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.
The Ten Commandments are critical to a Jewish and Christian understanding and are embedded as well in the Islamic Qur’an and in other world religions. They are about principles without reference to consequences. They are about principles which dignify our humanity and signal our freedom. They are grounded in God’s self-revelation as “I Am Who I Am”. They are about our liberation; at once from Egyptian bondage in the story of Israel and from the ways in which we imprison ourselves, enslaved to our passions and desires. They remind us that the legal is not always the ethical and its corollary that the illegal is not necessarily unethical. Not all laws and rules and regulations are good. They go to the question about what is the ethical good which transcends and informs our thoughts and actions. They speak to character and intent.
Drinking to get drunk, for instance, is unethical because you are surrendering your reason through the abuse of alcohol. If we ask, as we must, what is the ethical good of the recreational use of marijuana, now legalised in Canada and Uruguay (go figure!), the answer is that there isn’t any for the simple reason that wanting to get high is to surrender your reason. As Shakespeare puts it in his play, Macbeth, “have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” It may be a thoughtless lark on the part of adolescents who think they are invincible and spurn the consequences, real or imagined. But a thoughtless lark is just that, a thoughtless lark. Sometimes there are consequences from which one might learn. But getting high is not an ethical good. More disturbing would be wanting to get high for some other reason such as being unable to cope with reality and seeking some sort of escape. Too sad, but only too real.
The Ten Commandments reveal the ethical principles that ultimately underlie all forms of social and political order. God is God and is not to be confused with anything in the created order, hence the proscription against idolatry. God’s name is not to be taken in vain since capital ‘T’ Truth is to be honoured and God’s name is not to be wrongly invoked for our immediate ends. “Remember[ing] the Sabbath” is more particular and recalls us to Genesis and creation, though surely the idea of contemplation and the need for a time to reflect has a universal appeal. “Honour thy father and mother” recalls us to our natural origins, our families, regardless of how we feel about our parents and siblings. What we can do, and this is our freedom, is to honour them for what they are. “Thou shalt not kill” because you are not the author of your own being let alone the judge of someone else’s very existence. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” because our sexual lives, too, come under our relation to God in the honouring of marriage. “Thou shalt not steal” since property is an extension of personality. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” because our minds and our tongues are intended for truth speaking and truth seeking among ourselves. Finally, “thou shalt not covet.” This convicts us all and focuses on our hearts, on our inward being, upon our desires.
The commandments are a complete account of our relation to God and to one another which the story of the parable of the Good Samaritan sums up in “the summary of the Law,” illustrated in taking care of the stranger for the outsider is also our neighbour. The law is about love as the moving ethical principle in our lives, something which does not arise simply from us but from the divine love alive in us. The commandments bring out the deep qualities of soul that belong to our good and to our good together in community. Letting these principles speak to our souls is to let them begin to live in us. Only so can we heed Christ’s words, “Go and do thou likewise.” The parable illustrates that “the love of God and the love of neighbour” are the ethical principles of compassion alive in us. We can only care if we care for what is good and true and beautiful.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy