SOURCE: Quinn, John R. “Corpus Juris Tertium: Redemptive Jurisprudence in Angels in America.” Theatre Journal 48, no. 1 (March 1996): 79-90.

[In the following essay, Quinn argues that the concept of law is central to both the national and spiritual themes running through Angels in America. Quinn asserts that, in Kushner's play, the law emerges as a kind of secular religion.]

“In the beginning was the Word; … [then] The Word became flesh.”

—John 1:1,14

Law, at least the contemporary American concept of it, is a nerve running through nearly every organ and extremity of the body of Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The abundance of Angels passages that address or refer to the law demonstrates the subject's ubiquity in the plays. Among other things, two of the plays' central characters, Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt, are not only closeted homosexuals but also attorneys (Cohn is a seasoned practitioner, whereas Joe Pitt researches and drafts opinions for a federal judge). Their presence, as I discuss in greater depth below, saturates the plays' dialogue with the vocabulary and cultural referents of American legalspeak. Legal metaphor and allusion are also part of the everyday discourse of non-lawyers Louis and Prior: for example, Prior renders a “verdict” on Louis's failings in love,¹ Louis and Prior debate the merits of the judicial tasks of deliberating and rendering judgment (MA 38-39), and Louis's masturbatory intellectualism includes speculations on the relationship among law, “Justice,” and the Constitution.² Law enters into countless other lay settings as well; to name a few, Mr. Ties reminds Harper of the “by-laws” (MA 102) of the International Organization of Travel Agents, Belize speaks of the “law” of love (MA 100), Roy urges Joe to find some “law” that he can break (MA 110), and the “Law for real” busts Harper's imagination (P 21). Legal places, such as the ironically named Hall of Justice in Brooklyn and Department of Justice in Washington, loom large in the plays' landscape. Lastly, many of the plays' pivotal dramatic moments are or involve momentous legal events, such as the trial of Ethel Rosenberg, Cohn's disbarment proceedings, and Louis's discovery of the conservative opinions that Joe Pitt ghostwrote for Judge Wilson.

In this essay I argue that law is more than subtext or local color. Instead, law is intricately intertwined among the “national” themes Kushner handles, significantly advancing the urgent and weighty messages about spirituality and apocalypse that Angels so poignantly delivers. Ultimately, law acquires the salient characteristics of a secular religion in the America that Kushner brings to the stage.

Many of the plays' principal characters embody different types or distinctive components of law. We know this by the stark difference between Joe Pitt's and Roy Cohn's legal ethics: they disagree strongly about the “legality” and necessity of Cohn's having accepted a loan from his client (MA 66) and about Cohn's having engaged in private, ex parte conversations with the judge during the Rosenberg case (MA 108). (Cohn and Joe clash equally in lay ethics as well, as evidenced by their argument over Joe's refusal to go to Washington without his wife Harper [MA 106-8]). Roy Cohn's ogreish, grotesque, scene-stealing command of Angels demands that his character be first in an interpretation of law's function in the plays.

Kushner employs Cohn, the “famous lawyer” (MA 112), as a stereotype of the successful lawyer in capitalist, materialist, litigious America. Like many of the other characters in the plays, however, Cohn's stereotypicality is only superficial; in reality, he is a subversion, or more accurately for Cohn, a perversion, of the familiar type. Cohn's lawyering is conspicuous for its mangling of truth, its shoot-from-the-hip, get-away-with-whatever-you-can impudence, and the ensuing lability of the governing rule of law. My focus here, however, is the extent to which Cohn's lawyering differs from the garden-variety, ethically compromised practice of the stereotypical American lawyer. As many readers and theatregoers probably would concur, a skillful attorney, if paid to do so, can argue that black is white or the Pope is Jewish. Increased media coverage of sensationalistic trials has stimulated American appetite to near insatiability and encouraged popular belief that success as a defense lawyer in particular seems to be a function of antics, gamesmanship and manipulation—a kind of legaltheatre. Delineation of the important though subtle difference between Cohn and the American stereotype first requires an accurate measure of the amount of truth-mangling and procedural impudence American jurisprudence regards as healthy, and an appraisal of the extent of ensuing preceptive instability it tolerates.

