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theirisvoyage · 1 year

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Comedy

Day 69. 420 Light Years from Earth. Destination: OldeKomos

With the crew in high spirits, we began our descent into the atmosphere of OldeKomos. Right away, we notice two kingdoms, separated by a vast expanse of wooded fields. We approached the one nearest to our landing site, greeted by the sounds of debaucherous festivities. The air was marked with the smell of wine and old stone, and after conversing with the partygoers, we began to explore what we are told is the Old kingdom. The palace grounds, dubbed the Polis, had shelves scattered about, each filled with thick texts and an inscription thanking their founder, Aristophanes. We passed uncomfortably phallic spires as we searched for a political or religious leader to help guide us through this foreign planet, but every inquiry to a (mostly nude) citizen was met with laughter and satirically political banter. While there was no one specific monarch, we rather found that the kingdom was ruled by 4 sectors. The Parados sector handled the general public and when it should be welcomed into the palace, the Parabasis sector would communicate directly with public and the courts, the Agon sector handled any conflict, debates, or contentions, and the Exodus sector focused more on safely bringing the public out of the palace. After introductions and good graces to each, we began our journey through the woods to reach the second kingdom we spotted on our way in.

It did not take long to be welcomed into the New Kingdom. Unlike the Old Kingdom, citizens here seemed much more enthralled with sharing the ways of their home and personal lives, rather than the political discussions favored by their neighbors. Citizens gladly showed us to their palace, lovingly dubbed the Oikos, to meet their political leaders, all the while filling us in on the daily dramas and gossip of the time. The court wasted no time, ushering us into the Oikos, thrilled to be receiving guests. Our crew eagerly took notes on our conversations and the basic functions of their society, and we found ourselves utterly amused at the honesty of these leaders. Fascinated by true human nature and expression, they admitted to implementing an absolutely ridiculous set of laws, cycling in new ones every so often, in order to insight more drama amongst their subjects. The subjects themselves are categorized by personality type, and often these laws are written in such a way that allows for restriction or manipulation of which personality type interacts at a given time, meaning stories of romantic, platonic, and familial relationships being sent into disarray arrive on the daily. With the societal landscape changing so frequently, citizens often find themselves in a slurry of ruses, misunderstandings, and other sticky situations. The court’s favorite type of drama to manufacture would be found then lost love, forcing those in the throngs of puppy love away from each other, then leaving enough of a legal loophole that allows them to have their happily ever after. The kingdom was built upon the field neighboring the woods, dubbed the Green World, in order to give young lovers a place to escape and scheme their way back into each other's arms. I suppose it’s quite convenient that the woods can also be used as a wedding venue.

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bibliotecarubenbonifaz · 5 months

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#Aristófanes #Hubbard Thomas K.#Drama griego #Coros

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kingdomoftheheavens · 3 years

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Postscript: "Sin" Words: Lexical Definitions

Postscript: "Sin" Words: Lexical Definitions--They are NOT synonyms

The following list contains all of the words related to the concept of “sin” contained in the same context as paráptōma. It does not contain all of the words related to “sin” in the entire New Testament, though the most common words are discussed here. Hamartanō Verb. According to Strong’s Concordance, Greek No, 264: “to miss the mark, do wrong, sin; originally: I miss the mark, hence (a) I…

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graphitedecay · 7 years

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Uomini, cui natura dannava a cieca notte, stirpi di fronde lievi, effimeri, senz'ali, di vita breve, impasti di fango: oh vane frotte d'ombre, oh simili ai sogni, sventurati mortali!

Aristofane, Gli Uccelli

#citazione #cit #ispirazione #corifeo #parabasi #aristofane #uccelli #nubicuculia #uomo #notte #natura umana #commedia #grecia #liceo classico #words of wisdom #classicista #libro

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crimsong19 · 2 years

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2nd #bookevent of the week - @thehighsign's 'Camera Man' Buster Keaton biography & @parabasis's 'The Method' with Stephen Metcalf doubling as a @SlateCultFest taping. #AlphaClub #SonyA6000 #A6000 (at Strand Book Store) https://www.instagram.com/p/CZisu9qsN6r/?utm_medium=tumblr

#bookevent #alphaclub #sonya6000 #a6000

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ill-will-editions · 4 years

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SQUIRRELS ON THE LOOSE: ON THE CHILEAN STATE OF EXCEPTION Gerardo Muñoz

First published on the Swedish site Tillfällighetsskrivande [Occasional Writings].

