The term "classical" is often misunderstood.  Is classical music called classical because it is the oldest kind of music?  No, for music was unthinkably ancient before classical music was developed.  Is it so named because it is the best kind of music?  No, for people may disagree about which music is best and yet agree about which music is classical.  Because it is obsolete?  No, for a classical tradition can remain vibrantly alive, continuing to develop and give birth to new work.

The proper meaning of the term "classical" is none of these.  Rather it signifies, "Here is the body of work which sets the standard for all subsequent achievement."  This holds for classical traditions in all fields, not just music.  A classical tradition of thought, for instance, might not pose all the important questions, might not answer all those that they do pose, and might not give the right answers, but it sets the standard for what sort of things count as good questions and good answers.  So even if one rejects a classical tradition, one is most unwise to ignore it.

“And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him.  ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’  And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.’”   (Matthew 22:35-40, RSV.)

The second of these two precepts presupposes that I love myself, but it does not command me to love myself.  There is no need, because everyone loves himself.  Even the suicide desires his own good; he merely makes the mistake of thinking that he would be better off dead.  The moral problem is not that we love ourselves, but that we love ourselves the wrong way.

Thomas Aquinas holds that love of God and love of neighbor “are the first general principles of the natural law, and are self-evident to human reason.”    They are inviolable:  We may not transgress them for the sake of supposedly "greater" ends, like telling lies to elect good men to office.  They are also non-substitutable:  We may not trade them off against each other, like committing a few more murders to achieve a larger reduction in thefts.  In these two senses, neither has priority.

But in another sense, loving God certainly has priority -- it is more grave, more important, as the root is more important than the branch.  Besides, the love of God should be beyond measure, while the love of neighbor should be proportioned to the proper love of self.  To be sure, this is a very high proportion.  If I really loved my neighbor as myself I would die for him.  But my love for God should exceed even that.  Even the principle of justice, “Render to each one his due,” might teach that to us, if only we could gaze steadily upon it -- for if God is truly God, then in the most literal of senses we owe Him everything.

In the context of the Decalogue, love of God is spelled out in the first group of commandments, while love of neighbor is spelled out the second group.  The nature of this “spelling out” is crucial.  It is not that the commandments are deduced from love of God and neighbor; that is not how this works.  Rather, it is in the light of the commandments that we first understand what loving God and neighbor mean.  Once we recognize just what love it is that the commandments spell out, we come to understand them more deeply than we did at first.

A warning:  You may try to be truthful about the goodness of loving your neighbor -- but if you lie to yourself about the God who loved your neighbor into being, then your understanding of all love and every neighbor will be defective.  A more adequate understanding of love and neighbor will be terribly dangerous, because it may make you think of God.

I pointed out yesterday that the Golden Rule doesn’t replace the moral precepts, but presupposes them.  This limitation is not a defect in the Golden Rule; it merely corrects a possible misunderstanding about what the Rule is for.  As excellent as the Rule is, you couldn’t know how to live if you knew the Rule but nothing else.

The same limitation pertains to all proposed summaries of ethics.  Consider, for example, the second formula of Kant’s Categorical Imperative:  That we must never treat others merely as means to our ends.  One does not have to be a Kantian to see that this is very true.  But try interpreting the formula without knowing anything else about right and wrong, and see what happens.

Abortion is wrong because the unborn baby is not a means to his mother’s convenience -- but someone who wants an abortion will protest that she is not a “means” to the baby’s survival.  Coercing a doctor to assist in suicide is wrong because he is not a means to his patient’s wish to murder himself – but someone who insists on his assistance will reply he is not a “means” to the doctor’s peace of conscience.  Public indecency is wrong because the bystander who cannot help seeing it is not a means to the exhibitionist’s self-exposure -- but the exhibitionist will complain that he is not a “means” to the bystander’s purity.  In fact, don’t we hear such arguments daily?

These rationalizations are perverse, but they cannot be corrected just by appealing to the Kantian formula.  The bare idea of not using others cannot produce a moral code, for only in the light of a moral code can we tell what counts as using others.

The Golden Rule is the pinnacle of ethics.  But it does not replace the other moral precepts; it presupposes them.

Imagine a man reasoning, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- yeah, sure.  I wouldn’t mind if that fellow slept with my wife; fidelity is boring, and possessiveness is old-fashioned anyway.  Therefore, he shouldn’t mind if I sleep with his.”

In order to get the right results from doing unto other as you would have them do unto you, you have to want them to do the right things unto you.

When I teach, such are the times, the objection to the correspondence theory of truth often takes a form something like this:  “You say thought ought to reflect how the world really is.  If we think dogs are cats, we’re mistaken, because dogs are not cats.  But ‘dogs’ and ‘cats’ are just words.  We can define words any way that we like.  If some language used the word ‘dogs’ to mean both dogs and cats, who is to say they are wrong?”

There is no need to deny that some people might speak a language in which the same word were used for both dogs and cats.  But such a language would be inconvenient, for it would be missing a distinction that actually exists in reality.  If speakers of the language imagined that dogs and cats were the same species just because they used the same word, “dog,” for both of them, they would be mistaken.  One sort of “dog” would pant and wag its tail; another sort of “dog” would purr and lick itself clean.  The first sort of “dog” would chase the second sort, but the second sort would rarely chase the first.  The two sorts of “dog” would be unable to interbreed, and people who liked one sort as pets would often dislike the other.  Yes, one can use words any way one wishes, but not every way of using words is fitting, because not every way corresponds to reality.  Truth really does lie in the equation of intellect with thing.

The question about calling both cats and dogs “dogs” may seem silly.  But there is such a thing as motivated error:  Often, when people keep asking the same silly questions, there is a reason, rooted in desire.  For though no one in our culture seriously proposes to call cats “dogs,” people in our culture do earnestly seek to have us all call animals “persons,” some persons “non-persons,” some non-marriages “marriages,” and so forth.  Because the case for these ways of thinking is difficult to make, proponents fall back on sophisms about words meaning whatever we say they mean and about reality being whatever we want it to be.  Or they resort to insults, in the fashionable psychotherapeutic style.  Those who resist “saying of what is that it is not, and of what is not that it is,” are said to have a “phobia” or irrational fear.

Then again, perhaps those who warn of phobias are onto something, for a certain irrational fear does seem to be abroad. Perhaps we might call it aletheiaphobia, fear of acknowledging the truth of how things really are, logophobia, fear of the supreme Logos; or nomophobia, hostility to eternal law.