In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates names “Nothing in excess” among the sayings written up at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The phrase “moderation in all things” is not in the Bible in those words, and the idea behind it is Greek and older than Paul. The Bible’s nearest line is Paul’s: an athlete training for a crown “is temperate in all things.”
A Greek motto
Aristotle built his ethics on the same instinct. Courage, for him, sits between rashness and cowardice, generosity between waste and stinginess, and each virtue is a mean between too much and too little. The Roman playwright Terence put it in Latin as ne quid nimis, nothing too much. Each of those sayings warns against too much.
Scripture does count amounts. Proverbs 25:16 advises, “Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.” In 1 Timothy 3:8 Paul wants deacons “not given to much wine,” and in Ephesians 5:18 he writes, “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” What Paul forbids is drunkenness, not wine. Paul even tells Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:23 to “use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” The King James Bible of 1611 also printed the books between the Testaments that most Protestant Bibles now leave out, and one of them, Sirach, praises “moderate eating” in 31:20. And Paul uses the very phrase people half-remember:
And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.
1 Corinthians 9:25 (KJV)
So the Bible teaches self-control, and Galatians 5:23 lists “temperance” in the fruit of the Spirit. What it does with that teaching is where it parts company with the motto.
Philippians 4:5
The verse people usually attach the saying to is a different one.
Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.
Philippians 4:5 (KJV)
“Moderation” appears exactly once in the King James, here. The World English Bible reads “Let your gentleness be known to all men,” and that is the sense the context demands. Three verses earlier, in 4:2, Paul has named two women in the church at Philippi who were not of one mind: “I beseech Euodias, and beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord.” The letter would be read to the church, so both would likely hear it.
Into that quarrel Paul writes gentleness: the willingness to give ground and to be easy to deal with. He does not explain the connection to the next sentence. He sets the two side by side and lets them stand: “Let your moderation be known unto all men,” and “The Lord is at hand.”
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes 7:16-18 comes near a mean, and even he measures something larger than portions: “Be not righteous over much… Be not over much wicked.” He ends by sending the reader to God: “he that feareth God shall come forth of them all.”
Under the power of
When the Corinthians brought Paul a slogan about their appetites, he answered with a question about who was in charge.
All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
1 Corinthians 6:12 (KJV)
Under the power of. That is the test, and it asks who is in charge more than how much. A person can be mastered by a small amount taken every day at the same hour, never once exceeding a sensible portion, and a person can enjoy a good dinner without being mastered by anything. Paul ends the same chapter with the reason the question matters to a Christian, in 6:19-20: “ye are not your own… ye are bought with a price.” The question underneath is whose you are.
The motto from Delphi warns against too much, and Scripture does too. Paul also asks what has hold of you, and he expects the answer to be the Lord who bought you. God helps those who help themselves is another saying whose idea goes back to the Greeks, in that case to a fable.
So ask two questions. About any habit, ask whether it has power over you, which is a sharper question than whether you have had too much. About any quarrel, ask whether you can give ground, as Paul asked at Philippi while two women there were at odds, and he set that request beside the nearness of the Lord.