Porterville Working Paper No. 23 Prof. Heinrich Tschudi, Chair of Law and Covenant Studies, Provincial College of Porterville
I. The Question, Which Indicts Its Author
In Working Paper No. 22 I built a doctrine that rests upon a load-bearing claim, and I made the claim faster than I had earned it. Having argued that the choke-point re-forms even in a well-built body—that holdings drift together over the generations despite every dispersive design—I asserted that the law answers this slow regathering with a periodic dissolution: the seventh-year release of debts and the fiftieth-year return of the land. I treated the periodic dissolution as a thing Bravia has, and I rested the soundness of the whole doctrine of dispersion upon it, for a law that prevents only the first seizing and makes no provision for the slow ones would find its choke-points reassembled within three generations under new names.
The hard question, which a colleague has rightly pressed upon me, is whether Bravia in fact performs this dissolution at all, or whether it only sings it. And I must begin by confessing that if Bravia does not perform it—if the release and the Jubilee are kept in the liturgy of the feasts but never enforced in the land-registry or the debt-court—then the doctrine of No. 22 has a hole I covered with a word, and the dispersive design I praised is racing, even now, toward the regathering I said the dissolution would prevent. This paper is therefore written against my own prior confidence. I will try to determine, from the evidence we have and the silence we have, whether the periodic dissolution is law or liturgy in present-day Bravia. I will not be able to settle it. The honest scholar’s duty here is to mark the question as open with exactness, not to close it with invention, and the question is, I have come to think, the single most exposed point in the whole Bravian order.
II. The Two Instruments
Two distinct instruments are in view, and they must not be run together, for they fail in different ways.
The first is the release, the seventh-year remission of debts: At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it (Deuteronomy 15:1–2). This is the dissolution of the choke-point in time—the periodic cancellation of the accumulated debt by which the strong gather the weak. It is severe but it is small; it touches credit, not title.
The second is the Jubilee, the fiftieth-year instrument of Leviticus 25, and it is the harder by far, for it touches title itself. Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession (Leviticus 25:10). The land alienated across two generations comes back to the family that held it, for the land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine (Leviticus 25:23). The release cancels what is owed; the Jubilee undoes what has been gathered, and restores to each man the ground of his own life. It is the periodic dissolution at full strength, and it is the one a settled people finds hardest to perform, because by the fiftieth year the gathered land is held by the powerful, and the powerful do not return what they hold without a law that compels them and a people that means it.
III. The Terrible Precedent
Before asking whether Bravia keeps these, the jurist must reckon with a fact that ought to chasten anyone who treats the periodic dissolution as a thing easily had. The one people who held these instruments in their actual civil code did not keep them, and the land took its unkept sabbaths out of their flesh.
The Scriptures are not silent on this; they are merciless. When the people were carried into exile, the chronicler gives the reason in the language of an unpaid debt: the captivity lasted until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years (2 Chronicles 36:21). Read it plainly. The land lay empty for seventy years because for seventy sabbath-years the people had not released it, and the law collected, all at once and by force of judgment, the rest that had been owed and withheld across the centuries. The periodic dissolution was the law most honored in the singing and most broken in the doing, and the breaking of it was the specific cause of the exile.
Jeremiah records the breaking in the very act. King Zedekiah made a covenant to proclaim liberty to the bondservants, and the people obeyed and let them go—and then they turned, and caused the servants… to return, and brought them into subjection (Jeremiah 34:11). The proclamation was made in the temple and reversed in the street within the week, and the Lord’s answer was terrible: I proclaim a liberty for you… to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine (Jeremiah 34:17). Liberty proclaimed and not performed is not a small fault in covenant law. It is the fault that brings the sword.