The series of articles published by Giorgio Agamben in the wake of the COVID-19 have received an unsurprising reaction by the night watchmen of liberal democracy. The misunderstanding arises as a coping mechanism comprised of two distinct requests: first, the demand that we abandon the conditions informing Agamben’s archeological project (Homo sacer, 1995-2015); and, on the other hand, the desire to make an exception out of the current situation, as if, this time, “immunity” or a “democratic biopolitics” will effectively redeem Humanity [i] . The nature of this desperate reaction speaks to the fantasy of a grounded ‘good politics for the right time’, as if the business of resurrecting principles of legitimation were a credible enterprise during a time of civilizational decay for our species. By this point we are accustomed to the tone of the university discourse and its strategic deployment as a compensatory measure for its inferiority complex. In fact, it forms the spirit of our time.

It is not my intention to rehearse Agamben’s theses. These are well-known by all those who have encountered his work on “life”, the state of exception, and the consummation of the oikonomia at heart of Western politics. Rather, I would like to shift the discussion to the Chilean case, where I was surprised to see many intellectual voices tapping into Agamben’s premises, in particular in the aftermath of a recent letter by academics concerned with COVID-19 [ii]. For me it says a great deal about the Chilean experience and its current moment, which has been in a prolonged state of exception for over half a century. My thesis, then, is that the Chilean debate is in a better position to arrive at a mature understanding of the state of exception, not as an abstract formula, but as something latent within democracies. The dispensation of Western politics into security and exceptionality is not a conceptual horizon of what politics could be; it is what the ontology of the political represents once the internal limits of liberal principles crumble to pieces (and with it, any separation between consumers and citizens, state and market, jurisprudence and real subsumption).

Although President Sebastian Piñera has recently decreed a state of “exceptional catastrophe” in order to face the increasing threat of the COVID-19 in the country, his decision must be placed within the larger context of what we may call the long Chilean state of exception. There are at least three distinct historical segments of this exceptionalism. First, the criollo exceptionalism of the early republican period in which the relation between the state and the constituent power was unbalanced; second, the political dictatorial state of exception effectuated in the coup d'état against Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government in 1973; and finally, the so called “transition to democracy” of 1990, which served to juridically optimize what Tomás Moulian called the productivist-consumer matrix of society [iii]. One should not understand these temporal segments as a mere continuation of political instability or erratic juridical illegality, quite the contrary. The Chilean case brings to bear how the normalization of the state of exception could very well live under the veneer of effective legal borders of a subsidiary state that functions as the arbiter of accumulation and debt for societal dynamism. In a groundbreaking essay, “El golpe como consumación de la Vanguardia” (“The Coup as the consummation of the Avant-Garde”, 2003), the Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer argued that the Chilean coup of 1973 was the true avant-garde gesture, and thus, the ‘big-bang’ of globalization, since it blurred the inter-epochal passage from the dictatorship to that of the post-dictatorship. As Thayer argues in a decisive moment of his essay:

The repressed ground of the law – that is, what the law must repress in order to become itself – returns as a norm [in time of post-dictatorship]. The exception becomes the norm. The violence against the unlimited becomes violence against limitation. And if, before, the exception concerned the norms as exception from the norm; today, in the wake of globalization, what is understood as the exception has become the rule. The state of exception as factical proliferation of the norm is outside all generic norms: the market, the entrepreneurial freedom, the market’s anomie, or any specific norm, as well as any decision around what counts as a norm…Today, it is the Coup, more than artistic practices, that is outside of any frame and that destitutes not only the institution, the habits, and our presumptions about art; but that also alters the codes inherent to understanding. It is the Coup, and not the university, that brings about the reform of subjectivity and thought; it is the Coup that transforms art, the university, politics, and subjectivity itself. [iv]

