In Vain

I. The Smallest Reading

Everybody knows this commandment, and everybody knows what it means.

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh [Their] name in vain.¹

It means don't swear. You know this. If you were raised anywhere near a church you can still hear the adult who told you, and if you weren't, you know it anyway, because it's the one commandment with a rule of etiquette attached, and for most people who can recite it the etiquette is the whole of it.

You're expecting me to say they're wrong, and they aren't. The readings that take the commandment to be about speech are the oldest: the oath sworn in God's name and not kept, the name spoken lightly, the name spoken for effect. Those aren't misreadings that better scholarship has since corrected. Those readings are the commandment's smallest case, and the smallest case is still a case.

The small one repays a look. Oh my God. Somebody says it because the coffee is hot, or the light turned red, or a friend told them something mildly surprising. A name meant for God gets spent on the size of my own irritation. It's a tiny thing. Nobody would call it vanity. But the shape of it: a name that big, borrowed to make a small feeling of mine seem larger than it is. That shape is the subject of this essay. The swear is where it's small enough to see whole.

There's a second thing you know about this commandment, or think you know, and it's the part that made it frightening. The LORD will not hold him guiltless. If you were handed a faith built on fear, this is one of the verses it was built from: a rule about a word, backed by a threat about a soul. It sounds like a penalty. I don't think it is one. I think it's a description, and the difference between those two is the whole difference between the God people are threatened with and the One who found me.

II. What the Word Means

Vain means empty.

That's the whole of it, before anything gets built on it. The English word comes through French from the Latin vanus: empty, hollow, containing nothing. A vain effort is an effort with nothing at the end of it. A vain hope is a hope with nothing under it. When the Preacher says vanity of vanities; all is vanity,² he isn't saying that everything is conceited; he's saying that everything is hollow. You can put your hand through it.

And the word did what words do, and did it early. Alongside the hollowness of things, vanity came to mean a particular hollowness in people: the excessive care for how one is seen. Conceit. Self-regard. Latin already had both senses and English took both, and the two have lived side by side ever since, and most of us use the second without ever hearing the first inside it.

The two aren't a coincidence the language produced and an essayist noticed. The two are one fact seen from two sides. Conceit is emptiness with a self in it. Self-regard is what the hollowness looks like from inside, when someone is living in it and arranging its face.

None of this tells you what the commandment means, and you already know why: English wasn't there. Moses didn't speak Latin. The word under in vain in the Hebrew is a word for emptiness and falsehood that does not, so far as I can find, ever mean self-regard; the word under vanity in Ecclesiastes is a different word again, a word for vapor or breath; and the Greek the early church read the commandment in has two words where English has one.³ The history of an English word records what a concept was modeled on. It doesn't tell you what a Hebrew sentence says. So no, the third commandment doesn't secretly mean don't be conceited. What's true is smaller and harder to get around: the King James translators put one English word over several older ones, and the one word happens to tell the truth from both of its sides, and the tradition says the same thing in its own language, in a passage that never met the English at all. The English is only where it's easiest to see.

III. Where the Last Essay Stopped

I've written about this commandment before, in In the Name, and that essay ended at a particular place. The verb in take the name is a verb for lifting, for carrying, for bearing, and there's a serious reading of the commandment, not the oldest and not a consensus, that hears it as you shall not bear the name of the LORD your God emptily.⁴ Bear it the way a herald bears a king's name into a room: claiming to speak for someone, carrying their intention, so that the people in the room are dealing with the king and not with them. And emptily is the case where the herald has nobody behind them: carrying the name, and delivering themselves.

The men in Matthew who say LORD, LORD are the standing example, and I've spent them once already in The Sheep in the Basement. Those men prophesied in His name, cast out devils in His name, did many wonderful works in His name, and are told I never knew you.⁵ Nobody in the scene says the works didn't happen. What's denied is that He was in them. The name was borne, and borne with results, and borne emptily.

That essay stopped there. The next question is the one that matters. Emptily. Empty of what?

Not of God. God isn't absent from anything; that's not a thing that can be arranged. The men saying LORD, LORD weren't standing in a God-shaped vacancy. Something was in the name when they bore it, because a name that's being borne is borne by someone, for something. So who? Whose was it, in the moment it was being carried?

Theirs.

The name wasn't vacant. It had a self in it. The emptiness the commandment names is not an absence. It's an occupant: a self where God was supposed to be. And the self, it turns out, is the hollow thing.

IV. The Empty Thing

The separate self is the empty thing. Not a person. A position.

I've argued this in The Knowledge of Good and Evil, where there was only ever one life and the branch that thinks itself a separate life is only a branch that has forgotten where the sap comes from, and in The Novelist DM, where each of us is a finite, self-forgetting aspect of one infinite consciousness, and the forgetting is real and the separateness isn't. If either of those is right, the self that stands apart, defending its borders, managing its reputation, doing its private math about safety, is not a thing that exists. It's a wall somebody is living behind, and the wall is made of the belief that there's an outside.

You have two objections ready, and both are right as far as they go.

The first: then the harm isn't real either. No. The harm is not less real for the self being unreal. Someone who takes a rope for a snake and dies of the fright has died. Nothing here says a wrong done from separateness isn't a wrong, or that a person suffering under someone else's vanity is suffering under an illusion and should feel better. The wall isn't there. The bruises from walking into it are.

The second: then I'm not real either. Also no, and this is the line the whole publication runs on. Separate is not distinct. The Distance That Love Needs put it as the wall is the wound; the twoness was the design: a lover and a beloved, a face here and a face there, is what God made and never an error. The face God gave you is not the empty thing. The wall is. When I say the separate self is hollow I mean the posture of separateness, the holding, the wall, and I don't mean the someone God gave a name to and knows by it. That someone stays. The wall comes down. Vanity names the wall. It never names the face.

Vain means empty. The separate self is the empty thing. So a thing done in the service of the separate self is done for something that isn't there. It's done for nothing. And done for nothing is exactly, literally, what in vain means.

That isn't a pun, though it sounds like one. It's the same word doing the same job at both ends of the sentence. The conceit is empty because the self it serves is empty. Everything done to feed the wall, defend the wall, decorate the wall so the people on the far side of it think well of the wall, is done in vain in the oldest sense: poured into a container with no bottom. Both Ends of the Leash described the separate self as a frightened creature doing math about safety, and noticed what happens when you punish the creature: the wanting goes underground and comes back with better cover — the vanity as service. That's what an empty thing does when it's cornered. It changes costume. It doesn't fill.

The Psalm says it without any of my machinery. Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it.⁶ A house is going up. There's a lot, and a foundation, and framing, and people on the framing who know what they're doing. The lumber is real; you can get a splinter from it. The wages are real. The sweat is real. The question anyone asks about a house is whose it is. Who's it for? And the answer, in the case the Psalm is describing, is that it's for the client who commissioned it, and the client is the self that stands apart, and that self is a position and not a person. So there is no client. There never was. The lumber is still real. The splinter is still real. And the house, the thing that all of that was for, isn't there, because a house is a house by being somebody's, and there's nobody.

The verse doesn't say the LORD knocks the house down. It doesn't say the builders are fined for building. It says the labor is in vain: they worked, and the house isn't there. Nothing was added to the effort as punishment. The emptiness was already in the effort, because of who the house was for.

The second half of the commandment is going to need that.

V. Vainglory and the Emptying

English wasn't in the room when any of this was written. The tradition makes the same argument in its own words, in a single passage of Paul's, written by someone who had never heard of the King James Version.

Paul, to the church at Philippi:

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.⁷

The word under vainglory is kenodoxia. It's a compound: kenos, empty, and doxa, glory. Empty glory. Glory with nothing in it. Paul isn't warning against ambition or against wanting to do well; he's naming a specific hollowness, a glory sought for a self, and he calls it by its structure. It is glory that is empty.

Four verses later, he describes Christ.

But made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.⁸

Made Himself of no reputation is the King James doing its careful best with two Greek words: heauton ekenōsen. He emptied Himself. The verb is kenoō, to empty, to make void, and it's the same root as the kenos in kenodoxia.⁹ The old theological word for what Christ did here, kenosis, is this verb turned into a noun.

So within four verses of one letter Paul sets two emptinesses against each other, and they share a root, and they're opposites. In the first, a self fills itself with glory and the glory is empty. In the second, a self empties itself and the result is a name with everything in it. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name.¹⁰ The One who emptied Himself of self is the One whose name is not vain. The one who is full of self carries a glory with nothing in it. You can be empty of the separate self or you can be an empty self. There's no third condition on offer, and Paul put both of them in one paragraph so nobody would miss it.