And the law itself is honest about its own difficulty. In the very passage commanding the release, two sentences sit in tension that the law makes no attempt to soften: there shall be no poor among you (Deuteronomy 15:4), and, a few verses on, the poor shall never cease out of the land (Deuteronomy 15:11). The first is the law’s promise if the release is kept. The second is the law’s realism about whether it will be. The periodic dissolution is the commandment that knows it will be disobeyed and commands obedience anyway. This is the precedent against which the Bravian question must be asked, and it forbids any easy answer. We are not asking whether Bravia keeps an easy law. We are asking whether Bravia keeps the law that broke Israel.
IV. The Silence of the Sources
What, then, does the source literature record of Bravian practice? I must report honestly: it records the feast and it records the expansion, and on the civil dissolution proper it is silent.
We know with confidence that Bravia keeps the feast calendar. The Dispatches show us the Passover services, the Sabbath, the Holy Days, the whole appointed rhythm observed under the New Covenant with Jesus Christ at its center. The liturgical frame within which a release-year or a Jubilee would be proclaimed plainly exists; the feasts are kept, and Hochstrasser is right to call the calendar the backbone of the common life. But the keeping of the feast is not the keeping of the dissolution. A people may proclaim liberty at the appointed feast and reverse it in the street, as Zedekiah’s people did, and the proclaiming proves nothing about the performing.
And of the performing we have not one recorded instance. The source literature does not show us a seventh year in which the debt-courts cleared the ledgers. It does not show us a fiftieth year in which the land-registry returned alienated holdings to their families. It does not show us a single case, a single dispute, a single complaint of a Jubilee enforced or a Jubilee denied. I will not manufacture one. The temptation of the worldbuilder and of the apologist alike is to supply the missing case—to say “doubtless the amphoes hold a release-year,” because the doctrine needs it—and that temptation is exactly the false witness the law of the just balance forbids. The truth is that we do not know, from the texts we have, whether present-day Bravia performs the periodic dissolution in law and court, and the gap is real and must be left open. What follows is reasoning across that gap, not a paving of it.
V. Three Hypotheses
Three accounts can be given of the silence, and each must be weighed.
The first is full civil observance: that Bravia keeps the release and the Jubilee in law, in the courts and the registries, and the source literature simply does not happen to record an instance, as it records no instance of a great many ordinary things. In its favor: the whole architecture of No. 20 through No. 22 demands it, and a people this serious about dispersing the choke-point at the start would be strange indeed to leave the regathering wholly unremedied. Against it: the silence is loud. The Dispatches are written by an outsider straining to understand Bravian ways, and a fifty-year land-return is precisely the kind of astonishing institution he would have seized upon and described at length had he seen or heard of one. That he reports the donkey-paths and the cave-palaces and the harbor-fee policy but nothing of a Jubilee is at least some evidence that no Jubilee crossed his path.
The second is liturgical-only observance: that the release and the Jubilee are proclaimed at the feasts as part of the remembered law and the New Covenant hope, but are not enforced as civil statute, the work of dissolution being done by other means. This fits the silence well. It is also the most dangerous of the three, because it is precisely the condition of Zedekiah’s people—liberty in the temple, subjection in the street—and a people in that condition does not know it is in that condition, for the singing persuades them they keep what they have ceased to do.
The third is the New Covenant fulfillment reading: that Bravia, as a people of the New Covenant, holds the Jubilee to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ and therefore not owed as a fiftieth-year ledger event. The text for this is unavoidable. When the Lord stood in the synagogue at Nazareth and read from Isaiah, He read the Jubilee—to preach deliverance to the captives… to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord—and then said, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears (Luke 4:18–21). Christ proclaims Himself the acceptable year, the Jubilee in person, the liberty no longer deferred to a fiftieth-year reckoning but standing open and present. A biblicist people could reasonably conclude that the type is fulfilled and the shadow need not be enacted in the land-registry, and could keep the spirit of release—open opportunity, the freeing of the bound, the refusal of permanent bondage—without the mechanical statute.
