“‘There’s more to good or bad than what’s written in the Ruleboook.’
‘That’s just not true,’ I replied,
shocked by the notion that there might be another, higher arbiter of
social conduct. ‘The Rulebook tells us precisely what is right or wrong
– that’s the point.’”
Jasper Fforde, Shades
of Grey (2010)
 |
| Although I’m used to calling this kind of measuring device a ‘ruler’, it’s technically simply a ‘rule’. Still, it’s probably not a very good idea to get too caught up in technicality. |
I’m currently reading a book called Shades
of Grey. This piece of information is proving a somewhat problematic one to
communicate to people as they tend, understandably, upon hearing the title, to
make associations with a Certain Other Book of remarkably similar title,
compelling me to hastily explain that Shades of Grey is actually a
comedic dystopian sci-fi novel set in a world where people’s social standing is
determined according to their perception of colour, and written by Jasper
Fforde in his usual hilarious tone of mild-mannered surrealism, as if the story
is simply too Britishly polite to presents its contents as anything out of the
ordinary even when they clearly are.1 (The title is, as far as I can
ascertain, an unfortunate coincidence; indeed, Shades of Grey was
actually published first.)2
The world of Shades of Grey is
run according to a copious compendium of rules written down by someone called
Munsell following the Something that Happened. Adherence to the Rules is not
just strict, but absolute, to the point that anything Apocryphal, namely
defying explanation according to the Rules, must be ignored and never spoken
of. There is, however, a certain room for flexibility provided that the rules
are technically obeyed. Early on in the story, protagonist Eddie Russett
has a conversation on a train with a Yellow stranger named Travis, who has got
himself into severe trouble on account of his opposition to the pointlessly
elaborate system of postal redirection made necessary by the Rule that
postcodes be allocated at birth and for permanence:
“That’s the Rules,” said the Yellow,
“and the Rules are infallible, remember?”
This was true too. The Word of Munsell
was the Rules, and the Rules were the Word of Munsell. They regulated
everything we did, and had brought peace to the Collective for nearly four
centuries. They were sometimes very odd indeed – the banning of the number that
lay between 72 and 74 was a case in point, and no one had ever fully explained
why it was forbidden to count sheep, make any new spoons or use acronyms. But
they were the Rules
– and presumably for some very good reason, although what that might be was not
entirely obvious.
“So where do you come into this?” I
asked.
“I used to work in the main sorting
office in Cobalt. I attempted to circumvent
the Rules with a loophole to stop redirections for long-deceased recipients.
When that failed I wrote to Head Office to complain. I got one of their ‘your
request is being considered’ form letters. Then another. After the sixth I gave
up and set fire to three tons of undeliverable mail outside the post office.”
“That must have been quite a blaze.”
“We cooked spuds in the embers.”
“I suggested a better way to queue
once,” I said in a lame attempt to show Travis he wasn’t the only one with
radical tendencies, “a single line feeding multiple servers at lunch.”
“How did that go down?”
“Not very well at all. I was fined
thirty merits for ‘insulting the simple purity of the queue-line’.”
“You should have registered it as a
Standard Variable.”
“Does that work?”
Travis said that it did. The ‘Standard
Variable’ procedure was in place to allow very minor changes of the Rules. The
most obvious example was the ‘Children under ten are to be given a glass of
milk and a smack at 11 a.m.’ rule, which for almost two hundred years was
interpreted as the literal Word of Munsell, and children were given the glass
of milk, and then clipped around the ear. It took a brave Prefect to point out
– tactfully, of course – that this was doubtless a spelling mistake, and should
have read ‘snack’. It was blamed on a scribe’s error rather than Rule
Fallibility and the Variable was adopted. Most loopholes and Leapback
circumvention were based on Standard Variables. Another good example would be
the train we were riding on now. Although ‘The Railways’ had been banned during
Leapback III, a wily travel officer had postulated that a singular railway was still allowable – hence the
gyro-stabilised inverted monorail in current usage. It was loopholery at its
very best.
For the inhabitants of Jasper Fforde’s
dystopian future, the whole of morality is precise, pedantic, and practical.
The Rules point to no higher, more absolute morality beyond themselves: to obey
the Rules, however nominally, is the definition of right, to disobey them is
the definition of wrong. For this reason, one is quite free to exploit as much
wriggle-room as one can find within their limits; motivations and attitudes are
really neither here nor there.
Now, the thing to understand about the
Pharisees’ relationship with the Law3 is that it was really absolutely
nothing like that.
Last week, I made an attempt at
deconstructing some elements of the false impression I formed of the Pharisees
when I was younger.4 A further facet of this false impression – one that
developed some time after the generic Bad Guy stereotype – was that the
Pharisees were somehow labouring under the delusion that, provided they stuck
to the Law, and all the extra rules they added to it, intentions and concerns
and attitudes of heart and mind and soul were of little consequence. In other
words, I thought they were rather like the inhabitants of the world of Shades
of Grey. This view is simply untenable. For one thing, it’s made abundantly
clear throughout the Old Testament that God is massively more interested in
genuine inner worship than superficial outward signs of it.5 On top
of that, however, those of you with extremely good memories may recall that I
included in last week’s list of potentially surprising characteristics of the
Pharisaic sect a belief that scripture should be interpreted according to the
spirit of what it said, rather than by unthinking adherence to the letter of
the Law. This week, I’d like to go a bit further into the details of that
belief.