The Coup introduces a new historical temporality, flattening its very nature as exceptional through the unlimited exchange of values between subjects and things. This takes place within a constitutional arrangement that blocks any ius reformandi and becomes preventively unwarranted. This was, after all, the ideal of legal theorist Jaime Guzmán, who tried to combine a Thomist conception of the state as “accident” with a hyper-personalism of the “persona” as a substance [v]. As if already prefiguring the demise of liberalism’s active social state, Guzmán incarnates the current drift of the nationalist right’s efforts to reconcile Aquinas with the market, corporativism with the U.S Constitution, and the ‘Common Good’ with the geopolitical battles against the rise of China [vi]. Of course, Guzmán was not a soothsayer, and he did not see this particular arrangement. However, he did see the normalization of the state of exception as a strategy to restrict any pull of ‘civil society’ against the structures of the subsidiary state. If Chile indicates one thing today, it is this: the problem of the political exception is not a problem of state form; it is a problem of the exhaustion of the boundaries between state and civil society, where autonomous social form is a zone of extraction for the exchange of value in the face of collective survival. The “tyranny of values” acquires a new meaning here: it is no longer a problem of moral discursivity, but rather an intensification of the war waged against life itself.

We know the discourse around the ‘withering of civil society’ has been around for quite some time [vii]. But this withering once meant that a “political subject” could emerge to organize a new transformation. One might ask: is this, then, what happened during the October uprisings? Not really, I would argue. Unlike the previous protests of 2003 and 2011, October of 2019 was driven by what has elsewhere been called an ‘experiential politics’, in which the de-articulation between people and representation no longer attempted to translate its discomfort into ‘demands’, as is typical in populist moments [viii]. The Chilean October was a “parabasis” on the social stage, a movement against representation and ideal types, a form of errancy that cannot be equated with the modern pursuit of “freedom”. If freedom has always been hermeneutically grounded in an analogical relation to action, then the call for “evasion” in the Chilean October demonstrated clearly that human praxis is irreducible to human activity, and that there exists a form of life beyond biopolitical security. This is why today, any attempt at a ‘spiritualist’ defense of ‘this life’ is already fallen to biopolitical machination, and to the reproduction of a subjective vitalism in which survival is guaranteed only as an abstract, non-existential ‘Good’. This is the other side of Thomism. However, as Agamben reminds us,

“Whoever has a character always has the same experience, because he can only re-live and never live. Etymologically, ēthos (’character’) and ethos (‘habit’, ‘way of life’) are the same word...and thus both mean ‘selfhood’. Selfhood, being-a-self, is expressed in a character or a habit. In each case, there lies an impossibility of living” [ix].

The new Chilean state of exception is an attempt to combat this truth through a full deployment of the police, the market, the university, the intelligentsia, and the rule of law itself.

The destituent moment against the Chilean exception is waged against the reduction of existence to “life”. As Ivan Illich knew well, “there is something apocalyptic in searching for Life under a microscope” [x]. Obviously, this resonates clearly with Agamben’s concern about the political strategies’ concern with the “living” and the security of “life”. It is no surprise, on the other hand, how the intelligentsia of the Chilean status quo have refracted this assault on the vital fabric of human existence by developing new strategies of “order” to counteract what they have called the “party of violence” that seeks to destitute its reduction to the vitalist apparatus [xi]. Other more refined attempts in the restructuring of the Chilean political right, such as Hugo Herrera’s programmatic Octubre en Chile (2019), calls for a popular republicanism, which renews the mediation between society and state through a Schmittian conception of the political as both telluric and contingent. Inverting the terms (politics having primacy over the economy) drags into the open the dual machine of governance, where bipolar forces of relative weakness and optimal strength are woven together into an interface for social conservation [xii]. This strategy confronts the epochal crisis by mobilizing a fear of fragmentation and the general contention of the species. The same goes for the modernist proposals based on the supremacy of constituent power, with its ideal engineering of the “social” that accords a force of transformation to “passive devices” such as deliberative assemblies and communicative action (of which Chile has a long tradition, under the form of cabildos) that could canvas the true colors of democratic separation of powers and cohesiveness of a new social contract. Unfortunately, endless gatherings and assemblies are powerless against the contemporary mechanisms of power, which today consist in the management of flows, infrastructure, and the general system of extraction [xiii]. We can talk amongst ourselves all we want, but it does not get us anywhere. The call for an implicit “communicative unity” of the body polity runs in a circle, with life, production and value remaining intact.

