Series:
Essay #7:
Synopsis:
It and Thou
Render to God
We render to God the sacred and the Thou, whose dignity I must respect and whom I may neither use nor despoil
A few essays back, I covered the first part of the phrase, Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. To Caesar I render daily life in a world of scarcity and budgets, where I take my stand in I-and-It to get things done, using utility calculations to make it happen, and I use other people in small, acceptable ways. To Caesar I render the useful.
To God I render the sacred. The sacred is a feeling that family, church, the land, country, more, came before me and will survive me, and they come before me in right. They give meaning to me, I thank them, and I owe responsibility and honor to them. The sacred doesn’t exist for my use and despoilment, rather, the sacred is a free being whom I call Thou.
Sacred is the first faith that informs everything else. Faith brings Thou into human relations, and we express it in the moral truths by which we live together. For example, it’s moral truth that every person counts for one and no person for more or less than one. The Declaration of Independence states it as “all men are created equal.” In his Chicago speech, President Lincoln called this truth the father of all moral principle. This truth is sacred. So Caesar can write laws about many things, and he does, but he can’t change this truth that no man counts for more or less than another man; everyone is equal in Thou.
Sacred moral truth is a good-in-itself, not good for something else. It’s a good-for-nothing except Thou, and by that I mean it exists independent of the uses that I have for it. Many people claim the opposite: that moral truth is a utility-function, that there is no moral truth but only laws and beliefs that are more or less useful as tools for the control of other people. Recognize this stance for what it is: the I-and-It of Caesar’s world. Recognize further that this stance is another choice of faith. Everything begins with a faith of one sort or another, and my first choice of faith is how I relate to the world and the people in it: either as It or Thou. On faith alone I relate to you as It or Thou, and this relation is the primary assumption that determines all my conclusions.
I remember something that Judge Clarence Thomas said back in the 90’s. He said, “slavery was once the law.” For decades I couldn’t understand what he meant, but I carried it in my heart because I knew it was important. Now I know why I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand because faith comes before understanding, and my faith was in Caesar and his laws. Judge Thomas was saying that man-made law can permit slavery, but the law of God cannot. Slavery can exist in Caesar’s law but not God’s.
Slavery was law in almost every ancient civilization. Here in the United States, before the Civil War, the Southern States (all democracies) maintained slavery as a legal institution recognized and supported by the power of the State. Slavery was man-made law, backed by the State, the will of the voting majority, and countless utilitarian arguments from Southern slaveholders about their slaves having standards of living that were better than free laborers in the North. Yet most Americans then, and all Americans today, reject this man-made law on grounds that it violates a higher moral law. Sacred moral truth exists.
Judge Thomas said something even more interesting in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (2014). Obergefell was the same-sex marriage case. The majority argued that government action in promotion of same-sex marriage gives dignity to same-sex couples. Judge Thomas countered that the State is incapable of bestowing dignity.
“Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. ….. The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. …. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”
Caesar can make laws for us, but he can’t give or take away our dignity. Our dignity came before Caesar took office and it’ll outlive Caesar, or whomsoever is currently residing in the White House. Dignity is given by God, and that's why it's sacred and that's why it’s the aspect of you that I must respect without qualification or negotiation.
You are Thou and that's that. For sure, I can ratiocinate various arguments for why moral truths are only true because they’re useful, and yes, in most social contexts I relate to you as It because that’s the way of the world. But in all that It, your Thou looks at me from behind the façade and I see you for who you are: a fellow member of God's creation. Morality begins in the sacred God-given Thou, and morality is reality as I show in my next essay.