The Fifth Commandment: Love Your Enemies

The Fifth Commandment: Love Your Enemies is the culminating precept among the five laws that Nekhludoff, in a state of rapturous revelation, extracts from the Sermon on the Mount during the night after Kryltzoff's death. It is the most demanding of the series, requiring not only the cessation of anger, lust, oaths, and retaliation, but the positive, active cultivation of love, help, and service toward those who are hostile. For Nekhludoff, this commandment provides the ultimate answer to the question that has tormented him throughout his journey: how to respond to the vast, institutionalized evil of the prison system and the men who perpetrate it.

The Content of the Commandment

The fifth law, as Nekhludoff formulates it from Matthew 5:43-48, states that man should not only not hate his enemy and not fight him, but love him, help him, serve him. This is a direct inversion of the ancient lex talionis and of the conventional morality that permits hatred of one's personal or national foes. The commandment is absolute: it admits no exceptions based on the enemy's guilt, danger, or moral worth. It is the logical extension of the principle of unlimited forgiveness that Christ enunciated to Peter—forgive not seven times but seventy times seven—because all men are sinners and therefore none has the right to punish or correct another. The Fifth Commandment transforms forgiveness from a passive, reactive stance into an active, creative force.

Nekhludoff's Discovery and Its Context

Nekhludoff arrives at this understanding after a day of overwhelming horror. He has witnessed the sunstroke deaths of convicts, the flogging of prisoners, the brutal treatment of a father carrying his child, and the death of his friend Kryltzoff, whose corpse he sees in the prison mortuary. Returning to his hotel, exhausted and despairing, he mechanically opens a copy of the Gospels given to him by the English traveller. Reading the Sermon on the Mount, he suddenly sees the commandments not as abstract, impossible ideals but as simple, clear, practical laws whose observance would establish perfectly new and surprising conditions of social life, in which the violence that filled him with such indignation would cease of itself. The Fifth Commandment is the most radical of these laws, and it is the one that directly addresses the problem of the enemy—the official, the jailer, the judge who inflicts suffering.

The Commandment and the Problem of Evil

Throughout the novel, Nekhludoff has been confronted with the spectacle of men who are not monsters but ordinary officials—Maslennikoff, the convoy officer, the prison inspector, the General—who commit terrible acts because they are inured against pity by their offices. The Fifth Commandment provides the only solution to this problem that Nekhludoff can accept. The usual objection—"What is one to do with evil doers? Surely not let them go unpunished?"—no longer confuses him. He sees that punishment does not lessen crime or improve the criminal; it only depraves both the punisher and the punished. The only reasonable thing to do is to leave off doing the things which are not only useless, but harmful, immoral and cruel. The Fifth Commandment replaces the entire apparatus of retributive justice with the active, creative work of love.

The Commandment and the Kingdom of Heaven

For Nekhludoff, the Fifth Commandment is not merely a personal ethic but the key to social transformation. He understands that if men would obey these laws, they would obtain the highest blessing they can attain to: the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The parable of the vineyard illustrates the error of those who imagine that life is given for their own enjoyment and who forget the Master. The Master's will is expressed in these commandments, and the Fifth Commandment is the most complete expression of that will. Nekhludoff's discovery of this law marks the beginning of a perfectly new life, not because he has entered into new conditions of life, but because everything he does after that night has a new and quite different significance. The Fifth Commandment becomes the foundation of his future actions, the principle by which he will live.

Significance in the Novel's Moral Architecture

The Fifth Commandment stands as the final answer to the novel's central question: how can one live in a world of institutionalized cruelty without becoming complicit in it? Nekhludoff's earlier attempts at reform—giving land to the peasants, appealing to the Senate, petitioning the Emperor—all operate within the existing system. The Fifth Commandment calls for a complete transformation of that system from within, by changing the hearts of individuals. It is the most demanding of the five laws because it requires not merely abstaining from evil but actively doing good to those who do evil. In the context of the novel's relentless exposure of the horrors of the prison system, the Fifth Commandment offers a radical, almost utopian, alternative: the power of love to overcome the power of violence.