Agamben is correct to observe how unsurprising it is to see citizens today be willing to accept a reduction of their form of life to bare life in the name of security, since “crisis” is the way in which governance administers the internal strife of this acephalous polity [xiv]. In a recent column, Hugo Herrera provides an image that captures this movement: the protestors in the streets are like ‘squirrels on the loose’ [xv]. The squirrels’ movements are a combination of rhythm and caprice; it is not clear where they are going, whom they are going to meet, nor what their destiny will be. Like Pulcinella, half human and half chicken, the scampering squirrel is what remains when the singular body enters in contact with another without any aspiration to create a self-destiny superseding [xvi]. There is something to be said of the encounter between animal and human that can potentially deprogram the metropolitan topoi, turning the exception into the gleaming transfiguration of another world. In the mere act of seeking, new possibilities emerge. And if the point is to create a different relation to the world, one in which all the “potentialities of the entire species can finally develop”, then every exception is a tool of domestication, a form of political atrophy [xvii]. The destituent possibility is not a realization; it is a questioning of the very disjointed presence of the Social as an ‘autonomous space’ for action. Here too, the Chilean exception offers us a mirror by which to flee the obstinacy of the present.

***

Gerardo Muñoz teaches at the Modern Language and Literatures department at Lehigh University. His most recent publications are Por una política posthegemónica (DobleA editores 2020), and the forthcoming edited volume La rivoluzione in esilio: Scritti su Mario Tronti (Quodlibet, 2020).

Notes

[i] For positions against Giorgio Agamben’s thesis, see Panagiotis Sotiris, "Against Agamben: Is a democratic biopolitics possible?": https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/14/against-agamben-is-a-democratic-biopolitics-possible/ , and Roberto Esposito, “Curati a oltranza”, https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/28/curati-a-oltranza/

[ii]The document of the letters of the Chilean academics about the COVID-19 can be found here: https://bit.ly/2IW7npd

[iii] Tomás Moulian, Chile Actual: Anatomía de un mito (LOM, 2002), p.81-119.

[iv] Willy Thayer, “El Golpe como consumación de la vanguardia”, El fragmento repetido: escritos en estado de excepción (ediciones metales pesados, 2006), p.24-25.

[v] See, Renato Cristi, El pensamiento político de Jaime Guzmán (LOM, 2011).

[vi] See in the latest issue of American Affairs (Vol. IV, Spring 2020), the articles “Common Good Capitalism: An interview with Marco Rubio”, and “Corporativism for the Twenty-First Century”, by Gladden Pappin. Also, on the reactivation of an economic Thomism, see Mary L. Hirschfield, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[vii] Michael Hardt, “The withering of civil society”, Social Text, N.45, 1995.

[viii] See Michalis Lianos, "Une politique expérientielle": https://lundi.am/Une-politique-experientielle-IV-Entretien-avec-Michalis-Lianoswell. Also, the dossier on the Chilean uprising, "Los estados generales de la emergencia", Ficción de la razón, october 2019: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2019/10/29/vvaa-los-estados-generales-de-emergencia-dossier-en-movimiento-sobre-revueltas-y-crisis-neoliberal/

[ix] Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella or, Entertainment for Kids (New York, 2018), p.104.

[x] Ivan Illich, “The Institutional Construction of a new fetish: Human Life”, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1990 (Marion Boysars, 1992), p.223.

[xi] José Joaquin Brunner, “Violencia: el desquiciamiento de la sociedad”, November 2019, El Libero: https://ellibero.cl/opinion/jose-joaquin-brunner-violencia-el-desquiciamiento-de-la-sociedad/.

[xii] Schmitt taught as early as in the twenties this state-market duality. See, “Strong State and Free Economy", in Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism (University of Wales Press, 1998), ed. Renato Cristi. p.215.

