The Zeroth Commandment

© Laurence B. Winn

Dec 1, 1999

Whether one buys into the mystery of Old Testament gospel or not, it is almost universally acknowledged that the moral core of the biblical Ten Commandments is a useful model for secular law.

Passing over religious imperatives concerning false gods, idols, misuse of God's name and the keeping of the Sabbath, we have six rules of social organization. They include respect for parental authority and prohibitions against murder, theft, adultery, perjury and covetousness.

And that, we are told, is the foundation of Judeo-Christian law.

The often-cited commandments are good rules, but they are not enough. Civilizations which last the longest and produce the least misery among their members follow an even earlier commandment, the Zeroth Commandment.

According to biblical history, the prophet Moses and his band of outcasts were following the Zeroth Commandment when they received the Ten. They were moving on.

Genesis1:28 gives us, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle and all the animals that crawl on the earth," a passage which is widely summarized as "go forth and multiply". The term "earth", as used in the ancient texts, refers not to the planet earth, a concept which was unrecognized at the time, but to the condition of existence distinguished from heaven and hell. We are enjoined to fill all of existence, the space between the stars included, with copies of ourselves.

As a species, we humans have been gifted with intelligence and imagination. These are the tools which allow us to obey the zeroth commandment of God by leaving the earth, which we now know to be only one of many planets in God's creation. So far, we have demurred, which brings us to the need for a Newer Testament.

In the approaching season, for it is nearly Christmas, we will hear a great deal about the need for charity from persons who subscribe to Christianity, the ethics of Charles Dickens, or both. We must also throw Marxists into the charity league, since, for them, "to each according to his need; from each according to his ability" is axiomatic.

To Christianity, some have said, we owe the decline of the Roman Empire after Christ. The first five books of St. Augustine's City of God are a defense against those pagan accusers who claimed that the Christian religion, by prohibiting worship of the gods, brought about all the calamities of the world, especially the sack of Rome by the Goths. Augustine argues that the tribulations of Rome began before the coming of Christ, and that, far from preserving Rome from harm, the gods it worshipped plunged Roman society into a moral corruption from which it could not recover.

Frontier theory maintains that Rome's moral decay was a symptom of its inability to purge itself of outcasts by allowing them to escape beyond its frontiers. Before its end, the Roman Empire had closed itself in, in some cases actually building walls. If Christianity were at all to blame for the hard luck of Rome, it would have been its focus on charity, not its monotheism, that did the damage. To the extent that charity makes enclosure acceptable, it is a cultural and political hazard.

Augustine of Hippo could not be aware that, fourteen centuries later, the influence of enclosure would tar Europe, and then the world, with the same evil. Augustine did not see Christian beginnings as a God-inspired temporary adaptation to enclosure, a solution given to a society unable to provide places for increasing numbers of its people. He should have.

The single-minded pursuit of charity to the exclusion of real solutions is a sin. It hurts more than it helps because it drives its victims into dependence. If the Second Coming finds us returned to the condition from which Christ rescued us 2000 years ago, it will be interesting, but probably not pleasant, to learn the consequences of having, again, ignored the Zeroth Commandment.