Thou Shalt Not Kill

A Political and Theological Dialogue

Adriana Cavarero, Angelo Scola, Margaret Adams Groesbeck, Adam Sitze, Margaret Adams Groesbeck, Adam Sitze

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823267354, 9780823267347
• eBook ISBN: 9780823267361
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In this fascinating and rare little book, a leading Italian feminist philosopher and the Archbishop of Milan face off over the contemporary meaning of the biblical commandment not to kill.The result is a series of erudite and wide-ranging arguments that move from murder and suicide to just war and drone strikes, from bioethics and biopolitics to hermeneutics and philology, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, from Torah and Scripture to art and literature, from the essence of human dignity and the paradoxes of fratricide to engagements with Levinasian ethics.Less a direct debate than a disputation in the classical sense, Thou Shalt Not Kill proves to be a searching meditation on one of the unstated moral premises shared by otherwise bitterly opposed political factions. It will stimulate the mind of the novice while also reminding more advanced readers of the necessity and desirability of thinking in the present.

PART I

The Irrepressible Face of the Other

ANGELO SCOLA

POINT OF DEPARTURE

Whosoever destroys one man is counted by Scripture as though he had destroyed the whole world. This is also true of Cain who killed Abel, his brother, as it is written in the Scripture: The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me (Genesis 4.10). Though he may shed the blood (dm) of only a single person, the text uses the plural: dmym (“bloods”). This teaches us that the blood of Abel’s children, and his children’s children, and all the descendants destined to come forth from him until the end of time—all of them stood crying out before the Holy One, blessed be He. Thus thou dost learn that one man’s life is equal to all the work of creation.1

This important affirmation, to which we could add others with similar and even more radical importance, would suffice to demonstrate the need to place the commandment “You shall not kill” in its original context and to highlight what Christian tradition, passed down through Western culture, recognizes in the commandment.

We should point out right away what The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us:

The division and numbering of the Commandments have varied in the course of history. The present catechism follows the division of the Commandments established by St. Augustine, which has become traditional in the Catholic Church. It is also that of the Lutheran confessions. The Greek Fathers worked out a slightly different division, which is found in the Orthodox Churches and Reformed communities.2

For this reason it is worth giving a synopsis of the Hebrew division of the “ten words”3 and that of the Ten Commandments of the Catechism (see accompanying table).4

The contextualization of these “ten words,” which if done fully would require enormous effort, allows us to reveal the deeper meaning proper to their formulation in the book of Exodus, to which the passage of time has grafted other values that sometimes have changed more than just the words’ literal meaning.

If, for example, we refer to some recent Jewish commentaries on Exodus 20, which contains the “ten words”—among them “You shall not kill”5—we learn that the root of the term used here directly refers only to unjustified killing. And it must be placed in a wider context, supported by still other sources,6 to enable us to assert that, with the word “You shall not kill,” God asks that we “not, therefore vandalize My creation by spilling human blood, for I created human beings to honor and acknowledge Me in all these ways.”7 This lets more than one commentator maintain that, since the text of Exodus 20 refers only to “unauthorized homicide,” it cannot by itself be used to exclude “killing during war” or to support the “abolition of capital punishment.” Following this reasoning, one would remain unable to derive from this commandment a “prohibition against suicide.”8

Exodus 20.2–17	Deuteronomy 5.6–21	Catholic Formula
I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.	I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
You shall have no gods except me. You shall not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in heaven or on earth beneath or in the waters under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God and I punish the father’s fault in the sons, the grandsons, and the great-grandsons of those who hate me; but I show kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.	You shall have no gods except me …	I am the LORD your God: you shall not have strange Gods before me.
You shall not utter the name of Yahweh your God to misuse it, for Yahweh will not leave unpunished the man who utters his name to misuse it.	You shall not utter the name of Yahweh your God to misuse it …	You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath for Yahweh your God. You shall do no work that day, neither you nor your son nor your daughter nor your servants, men or women, nor your animals nor the stranger who lives with you. For six days Yahweh made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that these hold, but on the seventh day he rested; that is why Yahweh has blessed the Sabbath and made it sacred.	Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy …	Remember to keep holy the LORD’s Day.
Honour your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that Yahweh your God has given you.	Honour your father and your mother …	Honor your father and your mother.
You shall not kill.	You shall not kill.	You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery.	You shall not commit adultery.	You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.	You shall not steal.	You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.	You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.	You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his servant, man or woman, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is his.	You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, you shall not set your heart on his house, his field, his servant—man or woman—his ox, his donkey, or anything that is his.	You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
	You shall not set your heart on his house, his field, his servant—man or woman—his ox, his donkey, or anything that is his.	You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.