[xiii] For the thesis on the control of social flows, see “Julien Coupat et Mathieu Burnel interrogés par Mediapart", Lundi Matin, 66, 2016: https://bit.ly/3bdRAOs . For the new form of power as extraction, see Alberto Moreiras, "Notes on the illegal condition in the state of extraction", RIAS, Vol.11, N.2, 2018, p.21-35.

[xiv] Giorgio Agamben, “Chiarimenti", March 17, 2020, Quodlibet: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-chiarimenti. Denna text finns också på svenska här.

[xv] Hugo Herrera, “Crisis sobre Crisis”, March 17, 2020, La Segunda: https://bit.ly/2Wvc0i0.

[xvi] Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella or, Entertainment for Kids (New York, 2018), p.117.

[xvii] Jacques Camatte, “The Wandering of Humanity”, in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1995), p.71.

#COVID19 #Coronavirus #Chile #revolt #Agamben #destituent power #insurrection

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fuckyeahgreatplays · 4 years

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Today it is Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020. I am 40 years old, and we have been at war since six months after I left college. This war is one, we now know, the Pentagon itself felt was unwinnable and quite possibly counterproductive as early as 2005. Yet we are still fighting it. Less than a month ago it looked like we were going to expand this war into Iran, for reasons that made little sense, and were likely based on falsehoods.

This is the kind of cynical, cyclical failure that Shakespeare imagined again and again, but he struggled mightily to imagine how to make it stop. In his later plays, the Romances, we see forgiveness enter into the dramatic action, but forgiveness in Shakespeare’s plays is a form of magic, it can neither be controlled nor understood. A wife forgiving her husband and a statue coming to life are, on some cosmic level, the same. And the dead child she must forgive him for can never be resurrected. Prospero can forgive, but the act leaves him despairing, and thinking every third thought on his grave.

#shakespeare #isaac butler #theater #plays #war #politics

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alchemist-shizun · 4 years

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21 questions

tb the lovely adorable @spooky-scary-virgil whom I love very much

1. nickname: Ellie/El, “our beautiful goddess” or “angel” by the ts italian gang for some reason

2. zodiac: Libra

3. height: 150 cm or something around there

4. hogwarts house: Ravenclaw

5. last thing i googled: Parabasis

6. fav musicians: Set it Off, Maneskin, PATD, different musicals, idrk

7. song stuck in my head: Right now it’s Hourglass by Set it Off but I had another one two seconds ago wild

8. following: 268

9. followers: 578

10. do you ever get asks: Sometimes yes, mostly by friends or during ask games or by my wonderful love anon

11. amount of sleep: 5 to 6 hours, sometimes 7, if I ever go beyond 8 it’s because it’s Sunday and the alarm didn’t ring

12. what are you wearing: beige pj with black spots and soft big socks cause we comfy in bed

13. dream job: either writer or archaeologist but we all know I’m going to end up in mcdonalds at max

14. dream trip: Norway or Japan

15. instruments: I have no talent

16. languages: Italian, English, did German in middle school, I can understand Spanish sometimes, I tried to learn Norwegian once. I don’t think dead languages count here but eh honorable mention to latin and ancient greek which are fucking up my grades.

17. 10 fav songs as of now: My life is going on by Cecilia Krull, Chant (reprise) from Hadestown, Say my name from Beetlejuice, Twisted by Starkid, Cecily Smith by Will Connolly, Way down Hadestown from Hadestown, Dance dance by FOB, Ricordami from Coco, Fuyu No Hanashi from Given

18. if you were an animal: Jellyfish cause I have no brain

19. fav food: I’m sure none will believe me when I say it’s some italian food

20. random fact: I have an alpaca plushie named Gesualdo

21. my aesthetic: i have no clue help

@softanxiouspatton @lance-alt @kim-argent-moon @mijako98 @a-random-italian

#tag game #not ts

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shakespearenews · 4 years

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The second problem — and this one is a doozy — is that dramatic action is a term with no consensus definition...There’s been debates and symposia and panels on what the term might mean for hundreds of years. If you read, say, the great drama critic Eric Bentley’s essay on dramatic action, you can actually watch his brain melt out of his ears in real time as he tries to figure it out...

