Commencement 2001
Baccalaureate Homily
By Fr. George Rutler
June 9, 2001
"The Price of Mediocrity"
 If
any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take
up his cross and follow me."
Your unworthy preacher comes to this paradisiacal
valley by way of a part of New York City called "Hell's
Kitchen." So I preach to you from a universal perspective.
St. Thomas More said in Utopia that the way to heaven
out of all places is of like length and distance. Our Lord
spoke of the cross in Caesarea Philippi which is no closer
to heaven than this College. But by force of logic we then
have to admit, nor is it any closer to hell than this College.
That's the whole point of what he said to Peter
and the apostles in words that Matthew and Mark use almost
identically. "If any man will come after me, let him
deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Do
that and, as St. Teresa of Avila used to say, "You are
already in heaven on earth." Don't do that and you are
already in hell on earth.
Our Lord said this right after he had asked
his apostles who they thought he was. Peter made his confession
of faith, "You are the Christ." "Blessed are
you Simon Bar Jonah for flesh and blood have not revealed
this to you but my Father in heaven." Christ here was
using more than a rhetorical device but not less than a rhetorical
device: "Blessed are you."
Cicero said the first object of a public orator
is to make his audience well disposed. Christ who is Himself
the living Word disposes his hearers to consider the mysterious
realms of eternity. "Blessed are you Simon Bar Jonah
for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father
in heaven."
In one of his Dublin lectures on university
education, John Henry Newman said, "Neither Livy nor
Tacitus nor Terence nor Seneca nor Pliny nor Quintilian is
an adequate spokesman for the Imperial City. They write Latin.
Cicero writes Roman." He means that Cicero spoke heart
to heart. That was an expression of St. Francis de Sales.
Cardinal Newman made that his Cardinalatial motto.
When Christ speaks to us, the Sacred Heart speaks
heart-to-heart, and here then is the interplay of the Love
that made all things with all things He has made. The Sacred
Heart speaks of the cross. It has been said that the crucifixion
of Christ is the only drama in history - not the greatest
drama, but the only drama. All our great and little adventures
define themselves and become tragic or divinely comic according
to how they tie in with the cross. So He says we must take
up our crosses, and they only become the way to heaven when
we carry them through life along the path pointed out by Christ.
There is a jargon-term for rejecting the cross;
it is "self-affirmation." Peter did not affirm himself,
he affirmed Christ: "Thou art the Christ." Only
then could he begin to grasp what he himself was. To deny
the self is simply to reject the superficial estimation of
who I am.
An old maxim holds that when you are all tied
up in yourself, you become a very small package, very small.
Such smallness is called mere existence. Denial of the self
does not deny our existence. (There are some oriental religions
that actually do that, and some forms of modern philosophy,
too.) Self-denial means knowing we are all things with Christ
and nothing without Him. Self-denial turns existence into
life. St. Paul says, "It is no longer I who live but
Christ who lives in me. Pope John Paul II says, "Become
what you are." That is a paradox. But paradoxes exist
because there is a heaven as well as an earth.
The noblest thinkers of the ancient pagans understood
self-denial. It was the key to the life of the virtues and
could be summed up in the timeless ideal of the Golden Mean.
The seven sages of Greece understood how life is not lived
without following the straight and narrow path of integrity.
Horace praised those who loved well the Golden Mean, "Auream
quisquis mediocritatem diligit."
This life of moderation is not what we popularly
mean by moderation. The classical Golden Mean, which Christ
transfigured into a life of holiness, is the choice of the
good over the convenient and commitment to the true instead
of to the plausible.
Liberal education is tutelage in that golden path. It is liberal
by freeing the scholar from the slavery of the lowest common
denominator. Any civilization so wrapped up in itself that
it settles for the lowest common denominator quickly bottoms
out and rarely rises again, and then only at a dreadful cost
to souls. This self-absorption instead of self-denial is what
William James scorned when he said, "Our colleges ought
to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind
of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities."
 Virtue
then is the desire to observe the Golden Mean. Courage is
the mean between cowardice and bravado; magnificence, the
mean between vulgarity and miserliness; noble pride, the mean
between vanity and servility. In the 18th century, Bishop
Berkeley called religion the mean between superstition and
incredulity.
Like all gold, the Golden Mean is purified by
fire. This is the meaning of the cross. St. John Vianney said,
"The worst cross is to have no cross." Common place
mediocrity is life without a cross, lukewarmness, and moral
tepidity. And the Book of Revelation holds up the Laodiceans
as examples of that. Check out your Bible commentaries, they
will tell you that Laodicea was a prosperous commercial city
southeast of Philadelphia. Anachronistic is he who supposes
that means Atlantic City. It is not anachronistic for doctors
of souls to spot the Laodicean disease in every modern city.
Mediocrity poses as inclusiveness, populism,
condescension, tolerance, modesty, empathy with your pain,
broad-mindedness, cheerfulness, and even charity. Mediocrity
mumbles from the vapors of moral anesthesia that it does feel
your suffering. And this is why modern secular humanism has
been called charity without a cross. Mediocrity, that kind
of mediocrity, is only the etiquette of sloth, a little road
by Laodicea to indecision. And as a sadness of spirit, sloth
is an offense against charity. Did the Romans crucify Christ?
Did the Jews crucify Christ? No. Sloth crucified Christ.
Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas finally became
friends when they saw in each other their mutual mediocrity.
The encyclical Centesimus Annus names the Yalta Conference
at the end of the second World War as a paramount symbol of
deadly death-dealing compromise. The Pope of that encyclical
grew up in a nation crucified because diplomats thought it
diplomatically unwise to take up their own crosses.
Christ was crucified millions of times in the 20th Century.
