The Tenth Commandment

You shall not covet your neighbour’s goods …

Why is ‘the love of money’ the root of all evil (1 Tim 6:10)? Certainly an undue attachment to things causes problems but people have to live in the ‘real world’, care for their security and prosperity, and store up something for rainy days.

The vice of covetousness (also called avarice or greed) seeks to possess material wealth beyond what is necessary. It is a matter of proportion, of using material things reasonably, in line with what one really needs. Questions of justice and charity also come into it. It is impossible, St Thomas Aquinas thinks, for one person to enjoy extreme wealth without someone else suffering extreme want.

If people find their sense of meaning and identity in external goods then reality is being distorted and we are faced with a serious vice. The scriptures are clear that covetousness is a radical thing. Eph 5:5 and Col 3:5 describe it as idolatry. Other biblical texts associate it with injustice and with sexual immorality (Sir 14:9; Ezek 22:23-31; Amos 5:10-15; 1 Cor 10:6).

In the gospel we find Jesus saying ‘blessed are you who are poor’ and ‘woe to you who are rich’ (Luke 6:20, 24). He says ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Luke 18:25). He does not talk about ‘undue attachment to wealth’ or ‘disproportionate interest in wealth’: riches themselves are a problem, it seems.

If what one owns becomes the source of one’s meaning and identity, providing one’s sense of self and of purpose and becoming the final goal of one’s life, then something has gone seriously wrong. If the possession of things is no longer just about security and comfort but becomes a matter of identity and meaning then we are serving Mammon. But God is to be our only treasure and our entire security. This is not a recommendation that we become impractical about the necessities of life, just that we live our lives within a radical, God-centred perspective.

We must be sensible, reasonable, and prudent. Different kinds of relationship with material things are appropriate for people with different responsibilities. One who is rearing and educating children obviously needs more resources than someone living the life of a hermit. At the same time every Christian is called to follow ‘the poor Christ’ and to lay up ‘treasure in heaven’.

Anything we can ‘have’ or ‘own’ can function as a way of being rich and to the extent that it does so our attachment to it can become idolatrous. We find our security and identity in something less than God.  Knowledge is such a thing, and so is power, fame or high position. Saint John of the Cross says there is even ‘spiritual avarice’, where people become discontented with the spirituality God has given them. They want nothing except to listen to talks and read books about spirituality instead of doing penance and perfecting inward poverty, they become collectors of religious objects and even of religious experiences and it is all just a form of covetousness.

Covetousness drives us to find our security and identity in possessions. It is a way of becoming self-sufficient and so is a root of sin (Acts 14:15-17; Rom 1:19). Anger may arise from tiredness and lust from uncontrolled passion but covetousness is cold and hostile.

Aquinas says it is a capital sin not because it is obviously very bad in itself but because it provides the means for so many other sins to be carried out. John Cassian identifies these ‘children of avarice’ as lying, fraud, robbery, perjury and violence, and Gregory the Great adds treachery, deceit, restlessness and hardness of heart. We know how much corruption money can bring in its train.

Aquinas says it is the most deforming sin because it makes human desires subject to external things. Gregory the Great sees the tragedy in covetousness: ‘when the disturbed heart has lost the satisfaction of joy within it seeks for sources of consolation without, and is more anxious to possess external goods, the more it has no joy on which to fall back within’. The solution, then, is to find the source of true joy and to desire to ‘own’ it above all other things.

The Ninth Commandment

You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife …

Saint Gregory of Nyssa believed sexual difference arose because of the fall. Genesis 1:26-28 already speaks about God creating the human being ‘male and female’ but this was because God anticipated what was to happen. They would fall from grace and so end up needing the sexual organs with which God equipped them from the beginning.

Saint Thomas Aquinas disagreed with Gregory about this and said that our sexual desire and capacity are part of the original and good creation. Before the fall Adam and Eve might have enjoyed sex and conceived children just as they ate of the good things of the garden. We are the image of God in our capacity to reproduce, he says: as God is from God so human beings come from human beings. It means there is a fuller ‘imaging’ of God in the living human animal than there is in the angel which is purely (and therefore only) spiritual.

So when does sexual desire become sinful? It depends on the context in which it is found and how it is acted upon – by whom, with whom, in what way. The desire itself cannot automatically be sinful whereas acting on it may be sinful. It depends on people’s commitments and ‘states of life’. As well as being respectful of human dignity in ourselves and in others, sexual activity should be appropriate to who we are and what we are about.

Christian teachers often link lust and gluttony. To treat a person lustfully is a way of chopping them up into manageable bits with a view to incorporating them into ourselves. Lust loses sight of the other person as a human person, makes them something less than that, and is happy then to ‘have’ them with a view to its own pleasure. It acts without proper thought for the other person as also without proper thought for the third person, the potential child, which the sexual drive is always also about.

