En la Veritatis Splendor, el Papa enmarca toda su reflexión en la pregunta del joven rico, "Y cierto hombre prominente le preguntó, diciendo: Maestro bueno, ¿qué haré para heredar la vida eterna? Jesús le respondió: ¿Por qué me llamas bueno? Nadie es bueno, sino sólo uno, Dios. Tú sabes los mandamientos...

The Pope explains in the first chapter that the first and ultimate question of morality is not a lawyerly question. Unlike the Pharisees, the rich young man does not ask what the bottom line is, from a legal standpoint. Rather, lie asks what must be done in order to achieve the unconditional good, which is communion with God. Christ takes the sting out of law, not by annulling it, but by revealing the Good to which it directs us. Remove or forget the Good and law inevitably becomes legalism.

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The Scripture relates that, the young man went away sad, for he had many possessions. But the modern audience is more apt to turn away sad when faced with the teaching that there is a moral law that is indispensable, and that indeed binds authority itself The Pope points out that all issues of circumstance, culture, place, and time notwithstanding, certain actions can never be made right; no human "law" can make them right. Just as from the scales and axiomatic measures of music there can come a Beethoven sonata or a Schoenberg twelve-tone composition, so obedience to the commandments opens the possibility of a creative, fluid, and completely realized human liberty. The point of learning the musical scales is not to engage in mindless repetition; the point is to prepare to make beautiful music. A piano teacher who taught only the scales would be a legalistic simpleton. But a piano teacher who neglected to teach these rudiments would be unworthy of the name teacher. Musical order cannot begin solely with human spontaneity and creative improvisation. And the same is true in the domain of moral action. Anyone who sets up an opposition between law and freedom, and then takes the side of freedom, not only underestimates the need for law but also misrep­resents the nature of freedom.

The story of the rich young man shows the essential unity of the law and the Gospel, and in Veritatis the Pope spends considerable effort on a related theme: the unity of the two tables of the Deca­logue. "Acknowledging the Lord as God," he says, "is the very core, the heart of the law, from which the particular precepts flow and toward which they are ordered."53 Each precept, he continues, "is the interpretation of what the words 'I am the Lord your God' mean for man." 54

"To ask about the good," in fact, "ultimately means to turn towards God," the fullness of goodness. Jesus shows that the young man's question is really a "religious question, and that the goodness that attracts and at the same time obliges man has its source in God, and indeed is God himself."55 Georges Cottier, the Dominican theologian of the papal household, has underscored the importance of this point in the encyclical:

. . . awareness of the self as an image of God is at the root of moral judgements, beginning with the norms of the moral law. . . . The image is turned toward its Archetype and is the origin of a desire for union with it and assimilation to it. The natural law makes known to our reason the essential goods to which we must tend in order to reach God, who is the supreme Good.56

Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology, pp. 22 y 23