Archa­ic thinkers used excep­tion­ally vivid meta­phors. One such simile likens the hori­zont­al cross-sec­tion of the uni­verse to a cartwheel. It places at the centre the ulti­mate essence, or, if you like, God. Imme­di­ately around it lies the home of the heav­enly orders, the home of rap­ture and holy har­mony, which radi­ates the joy of the heav­enly order. The spokes are spir­itu­al pro­cesses of dif­fer­ing natures: the hero­ic or litur­gic­al, ritu­al path of action; the epi­stem­o­lo­gic­al, philo­soph­ic­al path of know­ledge; and the rev­er­ent love-path of devo­tion. These spokes join the hub to the rim, which is the sys­tem of moral com­mand­ments, pro­hib­i­tions and pre­cepts. The philo­soph­ic­al pro­jec­tion of mor­al­ity is eth­ics, which not only sec­u­lar laws or reli­gious sys­tems but philo­soph­ers too have addressed since time imme­mori­al. Mor­al­ity eases human coex­ist­ence, marks out the right forms of con­duct and those to be avoided, and points, too, to man's etern­al call­ing.

The little-known Pierre Char­ron (1542–1603) was a French preach­er who, though a con­vinced Chris­ti­an, was accused of athe­ism, pre­cisely because of his philo­soph­ic­al and moral treat­ise Of Wis­dom. In it he writes:

The call­ing of wis­dom: to learn how we may mod­er­ate and gov­ern our desires and pleas­ures… This instruc­tion can be summed up in four points: little, nat­ur­ally, mod­er­ately, with restraint.

To desire little – with this we can safely stand up to fickle for­tune.

Nat­ur­ally – there are two kinds of desire, nat­ur­al and unnat­ur­al; for the nat­ur­al, even a little is enough…

In mod­er­a­tion, without excess – so we do no harm to oth­ers and safe­guard our own good.

With restraint – let the course of our desires and pleas­ures be cir­cum­scribed, lim­ited and brief.

Per­haps it is no sur­prise that Char­ron reaches back to the four car­din­al vir­tues of clas­sic­al Greek antiquity, which, fol­low­ing Plato, are wis­dom, cour­age, mod­er­a­tion and justice. To these the Greeks fur­ther added friend­ship, in which one steps out of indi­vidu­al exist­ence into the sphere of com­mun­al exist­ence. The mod­er­a­tion Char­ron stresses is akin to Buddha's golden middle way, or to the dis­cip­line of yoga, but the ancients too held that moral vir­tue is the mean between extremes: ‘you will go most safely in the middle’, said Ovid. Char­ron also pro­nounces on the con­duct of the sage:

Let our face and our gaze be open and pleas­ing to all, but let our spir­it and our thoughts be veiled and remain hid­den from all; let our man­ner of speech be simple and dis­creet; let us always keep watch over ourselves and be vigil­ant: ‘an open brow, a bridled tongue, a hid­den mind, and: trust no one’; it is right to see and hear much, to speak little, to judge all things: ‘see, hear, judge’!

It is not only cour­tesy and good man­ners that Char­ron's moral admon­i­tion demands. Besides right con­duct, it also reflects on the ulti­mate ques­tion of death:

It would be folly to walk a path that leads nowhere. The vir­tu­ous man is far more for­bear­ing in mis­for­tune than the dis­sol­ute in prosper­ity. Death is the prince of days, and judges all the rest. In the last scene (in death) there is no pre­tence: ‘Thus your true mind leaves the depths of the heart / The mask falls, and the man remains.’