Natural Moral Law and the Ten Commandments

One often finds in discussions of the natural moral law the idea that it is written on our hearts by our Creator. In support of this observation, one often finds reference to Romans 2: 13-15: “(For not the hearers of the law are justified before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which show the work of the law written on their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;…)” People know what is right and what is wrong; doing right is a different matter. Modern moral philosophy is sometimes criticized for being reductionist, by which is meant that influential moral theories gain traction by reducing the range of moral experience to just one or a few elements of it. For example, the Principle of Utility at the heart of utilitarian moral theory holds that an act is right if it produces more happiness than unhappiness, and “happiness” is understood to be pleasure and the relative absence of pain. A multitude of questions erupt upon hearing this, but they can be overlooked because this writing is not about modern moral philosophy, but rather about a much older tradition, natural moral law, and particularly that pristine form of it found in the Ten Commandments in the 20th chapter of Exodus.[i]

The history of thought about natural law theory runs back into classical Greece and a bit later to Rome, but it flourished among Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages. The idea, in brief, is that we human beings are created in the image and likeness of God for the primary, though not exclusive, purpose of communion with Him. This raises the question of human nature by way of seeking to understand in what the image of God within us consists. Thomas Aquinas is arguably the greatest thinker of the Christian Middle Ages, and in his writings one finds fascinating discussions of human nature, but it seems to me helpful to notice that our natures are moral and intellectual because we have wills and minds, both of which need to be developed. Our wills need to be developed in the skill of taking consistently sound decisions about our actions, and our minds must be trained both to deliberate on practical action and to contemplate truth, for truth is the nourishment of the mind. In fact, a mind that is stocked with falsehoods cannot help but be unhealthy, and the person whose mind it is, unhappy.

When God led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, they had been for centuries practitioners of a truly diabolical religion that included sacrificing children to the demons they worshipped. They did not know who they were as children of God, and so much of what we read in the first five books of the Old Testament is God weaning the Israelites off of the pagan religion that gripped them, and drawing them to himself and to the worship of the one true God and to lives that are fit for them as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. This, for example, is the purpose for the very elaborate system of animal sacrifices for various and specified purposes, aimed at getting the Israelites away from the belief that they must sacrifice human beings. This explains why when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham was not surprised, but in the end, God supplied a ram for Abraham to kill. At length, however, God begins telling his people that he does not want sacrifices of animals from them, but sacrifices of praise and obedience to his law, for it is the law of our created nature, and happiness and peace consist in living according to it. In Psalm 50: 9 and following, we read God saying to his people: “Not for sacrifices will I reprove you; nay, your whole-burnt offerings are continually before Me. I will not welcome bullocks out of your house, nor he-goats out of your flocks. For Mine are all the beasts of the field, cattle on the mountains, and oxen. I know all the fowls of the air, and with Me is the beauty of the field. If I hunger, not to you will I tell it; for Mine is the world and the fullness thereof. Shall I eat of the flesh of bulls? Or the blood of goats, shall I drink it? Sacrifice unto God a sacrifice of praise, and pay unto the Most High your vows.”

God leads his people out of Egypt through Moses, and brings them to Mt. Sinai where he gives them the law they are to follow as the path toward becoming fully human: what we know as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 1-17). Right away, God tells the people who he is. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.” Interestingly, God doesn’t say to the Israelites that he is their creator and God, and they shall have no other Gods, but rather he tells them it is he who brought them out of bondage in Egypt. In this, we get a glimpse of the simplicity of the people. They saw the plagues in Egypt and how they troubled the Egyptians, but not them. They saw how God destroyed Pharaoh and his army. They saw God going in front of them as they traveled as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. And they saw how God fed them in the desert. This clearly is a powerful God and so when God says to them that they shall have no other gods but him, they may not know just who is speaking to them, but they know he is more powerful than the gods they had been worshipping. In the second commandment, God tells the people what his presence among them means for them. “You shall not make unto you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: You shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.” Here God tells his people that they will no longer worship in the ways they are used to, for there will be punishment in it, but blessing for obeying his commandments. For reasons that are all too evident, moral philosophers used to debate the question of the nature, if any, of our moral obligation to obey God. The question is faulty because it assumes that God is a moral being in ways that are compatible with our moral being. This is not so. God is Being Himself, and our creator. We are made by Him such that we desire to be happy, and in fact we desire to be happy by nature, which means that we are not free to not want to be happy, although we may misunderstand what that is. So the path to happiness, which is a gift of God, is to obey His commandments and in this way recover the form, His image and likeness within us, in which we are made.

