Love, Particular and Universal

To read a text in the company of Leon Kass is always to see things one might otherwise not have seen and to be moved to reflect on hard and complicated questions about the meaning of our humanity. His essay on the Decalogue, patiently building a case for its “enduring moral and political significance,” is no exception. One might engage it from many different angles.

But if the reader engaging it is a Christian, as I am, he can hardly help being provoked to thought by two sentences that come fairly late in the essay, when Kass is considering how the command to honor one’s father and mother in particular relates to our more universal obligations:

Unlike a later scriptural teacher, the Lord of the Decalogue does not exhort you to leave your father and your mother and follow me (Matthew 10:34-38). Instead He celebrates the fact that grace comes locally and parochially, into the life each one of us was given to live as well as we can, embedded in the covenantal community into which we have been blessed to be born.