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.
Because God is God, the Name of the Lord thy God is not to be taken in vain but respected and honoured. The idea of name is crucial. In the Jewish understanding, it refers to the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush where God identifies himself first, in relation to the tribal realities of the Hebrews, and, then universally and philosophically, as “I Am Who I Am”, the principle of the being and knowing of all things. This Third Commandment speaks to our recognition of what God has revealed
The Fourth Commandment recalls us to creation and to the Sabbath as a day or time dedicated to God in the idea of God’s taking delight in the whole of creation. This contrasts with our pre-occupations and worldly busyness. Our labours, too, belong to our life with God and creation.
The Fifth Commandment reminds us of our natural origins, our fathers and mothers, who are to be honoured, for regardless of how we might feel about our parents, they are our parents. The idea here is about life as a gift and as such to be honoured. A powerful critique of the current obsessions with the sovereign individual, isolated and separate, the Sixth Commandment builds on the same underlying logic of life as a gift from God and thus to not murder. If our own life is a gift then we have no right to take the life of others. In the positive, it means honouring and respecting others even if they are your enemies, as Jesus pointedly says.
“Thou shalt not commit adultery” is the Seventh Commandment. It speaks to self-control in matters of sexual activity, on the one hand, and to the idea of honouring the institution of marriage as something God-given rather than simply a human invention, on the other hand. Marriage, as the classical service puts it, is “instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency”. The Eighth Commandment speaks to matters of property which come to be understood as an extension of personality. In stealing we take what belongs to another.
As with all the Commandments, breaking any of them is self-contradiction. The Ninth Commandment highlights this in terms of lying. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbour.” A lie has no power apart from the truth which it both assumes and denies. We have tongues to give voice to truth not to lies which are a denial of our own rationality.
The Tenth Commandment proscribes coveting things for yourself that others have. It has to do with the desires of our hearts. Unlike most of the preceding commandments, it is inward. It is about what is in our hearts. But in that sense it recalls us to God as God and therefore as the God of all that is visible and invisible, even to the things of our hearts. It speaks to conscience and to self-consciousness.
This brief excursus shows that there is a logic at work in the Ten Commandments and that they are comprehensive. They are neither arbitrary nor simply a list of ‘do-nots’. They belong to the real truth and dignity of our humanity and to the radical idea of our being freed to God. They actually begin by recalling the idea of liberation from all that enslaves us to ourselves and to others. Their context is the liberation of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery and to the service of God, “whose service is perfect freedom.” We do well to ponder the wisdom of the Law. They belong to the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self in their inter-relation and thus to our thinking about the world and one another. In that sense the Law is to be loved.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy