A friend of mine recently told a discussion group that he was amazed to find himself "squarely in the middle" amongst us on a political issue. Although he wasn't trying to claim the higher ground, I was taken by how his staking out the middle ground had that effect anyway. It led to this end-of-the-week rumination:

Even as he was amazed to find himself "squarely in the middle", so I am amazed at how deeply entrenched political discourse is in mathematical metaphors. In one sense, all language is metaphorical--I think this is a result of God revealing Himself through ectypal figures while He Himself is incomprehensible as archetype. However, what amazes me in this case is how the mathematical metaphor itself carries persuasive force.

One might trace this back to the Pythagoreans, who believed that all of reality could be reduced to mathematical relationships. The Pythagorean theorem was, for them, not simply a geometric truth; it was a metaphysical truth. In fact, it was a religious truth. The Pythagoreans had a significant influence on Plato and when regarding his Doctrine of the Forms, it is important to keep this influence in mind. Plato's Forms (or Ideals) are not cookie-cutter semblances of the material objects; they are closer to something like a form(ula).

We should also keep in mind that Aristotle was a Platonist that radicalized the doctrine of the Forms, eliminating Plato's dualism, but maintaining the notion of forms in the things themselves. He also, interestingly, developed an ethic of the mean. For Aristotle, the ethical good could be found in the middle between two extremes. For instance, between cowardice and foolhardiness, the ethical mean is courage.

Contrast Aristotle's ethics with biblical ethics. You will not find the quote "moderation in all things" in the Bible. (That comes from a 2nd century BC Roman dramatist.) In the Bible, the ethical good is not good by virtue of a mean or moderation. The good is good by virtue of God's will and character. You can only derive a mean if you know the entire population of data or have a good representative sample. How could Aristotle know if his sample was adequate? Most modern people who read his description of the "large-soul man" see an individual we would regard as a complete jerk. The mean for ancient Greek culture is not the mean for modern western society. On the other hand, what God commands in the ancient world is the same as what He commands in the modern world.

About 18 centuries ago, Tertullian asked "What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?" Tertullian went too far in despising reason itself, a sentiment expressed also in Luther's "That great whore, Reason", but their suspicion against reason is understandable given how Hellenic thought so easily infects sound biblical reasoning. Much of the Church's theological progress over that last two millennia has been overcoming corruptions of Greek thought. The council of Nicea overcame Arianism, which has its roots in neo-platonic thinking. The Reformation overcame issues that developed when the Scholastics adopted Aristotle (and Plato before that) as their patron philosopher. Our recent battles against the effects of the Enlightenment can be traced to the Renaissance of pagan Greek culture.

And to this day, it still makes for a convincing argument to place your position between two points of an imaginary scale. If you can make a case for a continuum connecting the points, the middle position has an advantage by virtue of being in the middle. Likewise, the end-points become candidates for "extremism" just by virtue of being on the ends. Absurd as this is, it really does carry persuasive force. I know we cannot reduce all political discourse to this metaphor, but it amazes me how polemically significant this figure has become.