It was this triangulation that was most important for me in making Lend Me Your Ears. That podcast really grew out of a failure on my part. I was teaching Shakespeare the day after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. And it was, for me and my students, a kind of traumatic event. We thought the world was headed in one direction, and it instead was headed in another, far more dangerous one, one we probably should have seen coming. This is the kind of event that Shakespeare wrote about all the time, of course. And yet that day, as I tried to talk to my students, I had nothing of Shakespeare’s to give them. I had no idea what to say.

#shakespearae #william shakespeare #isaac butler #theater #theatre #podcasts #lend me your ears #olitics #dramatic action #eric bentley

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davidrmaas · 5 years

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After chastising the Galatians for exchanging the liberating Spirit for the bondage of circumcision (Galatians 3:1-8), the Apostle Paul then makes an argument based on the example of Abraham (3:6-14). He links Abraham to faith, righteousness and the promised blessing for Gentiles, then introduces the subjects of the “sons of Abraham,” the ingathering of the Gentiles and the curse of the Law. Abraham was reckoned righteous on the basis of faith (“just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him for righteousness”), therefore those who are from faith are true “sons of Abraham.” God promised that in Abraham “all the Gentiles will be blessed”; from the beginning His purpose was that “the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles in Jesus Christ, in order that the promise of the Spirit might be received through the faith.” Paul equates the “blessing of Abraham” with the “promise of the Spirit.” In contrast, those “from the works of the Law” place themselves under the Law's curse. The Law pronounces that those under it are obligated “to continue in ALL the things written in the Book of the Law” (Deuteronomy 27:26). The Law is not a pick-and-choose menu but an all-or-nothing proposition. Gentile believers that subject themselves to circumcision must understand that much more is involved than just the removal of foreskin. Torah requires covenant members to do all that is written in it; failure to do so will place one under its curse. Circumcision is just a first step and entry point to something much larger. Paul next presents an argument based on the nature of a covenant (3:15-18). The covenant with Abraham represented God's original intent and irreversible will. A covenant once ratified “no one voids or appends,” therefore the Law that “came into being four hundred and thirty years later does not invalidate or nullify” the earlier promise. The Promise was given not just to Abraham but to “his seed,” singular, and that seed is Jesus. The promised inheritance with its blessings for Gentiles is therefore not from the law, but rather through “the promise to Abraham.” Paul's line of reasoning is covenantal. The Purpose & Duration of the Law: (Galatians 3:19-22) - “Why, then, the Law? It was added because of the transgressions until the time when the seed came for whom the promise was given, and it was given in charge through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not mediator of one, yet God is one. Is then the law against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given which was able to make alive, then righteousness would be from the law. But the scripture confined all things under sin, in order that the promise from the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them who believe.” If God gave the Law at Sinai, if right standing with God is based on faith not deeds of the Torah, and if the inheritance promised to Abraham is received through faith, not Law, what was and is the purpose of the Mosaic Law? Paul responds first that the Law was “added” after the original promise to Abraham. It is subsequent and subsidiary to the promise. It is also distinct from it in regards to its era in salvation history. By “added” Paul does not mean that the Mosaic legislation did add something to the original covenant. He identifies the Law given at Sinai to be a covenant confirmed by God (“a covenant confirmed beforehand by God, the law…does not void the promise”). Paul views the Mosaic legislation as a distinct covenant, a covenant that was “added” after the original Promise. The Law was given “until the seed should come.” This means there was a temporal limitation on the Law. “Until” translates the Greek preposition achri. When used with a place it connotes “as far as”; with time the sense is “until” or “up to” a termination point. Paul thus places the Law under a time constraint. Throughout his argument, Paul consistently refers to the “law” in the singular, to the Mosaic Law in its entirety. He never subdivides the Law into separate categories (e.g., moral, civil, ceremonial). It is not a part of the Law that has a termination point, but the whole Law. Paul identifies the promised “seed” as Christ and the arrival of this “seed” is the Law’s termination point. The Torah was to be in effect until the seed arrived. Paul sees