Words, Words, Words - Issue #4: “Humility”
Part Four of an Exercise in Amateur Etymology for Practical Use
"Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon--
The Greek warlord--and godlike Achilles." - Homer, The Iliad
"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." - Matthew 5:5
“As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.” - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” - Shunryu Suzuki
Humility is not a popular virtue these days. In fact, it is not commonly regarded as virtue at all in our cultural milieu of self-aggrandizement. As is my wont, I’m going to tackle more terms in this piece than I give in the title, but the atmosphere of ideas will consist of concepts closely knit to humility. We’ll, of necessity, have to take look at what a virtue is per se, at meekness and temperance, and of course at humility’s antagonist – pride.
There’s a harrowing bit in the prophecy spoken by Isaiah in which he pronounces: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” I fear that, on balance, our world has deemed pride a supreme virtue and left its antonym to wallow in disrepute, to our great collective detriment. Let us first redeem of pride what may be redeemed, and then see how we might bring humility back to its seemingly paradoxically exalted place in the ideal human character.
Pride is a slippery term, and I am given to thinking that this ambiguity is produced quite nefariously by some parties, language games and the dissolution of meaning being a prime battleground for the forces of evil. If you doubt this, I recommend to you the now-clichéd practice of reading Orwell’s 1984. We think in words to a large degree, and the breakdown of meaning in favor of rhetorical domination is a fast road to the gulag, both metaphorical and real. Taking pride in oneself can be done with temperance, but, I’d argue at that point that one is actually expressing humility by another name, as we’ll get to soon. The pride that has historically been so rightly maligned could perhaps be more accurately termed “spiritual pride” and consists in the over-appraisal of one’s value and abilities, often to the denigration of others. I’ll venture that pride is most safely taken by the appreciation of others instead, the chief example being in children. Of course one may also take pride in one’s friends and other close relations. The “good” sort of pride then is primarily an internal, and by extension externally expressed, praise of others. Turning this quality on yourself tends all too often to what the ancients called vainglory, and of course hubris, which implies an impending fall from grace. The Greeks would have called this a harmatia, a tragic flaw, and by no coincidence is this term used in the New Testament for “sin”. It’s literally an archery term that means “to miss the mark”.
I give the opening lines from The Iliad in the epigraph to illustrate my preceding point. At the risk of trivializing the undoubtedly sublime piece of literature that is Homer’s masterwork, I’ll say that the events of that epic poem proceed primarily form what we’d colloquially call “a diss battle” between Agamemnon and Achilles. They more or less begin by insulting each other on the beach and the resultant chaos and untold bloodshed is a vain attempt to preserve their honor, which is in reality only their respective senses of pride. The poet implores the muse to sing of Achilles’ rage, born of wounded pride, that sent so many of his beloved countrymen and close friends to their untimely graves. Aside from its purely literary beauty, if we must extract a lesson from The Iliad (a practice of which I am wary on principle), it surely is that blind commitment to one’s pride is a road to suffering and even gruesome death.
Self-Control
In much of ancient Greek literature, the quality spoken of in contrast to hubris is σωφροσύνη (sophrosyne) and translates to something like “self-control”. In the traditional listing of the cardinal virtues, this quality is called temperance. I think self-control is a nice translation (the King James calls Paul’s usage “a sound mind”) because it implies that pridefulness consists of a Self out of control. The Original Sin of humanity in the story of Adam and Eve is the desire for exaltation of the Self, by the Self, beyond limit. The serpent whispers that we might actually be equal to God Himself and that He oppressively hides this fact from us. The outcome of that story is history, as we say. Temperance, or a sound mind, in that situation would likely have led the primordial couple to reasoning through their circumstances to find that it was certainly not the case, what the serpent proffered. A theologian whom I forget once said that all wrongdoing was a failure of humans to be creatures before the Creator. As I always say, if you are not religious, I hope you can see the allegorical meaning I’m getting at here. Whatever your thoughts on God happen to be, human beings are bound by inexorable limitation. We cannot ascend to any and all heights through our own power and the quest to do so is literally the stuff of legend. We would do well to ponder carefully why this is the case, for if nothing else our great mythological and literary inheritance warns us repeatedly of this danger. I make no diatribe here against lofty aspiration or hunger for the highest that may be sought in life. I caution only in unison with our greatest minds and lives that we should not seek beyond these boundaries.
