glorious attributes in everything he does, and the helpless should know that he is their shield.

He was a shield for Hagar, even though she was an Egyptian slave woman. He was a shield for Job, who lived in the land of Uz. He was worshiped by Melchizedek, king of Salem, and by Abimelech king of the Philistines at Gerar. There was nothing even special about Abram: he came from the land of the Chaldeans (Babylonians).

So does God still love the Arabs (Ishmaelites)? Yes, God still loves the Arabs.


Question 2: Why did the angel tell Hagar to go back to Sarai?

Bringing her back under authority, even a cross old lady, was part of God's mercy.


Here's the rest of the angel's message.

11 The angel of the LORD also said to her:
"You are now with child
and you will have a son.
You shall name him Ishmael, ^[a]
for the LORD has heard of your misery.

12 He will be a wild donkey of a man;
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone's hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
toward ^[b] all his brothers."

I don't get what's so desirable about being a wild donkey. Maybe it ensures that, like Esau, you won't stay under anyone's domination. (By the way, Ishmael means 'God hears'.)

I like the next part especially.

13 She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: "You are the God who sees me," for she said, "I have now seen ^[c] the One who sees me." 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi ^[d] ; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.

P.S.

15 So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

Constant love needs an eternal end

Nehemiah 9:32-33

"Now therefore, O our God, the great, mighty and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love, do not let all this hardship seem trifling in your eyes--the hardship that has come upon us, upon our kings and leaders, upon our priests and prophets, upon our fathers and all your people, from the days of the kings of Assyria until today. In all that has happened to us, you have been just; you have acted faithfully, while we did wrong."

Eliz. Barret Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese XIV

If thou must love me, let it be for nought

Except for love's sake only. Do not say

I love her for her smile--her look--her way

Of speaking gently,--for a trick of thought

That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

A sense of ease on such a day

--

For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may

Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,

May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheek dry,--

A creature might forget to weep, who bore

Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

But love me for love's sake, that evermore

Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.

We love because He first loved us

Elizabeth Barret Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese XII

Indeed this very love which is my boast,

And which, when rising up from breast to brow,

Doth crown me with ruby large enow

To draw men's eyes and prove the inner cost,--

This love even, all my worth, to the uttermost,

I should not love withal, unless that thou

Hadst set me an example, shown me how,

When first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed,

And love called love. And thus, I cannot speak

Of love even, as good thing of my own:

Thy soul hath sn@tched up mine all faint and weak,

And placed it by thee on a golden throne,--

And that I love (O soul, we must be meek--)

Is by thee only, whom I love alone.

Copper price graphs

Graphics:

From London Metals Exchange website, http://www.lme.co.uk/dataprices_pricegraphs.asp

Price graph with values: copper, Jan. 1 2001-Nov. 21 2006, 3 months buyer contract.

Price graph with values: copper, Jan. 1-Nov. 21 2006, 3 months buyer contract.

Copper 3-months buyer contracts on LME

Current reading

Right now I'm reading:

Reclaiming Surrendered Ground by Jim Logan

The New Testament (last read 1 Thess.)

I pray that out of his glorious riches, He may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge -- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:16-19

This morning I go in for my CLA exam. Two ninety-minute tests today, and three tests tomorrow. If you read this, pray that I will be calm during the tests, and remember the important things, and manage time well. Today's tests are partly composed of hand-written essays (legal memoranda), which are a great challenge. But why should I worry? It's for my good, whether I pass or not.