Daedalus was a famous inventor surrounded by legend. He invented the labyrinth in which the Minotaur—a man with the head and tail of a bull—was kept captive on the island of Crete. Minos, the king of Crete, was so taken with Daedalus’ skill that he kept him captive in a tower, along with Daedalus’ son, Icarus. In spite of the circumstances, Daedalus was not at a loss. While Minos could prevent him from escaping by land or sea, “The sky certainly lies open,” Daedalus said. “We will go that way” (caelum certe patet; ibimus illac). Daedalus fashioned two sets of wings for himself and his son. Icarus stood by and touched the wings, “ignorant that he was handling his own peril” (ignarus sua se tractare pericla).
When the wings were finished, Daedalus “instructed his son, and said, ‘I warn you, Icarus, to fly in the middle way, lest if you go lower, the water should weigh down the feathers; if higher, the fire of the sun should scorch them. Fly between them both’” (Instruit et natum “medio” que “ut limite curras, Icare,” ait “moneo, ne, si demissior ibis, unda gravet pennas, si celsior, ignis adurat. Inter utrumque vola”). The father and son set out, and Icarus at first stuck close to his father. But “the boy began to enjoy the daring flight, and he abandoned his leader. Drawn by a desire for heaven, he made his path higher” (puer audaci coepit gaudere volatu deseruitque ducem caelique cupidine tractus altius egit iter). Icarus flew too near the heat of the sun, and its beams melted the wax and loosed the feathers. He cried out, “Father!” but there was nothing Daedalus could do. Icarus plunged headlong into the sea, and cry as he might, Daedalus received no answer, but only saw feathers floating in the waves. Daedalus was finally able to recover his son’s corpse, “and he swore off his arts and interred the body in a tomb” (devovitque suas artes corpusque sepulchro condidit; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk. 8, lines 183-235).
“Fly in the middle way.” These words capture the wisdom of the Greeks and plain common sense. The most famous temple of the ancient Greek world, the temple of Apollo at Delphi, had inscribed on it “μηδὲν ἄγαν” (mēden agan): “Nothing in excess.” The Roman playwright Terence enshrined that saying in his play Andria: Ne quid nimis, Nothing in excess. To this day our mothers teach us, “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing,” and while we may have added words, the wisdom remains.
The good life is the moderated life, the temperate life, the life that avoids extremes. It’s good, for example, to have the virtue of fortitude: to stick to the right things regardless of the odds or the consequences, to do your duty simply because it’s your duty, to fear what should be feared and to laugh at that which isn’t frightening. This is a middle way, and note that there are two extremes that stray from the virtue and become vice, or, as I tell the students, “There are two ways to fall off a horse.” There’s, of course, the coward, who shrinks from everything threatening, who forsakes his duty because he’s needlessly scared, who cares more about his own skin than anyone or anything else and is thus at the same time one of the most selfish and pitiable beings on the face of the earth. But there’s also the bombast, who rushes into danger without thinking, who casts aside caution and forethought under the delusion that rashness and bravado are bravery, who cares so little for himself that he ends up being a hindrance to the care of anyone else. We must avoid both extremes and “Fly between them both.”
This concept of the middle way applies well to the Christian life. Consider repentance. It is right to be sorry for your sins, and at the same time to have hope of forgiveness in Jesus Christ. There are two extremes that are enemies of repentance: the sun of being a Pharisee, and the wave of being a Judas.
Judas realized he had done wrong: “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” (Mt. 27:4). It was good that he recognized his sin and despaired of himself. Yet he took that despair to an extreme, and not only despaired of his own efforts at atoning for sin, but despaired of atonement entirely, went out, and hanged himself. That’s the wave we must avoid: the ungodly despair that sees no hope of salvation and ends up seeking refuge in its own death instead of the death of Jesus.
The Pharisee, on the other hand, flies too high by supposing that his own merits can get him heaven. He doesn’t despair of anything, but rather, puffed up by his own hot air, he pulls an Icarus. He dares to boast of his own works before God, and the heat of God’s anger melts off his feathers and the Pharisee falls down to destruction. If Icarus flew either too high or too low, he was going to end up in the same place, just as Judas and the Pharisee, by despairing entirely or despairing nothing, both end up in hell.
The Apostle Paul speaks of the middle way of repentance when he writes to the church in Corinth. In 1 Corinthians he had called them to repentance for a variety of sins. They took his words to heart, and he writes in 2 Corinthians 7, “For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I do not regret it; though I did regret it. For I perceive that the same epistle made you sorry, though only for a while. Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death” (2 Cor. 7:8-10).
The Corinthians despaired rightly. It is right to despair of our own efforts to achieve the forgiveness of sins. Yet it is not right to despair entirely, as if there were no such thing as the forgiveness of sins. Jesus died to forgive those sins, the blood of God covers those sins, and so there is all the reason in the world, and in heaven itself, to have hope. Repentance is to stand before God and call yourself a poor, miserable sinner, yet at the same time to take refuge in Jesus, to appeal to His sacrifice for forgiveness, and to have confidence that the blood of God is stronger than the sin of man. This is to fly the middle way, and it is arguably the highest art of the Christian life. For good reason has the story of Daedalus and Icarus resonated not only with the heathen, but with Christians, for Christians more than anyone understand what the middle way is: the way of repentance, of sorrow over sin and faith in Christ. May the Lord grant that we be “drawn by the desire for heaven” in the truest sense, and by His grace fly the middle way home.
In Christ,
Pastor Richard
Painting: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1558
