The Holy Decalogue by Robert F. Slesinski (review)

The Holy Decalogue is not a treatise in moral theology, says its author, but a treatment of the Ten Commandments "from the standpoint of liturgical, sacramental celebration" (11). It is, in other words, mystagogical catechesis—the ninth in a series of volumes in that genre by Father Robert Slesinski (b. 1950), a Byzantine Catholic priest and philosopher specializing in Russian religious thought. The book is divided into two parts: "Mystagogy and Morality" (chapters 1–3) and "The Wheel of Sevens" (chapters 4–5). Facing the first page of each chapter is a color reproduction of a religious icon related to the chapter's theme.

Slesinski quotes in the Introduction two apostolic epistles in order to demonstrate the harmony between orthodoxy, understood as both right belief and right worship (1 Tim 2:1–8), and "orthopraxis," right action (Jas 1:18–22). The true faith is both right worship (doxa=glory) and right doctrine (doxa=opinion), but without the "lived gospel" or "lived liturgy" it is dead faith (Jas 2:14): Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi, to augment the simplified dictum of Prosper of Aquitaine. The unity of prayer, belief, and life is deducible from "a true philosophical insight about life in general," an insight expressed by the Scholastic maxim: agere sequitur esse (15). The "being" of the human being is "oriented beyond itself and towards others" in action, meaning "a process of self-communication, which necessarily entails commitment toward truth and goodness" (15).

But why "necessarily"? Slesinski elaborates in chapter 1, taking as his point of departure the prologue of John's Gospel. God, who is boundless life, is Light and creates light, the first created good without which nothing else could be, or be good. By the Incarnation, the divine Logos of creation has visited us and manifested his love, the love he himself is in eternity. Love, then, is "a sign of life . . . an energy of being" (21), at one with goodness and light, all three being self-diffusive; luminosity finds its analogy in truth, particularly moral truth, which "vanquishes the darkness of error in the intellectual sphere and sin in the ethical orbit" (22). To realize the human good in one's actions, therefore, is indeed (as the chapter's title puts it) the "moral imperative before all human beings." In other words, we are morally obliged to live in the truth of our God-given humanity. Since that truth includes our gracious vocation from nonexistence to divinization in Christ, we need to experience God's sanctifying presence and "become alive to" God in the "doxological moment of liturgy and Christian living" (28). To illustrate the links between doxology and the call to holiness, a call that continually entails remorse for sin and receptivity to forgiveness, Slesinski cites (among other prayers) the Great Doxology of the Byzantine Office of Matins (Orthros) and the Hymn of Glorification of Byzantine Vespers.

Chapter 2 connects moral obligation with happiness. This connection will seem counterintuitive to those who are captive to a false rivalry between moral truth, on the one hand, and human freedom and fulfillment on the other. To be truly free is not to do whatever we choose but to be unimpeded from choosing the good. With growth in virtue comes growth in freedom to become more fully what we were intended to be. Such is the classical view of morality reaffirmed by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council in their 1965 Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (quoted here at length). Put briefly: there is an objective moral order knowable by reason and conscience. In applying the moral law to particular cases, the conscience of the individual stands under the law and should be formed by it. But the Church's moral teaching is not ultimately about rules. It is grounded in something more profound: the truth about man and his vocation.

From this perspective, we can see why the real "drama" of moral obligation is not figuring out what God's law "binds" us...