Marriage is the place for sexual activity. It is not absolutely impossible that we may, by God’s grace, live always in perfect chastity, living our sexuality only in ways appropriate to our commitments. Such perfect chastity seems rare, though, for a number of reasons: the strength of this desire, the fragmentation of fallen human nature, and the things human beings need to learn about intimacy, life and love.

Dorothy Sayers wrote that people fall into lust for two reasons. One is because of the sheer exuberance of animal spirits when, she says, a sharp application of the curb may be all that is needed to bring the body into subjection and remind it of its proper place in the scheme of human nature. Calm discipline, then, along with a sense of humour.

People also fall into lust through sheer boredom and discontent, she says, giving in to lust ‘because they have nothing better to do’. Where people’s mental and physical surroundings are drab and uncomfortable, where the philosophy they are offered is bankrupt (modern myths about sex, for example), where people’s vitality is impoverished and their culture superficial, then they will fall into a spiritual depression from which the satisfaction of lust seems to provide some partial, temporary release.

Sometimes, in giving way to lust, people are genuinely seeking love, although the two realities are very different. Shakespeare contrasts beautifully the effects of love and lust:

                                                                                     

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain

But lust’s effect is tempest after sun

Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain

Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done

Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies

Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies

-       Venus and Adonis, stanza 132

For Christians there is another level of intimacy, life and love, a fuller context in which everything is to be understood and lived out. This is the intimacy, life and love given in Christ’s relationship with us, the friendship with the Father in the Holy Spirit that Christ establishes for us. The great moment in which this love is celebrated is the Eucharist, the moment of greatest intimacy with Our Lord, where our love is sealed and our life increased, where all our desires are satisfied. As the liturgy says, the bread from heaven contains in itself all delights. When the love of Christ controls us, all our desires find their proper place.

The Eighth Commandment

You Shall Not Bear False Witness

The eighth commandment teaches that lying is wrong. The particular instance of lying mentioned in the commandment is perjury, where a person ‘bears false witness’ against their neighbour. All moral codes, and all legal systems, condemn perjury because it subverts justice. The very idea of a moral code or a legal system is undone by perjury.

More generally, this commandment condemns all lying. What does it mean to lie? To utter something that is untrue as if it were true. Why is it wrong to lie? Because it is a form of injustice, not rendering to another what is their due. We are all entitled to the truth.

One strand of thought among Christian teachers proposes that sometimes people are not entitled to the truth. For example, is a person who wants to use information to harm another entitled to that information? Is one justified in misleading such a person by telling them something false? Some Christian thinkers have said yes, one is so entitled, because the person has lost his or her right to the truth. Others have said no, because all lying, even lying to a wicked person, is an attack on the dignity of humanity. It would bring us down to their level, as someone prepared to distort the truth and live by lies. Of course one is not obliged to tell the truth to such a person even if one ought not lie to them either. One can remain silent, for example, or try to think of some response which is not false but which does not give the person the information they want.

Something else to which a human being is entitled is his or her good name. There are various ways in which we can act unjustly in this regard. Gossip, slander, calumny, and what St Thomas Aquinas calls ‘murmuring’: these things are very destructive of human communities. Fear, anxiety, envy, and lack of self-esteem: these lead people to want to pull others down and to destroy their reputations. ‘Of course she is not as good as you think she is’. ‘Of course you probably haven’t heard all that he has been up to.’

Sometimes we learn things about people that are true but harmful to their good name. We are not entitled to broadcast such information to anybody and everybody just because it is true. If the protection of others or the requirements of justice demand it then we must say what we know about people.  But most of what we hear about others we cannot know for certain to be true and some of it we may know to be false. In justice we ought not to pass on such gossip.

There are serious ethical questions here not only for journalists but also for all of us, because the good name of our neighbour is entrusted to our care (as ours is entrusted to their care). We may pretend to despise the tabloid newspapers but the fact that these are the biggest selling newspapers reminds us that they feed an appetite that is in all of us even if we would prefer to deny it.

Another aspect of life that deserves much thought in relation to the eighth commandment is advertising. Standards agencies try to ensure that its claims are not false, but overall much of the picture of life advertising presents is false and misleading, even idolatrous. So much of it is ‘touched up’. To value what is false as if it were true is the road to idolatry and there is today a worship of celebrity, fame and false beauty that verges on the idolatrous.

Jesus says that there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, nothing whispered in secret that will not be proclaimed from the rooftops. That may delight us or fill us with fear. Those who follow him will learn the truth, he says, and the truth will set them free. In the day of judgement all falsehood will be revealed, all lies will be exposed. How ready are we for the kingdom of light, for the presence of God in whom there is no darkness?  Although it is uncompromising, this is not a merciless light exposing us to ridicule and humiliation. It is a merciful light, God’s Word, helping us to see ourselves as we really are, very poor in so many ways but infinitely loved by God who is Truth.