The Curse, the Prison Cell, and the Lynching Mob: Revisiting the Limits of Law with Paul, Boethius, and the Coen Brothers

In a time that seems almost defined by social instability, “law” seems at once essential and treacherous. On the one hand, the law (as an aggregation of specific legal codes) may provide the only corrections for the excesses of our (or any) moment. Theoretically, laws enable us to hold the corrupt accountable for their crimes, to punish those who exploit the vulnerable, and to establish codes of conduct that promote peaceful coexistence. By contrast, the law can seem to generate as many social ills as it seeks to correct, failing to punish nefarious behavior or establish bulwarks against corporate greed.

All of this brings my mind back to Paul’s estimation of “the law” in his epistles gathered in the Christian New Testament. Particularly in his letters known as Romans and Galatians (so called for the communities to whom Paul was writing), Paul’s reflections on law—both religious and civic—represent an extremely creative turn in human legal thinking. On the one hand, Paul simply amplifies a distinctive impulse already present in Hebrew legal writings gathered in the Torah: the Law alone cannot make you the kind of person you want to be or should be or must be. In theory, this thesis holds at a social level, too: no particular legal structure can entirely create or sustain the best model of community that a given group might want to achieve. However worthy a set of laws may be (even if they are allegedly handed down by some divinity), those laws cannot fully transform their adherents into the human beings that they might want to become, regardless of the particular social ideals that accompany a given set of laws within a culture.

For Paul, as for the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, the psychology behind this principle is simple and devastating, but also recognizable: unless one follows all laws perfectly, then one is compromised (“cursed” in Paul’s idiom) before the law. Even to obey laws is to invite a curse on oneself, for obedience to law may bring about the mistaken sense that laws can lead to healing, deliverance, or wholeness. Therefore, those living within legal societies need something that transcends laws in order to fulfill the purposes of the law. To take an absurd example, if Joe is a good father but also a serial killer, then Joe’s obedience to laws governing child-rearing is not very impressive. The fact that Joe moonlights as a killer compromises his otherwise good standing beneath the law. Only perfection would make a whole subject beneath the law. And nobody achieves that.

In Book 1 of the Late Antique classic On the Consolation of Philosophy, the titular Lady Philosophy sings the praises of Law to the imprisoned Boethius. The song may illustrate a high view of law, but laws seem to haunt, rather than comfort, the Roman author as he endures his unjust prison sentence at the hands of King Theodoric. It is the personal presence of Philosophy as a guide, healer, and friend that actually galvanizes the visionary Boethius to some recovery of his own personhood and dignity. In the obscurity of imprisonment and torture, law becomes an object of praise, but only against the sickening irony that the law itself has wrongfully imprisoned Boethius. Mysticism, friendship, and poetry are the interpersonal gifts that convey comfort and something like hope to a prisoner who suffers for his ethical commitments; the law seems rather far away. To the extent that the law is close to the incarcerated Boethius, the law feels much more like a curse.

Boethius’s plight of unjust imprisonment seems like a frighteningly appropriate synecdoche for the state of the American prison system. As popular discourse increasingly emphasizes, marginalized communities in the United States disproportionately suffer at the hands of a legal system that fails them more often than not. Genealogies of the prison industrial complex show the racist origins of our incarceration system, a plain reminder that law is as often a “curse” as it is a panacea.

From a much different perspective, the Coen Brothers illustrate similar tensions in their 2001 comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? A liberal adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, the film frames the story of three escaped convicts against the racialized backdrop of the American South in the era of the Great Depression. As they deftly escape reimprisonment through a series of misadventures, Ulysses Everett McGill and his two companions—standing in for Odysseus and his men—are pursued by an unnamed figure who arguably incarnates Poseidon, that tempestuous god determined to thwart Odysseus’s safe passage home. In the guise supplied by the Coen Brothers, the unnamed antagonist carries a shotgun and wears a pair of sunglasses that shield his eyes from any external gaze. He seems to exist only to hunt Ulysses and his companions across the American South. In the film’s climax, the unnamed man and his posse finally catch up with the protagonists and prepare nooses for a lynching. One of the condemned men utters something about the illegality of the situation, a line that generates the most chilling moment in the film. “The law?” chuckles the nameless man wielding the shotgun. “The law is a human institution.”

