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The Delphic oracle issued two commandments: ‘nothing in excess’ and ‘know thyself’. The main theme of Growth and Guilt: Psychology and the Limits of Development, is that the second commandment has flourished since fifth-century BC Athens, while the first has inverted itself to read: ‘no amount of knowledge is enough’. This has led in the West to the unlimited development of reason and to the concept of ‘too much’. Far from being praiseworthy, the book's assertion is that, on the contrary, unlimited development is a perversion.
The ancient Greeks lived in mortal fear of man's desire for the infinite which they called hubris (arrogance), the only true sin in the Greek canon and one which was punished by nemesis (retributive justice). In this way, limits to human achievement were at one time imposed by the gods and any human who overstepped those limits feared the punishing envy of the gods. The gradual humanizing of the vainglorious gods of Homer's Iliad, to the more just gods of the slightly later Odyssey, was the beginning of a god-like expansion of human potential, which reached its height in