Truth's status in the epistemology of American jurisprudence is equivocal. On the one hand, fledgling lawyers are taught that truth is the pearl that advocacy and the adversary-based standard of American legal procedure are supposed, at the end of the day, to unearth. Most of the rules of evidence and procedure governing trials are specific applications of the general goal of promoting the reliability and trustworthiness of proof.³ Even an accused's right to have an attorney, and to cross-examine witnesses, both of which are constitutional guarantees, are repeatedly justified by the Supreme Court on the ground that adversariness promotes truth.⁴ When not abused, the procedural rules maximize the chance, though do not guarantee, that truth will emerge, that the judge or jury will ascertain the correct version of the historical events at issue in a case. On the other hand, even in their unabused application, the legal rules frequently endorse implicit departures from truth. Examples are the notorious legal fictions known as the presumption of innocence and the related distinction between legal guilt and factual guilt. Legal guilt is established by a sufficient quantity and quality (i.e., probativeness) of evidence; qualitative or quantitative deficiency results in acquittal, a concept the law carefully does not equate with factual innocence. Acquittal happens solely by operation of the presumption—not affirmative proof—of innocence and often may occur even when factual but inadequately proven guilt exists. Thus, “legal truth” equals not “factual truth,” but only that which can be proven according to the standards of the law.

Cohn's conduct, however reprehensible, at first appears to be within the letter of this code. For example, we know that Cohn accepted a loan from a client, but in Cohn's words, unless the event can be “proven” (MA 66) it did not occur. On closer inspection, however, Cohn's disregard for truth is more serious, flagrant, and conscious than that committed by the American lawyer's opportunistic capitalization on an adversary's meager proof at trial. For Cohn, the law's presumption of innocence and distinction between legal and factual guilt lose their tolerable fictional nature because he applies them not only to his courtroom practice but to his lay existence. He so consistently professes belief in what are in fact untruths—for example, he denies he is homosexual even though he sleeps with men (MA 45), he tells Joe he has cancer, not AIDS, and then denies he is ill at all (MA 109), and he evades admitting he accepted a loan from a client—that his version of truth seems to be grounded entirely in courtroom epistemology rather than in lay standards. In a word, Cohn lives too literally and exclusively by the letter of the law, a provision of which is the law's tolerance of the fictitious “legal” fact.

By contrast, the stereotype of which Cohn is a corruption exhibits at least some residual regard for the factual truth underlying the evidence and some recollection of the original goals of the system. Even when evading the rules, the ethically compromised stereotype does so with less impudence than Cohn. In short, the stereotype may practice the law's fictions inside the courtroom, but does not live by them outside. Cohn, however, takes the law's fictions and loopholes outside the arena of the courtroom and lives his life by them. The symptom of Cohn's pathological internalization of legal standards of truth is a sense of complete randomness and chaos; he loses any ability even to know when he is indulging legal fictions. Ranting at his doctor over the telephone, Cohn aptly summarizes his evidentiary non-principles: “I don't even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true!” (P 31, emphasis in original). Thus Cohn divorces the law (here, the evidentiary law, the way to truth) from its context, its spirit, the place where it has authority, by the consensus of the system and its participants. Disease and putrefaction inevitably ensue.

That Cohn's procedural jurisprudence is a diseased version of the norm is less subtly portrayed in the plays. Prototypically, aggrieved citizens do not have duels in the street but take their disputes to court, where judges and juries resolve them (and even the government prosecuting a criminal must proceed likewise). The same framework exists in Cohn's world, but it is contaminated by abuse. Again, it is fair to say that from even the typical lawyer we nowadays tolerate or even expect some procedural abuse in the name of zealous advocacy (i.e., the resort to last minute motions, undisclosed witnesses or other kinds of scheming mischief or disruptive harassing malpractices) when diligent research, copious documentation or rhetorical acumen fail. Still, Cohn's transgressions are far more substantively egregious. He does not merely file more last minute motions or harbor more undisclosed witnesses, but instead contaminates the entire framework, employing such litigation strategies as “schtupping” (MA 14), securing theatre tickets for judges (MA 12), and improperly conversing ex parte with them (MA 108). In really “big” cases he exploits the assistance of a “well-placed friend” in the Department of Justice (MA 67). Cohn practices not law but a debased, Boss Tweed politics masquerading as law, conduct that even American audiences long exposed to indictments of the conniving antics of the successful American lawyer find appalling. In short, Cohn's abuse of procedure, like his disregard for truth, is a perversion of the original, a mutation of the prototype, a desecration and defilement. To call his victory in any given legal matter a “legal result” would be profoundly ironic by any standard but Cohn's.

Like an incipient cancer, Cohn's corruption, however destructive, is nonetheless insidious. It infiltrates and draws on the body's internal systems to spread, eventually overtaking and destroying the host—Cohn or the law. Importantly, Cohn continues to operate within the framework even as he contaminates it. Although he corrupts the method by which judges decide cases (by sleeping with them and the like), he does not try to have cases decided any other way. He instead seeks to spread his tainted kind of judge: tellingly, Cohn approvingly describes the Reagan appointees on the federal bench as “land mines” (MA 66), lying in wait to destroy affirmative action and other civil and constitutional protections. In short, Cohn is a diseased version of the norm.

The ensuing instability of the rule of law that Cohn's lawyering engenders is, like his ailing regard for truth and sickly abuse of procedure, a diseased amplification of the norm. Delineating the typical lawyer's tolerance for law's instability is best accomplished in terms of the concept of “determinacy.” Determinacy—i.e., susceptibility to a more or less single correct reading—is a concern in legal scholarship because law usually takes the form of a written text, such as the Constitution, a statute, or a regulation, that requires interpretation (the interpretations often taking the form of judicial opinions that, in turn, also become texts to interpret). Like truth, determinacy has both an “official” and an “unofficial” position in the law. On the one hand, determinacy has long been supposed to be a sine qua non of the law: if the citizenry wishes to avoid prison, individuals must be able to know what the rule of law is and what it requires of them. Various doctrines, reliance on precedent, and reason decide individual cases or occasions for interpretation.

On the other hand, sensitive readers of United States law have always known that other factors affect the outcome and the rule of law. Oliver Wendell Holmes is an early spokesperson of legal realism, acknowledging that we are, after all, only human beings, and not machines, deciding legal cases and writing legal rules, so the social, political or other “attitude” of the decision-maker also influences the outcome.⁵ More recently, a movement in the legal academy known as Critical Legal Studies has made these factors, especially the political attitude of legislators and the original Constitution drafters, rather than doctrine, the focus of legal study.⁶ Currently, the debate about determinacy has taken on greater intensity as the emerging law and literature movement has gained momentum.⁷ In that debate, defenders of the distinction between literary and legal interpretation argue that law is unlike literature because literary texts tolerate or even prize plurivocality and multiple meaning, as argued by famous spokespersons of literary ambiguity (Cleanth Brooks), plurivocality (Roland Barthes) and indeterminacy (Derrida).⁸ In response, it has been argued that law is not as hermeneutically determinate as has been commonly supposed, but instead has determinacy superimposed on it for necessary political ends.⁹ Relying, moreover, on Robert Crosman's assertion that something that might be regarded as a single correct meaning is “negotiated” by collections of individual readers' interpretations, one might also argue that literature is itself less indeterminate than legal scholars suppose.¹⁰

Against even this backdrop, Cohn exhibits a more perverted indeterminacy. The indeterminacy that occupies legal scholars is a by-product of the effort to arrive at a rule of law, of the process that at times may only afford lip service to justice, fairness, consistency and so forth. For Cohn, on the contrary, the indeterminacy of the rule of law is a central tenet of his creed of life. Cohn's directive to Joe Pitt—“[m]ake the law or subject to it” (P 108)—is telling. Cohn sees only two possible relations to the law, and because he seeks to avoid, at all costs, ever subjecting himself to the law, Cohn ceaselessly works to change it. In other words, indeterminacy for him is the governing principle, rather than the unavoidable consequence, of human lawmaking. Indeterminate, alterable rules are the staple of his existence.

Thus, the indeterminacy that Cohn amplifies virtually disables law from continuing to carry out its principal function—i.e., to govern people, to define their rights and obligations, to advise them how to behave. In Cohn's world, the law follows the deed, merely rubber stamps the transpired events. To paraphrase Balzac, Cohn's actions are the author, and law is merely the secretary,¹¹ a relationship that strips law of its ability to prescribe, or describe, what ought to be.

Such a law is absolutely meaningless, form without substance, letter without spirit. If Kushner were Milton, Cohn would be Satan—impudent, conniving, master of words and tongues, insatiable sovereign of Chaos. For Kushner, of course, Cohn is the bad “Angel” battling the forces of good for the soul of America.

Cohn continues pathetically to profess a belief in the very system he has corrupted, frequently using legal vocabulary that he has stripped of meaning. For example, he insists on his “constitutional right” to be attended by a white nurse, describes Belize's attempt to steal his AZT supply as “illegal,” and threatens to “report” him for it (P 60). Cohn himself, though an attorney, lacks any real knowledge of substantive law. In the hospital, a complete reversal occurs and Cohn becomes the client-like recipient of legal advice from Belize, even though the ostensibly omnipotent Cohn at first cannot induce Belize, the “butterfingers spook faggot” black drag queen nurse, even to sit with him (P 30). Belize ultimately brings law to its knees, as Cohn resorts to begging Belize for his company, and it turns out that Belize in fact knows more about the legal aspects of AZT than Cohn and more about its medical aspects than Cohn's “very qualified, very expensive WASP” doctor (P 29).¹² In Cohn's world, the Department of Justice in Washington and the Hall of Justice in Brooklyn dispense anything but true justice—there is only corruption in Washington (MA 63), and Judge Wilson's opinions denying homosexuals constitutional protection and narrowly construing federal environmental protection legislation (P 109) exemplify the injustice issued in Brooklyn.¹³ In what are mere words, collections of letters devoid of meaning and spirit, these designations have the hollow ring of labels adorning the mock-equivalent institutions and monuments in totalitarian regimes.

Cohn's deviation from the jurisprudential norm is indeed like that of a cancer, ravenous in its hunger, growing and operating at a rate independent of the rest of the body of which it is a part, destined to overtake and kill the very body that sustains it. But the corrupt, diseased, tumorous nature of Cohn's lawyering also has important textual and thematic links with the physical infection and ensuing “corruption” of Cohn's flesh and blood with AIDS. In a telling speech in which Cohn again describes the indeterminacy of law, he also reveals an important link between the law and corporeality. Feigning indifference to the disbarment committee charges, Cohn defends his disregard for the “fine points” (MA 63) of the law, explaining: “I don't see the Law as a dead and arbitrary collection of antiquated dictums, thou shall, thou shalt not, because, because I know the Law's a pliable, breathing, sweating … organ” (MA 66; emphasis in original). (This motif is echoed later, when Cohn complains that with only one telephone line in his hospital room he cannot “perform basic bodily functions” [P 31].)

In another context or from another speaker, Cohn's characterization of law as pliable and breathing would be entirely unobjectionable. Popular disapproval of law tends to increase the more the laity perceives law to be a collection of technicalities, antiquated dictums, and “fine points,” so Cohn's declaration has some superficial appeal. For Cohn, however, the speech is another clever, lawyerly elocution to justify his own lawless conduct. The speech is also an important indicator of Cohn's thematic function.

Cohn's corporealization of the law reverberates in his own life and death. Law is Cohn's lifeblood, as vital to his existence as his actual circulatory system. Therefore, it is fitting that he dies as soon as he learns he is disbarred. Counterfeit prophet, Cohn actually foresaw the events; when first receiving the disbarment committee charges, Cohn defiantly insists that he will be a lawyer “till my last bitter day on earth … until the day I die” (MA 69). Cohn's prophecy has the ironic literalness of those voiced by three witches to Macbeth,¹⁴ as Cohn's death occurs immediately after, and on the same day as, his disbarment. Indeed, his rejoinder to Ethel Rosenberg's announcement of his disbarment is the query “Am I dead?” (P 113).

The coincidence of Cohn's disbarment and death is important. Both events exemplify the triumph of the true spoils of corruption. Both also signify the death of Cohn's corrupted, hollow, spiritless, unprincipled law. Cohn's brand of law fails as a way to salvation; he and it are both destroyed.

By allusion to biblical conceptions of law, prophecy, and salvation, Kushner uses Cohn's life, law practice and death by HIV infection to illuminate his message about spirituality and apocalypse. The ubiquity of law in the world of Angels in America is roughly akin to law's omnipresence and stature in the everyday life of the Jewish world portrayed in the Old Testament. Like the original law of Moses, Cohn is the old law that became corrupted as people lived by its letter but ignored its spirit. The sacred monuments of his law (the Hall of Justice and the Department of Justice) have become places of injustice, overrun with blasphemers, like the Temple in Jerusalem. And like that Temple and the old law, those monuments and Cohn must be destroyed and rebuilt or supplanted by a new covenant.

At the same time—and this is Kushner's accomplishment in the plays—the corporeality of Cohn and of Cohn's law are also inverted representations of the new law, a sort of Satan resurrected. John's Gospel tells us that “in the beginning was the Word”¹⁵—the old law—and then the Word “became flesh”¹⁶—Jesus Christ, the new law. Cohn's Satanic fiendishness and spiritual barrenness make him the antithesis of Christian values or the new covenant Christ was supposed to inaugurate, yet Kushner's text shrouds some of Cohn's moments with Christ references. For example, Cohn's heart is a “[t]ough little muscle” that “[n]ever bleeds,” (P 27), the opposite not only of a political liberal's figurative bleeding heart, but also of Christ's; Cohn's hospital stay begins as a kind of crucifixion by IV needle, during which his combative but spare uttering of “I hurt” (P 27; emphasis in original) antithetically echoes Christ's similarly unadorned “I thirst.”¹⁷ Like Christ, Cohn believes he is misunderstood by his own people (fellow lawyers) and handed over by them for trial and condemnation by outsiders. Cohn expressly compares the disbarment committee to a foreign sovereign: he describes the committee members as “genteel gentleman Brahmin lawyers, country-club men,” who probably think of him as “some filthy little Jewish troll,” and so complains that he is being tried by a jury that is not comprised of his “peers” (MA 66-67). Cohn is thus a Christlike sacrificial lamb. At the same time, however, he is Satan ousted from Heaven.

Cohn, then, is simultaneously Satanic and Christlike. He is Satanic in so far as he appears like a fallen prophet at the end of the world. He is, however, structurally similar to Christ in that he brings a new, or successor, law that is supposed to supplant a former law. But Cohn-as-Christ is as corrupted as the old law that the scriptural Christ was sent to destroy, and so Cohn too must be destroyed. Before the Angel appears to Prior, a voice echoing John the Baptist's repeatedly urges Prior to “prepare the way” (MA 35), the announcement that prophets will follow, and, like the biblical declarations, an admonition that the prophets may be good or false. Cohn, preacher of blindness, not vision, is a false prophet. In this way Cohn simultaneously signifies both the old and the new law. Through such a doubly endowed figure, Kushner makes the point that the successor—i.e., the current—regime, has features in common with the one it succeeded: the new, like the old, has run its course, has been corrupted, is also at its end.

Lawyering's inherent theatricality, and the fascination of audiences with legal drama, naturally makes law fruitful material for the stage. But law functions thematically, and especially effectively, as Kushner's material because his plays are a fantasia on American themes. In Kushner's America, secular law is a kind of religion, in much the same way scriptural law was religion in the world of Old Testament Judaism. Numerous legal scholars have theorized constitutional law as a kind of civil religion for America.¹⁸ Kushner renders this same concept theatrically.

A cornerstone of the law-as-religion argument is the notion that the United States Constitution is, like the Torah, the Koran, and the New Testament, a “sacred text,”¹⁹ a document having both rules and great symbolic value for the people it governs and “dispens[ing] not just social order but spiritual identity.”²⁰ Further, like the Torah, the Koran, and the New Testament, the Constitution has spawned a body of secondary texts commenting upon and interpreting the primary text which accrue to and become part of the text. Judicial opinions interpreting the Constitution—including the one Joe Pitt ghostwrote for Judge Wilson denying homosexuals protection under the Equal Protection Clause—are like Talmudic commentary on the Torah, or the apostles' epistles or contemporary priestly sermons interpreting the Gospels. Cohn is absolutely correct when he explains to Belize that: “Lawyers are … the High Priests of America. We alone know the words that made America. Out of thin air. We alone know how to use The Words. The Law …” (P 89). The point is underscored theatrically: onstage, the massive desk that dominates Cohn's office and opening scene functions as a kind of secular temple or altar.²¹ Continuing the metaphor, Cohn urges Belize to “[h]ire a lawyer, sue somebody” because “it's good for the soul” (P 89), a line through which Kushner seems to mock the sincerity of Cohn's claim that litigation has soul-enhancing properties. The line also conveys the playwright's overt indictment of America's blindness and spiritual death; its law lacks any spiritual dimension. It is hardly “good for the soul.”

By juxtaposing Cohn, the lawyer whose body is infected, with the plays' other lawyer (Joe Pitt) and other infected body (Prior), Kushner poignantly reveals his vision of America. Pitt is loyalty, belief, hard work, idealism, discipline, institutional religion. Not a bad guy if you agree with his politics, but the point is that he fervently believes in “the system.” Pitt is the non-corrupted, non-infected version of Cohn. Pitt's law, like Roy Cohn's, is also “not justice” or “an expression of the ideal” but only “power” (P 110); it is not as corrupt in its process as Cohn's ex parte communications and favors, but it is every but as lacking in real justice because it fails to connect with principles, consequences, real people, or a coherent vision of the common good. The legal opinions Pitt wrote for Judge Wilson (P 109-10) show that the “restored” law (MA 26) in which Pitt believes is, like Cohn's corrupted version, all letter and no spirit, form over substance. It is a jurisprudence that allows him to conclude that the federal Air and Water Protection Act “doesn't protect people, but actually only air and water” (P 109; emphasis in original).²² Pitt's law cannot be literally regarded as “corrupted” for the simple reason that it is altogether devoid of flesh and blood. Pitt's internal deadness emphasizes that his law-religion is no more the path to salvation than Cohn's.

