Therefore all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
All Commentaries on Matthew 7:12 Go To Matthew 7
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
Elsewhere Jesus says that there are two precepts on which the whole law and the prophets depend. The present precept seems to concern only the love of neighbor and not the love of God as well. Of course, if he had said, “All things whatever you wish to have done to you, do you also those things,” he would then have embraced those two precepts in the one maxim, for it would be readily understood that everyone would wish to be loved by both God and other persons. So, when someone would be given that one precept—when he would be required to do whatever he would wish to have done to him—then he would of course implicitly be given the other precept as well: that he should love both God and neighbor. But it would seem that the present maxim means nothing more than “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” for it seems very expressly restricted to persons, since it reads, “Whatever you wish that people would do to you, do so to them.” However, we must pay close attention to his further observation on this point, for Jesus goes on to say, “This is the law and the prophets.” In the case of the previously mentioned two precepts, he did not say merely that “the law and the prophets depend on them.” He said that “the whole law and the prophets depend” on them, for that is the sum of prophecy. But by omitting the word whole in the present instance, he seems to reserve a place for the other precept—the precept that pertains to the love of God. At any rate, the present instruction is one that was most apt for the occasion when he was expounding the precepts that pertain to singleness of heart. For there might be reason to fear that a person may have a double heart toward another, since the matters of the heart are hidden. But there is hardly anyone who would wish that others would deal doubleheartedly with oneself. It is impossible for one to render service singleheartedly to another unless one renders it in such a way that one looks for no temporal advantage from it. And one cannot do this unless one is motivated by the kind of intention that we have sufficiently discussed earlier, when we were speaking about the eye that is single. .