The bemused acknowledgment of the law’s humanity reveals something essential about the gun-wielding antagonist: he places himself above the law, and he does so on the basis of some presumed divinity (or non-human quality). Like Nietzsche (and Paul for that matter), this strange man knows that laws are only effective so long as humans invest them with power. And such power can be set aside, ignored, or distorted through shows of force. “The law is a human institution.” In other words, the law is a choice, one that is often made and remade according to the whims of personal power and preference. It is the manipulable structure that can lynch a few ex-convicts in the film’s story, and it is the social context whose fabric can imprison the historical Boethius for standing against the tyranny of the Roman state.

All of which is to return to a perennial question: is anarchy the only reasonable answer to the disturbing excesses of particular legal systems? Is the law only ever to be a curse, something that is either a sharp reminder of personal and social imperfection or an accomplice to malicious abuses of force? Perhaps. Those possibilities may warrant discussion. Paul seems to imply another option. Rather than resisting all legal structures as inherently defective, we can also set our sights on some conception of ourselves that the law is intended to serve. “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. In observing the law’s service to humanity, Mark’s Jesus seems to share Paul’s sense that the goodness of the law always hangs on a knife’s edge. It can be the social force that secures justice for the oppressed, or it can become another self-serving institution that forgets the forms of flourishing that it is intended to serve. In other words, Paul and Jesus are invested in recovering what laws are for. What kind of society is a set of laws supposed to make? Are laws achieving that goal in a given moment? If not, what is to be done? Granted, Paul is not exactly ready to advocate for a wholesale exception from legal society, questions which are complicated by the specifically Christian audiences to whom Paul addressed such questions. Nevertheless, Paul manifests an almost extreme skepticism of any law’s ability to save us from ourselves, from our worst instincts and destructive impulses. For that, we need something else.

Paul has a very specific account of that “something else” which need not come into focus here. What might interest us today is Paul’s intrepid insistence that a human being is something that cannot be exhaustively described by any legal system. Whatever humans are, they are not things that can survive and thrive purely on the basis of a particular set of legal codes and practices. However good and just those laws may be, our failure to live up to them (and their abusive misuses) will always turn law itself into something that oppresses us from without, an external force that rises up before humanity like some enemy that we are powerless to overcome.

Strangely, Paul’s insight is harrowingly close to the utterance of the shotgun-wielding hunter in O Brother. Like the Poseidon figure, Paul knows that the law is limited in its ability to secure what humans often want most for themselves in life. Both Paul and the southern Poseiden position themselves beyond the law. But how they do this and to what end starkly distinguish these two strategies of post-legal identity. For the southern antagonist positions himself beyond all law and laws in order to pursue his harmful desires according to his own will, which becomes a law unto itself. By contrast, Paul strives (somewhat fitfully) to imagine a particular image of the human community characterized by solidarity that honors the humanity of its members.

He strives… but does not always succeed. As is well known, Paul sometimes advances harmful notions of gender and sexuality, even as he other times champions radically egalitarian views on these and other social topics. The extent of these moral failures partly depends on which of Paul’s letters were actually written by Paul, a complex question that I have no ability to answer. My aim here is not to recover any detail of Paul’s specific account of human community or of flourishing, and anyone who finds his letters of interest should press Paul to account for the forms of exclusion that his letters occasionally manifest. I do think, however, that Paul is to be appreciated for his specific interest in reconceiving the human as one who is always living in a vexed relationship to law. It is a perspective that can actually serve to critique forms of social exclusion in the Pauline corpus.

In his prison cell, Boethius suffers the punishment of just laws that have been applied unjustly. In the Coen Brothers film, the movie’s protagonists nearly die at the hands of a vigilante executioner squad that lacks any regard for laws at all. Meanwhile, Paul surveys the scene of legality in all its many ambiguous forms, justified and horrifying, worthy and perverse. And from that vantage, he may help us to remember that laws should never (and could never) be the chief hope of human communities. As vital as laws may be to achieve common goods, the law has a lamentable habit of turning into a curse just when we think we need it the most.

Jacob Abell

Jacob Abell holds a joint PhD in French Studies and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice from Vanderbilt University (2021). He serves on the faculty of the Modern Foreign Languages Department at Baylor University where his teaching and research are focused on medieval literary and religious cultures, ecocriticism, and the digital humanities. His bookSpiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise is forthcoming with Medieval Institute Press and DeGruyter. With Dr. Lynn Ramey, Abell is working on a multi-year grant-funded study to create the first video game to learn spoken Old French through medieval travel narratives.