For every choice of the self over against the will of God
is a crucifixion of some soul. When Christ looks back on the
20th Century and all its glorious inventions, inhumane advances
notwithstanding, He surely says, "Get behind me Satan."
The Golden Mean is the narrow gate to Jerusalem
the Golden. Slothful mediocrity is self-indulgence: the choice
of choice for the sake of the choosing. Mediocrity has no
standard higher than self-justification. It screams the euphemism
pro-choice to exhaust all moral argument. On such a bucolic
day as this do not think me unmeasured when I say that mediocrity
leads to death. Higher voices than mine have called this a
culture of death. And that expression seems ridiculous only
to the mediocre.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt said that the
Nazi architect of so many horrors, Adolf Eichmann, incarnated
the banality of evil. He did not look dramatically wicked.
He did not speak with the decibels of deep darkness. He was
a mediocrity. His system massaged the economic and philosophic
conceits of his age.
That's what made him the tool of the prince
of lies whose hell is the unholy hall of half-life where mediocrity
is not a little way at all, it's the only way. The acid rejection
of the Way, the Truth and the Life. And that is why the Lord
said to Peter, "get behind me Satan." For it was
Satan who moved Peter in his weak moment right after his exalted
confession of faith. He analyzed Christ only according to
his own standards of happiness and success. And Peter wanted
to prevent Christ from taking up His cross. He was not denying
himself, he was denying God.
The doleful days of our culture of death are
distinguished in this. For all the words uttered, and never
have there been so many, they are almost entirely forgettable.
Our age of communication is not an age of communion. The rhetoric
of cyberspace speaks heartlessly not heart to heart as our
Lord spoke in Caesarea Philippi.
In the civil order, after years in public office, it is possible
for political leaders to have said nothing lapidary, no phrase
worthy of granite, no sentence to be cherished in the national
memories valiant, not a maxim decent to great government,
nary a motto with which any father could make a brave benediction
over his sons or could serve a mother in delighting her daughters.
Surely our age has no lack of great events to
inspire great declarations or grand challenges to provoke
grander deeds. But the bold words and heroes of the words
are few. The Golden Mean has been counterfeited by gilded
meanness. Virtuous souls speak words worthy of great legacies-but
souls that have bargained for less than virtue speak words
that are sleek and not serene, spinning the truth but not
telling the truth. Gandhi listed seven tragedies in such a
gilded life: politics without principle, wealth without work,
pleasure without conscience, knowledge without charity, commerce
without morality, science without humanity, and worship without
sacrifice.
The lazier people are, the more will they allow
mediocrity to serve the government, the courts, the arts,
and even the churches. Mediocrity is mellow, it's diction
mellifluous. Mediocrity wants to be dazzled but not enlightened.
It begs the consolations of power estranged from its obligations.
It demands in every act the right to choose without the duty
to choose life. It claims freedom to express the self but
not to express things higher than the self. It marks no division
between feeling good and being good. It prays for godliness
without god and a temporal world without end. Mediocrity unwinds
history and withers the drama of man, so that thousands of
years after Moses heard the voice saying, "I am Who I
am," compromised men ask what "is" is.
There are lesser and wrong forms of self-denial.
There was for instance the pessimistic asceticism of the Gnostics,
the Puritans, the Jansenists. It was summed up in that greatly
misguided line from the film The African Queen when
the missionary lady says "nature is what we are put on
earth to overcome." And there is a dangerous tendency
to that among many Catholics who consider themselves conservers
of the Sacred Tradition. Sometimes the pessimism actually
takes the form of suicide, sometimes cultic suicide, sometimes
medical suicide.
A few years ago the Hemlock Society published
a book on how to kill yourself called Final Exit. When that
book was first published our nations largest chain of bookstores
placed it in the section called Self-Improvement. There is
also a wrong kind of social self-denial when the problems
of society are analyzed without reference to the reality of
evil at the root of all crime and injustice and despair. That
was summed up in the words of the Mayor of one of our greatest
cities who said, "The crime rate isn't so bad if you
just don't count the murders."
Christ calls us to another kind of denial. It
is summed up in the Easter Vigil, "Do you reject Satan?"
At one Easter Vigil, and during the infelicities of a bad
English translation, I was surprised to hear a priest ask
the congregation, "Do you reject Satan, using option
number one?" Well there is no option number two or three.
There is only the option to live or die.
The Golden Mean is hard to find and to live
it heroically is even harder; it is even impossible without
the grace of God. While so great a man as Aristotle thought
the greatest happiness could be found in a life of virtue,
St. Thomas Aquinas and all the saints have known that blessed
joy comes finally in union with God. For the Golden Mean truly
is Christ Himself.
I suppose every college calls itself alma mater
but not every college is like this in knowing what alma
mater means. The beloved Mother teaches the art of living
by teaching the art of dying to the self. Mothers save things
and pass them on; mothers remember things and sing them to
us, sometimes in cradle songs, sometimes in the greatest symphonies
of culture.
After my mother died recently, I had the hard
and also inspiring task of going through closets and finding
what she had counted as treasures. But which were in a worldly
sense nothing at all. She had not saved my doctoral diplomas
but she did save the first words I ever wrote. Going through
all those boxes I remembered once when we were in disagreement
about something that should be done, and she said, "Remember,
however old you are, I am still your mother." I regret
to say that I replied starchily that Christ had said, "Who
is my mother?" And she replied, "Well, I am sure
He did not say it in that tone of voice."
Holy Mother Church passes on the word of God.
In the Scriptures Jesus says, "Take up your cross."
He meant a real cross but he did not say it crossly. His tone
of voice was different from those voices which have rattled
history from the lips of demagogues and tyrants. These are
the words of love without which we cannot know much, however
clever we may be. It is a love worth dying for so that we
might live forever.
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