Wieseltier on the Ten Commandments

The always eloquent if sometimes maddening Leon Wieseltier has an essay in the latest New Republic, called "God Again."  Here is his report on the recent oral arguments in the Ten Commandments cases:

It was amusing to watch the conservatives at the lectern argue that the monument of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol in Austin deserves the protection of the Court because it is the historical, and even the secular, symbol of a common heritage; and encouraging to discover that the justices were having none of this Christian casuistry. They seemed all to agree that the Decalogue is a religious expression, which plainly it is. None of them seemed especially horrified by this fact, at least in these settings. A reasonable distinction between the acknowledgment of religion by the state and the establishment of religion by the state was in the air, and none of the justices wished government to be hostile to religion. I will be surprised if the Court orders the slab of pious stone in Texas, or the framed commandments that hang in courthouses in Kentucky, removed.

And here are his concluding thoughts:

As an illustration of an acceptable display of the Ten Commandments on government property, some of the justices pointed to the figure of Moses on the marble frieze on the upper wall of their own courtroom, carved after pencil sketches by Cass Gilbert, the building's Beaux-Arts architect. (Moses appears also on the eastern pediment outside the building.) There the prophet stands, facing the bench, and holding in his hands the revealed law, inscribed in Hebrew and in gold. By a miracle of political convenience, only the second tablet appears, the one with the non-theological instructions. As I pondered this sculpture, I saw that it represents not a victory for the believers, but a defeat for them. For here is the son of Amram, fresh from his meeting with God at Sinai, newly in possession of the exclusive and immutable law, alongside Hammurabi and Menes and Solon and Confucius and Octavian. (And opposite Mohammed and Napoleon and John Marshall.) He is a lawgiver among lawgivers, no more. This is a fine iconographical program for the court, but it is decidedly not what the devout have in mind. On the south wall of America's most significant courtroom, the Ten Commandments have not only been celebrated, they have also been relativized. I reflected sweetly upon the inevitability with which the multiplicity of beliefs in an open society condemns absolutists to an exasperated existence. Pluralism protects them, but it also discomfits them. And their discomfiture is one of democracy's beauties. 

Rick