In the classical world the ancient Greeks identified man by distinguishing him from the gods and from animals. The inscription at the oracle at Delphi reads “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess.” Man is below the gods and above the animals. The sin of pride (hubris) presumes that man is equal to or above the gods, and the sin of excess defies the Greek moral precept of the Golden Mean, the idea that all virtue is a form of moderation or temperance–the right balance between excess and defect. The virtue of courage is not recklessness on the one hand or cowardice on the other but the mean. The virtue of generosity avoids the extremes of both extravagant, wasteful spending and miserly hoarding. Aristotle formulated this idea of self-knowledge with his famous definition of man as “rational animal.” Man’s rational nature governs all of his passions, appetites, urges, and instincts, and man’s rational nature cultivates the cardinal virtue of temperance that the Golden Mean achieves.
Plato’s image of the charioteer and the horses explains this relationship that defines human nature. Like the charioteer who reins the horses to prevent injury and accident, man’s reason checks, guides, and directs the passions to conquer evil and prevent tragedy. The Greeks, then, make sense of reality by first understanding man’s true nature as moral. By virtue of man’s rational and spiritual nature, human beings possess free will and carry moral responsibility. To the Greeks virtue is knowledge, not only of man’s rational being and the Golden Mean but also of the natural law and eternal law that Sophocles’ Antigone eloquently defends in arguing that she owes obedience to eternal law before a king’s unjust human law:
I did not think your edicts strong enough
To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
Of God and heaven, you being only a man.
They are not of yesterday or to-day, but everlasting . . .
St. Paul also alludes to this natural law in his letter to the Romans: “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts . . . . (Romans 2: 14-15). The classical view of man, then, understands human nature, the moral law, and virtue as universal and objective and binding on all men, in all times, and in all places.
In the Christian understanding of man, all human beings created in the image of God possess inherent dignity, an immortal soul, a heavenly destiny, free will, and the capacity to love and be loved. Man is destined to be a source of grace in the world, a reflection of God’s goodness, as he loves God and neighbor and performs the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. In this Christian worldview, man cooperates with God’s plan for creation and salvation. He is enjoined to be fruitful and multiply, to pray and offer sacrifices and sufferings for God’s redemptive work in the world, to do good “unto the least of these my brethren” in the knowledge that love of neighbor always expresses the love of God. While acknowledging human nature as below the gods and above the animals, the Christian view of man also views man as a fallen being wounded by original sin who endures the perpetual conflict between reason and will that St. Paul explains in referring to the law of the mind and the law of the members: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do . . . . So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Romans 7: 19-23). Christian self-knowledge, thus, sees man in the most universal light. He inherits a divine image, a human nature, an original sin, and an immortal soul designed for eternal life. The fact of original sin and the perpetual battle between good and evil and between man’s mind and flesh defeats the fantasy of a political utopia on earth.
This classical and Christian vision of man begins with a self-knowledge about human nature that forms a body of perennial wisdom and provides a unity to the human race. Modernity, however, does not view human nature as governed by reason, natural law, divine law, or universal self-evident truths. Modern man is subject only to man-made law, the will of reigning political powers, and the legal decisions determined by the courts. These political, judicial, and ideological forces conspire to eradicate all the moral categories and traditional virtues that civilized societies transmit from one generation to another—the meaning of marriage, the nature of the family, the ideals of motherhood and fatherhood, the virtue of chastity, and the sanctity of life. The legalization of abortion and euthanasia amounts to hubris, man assuming he is a god who determines who lives and dies. The legalization of same-sex unions repudiates all natural laws, both moral and biological, and gender ideology denies the evidence of the five senses that determines male and female from the moment of birth. Modern man possesses no norm of self-knowledge, constantly redefining and reinventing the definitions of freedom, equality, and rights to satisfy the wishes of ideologues who expect the entire structure of reality to accommodate their imaginary version of a utopian society where all aberrations and perversions assume the status of the normative.
Modern versions of self-knowledge do not hold that man is a rational animal or the image of God who possesses free will. The explanation for moral disorders is the rationale of biological determinism: certain individuals are “born that way.” Men who think they are women and women who believe they are men inherit these psychological traits at birth. The modern view of man does not recognize the Greek sin of hubris and the deadly sin of pride because it reverses or undoes all the teachings of Sacred Scripture, encouraging divorce for any reason (“It was not so from the beginning”), championing the cause of population control (“Be fruitful and multiply”), and choosing death over life (“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life that you and your descendants may live”). The modern view of man also does not teach the Golden Mean that forbids lust or respects the beauty of chastity that orders the human body. The promotion of contraception rules government policies about foreign aid, forms the agenda of many international organizations committed to population control, and governs societies afflicted with increasing incidences of sexually transmitted diseases caused by the promiscuity that contraception encourages.
The beginning of wisdom begins with self-knowledge. If man is not a rational animal, an image of God, a fallen being, or a person of free will, then he lacks a human identity and lives in dark ignorance, or he he becomes anything he wishes to call himself—a creature without a nature, without free will, without moral responsibility, and without purpose. He becomes an unknown quantity, a shapeless atom of humanity, an amorphous creature unguided by truth, law, or reason. Rather than a body informed by a rational soul, man behaves as if were merely “matter in motion.” Without the self-evident truths of self-knowledge, the reign of Chaos (“Whirl is King”) rather than eternal law or Divine Providence governs a world ruled by chance, madness, and lawlessness in all its destructive forms. In the famous words of William Butler Yeats from “The Last Coming”:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