According to the Pharisees, the written
Law was not the only authoritative source of spiritual truth; it was
accompanied by an oral Law, given by God to Moses at the same time as the
written Law, and preserved in spoken tradition. (This was a specifically
Pharisaic belief; the Sadducees maintained that the written Law was the sole
source of divine revelation.) The existence of this oral Law allowed for the
possibility of continuing revelation – that the written Law could, by means of
the oral Law, be reinterpreted and reapplied according to every new set of
circumstances. The extra details the oral Law could provide also went some way
to solving the problem of the written Law’s lack of specificity. The example
that was used in the relevant lecture of the Early Jewish Biblical Exegesis
module I took earlier this year was the issue of what to do with the corners of
one’s field.6
 |
| A field. I can’t see any of its corners, though. |
The Law says not to reap the corners completely,
so that that part of the harvest might be left for the poor.7
Straightforward enough, until one actually starts trying to do it, at
which point all sorts of practical questions are thrown up. For instance, how
big is a corner? What happens if two people are jointholders of a field? How
poor exactly does one have to be to go and gather crops from other people’s
corners? What if someone harvests half his field, then thieves steal the rest
of his crop – does he have to give the equivalent of the corners he would have
left unharvested from what he has already gathered in?
The answers to all these questions and
more (sometimes given in the form of a general consensus, sometimes that of
each side of an unresolved debate) are found in a text called the Mishnah, the canonical
written form in which the oral Law eventually ended up.8 (The oral
Law wasn’t written down for an extremely long time – until about 200CE –
basically because it was felt that would kind of defeat the point of it being
an oral accompaniment to the written Law.) Consider that last question: the
answer the Mishnah gives is that the owner of the field is exempt from the
corners rule, the implication being that he had every intention of leaving the
required unharvested corners but was thwarted. The next section, however, deals
with the scenario of thieves stealing the first half of the crop, in
which case the field owner is not exempt from the corners rule, because he still
has an opportunity to obey it when he harvests the latter half.
So what? Well, notice the focus on intentions.
These kinds of interpretations of the written Law are not just more rules for
the sake of more rules; they are a genuine attempt to reach behind the
substance of the written Law to the concerns that underlie it, and so to apply
the contents of the Law in a manner consistent with the character of the
Lawgiver. Perhaps a more obvious example comes a few sections later, where it
is stated that the amount of crop left in fulfilment of the corners rule should
correspond to the number of needy people about. It’s pretty clear from the
written Law that the purpose of the corners rule is so that the poor might be
provided for; the point of all the extra rules laid out in the Mishnah is
therefore to clarify how this purpose might best be achieved. There is an
assumption that the reader is on board with this concept; no space is left for
trying to get away with leaving as little as possible. Now imagine the same
rule was in place in the world of Shades of Grey. I expect people would
probably leave the smallest sliver of crop that could plausibly be called a
corner and not feel the slightest shred of guilt about it, because they
acknowledge no moral authority beyond the exact contents of the Rules. Quite a
contrast.
On the one hand, I don’t think the
Pharisees were right about the existence of the oral Law; it’s a case of sola
scriptura or bust as far as I’m concerned. On the other, however, there’s a
lot to be commended about the way they approached the Law, not just as Rules,
but as a way of getting to know the character of the higher moral authority
behind them. So, again, we should be shocked when we read about Jesus turning
round and saying this kind of thing to them:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the
weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you
ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining
out a gnat and swallowing a camel!9
The Pharisees knew they should
be pursuing justice and mercy and faithfulness. They knew these were the
weighty matters of the Law. Tithing mint and dill and cumin was actually one
way in which they were trying to pursue these things; such tithes were not
specifically required in the written Law, but the Pharisees went above and
beyond. They were committed to conducting themselves in a manner not just
nominally compliant with the Law, but reflective of the character of God
revealed in it, even in the tiniest aspects of their lives. And yet, according
to Jesus, they were still getting it horribly, horribly wrong.
That’s the thing, though. We’re all
getting it horribly, horribly wrong. The Pharisees were veritable paragons of
living according to scripture, yet they still failed miserably. In that
light, none of us stands a chance of living in a way God is happy with. In
fact, only one human being has ever lived who actually managed it. If only there
was some way we could have his righteousness bestowed upon us without us having
to achieve anything by ourselves to make us worthy of it … oh, wait a second,
that’s the gospel, isn’t it?
Footnotes
1 On the subject of British politeness, I commend to you
the work of Very British Problems: http://www.verybritishproblems.com/.
Although I can’t comment on the fairly new TV programme, there is much hilarity
to be had browsing the relevant Facebook and Twitter pages.
2 It also has a pretty snazzy website for a standalone
novel of limited fame: http://www.jasperfforde.com/grey/grey1.html.
3 In this post, I use ‘Law’ (capitalised) to refer to the
Torah, a.k.a the Pentateuch, a.k.a the first five books of the Bible, with a
particular focus on the rules laid out therein.
4 Link in the box on the right, but I’m sure you already
figured that out.
5 Try Isaiah 1:11-17, as just one random example: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+1&version=ESVUK.
I guarantee you won’t regret reading past verse 17, either.
6 The argument of the next three paragraphs (up until I
start talking about Shades of Grey again) is entirely and very
gratefully purloined from the lecturer in question, aside, of course, from any
heretical corruptions on my part.
7 Primarily Leviticus 19:9 and 23:22: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=lev+19&version=ESVUK.
8 This stuff is in the section called Zeraim (‘seeds’), in
the subsection called Peah (‘corner’), if you would like to check it and happen
to have a copy of the Babylonian Talmud lying around.
9 Good old Matthew 23 again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=ESVUK.
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