Last time we met, we looked at the first three commandments that God gave to his people through Moses. For the purposes of better understanding western thought, it is critical to recognize that the Ten Commandants have been the bedrock of western morality for centuries. As we discussed, the entire law of Moses is predicated on two key thoughts. The first is that we have free will. As humans we have a choice to either obey these laws or not. In the absence of free will, we would not need the law, we would be told what to do. The second is that these are the most basic of precepts. They are “natural”, meaning that a reasonable person can look at them and see how they make sense in an ordered life even if one were not to believe that they are divine in origin. It is interesting how closely this mirrors Aristotle’s concepts of constitutions which include the written law, as well as customs and traditions. The law does not have to be complex if the intent of the constitution is clear and people are educated in them enough to understand what they mean. If those conditions are met, then people will be able to self-govern.
While the first three commandments deal with how man should regard their God, and the remaining seven deal with how man should interact with man.
The fourth Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
– This is something of a transitional commandment between what do we owe God and how we relate to the people in our lives. Once you acknowledge that God is, and what we owe him (which, according to the first three commandments is not more than the opening lines in the prayer “Our Father”) then we have to acknowledge that we have one foot in this world and one in the next. The Sabbath is designed to give us time to contemplate how we carry forward the divine into the world in which we live. The Sabbath then, is about integrating spirituality with life, and bringing spiritual things into our daily life.
In addition, because slaves never get a day off, this day reminds us of who God enabled us to be as stated in the First Commandment. He brought us out of Egypt (literally for the Israelites and figuratively for us), and to be a slave to work would be no better than being a slave to the Egyptians. In that sense the observation of the Sabbath serves as a constant reminder that man is not a beast of burden. Note that there is nothing wrong with work, otherwise we would be commanded not to do any, rather we are commanded not to make work into a god in violation of the First Commandment.
The fifth: Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. – This command is more than a demand that we be kind to our parents, it is a command to honor the ideal that they represent as well. Natural law tells us to follow this commandment because it is easy to see examples of what happens to the family when we fail to honor these roles in today’s society. On the one hand, it is possible to object to this Commandment as there clearly are some bad parents out there. But even the best parents are human and thus have faults. By honoring their ideals, we keep them alive. Children are the creation of their parents in conjunction with God. As such, parents are participating with God in the ongoing creation of the world. Parents are the first teachers of morals, and in a parallel to what Aristotle taught, parents providing a solid education in the law, as well as in customs and traditions, are necessary for an ordered society. When we honor our parents and what they represent we carry forward the customs and traditions that they taught us to the next generation and ensure the continuity of civilization. If we fail in that mission, there is little doubt that we will not “live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”
The sixth: You shall not murder. – Murder is a better translation here than “kill” in that one does not murder a fly when it is swatted. If we think about the entire list of Commandments as a system for a civilized life, what is the gravest injury that we could cause to one of God’s fellow creations? That is why the ending of another human life, without just cause, is a sin. The Old Testament has plenty of examples of the acceptable killing of enemies. The New Testament calls some of this into question.
The seventh You shall not commit adultery. – In the same way that honoring of one’s father and mother is critical for the protection of the family, the family is critical for the protection of women and children. Once again, natural law tells us that, as does any rational study of the statistics involved. The protection of women and children is how we pass along civilization. Adultery destroys marriage and family and therefore destroys civilization.
In the absence of God, marriage is nothing but a legal arrangement. But again, even without an acknowledgement of the divinity of the Commandments, we can see that adultery is an assault on the meaning of promises. There is an authority that comes from modeling a certain behavior. If I want to tell my children to be keep their promises, then it is necessary that I do the same thing. If we want people to keep their word in small things then we need to keep our word in the big things. And finally, children are the next generation of civilization. And in the same way that honoring parents is about the perpetuation of civilization, corrupting children is corrupting civilization itself.
The eight: You shall not steal. – Immorality is the desire for that which we have not earned. But this can be more than just physical things, it can include reputation or ideas.[1] Beyond that, commerce is a critical component of civilization, and the most injurious thing you can do to commerce is steal. For us to have a society where commerce is openly conducted, people have to be secure in their property. Otherwise, the result is chaos.
9 You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor– in the Old Testament if you gave false testimony in a trial, you would receive the punishment for the crime about which you lied. We can see that our entire concept of justice is based on the concept that people will tell the truth. If Murder is the worst we can do to an individual, and adultery is the worst we can do to the family, what is the worst we can do to human justice? We can pervert it by lying, which is both a crime against the person you are lying about, and also a crime against the very concept of justice. The perversion of human justice would naturally call into question the concept of divine justice as well. And again, as with all of the commandments, justice is a requirement for a civilized society.
But the ninth is not just about materially lying in a court, it includes things like gossip. Again, even in the absence of divinity we can see the consequences of idle gossip on society every day. A careless tweet or post can ruin an individual’s reputation or destroy a relationship. In today’s social media world, we need to carefully contemplate all the ramifications of what we post, etc.
The tenth – You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. – This is the first and only thought sin. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with wanting something as long as you pursue that desire honorably. It is wrong to want something so much that you would be willing to take it from someone.
It is also helpful to think of coveting as wanting anything so much that it becomes an obsession, a god if you will, in violation of the first commandment. By the way, it is possible to covet even things that are good, but the moment that desire replaces God, or becomes a god, it becomes evil.
In their entirety it is helpful to think of the Ten Commandments as an inverted pyramid. All sin begins in the mind. We covet that which we see around us that we either cannot have because it belongs to someone else, or that we are unwilling to work for because we believe that it is rightfully ours. We don’t steal, murder, or commit adultery unless we first covet. There are several Biblical stories that reinforce this concept, including David and Bathsheba and the beheading of John the Baptist. I want X and I use power to get it. Remember our earlier discussion about Hannibal Lector and how he views Buffalo Bill. “Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?…. He covets. That is his nature.” That is because our sins start with wanting that which we should not. That is our nature.
And again, that’s it.
Back to Aristotle and the nature of constitutions, if man understands what the laws say, is educated in their meaning, and is raised with the customs and traditions that go with them, then the law does not need to be complex for society to be ordered.
Maybe, once again, we should be paying attention.
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[1] Which reminds me. Much of what I wrote about on Plato and Aristotle is has been discussed many times before. Stanford University has an entire web presence on philosophy which was very helpful to my writings. Use https://philosophy.stanford.edu as a starting point. This particular discussion on the Ten Commandments can be found in many places.