Defending the Motte, Living in the Bailey

 

A motte is the stone tower on its mound, hard to take and miserable to live in. The bailey is the courtyard below, comfortable, productive, exposed. Nicholas Shackel, in 2005, saw two arguments in one castle. The bailey is the claim someone actually wants to hold and act on, contested and difficult to defend. The motte is a shrunken, near-unarguable version of it. Press the bailey and the arguer retreats uphill to the motte, defends that successfully, and the moment you withdraw, walks back down and reoccupies the courtyard as though it too had been vindicated.

The move trades on an ambiguity nobody names aloud. Two propositions get one label. When the strong one draws fire, the weak one answers the door, and the strong one collects the credit. Nothing about the bailey is ever proven. The defender just refuses to stand in it long enough to be hit, then treats the intact motte as if it covered the whole estate. You have felt this without having a word for it: you refute what was said and are told you attacked a caricature, you engage the modest restatement and the immodest original quietly returns.

Rome's invocation of the saints runs on it. The bailey is the Rosary, the Litany of Loreto with its Health of the Sick and Refuge of Sinners, Mary hailed in the Salve Regina as our life, our sweetness, and our hope, graces sought from her hand. Object, and the motte appears: we only ask her to pray for us, the way you would ask a friend. No friend is titled Refuge of Sinners, and no friend receives a litany. The East does the same with icons. The bailey is the bow, the kiss, the lamp before the image, the language of the Second Council of Nicaea (787) about the honor passing to the prototype. Challenged, it contracts to a photograph on the mantel: we only respect it. The photograph draws no incense.

The Protestant version wears a verse. God is love, says 1 John 4:8, and no one disputes it; that is the motte. The bailey is everything built on it: Oord's theology in which love constrains God out of judgment, Bell's suggestion that love empties hell, the whole retiring of wrath, exclusivity, and substitution. Press the denial and you are asked, with wounded surprise, whether you truly deny that God is love. Anglicanism industrialized the pattern under a nobler name. Its motte is creedal and catholic, confessed in the Thirty-Nine Articles. Its bailey is a comprehensiveness wide enough to house a Bishop of Newark who denied the bodily resurrection and kept his see. Press the latitude and you are shown the Articles; press the Articles and you are shown the latitude. Neither is made to answer for the other.

This is why the leaven image fits. Leaven works unseen, changes the whole lump, asks no one's permission. A motte-and-bailey never argues you out of Scripture. It lets you keep a position Scripture forbids while appearing to defend only something innocent, which is worse, because there is nothing left to refute. The remedy is unglamorous. Pin the claim. Ask which proposition is being asserted, the strong one or the weak one, and hold the person to that one when the ground starts to shift under them. A doctrine that will only ever defend its motte has told you exactly where it does not want to be found.