Money ruined him

“A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.” Jonathan Swift

By Alex P. Vidal

WE have been reminded that money is not evil per se, or possession of money is not really evil.

The want to have money for specific reasons and purposes can’t and should not be considered as evil.

It’s the excessive love for money, or its excessive possession for excessive, irrational and wicked purposes that is the root of all evil.

Everybody is seeking for money, but it is the seeking that counts, as money is not always a blessing when it comes.

In a story narrated by Dr. Frank Crane in Everyday Wisdom, there was a man who won $20,000 for suggesting the name “Liberty” to a popular magazine.

“He is now charged by his wife with the abandonment of her and his four children,” narrates Crane.

Crane says the first thing the man did with his prize money, his wife claimed, was to buy a six-cylinder touring car and a quart of liquor.

She also said that he kept paying $5, $10 and $15 tips to taxicab chauffeurs and bootleggers.

“Before he won that prize we were in pretty poor circumstances,” said his wife. “We were in debt, but at least we were happy.”

LIFE

The question in life is not only who is going to receive the prizes, but what people are going to do with them.

Crane warns that winning a beauty prize may mean moral and spiritual ruin to the successful contestant. Beauty is of no advantage unless used beautifully.

“Many a man has found it harder work to take care of his money when he got it than to get it in the first place,” observes Crane. “If he makes a large amount of money he finds all society arrayed against him. Beggars assail him, tradesmen overcharge him, and the government taxes him. He finds that the possession of money renders him a marked man.”

A man with a large fortune is in one respect like Cain, for every man’s hand is again him, according to Crane.

So there are two sides to success.

It is a question whether success is more valuable as a goal to be attained than it is as a goal which has been attained.

Those on the way up to it get plenty of advice and sympathy from others. Those who have arrived do not receive much sympathy.

“It takes considerable training to be able to take care of money,” counsels Crane. “And often people who are suddenly raised to affluence do not know what to do with their possessions.”

LARGE

Certainly if receiving a large sum of money induces a man to take up extravagant and bad habits and to desert his wife and children it is a bad thing for him.

The same thing is true with the possession of any talent. A man may be a great violinist, a great pianist, or a great speaker, and his success may ruin him as a man.

It is very difficult for anyone who is extraordinarily endowed in any way, either in money or talent, to keep his faculties in balance.

Crane issues a warning: “The best condition for a man is one of struggle and uncertainty. While he is struggling he is automatically kept normal and in check. That the majority of the human race is not on Easy Street is a good thing for the race.”

If every man were a millionaire the world would speedily go to the devil.

It is the fact that most people need to worry and struggle along with obstacles that keep the world sound and sane.

Wisdom in being human

"The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race." E.M. FORSTER

By Alex P. Vidal

LOS ANGELES, California – In October 1521, five years before Martin Luther King was to begin to shake the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church, the great Renaissance painter and humanist Michelangelo had just finished decorating one of its ceilings.

“And what a ceiling it was!” exclaims Portland-based Ronald B. Allen, professor of Old Testament and Exegesis, in The Majesty of Man. 
The Sistine Chapel in Rome, named for Pope Sixtus IV who had begun its construction in 1473, has a ceiling that measures approximately 133 feet by 43 feet, with the crown of the vault some 70 feet above the pavement.

In conditions of terrible discomfort, Allen points out, the great artist Michelangelo spent nearly four years painting in the fresh plaster on the ceiling. 
“He lay on hard scaffolding board, breathing intolerable air and having eyes and skin constantly inflamed with plaster dust. All the while, the impatient Pope Julius II would periodically climb the scaffolding and threaten to toss the master to the ground if he did not finish his work more quickly,” narrates Allen.

The formal unveiling took place on October 31, 1512. 
What an event in the history of man this unveiling was—one of the finest artistic achievements of the Renaissance. 
Here Christian theology and humanism learned to hold hands. 
In his recital of the significance of this event, Charles H. Morgan says that Michelangelo “had joined two powerful philosophies, the Christian ethic and the perfect human, at the moment of their most sympathetic coexistence.”

CREATION OF MAN

This blending of the Christian and the human strains was perhaps nowhere more evidence than in Michelangelo’s portrayal of the Creation of Man. 
One of the most famous panels of the masterpiece is the scene of Adam reclining inertly on a brown field, his left arms stretched out languidly over his upraised left knee. Rushing toward him is God, surrounded by storm and cloud, attended by cherubim, and stretching out his hand in a dynamic gesture to the extended finger of Adam. 
Our attention is drawn to the rushing power of the finger of God and the small space left between God’s finger and that of man.

“In this painting,” suggests Allen, “we are there a microsecond before the giving of life!”

What are we to make of this imagery? 
Morgan sees in it the notion that the church had given nourishment to humanism, and that in this painting they both meet on an equal scale. 
Despite the tranquility of the scene, Morgan senses the irony in the painting, for a struggle was about to burst out between the church and humanism in which the power of God would be challenged by man whom heaven had empowered.

Allen says another view of the significance of the Creation of Man fresco is presented by the renowned American biblical theologian Samuel Terrien of Union Seminary, New York.

“Dr. Terrien, in a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco several years ago, observed that there is another figure in the painting in addition to God, Adam, and the cherubim,” Allen observes. “This other figure is a beautiful woman whose head is nestled in the left arm of God, and who looks with anxious interest on man whom God was enlivening.”

SPACE

We almost miss this woman because of our interest in the latent energy in the space between the finger of Adam and the finger of God. “But there she is!” Allan stresses. “And her presence causes us to ask, Who is she? Is she the as yet unformed Eve, awaiting the awakening of need for her in her mate?” Is she, as some Catholics have imagined, the Blessed Virgin Mary, anticipating a significant day long in the future when God would have a ministry of mystery for her? Terrien brushes away these and other conceptions with his great discovery: This woman is wisdom. It was with his arm around wisdom that God created man, his finest creature.”

Allen observes further: “I suspect that Morgan’s point of view more accurately represents art history. But I am convinced that the viewpoint of Terrien is the one who need in order to understand theology rightly. For this painting points us to one of the most significant elements in our understanding of what it means to be truly human: We were created by God to be wise.”