I find the third reading both true and perilous, and I want to be exact about why. It is true: Christ is the Jubilee, and the acceptable year is not a date but a Person and a present reality, and a New Covenant people rightly reads Leviticus 25 through Luke 4. But the fulfillment reading carries within it the most respectable of all excuses for never doing the hard civil work. It permits a people to sing of liberty fulfilled while the choke-points re-form in the fields below the singing, and to answer every demand for an actual return of land or release of debt with the reply that these were shadows now passed. The fulfillment of the type does not abolish the duty of the strong to loose the bound; it deepens it, for the one who has received the true Jubilee in Christ and then closes his hand on his neighbor’s millstone sins against the substance and not merely the shadow. The fulfillment reading is sound theology and a ready-made hiding place at once, and which of the two it is in present-day Bravia cannot be read off the liturgy. It can only be read off the practice, and the practice is what we cannot see.
VI. The Frontier as the Hidden Substitute
Here I reach what I believe is the true account of the silence, and it dissolves the question in a way that should not comfort us.
For two centuries Bravia has had a frontier. The Dispatches show it plainly: new provinces opening, younger sons and rising assistants who “wouldn’t be likely to inherit” receiving instant promotions and fresh land in the new towns, whole province-sized territories filling with a million and a half settlers, the High Bravians spilling across range after range. The foundation-sermon itself frames the whole enterprise as a rich land that richly rewards effort, open to any who will work. And a people with an open frontier does not need a Jubilee in the same way that a closed people does, because expansion does the dissolution’s work by another door. The pressure of concentration in the settled core never builds to the point of requiring redistribution, because the young, the landless, and the rising poor do not wait to be given back a holding in the fiftieth year—they walk to the frontier and take up new ground in the third. The choke-point that would have formed in Middle Bravia is relieved before it forms, not by undoing the gathering at the center but by opening an exit at the edge.
This is why I say the question has been masked rather than answered. Bravia has not had to choose among full observance, liturgical-only observance, and fulfillment, because the frontier made the choice unnecessary. The release and the Jubilee could lapse into liturgy without visible harm, and no one would feel the regathering, so long as the safety-valve of open land kept the core’s pressure low. We do well to remember the small-scale instruments that may yet be live beneath this: the amphoe holds common land, and the older peoples of the Swiss valleys whose ways the Bravians carry kept a genuine periodic reallotment of the common pasture and wood among the burghers’ households—a true dissolution at the scale of the commons, even where the law of private title knew no return. It is entirely possible that Bravia keeps the periodic dissolution alive in exactly this miniature, in the reallotment of the amphoe commons, while the grand civil Jubilee of private title sleeps in the liturgy, unneeded because the frontier has done its work. If so, the honest verdict is that present-day Bravia keeps the periodic dissolution in the small and in the song, and has not been required to keep it in the great—and a law one has never been required to keep is a law one does not yet know whether one would keep.
VII. The Apex That Does Not Dissolve
There is one place in the Bravian order where the regathering is not merely unaddressed but built in, and a paper on this subject that passed it over would be worthless. It is the apex.
The exilarchy is hereditary. The provincial governorships are hereditary—the line of the second son holds Middle Bravia, the third son Southwest, the fourth Southeast, and so down the sons, generation upon generation, with new lines added as new provinces open. This is a permanent concentration of office and of the land that office commands, and it returns in no Jubilee. The fiftieth year does not unseat a governor; the seventh year does not release the exilarch’s house. At the very summit of the Bravian world sits exactly the kind of un-dissolving concentration that the whole doctrine of No. 22 condemns as the choke-point, and the doctrine’s own logic, pressed honestly, must either justify the exception or confess a crack.
The justification available is the one this College has used before: that the office is held as stewardship and service, not as engrossed property—that the governor who enters his capital on a donkey, in deliberate imitation of our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, holds his place under the law of service and not the law of extraction, and that the amphoe-is-not-a-barony principle runs upward as well as down. The barony placed a lord’s extraction above a producing people; the Bravian governorship, on this reading, is forbidden the extractive use of its position, so that what the line holds permanently is the duty to serve and not the right to grind. The concentration of office, so understood, is not a seized millstone at all, because the office-holder is barred from working it as a millstone.
