Preface

At the height of martial law in Poland in the late 1980s, the people of Poland had an opportunity to watch on television a series of profound one-hour films by the great film director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Perhaps it was his experience of the illegitimacy of martial law that motivated Kieslowski to seek the foundation of moral law in the human heart through ten films titled The Decalogue.¹

Each film explores one of the ten commandments through the lives of different characters who live in a high-rise apartment building in a Polish city. The apartment building serves as the narrative frame in which the complex personal stories taken up in each film are contained. The link between the stories and the particular commandment explored in each film is sometimes overt, as in the fifth film, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," in which an alienated and socially hostile young man murders a taxi driver and is then sentenced to death for the crime. The film comes to focus on the deep abhorrence for the death penalty felt by a young defense attorney. In other films, such as the sixth, "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery," the relationship to the commandment is less direct—in this case, it explores at its heart the connection between erotic desire and love, when the obsessive and disordered love of a young boy for an older woman helps her to rediscover the reality of love, a reality she had come to deny as she sought to fill her empty life with meaningless sexual encounters. Without saying so, the films seem to suggest that the established cultural order is a harsh and ugly fabrication, much like the ugly urban environment in which the characters' lives unfold. Each film then carries its characters through an experience of crisis that enables them to discover a moral foundation that they recognize as a kind of bedrock they had not known was there.

Kieslowski has said that he deliberately eliminated many of the political and cultural elements that would have emphasized the particular circumstances of Polish life in the late 1980s so the universal aspects of the moral questions at the heart of each film could be pursued more fully. In that light, we can see the illegitimacy of Polish martial law as merely one example of a constructed modern order that seeks to establish itself as a sufficient and complete foundation for human life without need for the recognition of an underlying spiritual order. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy one hundred years earlier each had given witness to the emergence of voices within the culture that denied the existence of a spiritual order, voices that proclaimed the autonomy of a new cultural order based on the denial of the spiritual dimension. In The Brothers Karamazov, a character describes the prominent new views: "the science of this world, having united itself into a great force has, especially in the past century, examined everything heavenly that has been bequeathed to us in sacred books, and, after hard analysis, the learned ones of this world have absolutely nothing left of what was once holy."² As in Kieslowski's films, the response to such new worldviews in Dostoevsky's novel is not a counterargument but instead the disclosure of the reality of love and grace and goodness manifested in the strongest and purest hearts and brought into the world through compassion and love for others.

Tolstoy gives witness to a similar new cultural order emerging. One of the characters in Anna Karenina describes the phenomenon in this way: "It used to be that a freethinker was a man who had been brought up with notions of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at freethinking by himself, through his own toil and trouble. But now a new type of self-made freethinkers has appeared, who grow up and never even hear that there were laws of morality, religion, that there were authorities, but who grow up right into notions of the...