The obvious question that arises now is how we might practically exercise this self-control. My contention is that this is best, and perhaps only, done by indirection. The idea is not to grit one’s teeth and try very hard not to be proud or hubristic, but to seek the virtue which naturally opposes it and allow it to have its work in us. Because, in a cruel irony, the attempt to be less proud, will often lead one to become proud in the attainment of humility. This is the genesis of that old saw, and rather funny joke, about being “more humble than you”. Before we tackle humility directly, in the spirit of indirection, let’s take a slight detour into meekness, a related quality that is not quite synonymous.
“For I am meek and lowly in heart.”
In my younger days I often wondered at the “how” behind the beatitude given by Christ in Matthew 5:5, which I’ve included in the epigraph. While making no claim to fully understand the depth of Jesus’s teaching there, a certain linguistic interest pops up when we do a little casual probing into the Greek text. The word that the Authorized Version translates to “meek” is πραεῖς (praeis), which is, near as I can tell being a non-scholar, derived from martial equestrianism. The usage in Greek that predates the New Testament refers to a wild horse that has been broken to be used as a war horse. This concept has interesting implications for what we are discussing here.
Diving very briefly into virtues per se, a few things must be said. The word virtue these days carries a heavy connotation of naïve moralism. We would not have to ask too far to find someone to tell us that something like teetotalism is virtuous. That may well be, and is another discussion altogether, but, to my ear, “virtue” in common parlance has a distinctly milquetoast flavor that calls to mind that sometimes-lovable buffoon, Ned Flanders. While I think he’s an unfairly mocked character, the image serves us well in this exploration. The Latin root of “virtue” is “vir-“, which you’ll find in words like virile. To the Romans and Greeks, virtue was a source of power. Virtue was sought to enable one to live life with command and to navigate proverbial stormy seas with repose. Virtue was the source of confidence in one’s ability to meet the demands of living on their terms and to emerge victorious. While I differ with the Romans on the victory conditions, I accept and proclaim this characterization without reservation. While virtue may partially consist in abstinence from certain ways of the world, the enervated sort of concept that often comes to mind nowadays is wholly inadequate.
Now, if we take for argument’s sake that meekness is indeed a virtue, one must naturally ask “why?” Circling back to the broken horse image, the implication is that the horse has tremendous wild power but is unmeet to any specific and useful exercise of said power. The discipline of breaking the stallion is what makes it fit to purpose. But we should not disregard the fundamental presence of power. To bring it closer to home, a man who is incapable of violence displays no virtue by being peaceful. If one cannot make war, the commitment to peace is simply cowardice, not virtue. The title of this section is a direct quotation from Jesus, who, if you believe what I believe, was the most powerful human being to ever exist. And yet he kept that power under control by submission to God, that He might be fit for a greater purpose. St. Paul tells us this about Jesus: “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” There is that word humble, a direct relative to our subject “humility”.
If you do not find the Christian perspective convincing, perhaps we can agree that there is something admirable about the military man, trained to kill with remarkable skill and efficiency, who exercises restraint, mercy, and is committed to peace as much as is possible in this broken world. If you’ll permit me a pop culture reference, think of Maximus in the film Gladiator. A particularly moving scene in that movie finds Maximus in a position to execute a defeated gladiatorial opponent. Choosing to spare his bested foe, he garners the adoration of the crowd and the name “Maximus the Merciful”. Here is a great display of meekness from the disgraced general and we glimpse perhaps some of how the meek might indeed inherit the earth. The application of this virtue did gain Maximus more real power than if he had simply slain his adversary.
Down to Earth
Why this talk of being meek? Well, in the main, it is a cousin of humility and I would love for us to disabuse ourselves of the idea that humility is a weakness. Without getting into the subtleties of St. Paul’s teaching on weakness, in the common use, weakness is a negative quality indeed and it does no service to promoting the virtue of humility to label it weakness. Humility is power. Of course, I do not mean power to dominate others or impose your will on the world, but power in the sense of what we’ve already explored as the natural outgrowth of virtue. Humility is perhaps the virtue par excellence for dealing well with life. Humility is a gateway to confidence, meaning faith in one’s ability to meet existence with courage and in triumph.
Why should this be so? To answer this, we’ll now come to the etymological substance of humility. The root word in Latin from which we derive humility is “humus”, meaning literally “earth”. Dirt. Now, I know that thinking of ourselves as dirt offends our natural pride in ourselves. All the better for it. What we need to do is bring ourselves “down to earth”, as the saying goes. It is no happenstance that that phrase means something very positive colloquially, and you’ll no doubt perceive that it comes from this concept and etymological history of “humility”.