The third commandment tells us not to take the name of the Lord our God in vain. The word that is translated “in vain” (in the ancient Greek translation) means to regard or to use the name of God as empty, fruitless, powerless, and lacking truth.[ii] The name he has given us for himself is Being, and Life itself, which must be held as precious above all else. The fourth commandment is to remember the sabbath and keep it holy. God created all that is in six days, and He hallowed the seventh day in which we are to rest and to worship God. The first four commandments tell us who God is, and how we are to relate to him. That is, in these commandments, we are introduced to the ground of our being and the source of our life and of who we are, so they tell us much about our nature. They tell us how we are to interact with God.

            With the fifth commandment, we come to God’s law for how we human beings are to treat each other. “Honor your father and your mother: that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you.”  We may recognize the exegetical principle that scripture interprets scripture, and consider the question when understanding the fifth commandment whether the command to honor father and mother expects that father and mother will be honorable. Consider Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Also later in the chapter at verse 15: “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” We find some useful light on this in Proverbs 18:2 and 13: “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.” “He that answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him.” The two verses from Proverbs 22 are advice to parents in raising their children to be responsible, honest people who can one day raise their own healthy and disciplined children and contribute to the well-being of their communities. In this way, a cultural tradition is maintained and improved that can benefit people over generations. The second two verses from Proverbs 18 give us a glimpse of the moral and intellectual mayhem that follows the loss divine wisdom and the discipline to sustain it and to teach it, that is, a healthy cultural tradition.
            If we examine the unhealthy and even diabolical developments of the last century or two, we see a relentless assault on received tradition and divine wisdom. Consider the destruction done to people’s lives by feminism. A lie at the heart of feminism is that masculinity is superior to femininity. Moreover, men invented femininity and imposed it on the women in their lives in order to control them. This is foolish on its face, but when lies are told to people without serious criticism for a long enough period of time, they will believe it. This is a denial of what is written in Genesis 5: 1-2: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them, and he called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” God made us male and female and we are ordered one to the other, and God bound the man and the women together with a shared name. Feminism has been a central force in the damage we have seen done to marriage and to the formation and functioning of healthy families, and thus finally, to the formation of healthy souls in children. It is difficult for children who grew up without a father in the house and with a dysfunctional mother whose mind was filled with lies to honor their fathers and mothers because their fathers and mothers are not honorable. Yet when we see healthy, well-working families, we see husbands and wives who love each other, and love their children, and train them up in the way they should go, and importantly, we see children growing into adults, who naturally honor their fathers and their mothers.

The sixth commandment  (in the King James Version) is “You shall not kill.” The terse phrase in the Septuagint for this commandment is simply “Don’t commit murder.” The seventh commandment is “You shall not commit adultery.” The eighth commandment is “You shall not steal.” The ninth commandment is “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” The tenth commandment is most bracing: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.” Lumping together these commandments we can pass them before us quickly: don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie about others, don’t desire anything that belongs to someone else. One might be tempted to sum these up saying: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  When talking about this rule, St. Augustine observed that thieves hate to be stolen from, which is to say that each of us naturally knows how to treat others. We can imagine warriors discussing among themselves the idea of a glorious death in battle, and desiring just that kind of death when the time comes, but we can imagine also these warriors desiring a glorious death in the way St. Augustine wanted the gift of chastity from God: but not yet.