This is the third commandment from the inside. The men who said LORD, LORD had glory; they had prophecies and exorcisms and wonderful works to point to. It was kenodoxia. The name they bore was full of them and therefore empty. And the One they were saying it to had spent His whole life doing the reverse: I can of Mine own self do nothing … I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent Me.¹¹ Nothing borne for Himself. Which is what The Author Is Not a Character calls the one exception that only the Author could make: the one man in whom there was no separate self to bear the name for, and so the one man who never bore it in vain.

He also gave the test. He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory; but the One who seeks the glory of the Father who sent Him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him.¹² Whose glory a thing is for tells you whether it's true. Not how eloquent it is. Not what works came of it. Not whether the person saying it is sincere. Whose. You'd like a method here, and so would I. There isn't one. There's a question, and it can be asked of anything, and when I ask it of my own work the answer is rarely as clean as I'd like.

VI. The Author

Which is where the commandment lands on the person writing about it, and I don't get to write this part from outside.

An essay about vanity has an author. The author has a name at the top of it, and readers, and the ordinary wish to be read. There's no arrangement of those facts in which the question doesn't reach the person asking it. Whose glory is this for? I can tell you the answer I want to give, and I can tell you that I don't fully trust it, and both of those are true at once. If the argument is right, then an essay about God carried for the sake of the man who wrote it is the commandment's exact case, and it doesn't stop being the exact case because the essay is about the commandment.

I know the shape of this from the other side. I was raised to think of the devout as people who needed a comforting story, and I thought I was stronger than that. The Way Home Is Down says there is no vanity quite like the vanity of the disillusioned, and I'll leave it there. The point for now is only that the empty self was carrying something then, too. It was carrying my unbelief, and doing it for me, and doing it very well. The name it bore was nobody's, and it bore even that emptily. You don't need to believe in God to take Their name in vain. You only need to be the one the taking is for.

Now the second half of the verse. For the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh [Their] name in vain.

It sounds like a penalty. The words allow the reading that has frightened people for a very long time: a rule, and a God keeping score behind it, and a soul held to account for a word. I won't pretend that reading isn't available, or that people weren't hurt by it; some of you were, and you know which verses did it. The house already said why. They labour in vain that build it. Nobody knocks the house down. It was never standing. The emptiness wasn't added to the labor afterward as a judgment. It was in the labor from the first shovel, because of who the house was for.

That's what I hear in will not hold him guiltless. Not a fine. A description of what's already so. A name borne for the empty self is empty; there's nothing in it to be held guiltless by. God isn't refusing to overlook something. There's simply no one standing where the guiltless one would stand; there's a wall there, and a wall isn't the kind of thing that gets held guiltless or guilty. The verse describes the emptiness. It doesn't inflict it. And if that's right, then the most frightening sentence in the commandment is the most merciful one, because the remedy was never to be more careful with a word. It was to stop being the one the word was for.

That's a reading the words allow, and the Psalm supports, and the shape of the whole tradition leans toward. It isn't a proof that the fear-reading is wrong; the words allow that one too. If you were handed the fear, I can't take it from you with a paragraph. I can tell you there's another way to hear the same sentence, and that when I hear it that way, the God speaking it is the One who found me.

VII. In the LORD

So what's the opposite of in vain?

You'd say successfully, or with results, or for something. The tradition says something stranger and more exact. Paul again, closing the long chapter on the resurrection:

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the LORD, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the LORD.¹³

Not in vain in the LORD. The antonym of in vain is a preposition. Not in vain, but in the LORD. Paul doesn't say the labor is not in vain because it will succeed, or be rewarded, or be vindicated by history. It's not in vain, he says, because of where it is: whose it is, who it's done in. The same labor, the same house, the same prophecy, the same essay, is empty or full depending on nothing but that. Who it's for.

Jesus says the same thing about worship, and He says it in Isaiah's words, so the sentence is twice-attested. This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth Me with their lips; but their heart is far from Me. But in vain they do worship Me.¹⁴ The worship isn't in vain because it was badly done. It's in vain because of where the heart is. Worship done from the wall is worship done for the wall, and it's in vain no matter how well it's sung. The heart near is the whole correction. Nobody is told to sing differently.

And there's the prayer, the one nearly everyone raised anywhere near this tradition has said aloud. Hallowed be Thy name.¹⁵ I used to hear that as a request that God be honored, which it is. But hallowed means set apart, kept holy, and a name is kept holy when nothing else is in it. The prayer asks that the name be borne by no one in particular: that when it's carried into a room, the room meets the One it belongs to and not the herald. It's the third commandment turned from a prohibition into a longing. Don't take My name emptily and let Thy name be hallowed are the same sentence, said from its two ends.

