Why does a promise bind, when breaking it would cost us nothing and no one would find out?
We told someone we would do a thing. They have since forgotten or aren't around to call us on it. Nobody else heard it. There is no record, no consequence, no chance of discovery, and doing it now will cost us an afternoon we do not have. If we quietly let it go, the universe would register nothing.
It's in our file of obligation so most of the time we do it anyway. And on the occasions we don't, something happens that is harder to explain than the keeping — a small private accusation, from a source we would struggle to name. We never argue with it. We do not think it has its facts wrong. Whatever is bringing the charge, we agree with the charge.
So most of us keep a second file, and it is the one we do not open. The promise that quietly lapsed. The thing we meant when we said it and never did, said to someone who stopped expecting it years ago and will never raise it again. Nothing came of it. Nobody was told. It is still there.
I have never been able to work out what exactly gets made when a person says I promise.
Nothing moves. No money changes hands, nothing is handed over, no law is invoked. Air is pushed past a tongue in a particular pattern, and afterwards an obligation exists that did not exist ninety seconds earlier.
The law is less confident about this than we are. Under the common law a bare promise — a promise with nothing given in exchange — is generally not enforceable at all. There must be consideration, a bargain, something moving the other way, before a court will treat our words as binding.[^consideration] Which is a quiet admission. The legal system does not believe that spoken words alone can create an obligation. It believes an exchange can.
A promise of recompense for something exchanged is a transaction, and a court can price the trade. A promise with nothing received and nothing behind it but the person who made it gives a court nothing to price. The only security is the one who spoke.
Hold on to the phrase. Bare promise. Nothing given, nothing gained, nothing moving in the other direction. It all begs the question of why we make and value promises at all.
Thomas Schelling's insight, which reshaped how economists think about bargaining, is that promises can create the ability to tie our own hands and result in a form of power.[^schelling] The driver who visibly rips out his own steering wheel wins the game of chicken. The negotiator who has publicly committed to a number has gained leverage by surrendering his freedom to move. On this account a promise is a commitment device, valuable because breaking it is expensive. Reputation does the enforcing, and the cost is what gives the signal its worth.
This explains an enormous amount. It explains why we want promises made in front of witnesses. It explains our particular fury at the man who breaks small promises casually — he is showing us how cheap his word is. It explains why a promise from a stranger passing through town is worth less than the same words from a neighbor.
What it does not explain is the promise we started with.
There the whole apparatus is missing. No witnesses, no reputation at stake, no repeat encounter in which today's behavior could ever be priced. And this is not some marginal case. One consistent example is that people keep promises made to the dying. People keep promises made to parents who have been gone for thirty years and could not register their disappointment if they wanted to. A man will drive four hours to put flowers somewhere because of a sentence he said to someone who is no longer there to know whether he did it.
If these habits were built for live bargaining, where somebody across the table can hold us to our word, this version of oath-keeping is simply an error — a habit that goes on running long after the other party is gone. Maybe.
But look at what kind of error it would have to be. Malfunctions are noisy. They fire at random, they vary wildly from person to person, and they get corrected the moment somebody points them out. This one does none of that. It fires in the same direction every time, in people who have never met and share nothing else, and it is strongest exactly where the strategic account says it should be weakest — at the graveside, where there is nothing whatever left to gain. And when it is pointed out, nobody amends his behavior. We would think less of the man who did. A misfire we would refuse to have repaired is not behaving much like a misfire.
From the inside it does not feel like an error either. It feels like the thing is still owed. Owed to someone — which is the part the account cannot place, because the someone it was owed to is gone.
Lewis B. Smedes, who spent much of his life thinking about this, turned the matter around. A promise, he argued, is how a creature who cannot control the future reaches into it anyway and makes one small patch of it dependable — and in doing so becomes a person with a shape that outlasts his own moods.[^smedes]
That last part may be the whole thing, and it's what we get wrong whenever we hear our own promises as forecasts. Saying the words is not a weather report on our future feelings. It is not a prediction that on the relevant afternoon we will want to do the thing, or will still find the person likable, or will still be the man who meant it. If that were what a promise was, it would be the least reliable sentence in the language, since none of us has the faintest idea what he will feel on a Tuesday 12 years out from a vow.
No, a promise is made against the forecast. It is built for the day the feeling that prompted it has quietly gone somewhere else, and that day, not the day it was spoken, is the day it was for. So the afternoon we do not have is not an unfortunate edge case. It is the case for which promises were made. We find out the weight of what we said at the point where we no longer feel like having said it.
Read that way, a promise kept to the dead is not a leftover habit running on in the dark. It is a living man holding on to the consistency of his own personhood over time by being the same man who promised.
Robert Bolt puts the thing in a single image in A Man for All Seasons. More, waiting to die over an oath he will not swear, tells his daughter that when a man takes an oath he is holding his own self in his own hands — like water — and that if he opens his fingers, he need not hope to find himself again. It is not a rule about oaths. It is a description of what a man is made of. Something that can be spilled.
A slight 1994 film catches an echo of it, It Could Happen to You.[^film] A New York cop tells a waitress he will split his lottery ticket with her. The ticket wins four million dollars. His wife explains that the promise cannot possibly count, since nothing was ever written down — which is very nearly the common-law position, and is still obviously the wrong answer. He hands over two million. The money is the least interesting thing in it. What stays with you in this film is that the man who has just paid an absurd price for one unenforceable sentence is the only person in the end of story who still knows who he is.
But notice how much weight that puts on the keeping. If being faithful is what makes us somebody, then every promise is load-bearing, and the one we let lapse takes part of the structure down with it. That is a great deal to hang on a sentence said to a waitress — maybe more than a sentence, or a man, can hold.
And where does the man get a self solid enough to spend two million dollars on one sentence? Not from the sentence itself. The order must run the other way: he does not become somebody by paying, he pays because he is somebody already.
Which makes me wonder about the sting in the private accusation for failing. It is out of all proportion to the promise. We had been building a self out of our own reliability — we say, a man is what he keeps — and the lapse is a crack in the material. Except that we are still standing. The crack does not bring the building down, which suggests the building was never resting on that beam in the first place: somebody else is holding it up, somebody has given us a name our keeping did not earn and our lapse cannot revoke. But who?
Which sends us back to the phrase we were told to hold on to. Nothing given, nothing gained, nothing moving in the other direction.
In the first recorded naked promise, a childless man in the Bible's book of Genesis was told that a land will be his and his children past counting. The man asked God what anyone standing in an empty field would ask: O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He is not told to stop asking. He's given instructions instead — to bring a heifer, a goat and a ram, cut them in half, and lay the halves in two rows with a path between them.
That was how a covenant was ratified in ancient times. The two parties walked the path between the carcasses, and the walk itself was the oath implying the words: "may I be torn in two like these torn animals if I fail to keep my word". Centuries later Jeremiah still knew the ceremony, and described men who had walked that path and then broken faith with its oath that they would be handed over to become exactly what they had walked between.[^jer]
But in Abram's field the sun goes down, he falls into a dead sleep, and a smoking firepot and a blazing torch pass between the pieces alone. Only God walks the path. He alone takes the vow. It is a one-sided oath, in which the one party who could not conceivably default accepts the curse for both — and the man the promise was made to is unconscious on the ground while it happens.[^gen15]
Which answers Abram's question. How shall I know? Because I swear it, and I swear it on myself. Nothing given, nothing gained, nothing moving in the other direction — and the bare promise, the one with nothing behind it but the person who spoke, turns out to be the only promise in the universe that has never failed.
I have the sense (I think many of us do) that I stand nearer to Jeremiah's men than to the sleeping Abram. It's like the small accusation I mentioned earlier — of a promise unkept. They walked the path on their own feet and then broke faith; so have I, in some cosmic way I could not itemize if asked. Their sentence was to become like the thing they had walked between, and it is hard not to feel that this is the part of the ceremony still outstanding, the part with the bill attached. A sentence hanging over me.
