“Nothing in excess” Socrates
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replies: “Keep the commandments, you know: don’t commit murder, don’t commit adultery don’t steal . . . the rules given you by Moses.” The man shakes his head: “I’ve kept those rules since I was a boy; it has become routine; I’m aspiring to something more challenging; I’m bored.” This response excites Jesus. Here’s somebody with potential for becoming an extraordinary human being. So he says, “Well, there’s only one thing to do, one direction to go in: sell off all your wealth (stocks, bonds, bank accounts, plastic, real estate) and give the proceeds to the poor and come, live the life I live.” Ouch!
Was Jesus toying with the fellow? After all, later he tells his disciples it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. And here we go again with Jesus speaking in hyperboles. “Give up all your wealth . . . it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle . . .” Jesus, as always, engaging in the logic of excess, of losing one’s life to save it, of leaving all one has in order to have a hundred times more, in turning the other cheek, going the extra mile.
The influential philosophers of the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, would have nothing to do with such logic. They influenced our culture by imposing two ideas. They advocated our adhering to the golden mean, the middle ground between “too much” and “not enough.” In other words play it safe, keep your balance as if you were surfing your way through life. As for Plato, he used the allegory of the charioteer and his two winged horses. In other words, we live our lives holding the reins of one horse that is docile, controllable (rational) and another (a black one, an irrational one) that is always ready to leave the track, stampede, crash. And so to lead a safe, moderately progressive life it is you, your will power, the charioteer, who must keep control of the team. Moderation, reining back on one’s passions, one’s imagination, giving more play to reason – thereby one will live out a happy life.
And so here we are on the one hand heirs to this Greek way of seeing things – all moderation, restraint – as the Church’s favored theologian Thomas Aquinas has said: . . . evil consists in discordance from the rule or measure . . . by exceeding the measure or by falling short of it; . . . Therefore it is evident that moral virtue observes the mean.
On the other hand we are heirs to the Christ of the Gospels who speaks in hyperboles, extremes, advocates a “go for broke” way of seeing and being.
No wonder we are confused and settle down to a half-hearted commitment to our biblical creed. It’s as if, realizing the rich man in today’s Gospel wouldn’t give up everything to be like Christ, the Church accommodates him, did in fact give him a regimen to follow, explicit maxims to attach to the Ten Commandments, a kind of middle school curriculum to go with his elementary lessons – in other words a catechism to substitute for Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul.
But as I have mentioned before, the extreme statements of Jesus are figures of speech, not meant to be taken literally but to snap us out of our complacent, almost numb way of living, to stimulate our imaginations – like a slap in the face, to awaken in us an urge to hit back – as a minimum signal we are still alive!