By Anthony Esolen.

Suppose you enter business with a partner, and your contract specifies the work each partner will perform, the remuneration, and how the partnership may be dissolved so as not to kill the business. Now suppose your partner says to you that the contract is "alive," so that where it says that the physical plant will not be included in adjudicating the value of half of the business upon dissolution, it really means that it will be included. "The contract has grown since we signed it," he says, "and I know how it's grown."

The claim is absurd. It uses the metaphor of life in development, but what it implies is that no contract at all ever existed. It nullifies it from the start.

Or consider the marriage vow, whereby you promise to keep yourself only for your spouse, as long as you both shall live. That rules out adultery. But suppose your spouse says, "The marriage vow is alive! It was intended for our happiness, right? But variety makes me happy. And if I'm happier, then you're happier, see? So what's called 'adultery' isn't so at all, not when you consider the big picture. In fact, I'll be more devoted to you than ever. Aren't you lucky!"

That too is absurd. It forecloses the very possibility of making a vow. It kills the promise in the egg. Not only is such a vow not alive. It is assumed that it never was alive: it was never an active principle to organize married life.

I believe the teachings of Christ are alive, as a body is alive. Here again, as in my previous essay, I call on Catholics to consider what a body is not. It is not a mere collection, a group. When the child grows up to be a man, the powers that were latent in him assume full force. The muscles that looked like rolls of dough on his arm, but that did foreshadow the fully developed musculature, are now there in actuality. The little boy does not "develop" into a dog, a girl, a rock, a computer, or a fictional character in a novel. He becomes in act the man he was in potential.

I can remove an item from a collection and replace it with another, without changing the nature of the whole: I toss away the agate from a collection of semiprecious stones and replace it with carnelian. I trade a Morgan silver dollar for a Flying Eagle cent. I still have a rock collection. I still have a coin collection. That is because the items in a collection bear no organic relationship to one another. I can consider all the prime numbers below 1000. If I stretch the boundaries of the set to include all the primes below 100,000, I have not altered a single number. Their relations are not organic. They do not form a body.

But the teachings of the Church are organically related to one another. They are communications by God, the divine Person, communicating through persons, about persons individually and about persons properly speaking: beings whose existence is founded in communion with others.

We find a distant analogy in what a parent teaches a child about right and wrong. Those exist antecedent to the teaching; the parent merely adapts the teaching to the child's fitness to receive it. What seem to the child as mere rules - do not tell a lie, do not stuff yourself with food, obey your teacher - are living principles, or the immediate applications of those principles. They are interrelated, as members of a living body. The moral laws do not change. Their interrelationships do not change. What changes is the child's ability to understand them.

Therefore, you cannot teach a child that it is wrong to tell a lie, and then many years later say that it is all right to break a sacred promise if you believe you will be happier if you do so. You cannot excuse yourself by claiming that the law against falsehood is "living," when what you are doing is rendering it a dead letter, or when you have foreclosed its operation in the body, reducing it to something constricted or feeble or inert. Or when you have failed to consider that it is a member of a body in the first place.

...