Musing on the virtue and value of humility
Look up “humility” and the online dictionary says “The state or character of being humble; freedom from pride and arrogance; lowliness of mind; a low estimate of one's self; self-abasement.” Now look up humble and you get this: “Marked by meekness or modesty in behavior, attitude, or spirit; not arrogant or prideful.” We haven’t progressed very far.
The one phrase that makes sense of both words is “freedom from pride and arrogance.” Most of us would identify such freedom as humility. Not so much the low estimate of oneself. It’s more a matter of a realistic estimate of oneself.
It helps to go back to Greek and Latin roots to get a handle on humility. The word itself is from Latin, and perhaps surprisingly it derives from the word humus. That’s right, humus – as in soil, dirt, earth. At heart, then, to be humble is to be like the soil: receptive to seeds that make for growth. To be humble requires, then, the ability to be open to new information, ideas, people. In other words, to lay aside pride, which always gets in the way of receptivity to others. To get past these problems you must drop high or low estimations of yourself. Be who you are, beyond the lies, the duplicity, the hiding, and without comparison to others. Remember, humility is “the quality of being humble,” of being receptive to a more accurate sense of self.
There is, of course, a twisted sense of pride that leads to a false façade of humility. Think Uriah Heep in Dickens’ David Copperfield, the poster child for false humility in high school English class. Heep was, in short, a phony.
What does it mean to be humble? What is humility? Let us sketch some attributes and learn thereby, since it is quite hard to come up with a comprehensive definition. In the Philokalia, a massive work on the history and practice of spirituality from my Orthodox Church, we read: “a haughty person is not aware of his faults, nor a humble person of his good qualities.” It’s a matter of focus and attentiveness, of the direction your spirit is turned to face, so to speak. If you primarily pay attention to your own skills and intelligence and powers, that’s a matter of self-centeredness. In other words, pridefulness. With that primary focus you will fail to recognize your weaknesses. You may even think you have no weaknesses because you are so focused on yourself. If you want a definition of the opposite of humility, you can’t do better than this.
To be humble is to be aware of one’s own weakness and ignorance. It requires self-assessment, not self-effacement or self-doubt. You may be critical of yourself but not in a damaging, punishing way; this kind of criticism is about discerning how to move forward more gracefully, to further dispel your ignorance about self and others.
The word for humility in the New Testament Greek is translated, in older editions, as meekness. As in “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” This is a truly unfortunate translation since meekness today can mean self-effacement to the point of cowardliness or fearfulness. The Greek word has no such meaning. As mentioned above, it is better served by “receptivity.” Humility, humus, humble: they interweave one another. I like John Woolman’s idea from his Journal, where he sighs that young people in his day (the mid-seventeen hundreds) fail “to come to that inward humility in which true fortitude to endure hardness for the truth’s sake is experienced.” Humility is a kind of strength.
Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is a retired Orthodox Christian priest. Contact him at gabrielcroch@aol.com.
This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Musing on the virtue and value of humility