The things God commands us to do, worship Him only, keep the sabbath, do not speak dismissively about God, honor our parents, and the things He commands us not to do, don’t commit murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie about others, don’t desire what belongs to someone else, work to preserve and to develop the nature He has given us. This includes the fact that we are by nature social beings and the behaviors we are told not to engage in are just the sort of behaviors that ruin communities. Here, however, we are reviewing the things that can inhibit our growth, so we can say, with the exception of recognizing the importance of worshipping God, the commandments that govern our behavior with one another constitute a beginner’s course. Yet even though we are examining here a beginner’s course in being human, we can see all around how many people are failing. However, until one can make it through “Being Human 101” it is impossible to get to the advanced courses, of which we hear in Paul’s advice to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:15: “Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman who need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” Liars, gossips, thieves, and adulterers are not likely to be about the business of developing themselves morally and intellectually, to say nothing of growing spiritually.

The 13th century Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas is generally well known for, among other things, his discussion of the natural moral law. Without going into much detail, Thomas discusses four levels of law: eternal law, divine law, natural law, and human legislation (which strictly speaking is not law). The content of the natural law has been placed by God within reach of unaided human intellect, so it can be known by everyone, even those who know nothing of the God whose law it is. The point here has been made already, that people know what is right and what is wrong, and here one might wonder if this is not quite so since people do find themselves at times in situations in which it is not clear what is the right thing to do. Aquinas himself observed that the more complex are the circumstances in which one must decide upon action, the less clear is the application of the moral law. At the beginning of this paragraph, I identify the four levels of law Aquinas discusses, indicating that human legislation isn’t actually law. The reason for this is that the moral law, the natural law, is discovered both through reflection on the nature of the good, and importantly in the careful working through the details of disputes between and among people in search of just resolutions. In time, the just resolutions of cases form a body of law that can guide the conduct of a people within their communities. Of course, the moral law is broader than the common law among a people, in part because it guides not just the relations of people within a community, but it guides individuals also in their personal moral and intellectual growth. The point is this: law, or legislation, issued by a human being or a body of human beings that violates the natural law is not law, does not have the force of law, and therefore commands no obligation of obedience among the people. This is what is meant by saying that human legislation, strictly speaking, is not law.

In connection with the natural law, it is fitting to consider the virtues, which we may understand simply as excellences of the soul. There are four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. We should concentrate for now on justice as a virtue of the soul. The essence of this virtue in an individual is the constant and perpetual will to give to each person his due. Thus the heart of injustice is willfully to withhold from someone, or to take from him, what is due to him. How do we identify what is due to someone? We might begin by observing that we are created in the image and likeness of God, for communion with Him. This means that as regards other people, we each have a right to our lives, the liberty that is natural to our lives, and the property we have acquired to secure our lives and those of our families. Approached another way, we have our lives from our parents, and to the extent they trained us up in the way we should go, they are worthy of our honor and respect. Thus honoring father and mother is their due, and so justice naturally demands it. Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie about others, don’t desire anything that belongs to someone else, following these commandments ensures that we will act justly toward others by giving to them what is their due. Of course, we can sum this up with the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t want to be killed by another human; I don’t want someone to steal my wife away from me; I don’t want others to steal from me; I don’t want others spreading lies about me; I don’t want others eyeing my property looking for a chance to acquire it. Therefore, I won’t do any of these things to others.

Thinking and behaving like this, self-consciously in accord with justice, is natural to us, and so it is why God has commanded it of us. In other words, in the Ten Commandments, God reminds the Israelites what their years of paganism and bondage had caused them to forget. The discussion up to here may lead someone to ask why, if these commandments are natural to us, people hadn’t figured it out on their own. Perhaps they did, after all, people know what is right and what is wrong; doing right is a different matter.

[i] Readers who want to look more carefully into the question of modern moral philosophy will find Elizabeth Anscombe’s important paper by that title here:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/9E56836F22C34BE2CE4A3E763691C2FB/S0031819100037943a.pdf/modern_moral_philosophy1.pdf

[ii] When studying the Old Testament, I make regular reference to the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from around 250 B.C.