But the God who walked between the pieces walked alone, and he did not walk in ignorance. He knew we would break faith before he ever made the promise. He swore it anyway, on himself, with our breach already priced into the oath rather than made a condition of it.
So it is that the longest drive to a graveside in history ends at a tomb outside Jerusalem. God had made promises to people who died without seeing them fulfilled — a childless man in an empty field, a nation in a desert, a long line of prophets who wrote down words they would not live to watch land. Centuries went by. Nobody was left who could have held him to anything.
He kept the promises anyway.
And the price of the keeping was named from the promise itself, between two rows of carcasses in the dark. The one who walked the path alone is himself torn in two, publicly, on a hill, under a curse he accepted on a night when the man it was for lay asleep and could not lift a finger. The sentence for covenant-breaking was served by the only party who had never broken one. That's a surreal fulfillment of an old promise.
But the keeper went down into the grave and came up on the other side of it, which is the one move no legal system has a category for. The promisor outlived the death that was supposed to close the file.
Which does something to the four-hour drive.
If death closes the file, then the man setting down flowers is keeping faith in a direction where there is nobody left to keep faith with, then whole tender business is faintly ridiculous — an obligation discharged into thin air. That's the reading on which his instinct is a malfunction. But the instinct never said we owe a memory something. It said the thing is still owed, and owed to someone, and that was exactly the part the strategic account could not place. It could not place it because it was working from a file that death had closed. If a grave has been opened from the inside, the someone is not a figure of speech. Out of sight is not the same as gone. The dead in Christ are asleep the way Abram was asleep in the field while the torch went through — not absent from the covenant, only not awake for it yet. Maybe the four hours are not a promise kept to nobody.
Which leaves the second file, the one we do not open.
It is still there. The promise that quietly lapsed. The thing we meant when we said it and never did, said to someone who stopped expecting it years ago. Nobody was told. Nothing came of it. And the small private accusation goes on being made from a source we cannot name, and we go on not arguing with it, because we have never once thought it had its facts wrong. The charge is accurate. That is the trouble with it.
It is also the charge the torch and the firepot went between the pieces to absorb. The file is not shredded, and it is not found to be empty. It is opened by the only party who has already served the sentence written in it — so the charge we have never once argued with has been answered, and not by us.
Which changes what the afternoon is for. Not the closing of a file; the file is closed. Not the shoring up of a self, either — that was never the beam holding us up. We keep our small promises now out of a name already given, not to earn one.
Which is where More comes back, and the cop with him. More is right about the material — the self is water in the hands, and that is exactly what it feels like — but his counsel is to keep the fingers closed. Mine have opened. So have everyone's. The second file is the record of what has already run out between them.
So the hope cannot be a firmer grip. It has to be other hands. Out in the desert a grumbling people who deserved nothing were dying of thirst, and God told Moses to strike the rock; the place of judgment became the place the water came from, and Paul says the rock was Christ. On the cross the only man who ever kept every word he gave said, I thirst. Poured out like water. Struck, so that water could be handed free to people with nothing to trade for it.
We are not asked to hold ourselves. We are held, by the one who walked the path alone and whose hands do not leak. So we can go and keep faith with the thing we said.
[^consideration]: On consideration and the unenforceability of a bare promise (nudum pactum), see any standard treatment of the common law of contract. [^schelling]: Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1960). [^smedes]: Lewis B. Smedes, "Controlling the Unpredictable — The Power of Promising," Christianity Today, January 21, 1983. [^film]: It Could Happen to You, dir. Andrew Bergman (TriStar Pictures, 1994). [^jer]: Jeremiah 34:18-20. [^gen15]: Genesis 15:7-18. [^heb]: Hebrews 6:13–18. [^gal]: Galatians 3:13, citing Deuteronomy 21:23.