KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 20 October
Law and Love
We have gone this week in Chapel from the radical ethical teaching to “love your enemies” to the giving of the Law to Moses in the Ten Commandments, the universal moral code of our humanity. The idea of loving your enemies has to do with seeking the good rather than the harm of others. That idea turns upon the knowledge of being part of an intelligible and moral universe, something grasped both by natural reason and by way of revelation. In either case, it is about something known by all according to their capacity to know. It is fundamentally about the knowledge of good and evil in each of us. The law of nature, as Thomas Aquinas suggests, is nothing else than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.
All law is grounded in the law of God. “Thou shalt have none other gods” is the First Commandment which contains all the rest. In a way, the Ten Commandments stand between the first word of Genesis and the first word of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning God … in the beginning was the Word”. The Law is given first on tablets of stone but then, in the prophetic tradition, as written on our hearts. In the Christian understanding, Christ is “the Word made flesh”.
But the commandments begin and end with God. God is God, not some fiction of our minds in this view. We are made in the image of God, not God in our image. Aristotle famously said of Anaxagoras, who grasped that intellect or reason (νους – mind) was the ordering principle of reality rather than the material elements, that he was like “a sober man in the company of drunks”. This emphasis upon reason as that which grasps the nature of things is contrary to our current solipsisms in which the mind is the only reality, the only existent. But that is to live a fiction.
Because God is God, the First Commandment, there can be no confusion between Creator and created, hence the Second Commandment against “any graven images” that confuse and conflate image and reality. It is not by accident that the proscription against idolatry features so prominently in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding, albeit in different registers of emphasis. Something similar might be said about our fixation with images in ‘the culture of selfies’. They are images of you but not the whole truth of you. The distinction is crucial.