The End of the Law is Madness

...No Laws, No Caesars

“To create crime,” said Ursula LeGuin, “create laws.” 

Or, as Paul put it, “law came in, and the trespass multiplied… law brings wrath, but where there is no law, neither is there violation.” 

This is quite true in a technical sense: no law, no crime. Of course, it doesn't mean there are then no problems. But it's also true in another sense: that laws reflexively create violations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Whenever a fence is erected, of course we have to test it. We need to know what happens. We need to map out where the power lies. There is some compulsion to understand the nature of the world that contains us. I remember putting my hand on exactly the stove hob my mother told me not to touch. How hot could it be?

It seems very unlikely to me that all wrongdoing would come to an end if all the laws were removed. I'm not quite that sort of anarchist. But I also think that just as violence calls for law, so law creates more violence. Law is an expression of the problem, not the solution. And while, it might not be the case that violence would disappear with the disappearance of law, it is also true that—if we might entertain the absurd for a moment—law would have no meaningful place in a world that had recovered from its violent past. In that kind of world, law would become… something else.

My second guide to the messianic refusal of law was Walter Benjamin's friend, the historian of Judaism Gershom Scholem. In his essay, Toward an Understanding the Messianic Idea, he pointed out that rabbinic Judaism has always carried a spirited tension between two opposing energies. On one hand, there was the conservative impulse toward the religious law. For a stateless people, scattered across hostile Christian Europe, keeping a religious law was a means of survival. It helped them hold onto a sense of identity as a marginal community. On the other hand, there was messianic utopianism: a different posture altogether. Leaning into mystical visions of the messianic age, these sorts envisioned a time when all law would become meaningless. There would be no need for moral boundaries in the age to come, because the redeemed creation would be totally free of violence. It would be without moral shadow. There would be no distinction between sacred and profane because all things would be brought to their sacred wholeness. Finally, there would only be “the messianic spontaneity of human freedom purely flowing forth….”

Scholem's sketch is incredibly illuminating. For one thing, it meant that the New Testament’s critique of law is not a critique of Judaism, but a critique of the whole paradigm of law. Judaism had been making this critique for a long time. The Christian caricature of Judaism as sheer law, is as false as the conceit that Christianity is without law of its own.

For another thing—and this is of particular interest to these sketches of the four refusals—the messianic imagination longs toward a world with no law. There can be no law in the messianic age. And so it was that Scholem described the messianic idea as “the anarchic breeze in the well ordered house of Judaism.” 

All this is very ill-advised. There is a madness involved in utopian thinking. If you wish to imagine the world fully healed and at peace, it's a matter of the utmost seriousness not to take yourself or your epiphanies too seriously. There is a flex of mysticism involved in contemplating visions of the world healed of both the law of violence and the violence of law. How could the world ever be this way? The idea is beyond us. It belongs to the miraculous. And yet, thought is a kind of prayer. This kind of prayer is necessary to speak honestly about the compromised agreements we've been obliged to make with law.  This kind of prayer is necessary in order to see past the law’s mythic stature of iron-clad righteousness. The first century Messianics announced the end of law, not for arbitrary religious reasons, but for political, social, economic, and ethical ones. The law could not aright the world, because it was a systemic extension of the world's wrongs. The Messiah brings an end to the law, because the law is the sure sign that violence still rules.

It’s no wonder they were accused of turning the world upside-down.