[539] commandment to love God^a with all one's heart, which simply means the unconditional^b character of every commandment---which is unconditional. All the others are conditioned. There are always not only concrete situations in which they must be applied in a very different way, but there are always formulations which make exceptions to any of these commandments. Oh, I had a discussion yesterday with someone about the relationship of love to war, to the problem of war. Now if you use the command- ment "Thou shalt not murder"---which is the right translation of the Hebrew word---and call every

killing in terms of criminal, in terms of war, murder, then you have a very easy pacifist position^c which has no foundation in reality. But if you understand that murder and killing are not the same, and that the same Old Testament which says "Thou shalt not murder" commands, very often, "Thou shalt kill"---for instance in the Old Testament criminal law, or in the dealing with other nations---then you see the problem about the application of the law. The law^d always has the two limits: love^e on the one hand, and the concrete situation^f on the other. These are the criteria. Between them the law is an advice, an advice born out of human pragmatic experiences and the wisdom^g mankind has conquered, and if someone acts against the laws, which are matters of experience in one's own tradition, then one is due to be thrown into conflicts, into very serious conflicts. And this is especially true in periods of history^h in which traditions have come to an end and in which new possibilities have been opened. Now if this is the case, then I hope we have a possibility to deal with the whole realm of the moral law from a point of view which is not the moral lawⁱ itself. For instance the stoic^j laws, to which I already referred: The STOIC laws are much more abstract, namely the principle of

equality and the principle of freedom^k. Take the principle of equality---it is one of the most difficult ones. Certainly there is no justice^l without equality. But equality in which sense? Egalitarianism equality is a very rare event in human history^m, and certainly not an absolute command. There is one absolute command of loveⁿ, with respect to equality, namely to treat everyone as a person, as someone