See, at root, humility is nothing more or less than accurate appraisal of what you are and what you do. The root virtue traditionally, when looking at the cardinal four, is prudentia (prudence). As is our wide-ranging habit, this word also has come to mean something it never should have. While it now seems to mean comical over-caution, the ancient concept could perhaps be well-translated as “seeing clearly”. Prudence is the virtue of seeing things as they are, and thus bestows the attendant power of appropriate action based in Reality. So we might offer this definition of humility for us to work toward a conclusion:
Humility is the prudent appraisal of one’s person and life, leading to appropriately controlled power to grow and meet both sorrow and joy with victory
If you’d prefer something less dramatic:
Humility is seeing yourself for what you are, enabling you to move on to better things
And the crux of the matter is found in the idea that follows that comma. C.S Lewis is often quoted as saying that humility “is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less”. I can’t find the citation but if nothing else it is a good distillation of his thought on the matter, if it be apocryphal. Or, to borrow a hilarious line from my beloved sitcom, Frasier, “Copernicus called, you are not the center of the universe.”
When we get down to brass tacks, what we find is that the only way to really enjoy life and bear fruit, whether spiritual, artistic, relational, professional, etc. is to take the focus off ourselves as much as we can. When we are able to drop ourselves as the focal point of Reality, while our bruised ego and inborn pride might suffer (well and good), what we discover is that there is a grand and beautiful panoply of things that are indeed greater than ourselves. And for the soul that has embraced this virtue, what a joyous discovery it is. We are freed from the shackles of image-maintenance, and the painful introspective violence of constantly monitoring our standing in life. If I am not concerned with looking good, or “getting ahead”, or being better than anyone else, I am delivered into a rarefied space where I can look at something like a Caravaggio and be transported beyond my petty concerns to one of the grandest experiences possible this side of the Beatific Vision. If I happen to be a painter, and I have not pursued the virtue of humility, I may only experience this potential transcendence as a myopic and spirit-killing envy.
None of this is to say that we should evaluate ourselves as lower than we are. For that is a false humility, and as I have pointed out, is only really a covert manifestation of pride. As to myself, I am a very good musician. Trained in a good music school and with years of practice and performance under my belt, it would be dishonest in the extreme to claim that I am no good at it. When I receive compliments on my playing, I simply reply with my best genuine thanks, as, for lack of better words, the praise is warranted in that arena. But the difference comes in my prudent knowledge that, relatively speaking, I have a long way to go before approaching anything I’d define as mastery. And so, in humility, I look to the possibilities (nota bene the epigraphic quote I gave from Suzuki Roshi) and understand as objectively as I am able where I stand in the hierarchy of musical achievement. Then, I hopefully set out to get even better.
Upward
I am attempting to get at a seeming paradox in this essay. The paradox is that pursuing what is great for our own sake seems to actually preclude us from ever achieving it. I think the paradox dissolves when we deeply understand and practice humility. We need to start with the premise that there are innumerable things and people superior to ourselves in some way. We don’t do this to put ourselves down, but just to take stock of what is real. And in turn, this opens us up to the possibilities that life affords us in manifold and resplendent beauty. If I am oriented toward music or writing for its own sake, as something apart from and loftier than myself, I can pursue them with a pure heart that only wants what is best, not what is best for me (and who can even know such a thing?).
To get at beauty we need to acknowledge that there might be things in us which are ugly. To get at the Truth, we must start with the idea that we may be wrong. To get at goodness, we must see that there are likely parts of us that are deeply wicked.
Bach, perhaps the greatest genius in all music, signed his pieces “Soli Deo Gloria”, “to the Glory of God alone”. Those that built the great cathedrals and temples did so also for their God and their posterity, knowing that they might never see the fruit of their labors in their entirety. The great explorers set off in search of new lands they might never reach alive and certain that the real gifts would come only to their children’s children. They all hand magnificent visions of what could be, but it was not only for them. The vision was for their people, their families, their God.
And because I cannot do otherwise, I must finish by tying this whole exploration back to my God. Humility is perhaps ultimately an exercise in truly seeing what small gods we ourselves make. And with that pearl of priceless knowledge in hand we are made ready to approach the True God. What we will find in that Presence is an embarrassment of riches and glory and beauty that the mind full of pride can scarcely comprehend in its noblest imagining.
If we would ascend to the heavens, we must begin by bringing ourselves down to the earth.
This was wonderful, and a copernican admonition against the denigration, domination, and denial of others. A must read piece.