Prior, by contrast, is not institutionally religious, and not a lawyer, but he is the path to salvation. Kushner gives Prior only a handful of lines of overtly legal dialogue, but collectively they are telling: Prior by implication disagrees with Louis's preference for the “shaping of the law” and instead endorses the judgment and “execution” that Louis rejects (MA 38-39), expressly rendering a “verdict” against Louis's deficient heart (MA 78-79). He also complains that Louis's departure was “criminal,” something he had “no right” to do (MA 77). When Prior takes his final leave of the angels, he urges them to “sue God for abandonment” (P 136), echoing Cohn's earlier flippant advice to Belize (P 89).

Collectively, these lines reveal that Prior, like other prophets, is in some ways a product of his culture (namely, the United States, where law is an influential cultural referent), and, like many Americans, he often expresses his thoughts and feelings in legal jargon and metaphor. Individually, the lines reveal the dissimilarities between Prior's law-religion and Cohn's. Unlike Roy's law, Prior's is avowedly determinate. Deliberations must result in verdicts, and must proceed according to principles; Prior's law prizes the justice and truth lacking in Cohn's (and, for that matter, Pitt's). Prior is also a spiritual character, marked from the outset as one with vision, sensitivity and strength, which sets him apart from Cohn. (He is often referred to literally as a “prophet” [e.g., P 85].) A seer, Prior is a Jacob figure who ascends, undergoes transformation, and descends; the true prophet in polar opposition to Cohn's false prophecy. The union of law and religion that Cohn aggressively forges and appropriates is innate to Prior, whose name, after all, denotes judge in both secular and religious settings.

Returning to matters of flesh, Cohn and Prior differ in a subtle but important way. Both have HIV infection, but Cohn's body deteriorates more quickly and substantially than Prior's, which exhibits symptoms, to be sure, but seems to have reached a détente with the virus. Because the disease is AIDS, one cannot state that Prior “has survived,” or “is cured,” but he nonetheless is surviving, and has been “living with” (P 146)—not dying from—the disease for what Kushner wants us to regard as a long time (at least five years, longer than Prior lived with Louis [P 146]). Furthermore, what suffering and deterioration Prior does experience engenders his visionary development, whereas Cohn's persona retains all its manipulative mean-spiritedness in the face of fatal illness, such as when he tricks Ethel Rosenberg into thinking he is dead (P 115). It is no coincidence that Prior affirmatively chooses “more life” (P 136), whereas Cohn welcomes death, glad to be “finally done with this world, at long, long last” (P 113). If the physical corruption of Cohn's body and his corrupt lawyering—or the death of his body and lack of spirituality—go hand in hand, then so do the survival of Prior's infected body and his spiritual growth. Simply put, Prior's physical life continues only because he transcends mere physicality and develops spiritually, whereas Cohn dies seeking only physical remedies and materiality. Flesh follows spirit. (Onstage the inversion is carried further, as Prior and Cohn's appearances contrast with each other and subvert ordinary expectations. Prior, the endorser of life, wears a black, hooded cloak during much of Perestroika, while Cohn, the embodiment of death, wears hospital-patient white.)²³

The spiritual nature of Prior's law is underscored further by its dissimilarity from Louis's. Louis, whose Jewishness is featured throughout the plays, is the textbook rabbinic figure; yet he, too, is not the correct law or path to salvation. He exists completely in the rational world, the verbal world, is capable of endless speechifying (MA 89-92). The deliberative process is never-ending; indeed, he declares Justice to be an “immensity” (MA 39), presumably as immense as the body of Talmudic commentary. His preference for the process over the verdict (MA 38), a desire for excessively individualized justice, is his way of avoiding ultimate responsibility as Cohn does, an attitude consistent with his flight from Prior's illness. He does not see the law as indeterminate in theory; in practice, however, he is, as Belize observes, so “ambivalent” (MA 95) about everything that he will never move through the deliberative stage and arrive at a judgment. Louis is overly rational; his “law” is all in the mind, all “Big Ideas” (P 96), a process of words only (living up to his occupation, a word processor).²⁴ His law, like Cohn's, lacks any spiritual dimension. Not only flesh, but also the mind, must follow spirit.

If Prior has any disciple or spiritual comrade in the plays it is Belize. Like Prior, Belize has imaginative capacities (e.g., he does drag) and is emotional; he lacks neither mind (recall that he advises Cohn) nor body, but he exemplifies most the “law of love” (MA 100), exhibiting a kind of unassuming spirituality. In contrast to Louis's assertion that Justice is “immensity,” Belize insists, with the unadorned wisdom of an apparent fool figure, that “Justice is simple” (MA 100). Unlike Louis, he can “smell,” and what he smells is “[s]oftness, compliance, forgiveness, grace” (MA 100).

Prior's religion, if he can be regarded as representing one, is a sort of secular, modern-day American gnosticism. Following Ronald Garet, I use the term in a metaphoric sense, uncapitalized, to refer to ideas about salvation comparable to those of the traditions of Hellenistic culture known as Gnosticism.²⁵ I suggest that Prior exemplifies a gnostic interpretive position toward the law. As Garet has argued, the interpretive feat characteristic of gnosticism is a revisionist approach to creation stories in order “to privilege radical proposals and to relativize the claims of the orthodox.”²⁶ Typically, the “radical proposal” is a “retelling” of the creation story, of man's beginnings (Garet, 102). Substantively, Garet's uncapitalized “gnosticism” is “an account of redemption as a final overthrow of the limits inherent in the creaturely state” (102).

Through Prior, Kushner exemplifies a jurisprudential hermeneutics and substantive theme about salvation that are gnostic. Unquestionably, Prior demonstrates the gnostic triumph of spirituality over corporeality, the “final overthrow” of the “limits inherent in the creaturely state,” the flesh of Cohn's world. Yet Prior does this without in fact forsaking his body.

The spirit of gnosticism is best understood as the Latin anima, as distinguished from animus. Both are soul, or spirit, but anima is soul as the principle of life, whereas animus is soul as a principle of intellection and sensation. Prior exemplifies the triumph of anima over animus. Joe Pitt might be said to exhibit animus, a soul, but his is belief in the mind only. Prior exhibits spiritual knowledge, not the mere belief of Joe Pitt, nor the overrationalized kind of knowledge Louis pursues. Prior's knowledge, by contrast, is intuitive, wisdom based on experience and observation rather than books and deliberation. His intuition is often a kind of clairvoyance; at many moments in the play, he sees beyond mere appearances to the hidden truth. For example, when he sees Harper for the first time, he knows that her husband Joe is homosexual, without her saying anything (MA 33). Finally, Prior's choice to come back down to earth and not remain in that “other” place where angels traditionally reside is kind of gnostic gesture, a belief that salvation comes from within the individual person.²⁷

In Kushner's gnostic jurisprudence, the “radical proposal” is not a retelling of the creation story so much as it is a revision of redemption, a retelling of the orthodoxy's claims about salvation. If in the beginning the law was the word, and the word then became flesh, then in the gospel according to Kushner, the spirit must now transcend as it coexists with the flesh, as the new and final law, the new way, truth and life.

Notes

1. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 78. Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the text, preceded by the abbreviation MA (for Millennium Approaches).

2. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 35, 67. Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the text, preceded by the abbreviation P (for Perestroika).

3. For example, the Supreme Court has characterized cross examination as the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” California v. Green, 399 U.S. 149, 158; 90 Sup. Ct. 1930, 1935 (1970). Addressing procedure more generally, the Court has explained, “the procedural rules which have been fashioned from the generality of due process are our best instruments for the distillation and evaluation of essential facts from the conflicting welter of data that life and our adversary system present. [The rules] enhance the possibility that truth will emerge from the confrontation of opposing versions and conflicting data. ‘Procedure is to law what “scientific method” is to science.’” In Re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 21; 87 Sup. Ct. 1428,1440 (1967) (Fortas, J., quoting Henry Hubbar Foster, “Social Work, the Law and Social Action,” in Social Casework [1964], 386).

4. The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant the rights, among others, “to be confronted with the witnesses against him” and “to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” U.S. Constitution, amend. 6. The Supreme Court, in justifying the concept that the right to counsel necessarily includes the right to effective assistance of counsel, has explained that competent advocacy is essential to the truth-finding process of the adversary system. United States v. Cronic, 466 U.S. 648, 656; 104 Sup. Ct. 2039, 2045 (1984) (Stevens, J.). The Confrontation Clause, according to the Supreme Court, guarantees two separate rights: the right to physically face the accuser and witnesses, and the right to cross-examine those witnesses; its “central concern” is to “ensure the reliability of the evidence against a criminal defendant by subjecting it to rigorous testing in the context of an adversary proceeding.” Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836, 845; 110 Sup. Ct. 3157, 3163 (1990) (O'Connor, J.).

5. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 457, 467.

6. For general reference, see Duncan Kennedy and Karl E. Klare, “A Bibliography of Critical Legal Studies,” Yale Law Journal 94 (1984): 461-90 (1984) and James Boyle, ed., Critical Legal Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

7. The “law and literature” enterprise has two branches: the reading of literary texts with special attention to their treatment of law, and the effort to import literary theorists' insights about reading into the project of interpreting legal texts. Examples of the former include the collection of legal readings of The Merchant of Venice gathered in Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 5.1 (1993) and Brook Thomas's Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe and Melville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The latter I have discussed in greater depth in my recent article, “The Lost Language of the Irishgaymale: Textualization in Law and Literature,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 26 (1995): 553-678.

8. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner is a major opponent of the law and literature movement. He details his position in Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 247-57.

9. See Paul Kahn, “Interpretation and Authority in State Constitutionalism,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1147.

10. Robert Crosman, “How Readers Make Meaning,” College Literature 9 (1982): 207-15.

11. Honoré de Balzac, Introduction to The Human Comedy 15 (1842).

12. Belize is also the name of a South American nation whose laissez-faire regime makes it popular among tax-shelter seekers in the United States.

13. Just as Roy Cohn was a real person, much of Kushner's legal material is real, or realistic. As most know, there does exist a unit of the executive branch of the federal government known as the Department of Justice, and it is in Washington. There does not exist, however, a “Hall of Justice” in Brooklyn, but we know this is the label for a federal courthouse (P 92). A federal courthouse does exist in Brooklyn but it houses only trial-level judges, not appellate-level federal judges like the one for whom Joe Pitt is a clerk. A much more imposing courthouse, and one that houses both trial-level and appellate-level federal judges, exists in lower Manhattan and likely was Kushner's model.

14. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, act 4, scene 1, lines 80-81 and 92-94.

15. John 1:1 New American Bible.

16. John 1:14.

17. John 19:28.

18. See, e.g., Ronald R. Garet, “Comparative Normative Hermeneutics: Scripture, Literature, Constitution,” Southern California Law Review 58 (1985): 35; Thomas C. Grey, “The Constitution as Scripture,” Stanford Law Review 37 (1984): 1; Sanford Levinson, “The Constitution in American Civil Religion,” Supreme Court Review (1979).

19. E. L. Doctorow, “A Citizen Reads the Constitution,” in Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), 126. The document probably also falls within the category of “Classic Texts” that the world's oldest living Bolshevik complains no one reads anymore (P, 14).

20. Doctorow, “A Citizen Reads,” 126.

21. George C. Wolfe, director, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. By Tony Kushner. With Larry Pine (Cohn) and Daniel Jenkins (Prior). Walter Kerr Theatre, New York. 14 October 1994.

22. Although it sounds absurd, the theatrical opinion is not hyperbole, but a realistic portrayal of the kind of letter-over-spirit way in which real-life Republican appointees read the Constitution. A flagrant example is Justice Clarence Thomas's reasoning in a case involving the claim of a transsexual inmate who argued that his incarceration with male inmate invited assaults and abuse and was therefore “cruel and unusual punishment.” Justice Thomas concluded that because the “unfortunate attack that befell” the transsexual “was not part of his sentence, it did not constitute ‘punishment’ under the Eighth Amendment.” Farmer v. Brennan, 114 Sup. Ct. 1970 (1994) (emphasis added).

23. George C. Wolfe, director, Angels in America: Perestroika. By Tony Kushner. With Larry Pine (Cohn) and Daniel Jenkins (Prior). Walter Kerr Theatre, New York. 15 October 1994.

24. James Haigney first called to my attention the significance of Louis's occupation.

25. For general background on Gnosticism, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979) and Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, trans. Anthony Alcock (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991).

26. Ronald R. Garet, “Gnostic Due Process,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 7.1 (1995): 97, 102-3. Garet offers a fascinating reading of Justice Douglas's opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (the important precursor to Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 [1973]) arguing that it is a gnostic text.

27. Although this essay addresses religious themes in Angels it expressly does not discuss Mormonism because, inter alia, my point of entry is law, not religion; each strand in Kushner's complex thematic tapestry warrants discrete attention; and because Kushner's use of Mormon material has received notable treatment by David Savran in “Ambivalence, Utopia, and A Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation,” Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 207, 216-21.

My thanks to James Haigney of the Department of Theatre Arts at the State University of Stony Brook for an insightful introduction to Kushner's complex opus and for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay, and to Brian Gempp for continued trustworthy editorial assistance.