There's a way to get there. It isn't an exercise in emptying yourself; a self that sets out to empty itself has just found a new project, and the men who said LORD, LORD weren't sorted from the saints by a technique they lacked. You can't sort them either. What the way is belongs to Rising After Falls. What this one has is the question, and you can ask it now. Of the next thing you do, before you do it: who is this for? It's small enough to ask of a swear word and large enough to ask of a life, and it's a question the wall can't answer, because the honest answer is the wall.

Everybody knows this commandment, and everybody knows what it means. It means don't swear. It never said the swearing was about the words.

Exodus 20:7 (KJV); the parallel is Deuteronomy 5:11, near-verbatim. The King James reads that taketh his name in vain; the bracketed [Their] is this house's pronoun for God the Father, and the bracket marks the word as mine and not the translators'. Deity pronouns are capitalized here and throughout, including inside quotations; the King James lowercases them. Where the house pronoun is substituted rather than only recased, the substitution is bracketed. ↩
Ecclesiastes 1:2 (KJV). The Hebrew is hebel, vapor or breath, not the shav of the commandment; see the note on the words, below. ↩
Three languages, several words, one English rendering. Hebrew shav' (Exodus 20:7, Deuteronomy 5:11): emptiness, worthlessness, falsehood; it is the word for a false witness and an empty oath, and not a word for self-regard. Hebrew hebel (Ecclesiastes 1:2, Psalm 39:5): vapor, breath, what does not last; also not self-regard. Greek mataios and its family (Romans 8:20's vanity, the in vain of Matthew 15:9, and the Septuagint's rendering of the commandment): futile, without purpose. Greek kenos: empty, hollow, the word of Philippians 2, on which see the note at §V. The English vain and vanity both descend from Latin vanus, empty, by way of vanitas, which meant emptiness and falsity and, figuratively, foolish pride; English vanity is attested in the futility sense from about 1200 and in the self-conceit sense from the mid-fourteenth century. So the observation in §II is an observation about English and Latin, made as one, and the argument does not rest on it. Glosses per Strong's with Thayer and Brown-Driver-Briggs (H7723, H1892, G3152, G2756); Septuagint Exodus 20:7 reads epi mataiō; the English dates per the Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. vanity. ↩
The verb is nasa', to lift, carry, or bear. The bearing-the-name reading is argued most fully by Carmen Joy Imes, Bearing God's Name: Why Sinai Still Matters (IVP Academic, 2019), and the standing of that reading, neither the oldest nor a consensus, is set out in In the Name, which this essay does not repeat. The older readings, the false oath and the irreverent use in speech, are not rivals to it but its sharpest instances. ↩
Matthew 7:22–23 (KJV). ↩
Psalm 127:1 (KJV). The second half of the verse says it again: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. ↩
Philippians 2:3 (KJV). Greek kenodoxia, from kenos, empty, and doxa, glory; the King James renders it vainglory here and vain glory at Galatians 5:26, the only other place the family appears in the New Testament. ↩
Philippians 2:7 (KJV). The King James reads made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant; the pronouns are recased, not changed. ↩
Greek heauton ekenōsen, from kenoō, to empty or make void, the verb of kenosis. The claim in the body is only that kenodoxia (2:3) and ekenōsen (2:7) share the root kenos, and that Paul set them four verses apart; whether he intended the echo is not a claim this essay makes, and it does not need to. Derivations per Strong's and Thayer: kenodoxia (G2754) from kenodoxos (G2755), from kenos (G2756) and doxa; kenoō (G2758) from kenos. The noun occurs once in the New Testament (Philippians 2:3) and the adjective once (Galatians 5:26). ↩
Philippians 2:9 (KJV). The wherefore makes the exaltation the consequence of the emptying; In the Name §VIII reads the hinge in full. ↩
John 5:30 (KJV), abridged; the King James reads I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me. The Son's pronouns are recased. ↩
John 7:18 (KJV). The first clause is quoted as it stands; the second, but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, is paraphrased in the body because the King James his there is the Father's and would take the bracket, which breaks the sentence. The verse ends the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him, the him being the Son and recased. ↩
1 Corinthians 15:58 (KJV). Paul's labour keeps the King James spelling as a quotation; the essay's own prose writes labor. ↩
Matthew 15:8–9 (KJV), quoting Isaiah 29:13, where the words are the LORD's: this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me. The pronouns are recased. ↩
Matthew 6:9 (KJV). ↩