I find this justification real but incomplete, and I will not pretend otherwise. It is real because the distinction between office-as-service and office-as-extraction is the true distinction, and the source literature does show us governors who labor and serve rather than feast and extract. But it is incomplete because it makes the apex depend, for its safety, on exactly the thing No. 22 said the law must never depend on: the continued virtue of the man who holds the choke-point. Everywhere else the Bravian design refuses to trust the heart and removes the temptation by removing the concentration. At the apex alone it does not disperse; it only trusts. The hereditary lines are the one set of millstones the Bravian order leaves gathered, guarded by nothing but the conviction that the gatherers will not pull. So long as the lines remain houses of service this holds, and the donkey-path is not theater but discipline. But the structure provides no automatic dissolution should a line begin to grind, and on the day a royal house turns from service to extraction, the doctrine condemns it as surely as it condemns any engrosser—while providing, at that summit and that summit alone, no mechanism but rebellion to perform the dissolution the law requires. The apex is the most exposed flank of the entire Bravian order, and it is exposed precisely because it is the one place the periodic dissolution does not reach.
VIII. The Coming Test
I will end where honesty requires, which is short of an answer and in some unease.
So long as the frontier remains open, Bravia will never learn whether its Jubilee is law or only song, because it will never be required to perform the dissolution in its own settled core against its own accumulated holdings and its own hereditary apex. The safety-valve of new land will go on relieving the pressure before the pressure forces the question, and the liturgy will go on proclaiming a liberty that the courts have never been made to enforce, and no one will be able to tell—the Bravians themselves least of all—whether they keep the hardest law or merely sing it sweetly.
But no frontier is endless. The land is finite, the ranges are finite, the open provinces will one day all be filled, and the safety-valve will close. On that day, for the first time in its history, Bravia will be required to do what Israel was required to do and failed to do: to perform the periodic dissolution within a settled body, returning gathered land and releasing accumulated debt against the resistance of those who hold them, with no frontier left to escape into. On that day the masking ends and the question is answered, not by the scholar but by the deed. And the precedent is not encouraging. The one people who carried these instruments in their civil code reversed the proclaimed liberty within the week and lay seventy years desolate while the land collected its unkept sabbaths by force.
I cannot say which way Bravia will go. I can say only this, and I say it against my own prior confidence as much as to any reader: a people that has never been tested on its hardest law does not yet know its own righteousness, and is wise to suspect it. The dispersive design of which this College is justly proud has, for two centuries, been spared its severest test by the accident of open land, and a virtue that has never been required is not yet a virtue proven. The release and the Jubilee stand in the Bravian liturgy as a promise and a memory. Whether they stand also in the Bravian law, in the only place law is finally kept—in the deed done when the deed is costly and there is no longer any frontier to do it for us—is the question this people will one day be forced to answer, and has not yet been forced to answer, and would do well to begin answering before the land begins to collect what it is owed.
Cross-references: on the periodic dissolution as the remedy for the re-forming choke-point, and on the seized millstone as the genus of usury, the gabelle, and the false balance, see the present author, Working Paper No. 22, “The Millstone in Pledge”; on the dispersion of necessity and the refusal of the salt-staple, see Wegmüller, Working Paper No. 20, “The Covenant of Salt”; on the interior, the membrane, and the moral economy of carriage, see Hartwell, Working Paper No. 21, “Carriage Without Capture”; on covenant forms and the Jubilee logic of holdings, see the present author, Working Paper No. 14, “Covenant Forms and Their Permanence”; on the Free Port and the corruption that migrates inward from the membrane, see Working Paper No. 11. On the feast calendar as the liturgical frame in which liberty is proclaimed, see Hochstrasser’s guide to unleavened baking.
