'Not ... but' commas redux

What looks like one may be another kind of comma in disguise

Gloriana Catara writes: “Thanks for your article about ‘not ... but’ comma.

I have a question about whether there should be a comma before ‘but’ in the cases of a strong contrast. I was told there is such a rule, however, I could not find any information about that.

This is, of course, not a comma but a camel. Photo by Nour Wageh on Unsplash

I am not a native speaker, but I do work on English books, checking the translation, and there are always issues with commas.

For example, do you consider it necessary to put a comma in the next sentence?

‘For the Cathars, Christ was not a savior, a redeemer, but a Teacher of the Heavenly Love.’”

Gloriana: As you will have discovered in the post you mention, I don’t like “not … but” commas. Not everyone believes in avoiding them, but my former boss at The Atlantic, Bill Whitworth, emphatically did, as did Eleanor Gould, the longtime legendary copy editor at The New Yorker, from whom Bill learned the rule. So according to me, my sources for this are impeccable.

Your sentence, though, contains a twist. In “For the Cathars, Christ was not a savior, a redeemer, but a Teacher of the Heavenly Love,” a second element, “redeemer,” which is adding detail to the first one (in grammar-speak, such things are called appositives), comes after “savior,” and this has to be set off from the main line of the sentence with a comma before it and another comma after it. Here the comma before “but” is really functioning as a comma after “redeemer.”

Leave out the appositive — “For the Cathars, Christ was not a savior, a redeemer, but a Teacher of the Heavenly Love” — and presto! No commas are needed. Indeed, doesn’t “For the Cathars, Christ was not a savior, but a Teacher of the Heavenly Love” seem a bit off? That’s because the point of the sentence is that Christ was a Teacher of the Heavenly Love, and one doesn’t want to set the word describing him apart from its subject, Christ.

I hope that’s clear, even if at least one of its sentences is ridiculously long.