516
SOBERNESS, SOBRIETY
SOBERNESS, SOBRIETY
his reason was for the inornent obscured. St. Panl'.s message was utterly novel to him, and he conse- quently attributed liis intense emotion to mental (leranjjement, just as he regarded tlie content of his message as illusion and not reality (dXriSeia). Similarly, Penelope wlien roused from her slumber by the old nurse who came with the message that her long-lost Ulysses is home looks on the nurse as one whom the gods had deprived of her sanity [Od. xxiii. 13).
In 2 Co 5" the opposite of (riatj>j>ovetv is iMTTivai.. The phenomena of the Day of Pentecost were familiar in the early Christian Church. Men were carried out of themselves by a new experience of the Divine power. Excitement and enthusiasm such as men had never felt before led them on to action. Now the cautious onlooker was tempted to put this down to aberration, and unfortunately such might be the case. Rationalism is always tempted to explain enthusiasm as madness. 'Quench not the spirit' was a necessary warning even to a Christian people. Men naturally dis- trust emotion, and this was especially true of an emotional people like the Greeks.
' The Greeks, or gome sections of the Greek race, were very liable to violent emotions ; and hence it was that the Greek moral philosophers insisted on control of emotion as they did. The Greeks had a sort of natural want of self-respect and a tendency to forget themselves which particularly struck the Romans as unworthy ' (Nettleship, Lectures on Plato's Republic, p. 96).
St. Paul undoubtedly exhibited the signs of deep emotion. He was an enthusiast, but to God. The criticism that he was actuated by croKfipoavvq (ironi- cal) was the best answer to this (2 Co 5'^). Here the word includes self-control — constraint which had reason on its side. It was due to the love of Christ that he was so enthusiastic, and that love prompted a sober judging of man's needs and of the means to meet those needs. The Spartan king Archidamus (fwerAs Sokuiv etuai Kal cibcppuiv) exhibits sanity in this sense when he warns his people to think (Tutppdfas before going to war with Athens (Thuc. Hist. i. 7911'.). _ They should see to it that their resources are sufficient. There is included in the word in this connexion a sober balancing of ways and means, a counting of the cost as our Lord enjoined — a distrust of a course of action simply because it appeals to the fancy or the feelings. It must also ajipeal to sober common sense. St. Paul had done this and so had reached a irmppoairq on a higher level than mere prudence, a true intel- lectual love of God and man, to use Spinoza's famous phrase.* Philosophers are divided as to whether will or intellect has the primacy in man's constitution, and emotion is distrusted ; yet the true Christian (rwtppuv is one, like St. Paul, in whom tlie ajiprehended love of Christ rules the will and illumines the intellect. The emotional harmony is in the region of the spirit. Here is its source, and its sway is over the whole man from above.
In dealing with self-control Plato has always in view unworthy exhibitions of emotion. ' Is the picttire of a hero rolling on the ground with grief a worthy example?' he asks. From this point of view he criticizes Greek religion, Greek poetry and music. He was thus correcting a national weakness. 'Throughout the treatment of these virtues we find the characteristic Greek idea that excess, whether in grief or in laughter or in appetite or in any passion or emotion, is intrinsically bad. We have to remember that dignity was not a strong point of Greek character' (Nettleship, op. cit., p. 96). St. Paul also had to face this question, especially in Corinth, but he solves it by the appeal to love (1 Co 13). He philosophizes on a plane so ditt'ereut
* Cf. Ecce BorruM, London, 1873, p. 7 : ' No heart is pure that Is not passionate ; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. And such an enthusiastic virtue Christ was to introduce.'
from that of Plato that in trying to compare their ideas we have no common denominator.
(b) In Ko 12'''* aoKppoftii' is contrasted with virep- <t>povtiv. The Apostle, as is clear from the context, incIudesino-w^fioa-ufT/theabsenceof boasting, of vain- glory, undue emphasis on and opinion of oneself, ct liucqcnus oinne. It implies the Christian grace of humility, the reco^iition that all we are and have we owe to God. Positively there is included the thoughtful yet humble recognition of the nature and ]ilace of the powers that we possess, and their exercise in the service of the Christian community of which we are members. Tlie reference is not obtrusively to the control of bodilj' plea-sures — ' eating and drinking and sexual desires (-n-epl anluv Kal ttotCiv Kal tGiv a(ppo5icrlui'), which is the specilic meaning in Greek moral philosophy (see Green, Pro- Icgomenn to Ethics*, p. 327). This restricted usage is not unknown in the NT. It is found in 1 P 4', where the meaning is determined by the opposition to iv daeXyeiais, ^Triffvfiiais (1 P 4'), and it is pro- minent in Tit 2'^, where prudence {<Tucpp6i>wt) is opposed to worldly lusts and associated with justice and piety. This passage in Titus is valuable because it gives us the ground, the scope, and the hope of Christian morals. The ground is in the revealed grace of God ; the scope includes self-control, justice towards others, and piety towards God; the hope is the appearing of the Sa\iour God. Green (bk. iii. ch. v.) shows how much wider the scope of Christian self-control is than Greek, and, though he attempts to prove that the principle is still the same, few Christians will agree with him. What St. Paul calls the grace of God which brings salvation for all men is not within the vision of Plato or Aristotle. In Romans (ch. 12) the word is used rather of the humble temper of mind which saves from overweening excess or self-depreciat- ing defect. The former error is more noticeable in men in general, but the latter is not unknown. The talent may be hid in a napkin or buried in the earth, and in this case there is a lack of o-w- (ppoadnTi as truly as there is in self-aggrandizement. ' God does not require of us a false humility. We are not to think less highly of our.selves than we ought to think. We are to think soberly. We are to find out the truth about ourselves and think that. Then there will be no danger of our think- ing too highly' (Rabbi Duncan, Colloguia Peripa- tetica^, Edinburgh, 1907, p. 169). The sphere of o-oi- (ppoaivT] here is not so much the sensual pleasures as the Christian charismata in their social bearing. The social aspect of this grace is enforced just as it is enforced by Plato in his analysis of the same virtue (Rep. 430D-432B).