two distinct eras of Salvation History. The first ends when the second begins. Paul does not argue that the function of the Law is now added to or integrated with the promise; he argues the opposite when he says no one adds to or annuls an existing covenant. Paul sees the Abrahamic covenant and the Mosaic legislation as two separate covenants, not two parts of one. One is added to Israel’s story after the other. The Law became necessary “because of transgressions.” Transgression (parabasis) means an “overstepping, a trespass, a transgression.” It refers to deliberate or conscious acts of disobedience. Sin has existed since Adam but law turns it into “transgression” by making known God’s standard. The sense of the preposition “because of” or charin can be understood in one of two ways: either the Law was given to identify transgressions or to increase them. The first option fits the immediate context and Paul’s theology elsewhere (e.g., Romans 3:20). The idea of increasing sin makes little sense in light of his next statement, “until the seed should come to whom the promise was made.” Identifying transgression better fits the analogy of the Law’s role as a “custodian” in verse 24-25. The Law “was given in charge through angels by the hand of a mediator.” This thought reflects a later Jewish tradition that angels delivered the Law into the “hand of” Moses, one seen elsewhere in the New Testament (cp. Deuteronomy 33:2; Acts 7:38; 7:53; Hebrews 2:2). “The hand of a mediator” likely refers to Moses (the Septuagint frequently states the Law was “by the hand of Moses” (e.g., Leviticus 26:46; Numbers 4:37; 4:41, 4:45, 4:49; 9:23; 10:13; 15:23). To claim the Law was given by angels does not disparage it. A law given directly by God or by his appointed agents is valid. Possibly Paul’s opponents cited the angels’ presence at Sinai as evidence of the law’s glory. But Paul turns this tradition against them. The Law was given by the angels into “the hand of a mediator”; it was delivered into the hands of Moses who in turn mediated it to Israel. But “a mediator is not mediator of one, yet God is one.” A mediator implies a plurality of persons involved in a transaction. With Abraham God acted directly and unilaterally. He does not need an intermediary; God gave the promise directly to Abraham. This stresses the promise’s priority over the Torah. Paul does not disparage Moses, the Law, angels or the function of a mediator, but is stressing the priority of the earlier promise over the Law, which was given later and through intermediaries. The Law is not contrary to the Promise; “is the Law against the promises of God?” Since there are discontinuities between the Law and the Promise, and since the Law was added later and is subsidiary to the Promise, it is necessary to demonstrate the Law is not contrary to the Promise. “If a law had been given that was able to make alive, then righteousness would have been on the basis of law.” The Law is incapable of imparting life, therefore, righteousness cannot be based on the Law. The purpose of the Law was for something other than the impartation of life. Moreover, if the Law could make alive or acquit sinners before God, “then Christ died in vain” (2:21). Paul equates the impartation of life with the being set right with God. The Law is not contrary to the Promise but the Law lacks the necessary means to deliver the Promise. The “Scripture confined all things under sin” so that the promise from the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them who believe. “All things” is in the neuter gender and may here be a broader category than “all persons” (i.e., the entire creation under the dominion of sin). Paul is expanding his target to include all humanity. All those “under the Law,” that is, Israel, are under its curse, and all humans are confined under sin. Paul does not say the Law confined all things but “the Scripture,” singular. Elsewhere when Paul uses “the Scripture” in the singular with the definite article he refers to a specific passage (Galatians 3:8, 4:30, Romans 4:3, 9:17, 10:11, 11:2). Most likely he means the key proof text cited in the letter’s proposition (Galatians 2:16) quoted from Psalm 143:2 (“because by the works of the law shall no flesh be acquitted”). No flesh can be acquitted by the works of the law because all are confined under sin. “Confined” translates a Greek verb, sungkleiō, meaning to “shut together, to confine, hem in, imprison.” The idea is something shut up together on all sides, such as a school of fish caught in a net. A similar idea is expressed in Romans 11:32, “For God has confined them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.” The same verb is used in the next verse, “But before the faith came we were kept under the law, confined until the faith”. All flesh is under sin and unable to be set right before God. Verse 22 reads, “from the faith of Jesus Christ,” which points either to the “faith” of Jesus or to his “faithfulness.” Probably this is a cryptic reference to the faithful obedience of Jesus demonstrated in his death (2:20-21). The source or basis of the promise now available to all who believe is the faithfulness of Jesus.

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