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03/12/00 The Decalogue: Commandments and Conscience Because of well-publicized outbreaks of violence not only in the streets but also in some schools, a movement to post the Ten Commandments in school corridors or classrooms has taken hold in some states. The customary letters to the editors of major newspapers and a columnist or two have argued the idea, but the public commentary usually frames the arguments as a Church-State question. Practically, some have objected, posting a list of “rules” will make little difference in reducing youthful violence and, constitutionally, putting the Ten Commandments on a school wall seems to favor the religion of those who, like Jews and Christians, hold the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy sacred. The discussion seems to presuppose that the Ten Commandments are extrinsic rules, mandated by God or by a people’s culture or both, remnants of a much different time in human history, but certainly “laws” of the same sort as those passed in Congress or in the legislature in Springfield. Are they? When Pope John Paul II visited Egypt over a week ago, he did so especially to go as a pilgrim to Mount Sinai. The Sinai peninsula is the Asian part of Egypt, on the eastern side of the Suez Canal. It is mostly desert, except at its southern edge, which is mountainous. On Mount Sinai (called also Mount Horeb), Moses first heard God’s voice from a bush which burned but was not consumed by the fire (Exodus 3:1-17). God gave Moses a personal command to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in the promised land, well to the north and east of Mount Sinai. Returning later to Sinai with his fleeing and frightened people, Moses ascended the mountain again and received commandments for all the people (Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21). We call these commandments the Decalogue, from the Greek for “ten words.” They were spoken by God and, unlike other commands Moses received, were written with “God’s finger” (Exodus 24:12 and 31:18). To compare them to the Bible’s ceremonial prescriptions or reduce them to social arrangements for a migrant people is to deform divine revelation and show oneself ignorant of how to read Scripture. The commandments were repeated by Jesus in answer to a young man’s question about what he should do to have eternal life (Mt. 19:16-19). Then Jesus added to the Decalogue a personal word, an invitation to new life: “Come, follow me.” The commandments are intrinsic to the covenant between God and his people; they create a fundamental dialogue which keeps us on the way to God. They have been part of the Church’s catechesis for the past two thousand years and are taught to each generation of believers. While they are part of historical revelation, the Ten Commandments are written first of all in the human heart. The Church sees them not as extrinsic laws but as expressions of the law written in our nature itself. They tell us how to remain truly human, and injunctions similar to them can be found among peoples historically very distant from Moses and the Israelite people. Whether recognized by a legislature or not, the Ten Commandments speak to us of how to live rightly and morally, in every time and place. Each person’s internal guide to moral action is conscience, and what the commandments forbid and enjoin will corroborate the dictates of a well-formed conscience. Conscience is not a private legislature of a sovereign self but an expression of the link to God built into our constitution as creatures. Because one is acting according to one’s conscience does not mean an action is objectively right; it merely relieves the person acting of culpability for an action which might be sinful. For many reasons, a person might be mistaken in a sincere conscientious judgment of a particular action as moral or immoral; but over time the tug of God and of nature will correct the conscience of a person sincerely seeking, with the help of God’s grace, to do God’s holy will. If we are truly free, especially of self-deception and of slavery to evil desires and sinful habits, then our conscience will be the place where the liberating dialogue with God on Mount Sinai over three thousand years ago will find a home today. “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment...For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.” (Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, 16). “The Ten Commandments,” the Pope said at the Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, “are the law of freedom; not the freedom to follow our blind passions, but the freedom to love, to choose what is good in every situation...to keep the Commandments is to be faithful to God, but it is also to be faithful to ourselves, to our true nature and our deepest aspirations.... The encounter of God and Moses on this mountain enshrines at the heart of our religion the mystery of liberating obedience.” We are now in Lent 2000, when the Church once again retraces liturgically
the history of God’s covenant with the people he loves and when
each of us works to strengthen that covenant in his or her heart
through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Whether or not the Ten
Commandments are ever posted on school house walls, they remain
the way to genuine freedom, a way more easily understood and followed
when we enter wholeheartedly into the discipline of Lent. In future
columns this Lent, I will consider prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
Always, you are in my prayers. Sincerely yours in Christ, Francis Cardinal George, OMI
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