The Third Commandment: Do Not Swear Oaths

The Third Commandment: Do Not Swear Oaths is one of the five explicit moral laws that Prince Dmitri Ivanovitch Nekhludoff discovers during his transformative reading of the Gospel in the final chapter of the novel. It appears in the Sermon on the Mount, specifically Matthew 5:33-37, and commands that a man should never bind himself by an oath. For Nekhludoff, this prohibition is not an abstract religious precept but a practical, revolutionary principle that directly challenges the entire apparatus of the legal system he has just witnessed—a system built on sworn testimony, judicial oaths, and the perjury that inevitably accompanies them.

The Commandment in the Gospel Reading

Nekhludoff's discovery of the commandment occurs in the small hours of the night after a day of devastating prison visits. He has seen the mortuary where Anatole Kryltzoff's body lies, the cells crammed with dying and degraded prisoners, and the old man who defiantly refuses to stand before the inspector. Exhausted and despairing, he mechanically opens the Testament given him by the Englishman and begins reading the Sermon on the Mount. The third commandment strikes him with particular force: "that man should never bind himself by oath" . This is not a minor detail but one of five clear, practical laws that, if obeyed, would establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The commandment against oaths stands alongside the prohibitions of murder, adultery, retaliation, and the command to love enemies, forming a complete ethical program that Nekhludoff now sees as the only reasonable meaning of life.

The Commandment's Relation to the Legal System

The prohibition of oaths has a devastatingly concrete application to the world Nekhludoff has been moving through. The entire trial of Katerina Maslova was conducted under oath: the jury was sworn in by the old priest, who made them raise their right arms with fingers pressed together and repeat a formula invoking the Almighty God, the holy gospels, and the life-giving cross (E00200-E00202). The witnesses were similarly sworn, and the priest performed this ritual with the assurance that he was fulfilling a very useful and important duty . Yet the trial produced a verdict that Nekhludoff himself knew to be a monstrous injustice. The oath did not guarantee truth; it merely lent a solemn, hypocritical cover to a process that condemned an innocent woman. Nekhludoff's own earlier life was also entangled with oaths: as an officer in the Guards, he had sworn allegiance to the Tsar and the regiment, a system of conventional duties that replaced common human obligations and allowed him to forget his sin against Katusha (E00426-E00428). The commandment against oaths thus cuts to the root of both the judicial and the military institutions that have shaped his world.

The Commandment and Nekhludoff's Inner Transformation

The third commandment is not merely an external rule but a demand for a complete inner reorientation. Nekhludoff's entire journey has been a movement away from the "animal man" who lived by the approval of others and toward the "spiritual man" who answers only to his own conscience. The prohibition of oaths is the logical culmination of this: it insists that a person's word must be so truthful that no external guarantee is needed. Nekhludoff had already begun to live this principle before he read the Gospel. When he confessed to the Procureur that he had betrayed Maslova and intended to marry her, he spoke without any oath, simply stating the truth (E01037-E01039). When he resolved to tell Missy the truth about his profligacy and to break off his relations with Mary Vasilievna, he did so not because he had sworn to but because he recognized the lie in his life . The commandment thus confirms and deepens a change already underway: the movement from a life governed by external codes—military honor, social convention, legal procedure—to a life governed by the inner law of conscience.

The Commandment's Significance in the Novel's Moral Architecture

In the structure of Resurrection, the third commandment functions as part of the fivefold law that Nekhludoff discovers in the Sermon on the Mount, which he now sees not as "beautiful abstract thoughts" but as "simple, clear, practical laws" . These laws, if carried out, would establish "perfectly new and surprising conditions of social life, in which the violence that filled Nekhludoff with such indignation would cease of itself" . The commandment against oaths is particularly subversive because it undermines the very foundation of the legal and political order that has produced the horrors of the prison system. The old man in the prison cell had already expressed this truth in his own way when he refused to stand before the inspector, saying, "Thy servants are standing before thee. I am not thy servant. Thou bearest the seal" . The seal of office, the oath of allegiance, the sworn testimony—all are forms of binding oneself to a system that claims the right to judge and punish. The commandment declares that no such binding is legitimate. Nekhludoff's final realization is that the only certain means of salvation from the terrible evil he has witnessed is for men to acknowledge themselves as sinners before God and therefore unable to punish or correct others . The prohibition of oaths is an essential part of this acknowledgment: it strips away the false authority of institutional guarantees and leaves the individual standing alone before God and his own conscience.