KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 14 November
Law and the Ethics of Compassion
Two outstanding passages in the whole of the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, were read in Chapel this week: the one, the Ten Commandments; the other, the parable of the Good Samaritan. They complement each other and lay out in a very intense way the ethical principles upon which our lives radically depend.
We have been exploring in Chapel the need for an ethical principle for our humanity. Thinking back to the compelling story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder, we have wrestled with the profound idea that left to our own devices we are in a world which, in Thomas Hobbes’s famous 17th century words, is “the warre of every man against every man.” Human life in the hypothetical state of nature, Hobbes argues, is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” This leads to his form of the modern state as a social contract. Out of the fear of death, we contract with the Sovereign for safety and peace in return for service to the State. The whole idea is a kind of commentary on the Genesis story of life after the Fall. Left to ourselves we are deadly or dead.
Rousseau in the 18th century will famously argue that it is society itself which constrains and binds. Man in the hypothetical state of nature is pure and innocent, the antithesis of Hobbes. It reflects a view of man before the Fall perhaps but argues that human life has to be brought under the General Will which seeks the good of all. All of these early modern considerations illustrate Scriptural insights into the human recognition of the need for an ethical principle. We have explored the biblical narrative in terms of the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, and now we come to the Mosaic covenant as concentrated in the Ten Commandments.
Presented in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy, the Ten Commandments are the universal moral code for our humanity. They challenge us by making us think more deeply about the ethical principles which underlie law and order, regulation and restraint. They are a comprehensive set of ethical principles and while they appear to be given simply authoritatively (which in a Jewish view is important as a check upon human presumption), they are also known by human reason. John Chrysostom, in the late fourth and early fifth century, argued that nine out of the ten commandments were able to be known through natural reason. Maimonides, the great Medieval Jewish theologian writing in Arabic in Cairo in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, argues that the first two commandments – the existence of God and the unity of God – are known not just by prophetic authority but by natural reason.