To offer a last significant example, another well-known commentator asserts that “strictly speaking, other acts such as idolatry, Sabbath violation, and sexual crimes are considered more significant than murder because they are crimes against God and not crimes against man, as is murder.”9

Obviously these remarks are not intended to diminish the import or radical qualities of “You shall not kill.” They instead aim to free the commandment from an ahistorical vision that makes it refer to an abstract universal—a vision that has been widespread from the Enlightenment on and that holds that the religious roots for any principle—such as the commandments are when considered in their objective mode—are bound to history, “regionalizing” those roots in a way that deprives them of their universal force. In fact, the concrete universals of religion avoid the abstraction of any purely theoretical affirmation of principles. Abstractions such as these, incidentally, are in no small way responsible for the extreme difficulties that current democracies, founded though they may be on agreed-upon procedures, experience whenever they try to reach “grand compromises” that will guarantee a good life, even in a pluralist society.10

In order to better situate our theme, let us offer a last brief comment on the Christian interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

First of all, recent Christian commentators agree in recognizing that the special character of the Decalogue, not the least of which is the lack of an object in commandments 5 through 7,11 has encouraged throughout history a reading of the Ten Commandments as a collection of precepts outside of time, as a set of immutable divine laws. More careful studies, as we shall see, rightly have gone beyond that reductive position to read the commandments narrowly within the context of the Covenant of Sinai. This permits them, in turn, to be understood as correlates to the living will of God, where the Ten Commandments deal always with His manifestation: “I am Yahweh.” On one hand, this means that the commandments are not reducible to something purely adaptable to every historical moment. On the other, however, the Decalogue demands different applications as history moves along. Both the absoluteness of the Decalogue and, at the same time, its bond with history are thus guaranteed, and it is none other than this close relationship with the living God—with the God of the covenant who always asks of his people fidelity and renewal—that provides this guarantee.12

Whatever the exact meaning of the commandment under review, the Christian exegesis hardly moves far from the Jewish one, to which it often makes specific reference. In substance it recognizes a progressive evolution from an originary level bound to voluntary homicide in order to save the innocent, to assume, little by little, the character of a condemnation of every act of violence against another that stems from feelings of hatred or ill will. The commandment finally reaches the point of excluding the pretext of rendering justice by oneself, even when one suffers an objective, serious injustice.13

At this point it might be useful to recall, from a dialogue between André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, a telling observation on the relationship between this commandment and the entire corpus of the Bible.14 There LaCocque highlights the tension between “You shall not kill” and the divine demand that Abraham sacrifice his son.15 On one hand, in this way, the fifth commandment is set in relation to the first (to honor Yahweh): “You shall not kill” indicates the absolute, unconditional worth of human life. But, on the other hand, departing from a Kierkegaardian reading of the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, it seems to LaCocque to be able to annul the “You shall not kill” in a “narrative and prescriptive” way. In the divine claim on Abraham’s first born, the scholar believes he is singling out a new limitation on the commandment, one besides those condemning war and capital punishment. We would be dealing with what Kierkegaard called a “teleological suspension of the ethical”16—that is, with a suspension of the commandment’s apodictic character that, in turn, would reveal the existence of a metaethic internal to the Bible itself. Ricoeur’s answer to this questionable interpretation is both profound and precise. The relation between Genesis 22 and the commandment “You shall not kill,” he says, should be read starting not from the exception but rather from the excess of love in relation to justice.17

COMMANDMENTS AND COVENANT

This introductory framework should suffice to demonstrate that the very concept of “commandment,” when linked to the precepts of the Decalogue, requires a clarification that restates the authentic law. If we are to grasp the meanings of moral law in its actual cultural context, we cannot possibly trust some sort of common sense without immediately getting lost in a maze of multiple misunderstandings and contradictions. We will have to find ways to peel off the sedimented crust formed by the usual meanings and to strip ambiguity from the very debates that should have critically illuminated the problems.

Unavoidably, therefore, if the meaning of the commandments is not to be distorted, it becomes necessary to situate them, whether taken individually or all together, in the general context of the Bible. If we understand them not as the “ten words” of God but instead as the command of an imperative will, we misrepresent their meaning, whether from the point of view of content or that of method. Influenced by late medieval and modern voluntarism, we immediately read the commandments as imperatives from an authority who is at once absolute, vertical, and exterior.

The Decalogue cannot, however, be separated from the historical covenant God establishes with the people of Israel and, through them, with all humanity. The Decalogue is offered and “written on two stone tablets” in a clearly defined historical circumstance, and it cannot in any way be taken out of the close association with the divine action through which it was given. It cannot be idealistically, moralistically, or spiritually extrapolated from holy history and represented, in an Enlightenment manner, as some kind of canon based on an abstract universalism.

The substance of the “ten words” consists in their being an expression of the covenant. For just this reason the tablets will be set inside the Ark of the Covenant: to demons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translators’ Note
• Part I: The Irrepressible Face of the Other
• Part II: The Archaeology of Homicide
• Notes
• Index
• Series Page