Know Thyself
By DONALD DeMARCO
Virtues are the qualities which enable us to know who we are and what we need. They are akin to anti-viruses that counteract the seven deadly sins. Humility checks pride, unselfishness resists envy, patience counteracts anger, chastity defeats lust, love frustrates sloth, temperance curbs gluttony, and generosity keeps avarice at bay. They provide health to our moral immune system. Vices are our ruination.
In our materialistic society, avarice is particularly rampant. The National Basketball League provides us with a window that allows us to observe this deadly and embarrassing vice. In the year 2020, one NBA player, who has no claim to superstardom, rejected a contract that would have paid him $114 M for four years. He was then offered $45.2 M from another team which he also rejected. Finally, being out of options, he settled with a third team for $2.5 M for one year. This is by no means a unique phenomenon in professional basketball. What it brings to mind is our understanding of who we are, to what we are entitled, and how much do we really need?
Pride, which so often precedes a fall, can be divided into three species: vainglory in which we seek inordinate praise, ostentation in which we desire to show off, and ambition in which we seek things that are beyond our reach. Each of these vices is unrealistic, which explains why they precipitate a fall. They also represent attitudes that are riveted to the self and, consequently, ignore the needs of others.
The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was fond of using parables to convey his moral messages. In a parable he calls New Shoes, he tells of a man who had made enough money so that he could buy a pair of shoes and stockings and still have enough left over to get drunk. In his drunken state of mind, he lay down in the middle of the highway and fell asleep. A wagon came along and the driver shouted to him to move his legs or he would run over them. On awakening, the man looked at his legs but did not recognize them as belonging to him and said to the driver, “Drive on, they are not my legs.” Luxuries can seem alien to the self since they are not an integral part of the person. They do not give us what we long for, what we truly need. “Give me the luxuries,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his play, The Importance of Being Ernest. “I can dispense with the necessities.” In a less satirical and more realistic vein, he also said, “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.” Why imitate when you can be the real thing?
The ambition of Adam and Eve, like that of the fallen angels before them, was not to serve God, but to be God. In Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII, the ambitious and unscrupulous Cardinal Wolsey advises his king to divorce Katherine of Aragon to whom he had been married for 20 years. Confronted with the king’s wrath and his awareness of Wolsey’s double dealings, the discredited cardinal meditates on the precarious nature of ambition. Turning to his servant Cromwell, he says, “I charge, thee fling away ambition. By that sin fell the angels.” Wolsey’s fall was catastrophic: “Had I but served my God, with half the zeal I served my King, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”
In Leo Tolstoy’s short story, How Much Earth a Man Needs, a Russian, who is already rich, wants to increase his wealth. He is told by the elders of a tribe in the East that he can claim for himself all the land he can traverse on foot in one day. Greed impels him to stake much more land than he can possibly acquire in this manner. When he races back to the starting point, he falls dead of exhaustion. The elders laugh as they dig his grave saying: “This is how much earth man needs.”
A fable recounts the story of a dog who was content with his bone until he saw his image reflected in the water of what appeared to him to be a larger dog with a larger bone. When he barked at the image, he lost his bone. When we fail to count our blessings and lust for something we cannot have, we stand to lose everything.
In his address in 2002 at World Youth Day, Pope John Paul II used, as his theme, “You are the salt of the earth . . . you are the light of the world” (Matt. 5:13-14). But he also had a warning: “The human person, created in the image and likeness of God, cannot become a slave to things, to economic systems, to technological civilization, to consumerism, to easy success.”
“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” (Matt. 19:24).
The answer to the perennial question, “who am I,” is that we are persons who are called to be virtuous. Who we are and what we need is based on that irremovable fact. It is vain and foolish to want to be someone we are not, or to try to impress others with things that are not part of our reality as persons. The various deadly sins aim at defeating us as persons while erecting a false image of ourselves which is doomed to failure. When it comes to the temptations of avarice, we are well advised to “no thyself,” that is, to say “no” to all the things we not only do not need, but to the things that contribute to our downfall.
- + + (Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus, St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review and is the author of 39 books. One of his latest books, The 12 Supporting Pillars of the Culture of Life and Why They Are Crumbling, is posted on amazon.com. His fortieth book, Glimmers of Hope in a Darkening World, is now available.)
