The Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount

Abstract

The article analyses the Golden Rule (GR), which is considered to be one of the fundamen­tal principles of Christian ethics along with the Commandment of love, as a part and one of the culminating points of the Sermon on the Mount. The comparison of the GR with the Beatitudes, commandments of righteousness, “social obligations” and their accompanying commentaries allows us to identify both the deep normative-ethical affinity of the GR with them and their differences, as well as to answer the important question of what is the moral subject to whom the GR is addressed. Due to its complex unity with the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, the GR is essentially conceptualised. Considering the GR fromthis point of view makes it possible to fully understand its normative content, inparticular, in correla­tions with lex talionis and the Commandment of love. In the context of the Sermon on the Mount, the GR is freed from the characteristics of reward, egocentric individualism and worldly wisdom ascribed to it by some scholars. With a more general metanormative approach, based on the analysis of the GR as part of the Sermon on the Mount, it is possible to reconstruct intermediate normative forms specific in one way or another in the evolve­ment of the GR, which makes the Sermon on the Mount an interesting ethical-genealogical source.