Humility’s Destiny

If Christian humility sets as a regulative ideal complete unconcern for one’s own distinctive importance, the challenge is to say why anyone would consider Christian humility a disposition of human flourishing. The experience of one’s distinctive importance is often felt to be an important, if not essential, aspect of the good life. This chapter shows how Christian humility requires for its intelligibility a different account of what an excellent self is like, and a different account of what human flourishing is like. The Christian themes of crucifixion, Trinity, and beatitude are shown seriously to revise customary assumptions about human selfhood and human flourishing. The chapter shows how a distinctively Christian eschatology and anthropology grounds a distinctively Christian view of humility.

Remembering Christian Humility

Augustine’s Confessions is a locus classicus for early Christian privileging of the virtue of humility. This chapter shows that the contemporary “memory” of Christian humility fails to capture what Augustine took humility to be in the Confessions. Augustine had all the marks of the contemporary memory of “Christian humility,” yet still took himself to lack the humility of Jesus. The chapter then tries to supply an account of Augustinian humility. Augustinian humility is best understood as the virtue opposed to the Roman valorization of self-sufficiency and immortality. The chapter concludes by trying to relate Augustinian humility to the most prevalent contemporary accounts of humility, low concern and limitations-owning. Neither of those accounts can be assimilated to an Augustinian account of humility.

Becoming Humble

Monastic directives to humility have been dismissed by most contemporary theorists as remnants of a lamentable past. But, if radical Christian humility as envisioned by the early monastic tradition is a legitimate view of humility, there should be something to learn from their many directives. This chapter interprets monastic wisdom about the pursuit of humility, showing how ascetic practices are consistent with the claim that humility is a gift of grace. It argues that the monastics were right to think that genuine Christian humility is unattainable apart from experiences of humiliation. Ascetic regimes can promote humility by training practitioners to go on loving in the midst of humiliations that sabotage their quests for personal importance. Such practices “position” devotees to be recipients of supernatural love, which enables persons to go on without falling back on proper pride as a source of moral energy.

Radical Christian Humility

After clarifying how central proper pride is to a low concern account of humility, this chapter elucidates the sense in which pride and humility are “concerned” with the self. “Self”-language is sprawling and imprecise, so a significant portion of the chapter is spent clarifying different senses of “self” that are relevant to the question of whether or not humility requires “unselfing.” The chapter argues that pride and humility are specifically about an orientation toward an ego ideal, which is a self-representation focused specifically on one’s distinctive importance over and against others. The chapter then offers an account of radical Christian humility that proscribes proper pride, including any concern one might have with one’s own distinctive importance. The chapter concludes by showing that the account, which is dubbed a no concern account, need not bring with it any of the so-called vices of humility.

Mundane Humility

Christian humility was repurposed in the early modern period to suit the goals of the emerging liberal state. After sketching how Thomas Hobbes achieved this repurposing, this chapter shows how David Hume’s critique of Christian humility and Immanuel Kant’s attempt to rescue Christian humility from Hume’s critique created a new kind of “mundane” humility newly committed to the need for a counterbalancing proper pride alongside anything that could be called virtuous humility. After showing how this concern for proper pride was a modern development, the chapter then shows how it drives most contemporary theorizing about humility, including the dominant low concern account of humility. Given that early Christian sayings about humility show no regard for the proper prides, an account of Christian humility will need to confront the claim that the virtue of humility requires counterbalancing by pride.

Forgetting Christian Humility

Recent scholarship on humility can be grouped into five major accounts of humility. This chapter canvasses those accounts before suggesting that two accounts—“low concern” and “limitations-owning”—have become the dominant contemporary views. A recurring feature of the current discussion is the need to distance contemporary accounts of humility from their Christian antecedents, since those antecedents are typically thought to be grounded by unacceptable metaphysical commitments. But the contemporary “memory” of the major contours of Christian humility is mistaken. The chapter isolates a recurring story told by contemporary theorists about what Christian humility once was, and then shows why that story is almost certainly false.

Conclusion

Because it is so clearly indexed to Christian theological convictions, the account of humility developed in this book may appear irrelevant to the field of virtue theory broadly conceived. The Conclusion argues that this way of thinking fails to recognize that the rediscovery of the virtue tradition was originally animated—especially in the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre—by the realization that the moral life is more deeply tradition-dependent than reigning normative theories allow. This book should then be thought of as an exercise in general virtue theory insofar as it attempts carefully to display how one particular virtue, humility, is tradition-dependent all the way down. The Conclusion argues that attempts to specify the virtues in less tradition-dependent ways actually conceal ideological commitments to a liberal political agenda.

Introduction

The Introduction clarifies the aims of the book: to set forth an account of Christian humility as it was envisioned by the early and most radical proponents of Christian humility. The book does not aim to invalidate other views of humility, whether historic or contemporary. The methodological aim of the book is to display what other virtue theorists tend merely to assert—namely, that specific metaphysical and anthropological commitments matter for thorough specifications of the virtues. The Introduction also quotes several passages from the writings of the early desert monastic tradition to show the discrepancy between early Christian and contemporary visions of humility. The task of the book is conceptually to clarify the early Christian stream of wisdom about humility, and to defend it against contemporary detractors.

Humility and its Discontents

The most powerful critique of a radical Christian view of humility is the Humean critique, according to which proper pride is an essential aspect of moral formation and consistent moral action over time. The critique has been taken up with particular force by contemporary feminist and womanist theologians who implicate Christian humility in the history of patriarchal subjugation of women. This chapter addresses the feminist critique. It accepts much of the critique, but shows how the rejection of radical Christian humility does not follow from the critique. What follows, instead, is that radical Christian humility cannot be mandated as normative for members of subjected groups, or for anyone for that matter. Hume is right that proper pride is essential to moral formation, but he is wrong that proper pride is essential for consistent moral action over time. Thus radical Christian humility may be sought voluntarily by one who would like to conform more perfectly to the holiness of Jesus.