This is a relatively short book which nonetheless paints on the largest of possible canvasses. Joshua Neoh undertakes a genealogical enquiry into the intellectual origins and relations of three central values: law, love and freedom. In common with a growing strand in the contemporary history of ideas, he argues that our understanding of these values is rooted in Jewish and Christian theological frameworks to which our modern secularised versions owe a greater debt than is usually acknowledged. He seeks to excavate these frameworks not primarily by doctrinal, still less by sociological means. Rather, he admits to disciplinary eclecticism: analytical jurisprudence, ethics, aesthetics, biblical scholarship and political philosophy all shed light on his subject matter. But these perspectives are held together by particular attention to the historical narratives in which our accounts of value are embedded, arguing that it is the images we conjure and the stories we tell which determine our appropriation of them. Chapter 3 sets out a cogent defence of the linkages between description and evaluation, and practice and value, implied by this method.
Neoh's substantive argument shows some affinity to the fundamental contradictions of Critical Legal Studies. Each value is internally polarised and unstable. Law is caught between “authority” and “resistance”; love between “union” and “attention”; freedom between “identification” and “independence”. Chapter 2 explores the bipolarities in each of these three concepts in some depth. Law is simultaneously a medium of authorisation and a resource for opposing the exercise of authority. It generates order and allows us to exploit the gaps left by any order. Love is torn between the desire to overcome separateness and respect for the “otherness” of the other. It seeks the union of the lover's self-losing in the other and yet a deep respect for, and commitment to, the agency and distinctiveness of the beloved. Freedom must be understood both as “freedom from” (independence) and “freedom to” (identification with some ideal, aim or project). There is no stable reconciliation between these poles. However, each side of the antinomies belongs to a single coherent narrative: a “prior narrative” which represents the position of stability and respectability (authority, union and identification), and a “counter-narrative” which reacts, rejects, questions and overturns (resistance, attention and independence). Towards the end of his book, Neoh draws a helpful analogy here to Nietzsche's aesthetic scheme of Apollo and Dionysus, the one establishing order, discipline, balance and propriety, the other turning everything upside down in an ecstatic dance of release and redemption. It leaves us each with the burdens of judgment and self-creation: “In choosing to commit oneself to a configuration of values within a form of life, one constructs a subjective coherence amid the objective pluralism of values” (p. 181).
The poles are represented respectively by constitutionalist and anarchic ideal life forms. Chapters 4 and 5 recount the history of each in turn. In brief outline: ancient and medieval monasticism – living by rule – became democratised in the Reformation giving rise to Puritanism, the disciplined pursuit of a life of spiritual and moral perfection. Puritan theological covenantalism in turn gained political expression as American constitutionalism, the ideal of a whole community subject to law. This story is a relatively easy one to tell; the “Western” cultural preoccupation with legality has been noted by many from Max Weber to Judith Shklar. The counter-narrative of anarchism is more submerged, and the relations are, as Neoh admits, “more analogical than genealogical” (p. 143). However, he traces connections between Christian Gnosticism, with its distinctive combination of a radical internal freedom and disvaluing of the material world, and the ways in which Reformation thought elevated inner faith and legitimated political absolutism, to the apotheosis of Enlightened autonomy in the work of Max Stirner.
The whole of Neoh's work is unashamedly embedded in theological reflection, and it is this framing which I found both refreshing and frustrating. Chapter 1 contains Neoh's construal of biblical material. It starts with cosmological beginnings – the creation myths – and finishes with eschatological ends in St. Paul's theology of law. It is really the latter which is the lynchpin of Neoh's theological argument, since like many commentators down the ages he detects in Paul a deep ambivalence about law. Throughout the book, Neoh keeps returning to Paul and this ambivalence. It is well-known that there are two ways of reading the Pauline material – is the Christian free from “law” or subject to a new “law”? What is the place of “law” in the life of the Christian? As well as considering a range of possible interpretations and reconciliations of the material, there is a more basic question: should we be seeking coherence at all? It is part of Neoh's case that there is no theoretical reconciliation, so Paul must be read as incoherent and unstable, trying to have it both ways, rather than complex and nuanced. So, for example, the claim that “Christ is the end of the law” (Romans 10:4) is read to emphasise the idea of redundancy rather than the completion which telos might otherwise suggest. Lutheran theology arguably comes closest of all Christian theologies to capturing the paradox of law, but Luther figures similarly in Neoh's book only as one who converts from one pole to the other. Yet Luther himself arguably saw – and attempted to work through – the same antinomy as Neoh himself. One only needs to consider the opening words of one of his most famous tracts: “The Christian is a free man, subject to no-one; the Christian is a slave, bound to everyone” (On the Freedom of a Christian (1525)).
The persistence of this interpretive choice is fair enough as a reading of Pauline theology; Neoh's antinomy wreaks rather more serious theological havoc when applied to the creation narratives with which he starts. Here, the Edenic vision is correlated to the prior narrative and the Fall to the counter-narrative. The world is created in order and harmony, against which the first humans assert their independence with tragic consequences. Yet in Neoh's construal, Creation and Fall are moral necessities rooted in the character of God: “In order for God to be God, he needs another independent being to recognise him as such” (p. 18). The command “not to eat of the tree” introduces the possibility of law, which is only realised when another “strong-willed and self-conscious being” (p. 19) reacts against it. The “knowledge of good and evil” prohibited to Adam and Eve is the capacity to engage in moral reasoning, not the lived experience of separation from God. Thus it is the Fall which complexifies love into the recognition of difference and introduces independence into freedom. O felix culpa!
Nevertheless, this is not an orthodox reading of the creation myths. And I suspect that a Christian theologian might find the key to Neoh's heterodoxy in his failure to reflect on the doctrine of the Trinity. Apart from one brief mention in the context of “love as union”, the Trinity does not feature in Neoh's account. This absence is rather surprising, for it is in this idea that Christian theologians have located God's self-sufficiency in love. Here, there is both differentiation and unity of persons, distinctiveness of role and harmony of purpose, in an unending dance of relationship (perichoresis). But instead of rooting the complexity of law, love and freedom in the both/and of the Trinity, Neoh locates it theologically in the either/or of good and evil. As a result, he both downplays the elements of differentiation and individual creativity in Eden and the destructive effects of the Fall on any conception of law, love or freedom. One wonders where disorder, alienation and moral slavery fit into this picture. Ultimately, his theological stance seems more Buddhist or Manichean than Christian.
This is bold and vigorous work, which in broad strokes seeks to capture the central elements of European legal culture. It surveys a remarkably broad sweep of literature and in doing so captures well the ambivalence we feel about law. Whether the tragic note it ultimately sounds is also a defining characteristic of the tradition is less clear; after all, the counter-narrative remains at all times, “counter”. And, as I have suggested, there is perhaps more intellectual resource for an ultimate, if only aspirational, reconciliation of values in the Western theological and political tradition than Neoh wishes to admit.
