Metaphors in a Land of Unlikeness

Abstract

I begin this too-brief response to Milner Ball's exciting lecture with my favorite From W. H. Auden's concluding chorus in For the Time Being: He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts, and have adventures.1 Spending the 7th to the 9th of November on the campus of Washington and Lee University in colloquium on the theology of law (my notion of what it was all about), was a unique adventure. I owe both Professors Ball and Shaffer, as well as our colleagues in the colloquium, a great thanks redeeming my life from the ordinary, during those days. My hope would be that Prof. Ball's lecture and his subsequent completed and published work may set off the kind of external dialogue and internal growth in other lawyers and politicians as it did in me. I hope that many will argue at length whether law is basically a medium or a bulwark, but there is no argument that the work of Milner Ball is a catalyst of conversation much needed by the inert solutions of today's legal profession. My comments beyond appreciation are brief. Auden has rightly described the world I know as The Land of Unlikeness. Metaphors, analogies, myths, idiom, paradigm all are in jeopardy in a world without likeness. Language itself is certainly at risk. And law. What Milner Ball has done is to suggest a bridge from our unlikely place in time toward a future of possible new communities of meaning. Only metaphors can do this law, or, that matter, any other discipline. Law as medium is such a dynamic metaphor. To play off Auden, for the time being, we must think in such transitional concepts (as medium). Nothing that is fixed can help us. Nothing that assumes stability, or continuity, or community of mean-