I don’t think I have a worldview. Moses had one, Martin Luther King, Jr., had one. And Jesus had the most comprehensive one. All three views were clear, forcefully stated, and led to action. Mine is cloudy and diffuse. What I have are the influences on me from those I love and those I loathed. Influences form attitudes, attitudes become habits, habits may become virtues by which we navigate life. One powerful and mysterious influence on me is humility, modeled by others and life-changing when witnessed.
I don’t remember when I first weighed the difference between humility and humiliation. It may have been when I’d reluctantly joined a party game, reluctantly because I am not good at party games of any sort. This game involved thinking of a word that everyone else had to guess. The fun part was that you would give clues that would throw everybody off, and if you could hold them off for a certain length of time, you won. [This paragraph was omitted in error in the printed version. We apologize.]
At least I think that was the point. It was a long time ago, and I’ve forgotten almost everything but the part where I leaped to my feet in triumph and shouted that I’d won.
There was silence as everyone stared at me. Gently, a friend explained a crucial bit of information. It took a moment before I realized that, in fact, I had misunderstood the rules from the beginning. I’d been losing all along. No one had had the heart to tell me. But now it was obvious—even to me—and there was nothing to do but wither up and die.
The conversations resumed. Chips and salsa were passed around. Voices rose over laughter. The world righted itself and sailed on elliptically around the sun. I shot myself into space at an oblique angle that would place me in orbit around Pluto sometime in 2030.
I’m convinced that humility is vital to our survival. C.S. Lewis put it succinctly when he said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.” That has the ring of truth, but paradoxically, the humble are more self-aware than the rest of us.
There are many in religion and the religions, who are icons of humility. This is not surprising, since some religions make humility the sine qua non of relationships, both human and divine.
Why was this, I wondered. Was the humble person a convenient patsy for those in power? Does God and the gods require the abject humiliation of humans in order to feel good about themselves? Were humble Christians limp rags, wrung out scraps with no personality, no fight, mere toadies and bootlickers?
In philosophy courses in graduate school, I’d felt the sting of Nietzsche’s scorn for the humble. I remembered my grandfather, a gentle man from Yorkshire, who had raised me. He didn’t seem to fit the bill of Nietzsche’s resentful and craven Christian. He was kind, resolute, stony-lipped when in pain, and uncomplaining. He could also stand his ground on moral matters. He was my exemplar.
I wanted to be humble. I wondered if wanting it was a form of pride. Was it something I should pray for? How would I know if I’d truly become humble?
To examine humility rightly—or perhaps righteously—is to vanish into it past the point of articulation or at least of explanation. The truly humble are those who are pointed out by others. Nobody says, “I do humble right” or even “I am humble.” To claim it is to refute it in the claiming.
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Humility is not listed among the classic virtues. Aristotle and Plato would have regarded it with suspicion, if not distaste. In a hierarchical society of elites ruling over a vastly larger population of common people, humility is not only unnecessary, but also socially destructive. It suggests weakness, vacillation, an inability to properly assess one’s position in society.
What threatens one, threatens all. To question the inherent rightness of one’s position is to question the social order that supports and legitimizes that position. Little wonder, then, that those in powerful positions rarely show genuine humility.
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Is humility a virtue? It does not appear in most lists of virtues, either classical or contemporary. Neither is it part of the fruits of the Spirit that Christians find in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.
The word itself derives from the French, humilité, which can be traced back to Classical Latin and the word humus, or earth, in the sense of soil. This is the origin of the word human, the creature whom God fashioned by hand out of the dirt, the one who is close to the earth.
I find this earthy quality deeply attractive. It grounds us (pun inevitable) in this world in a manner both direct and graceful. We are here at home, growing up out of the soil that roots us, sustains us, and to which we shall return. To walk upon this earth with grace is to recognize what we owe it—a passage that takes only what it needs, replaces what it can, and preserves the rest.
It occurs to me that humility is a form of self-knowledge, the inner eye perceiving oneself from the outside. This measuring, assessing, observing, is the work of the self in dialogue with the Spirit.
It is a sign of moral health to recognize and own up to one’s failings. It is the necessary first step toward metanoia or repentance. Paradoxically, one moves forward in spiritual experience through a reversal, a turning away from plunging over the cliff of despair. Peter found it after betraying the Lord; Judas did not.
Humility acknowledges our limitations. The best we have to offer, said Kant, pales by comparison to the requirements of the moral law. And that is the only comparison we should make, he said. To compare ourselves to others is futile and wrong: we are all equally deserving of respect. We learn humility only when we realize how far short of the moral law we fall.
Humility, then, is a clear-eyed lucidity about ourselves. Far from a weakness, it is a recognition both of our limitations and of the spectrum of our potential—frail, complex, conflicted beings as capable of the sublime as we are of monstrosities.
But Kant’s critique, though right on both counts—that we are deserving of respect, and we inevitably fall short of the law—offers no hint of mercy. And mercy, as the humble well know, is the traveling companion of humility.
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If humility begins with the recognition that we lack something essential, then it would be a general precondition to learning, an awareness sometimes arrived at only in the wake of humiliation.
It took me a while, but in time I came up with the phrase, “epistemological humility,” by which I meant, as I explained much later to my students, that there is no shame in admitting one’s ignorance. It’s only when we try to brazen it out that we get ourselves entangled. And silence, in those situations, is rarely taken for wisdom. Humility as a prerequisite to learning is not passive but open and alert.
If epistemological humility is one of the gateways to learning, where does it lead one in the realm of the spirit? In religions, notoriously, there is a lot of bowing and prostrating.
The Bible is full of references to bowing before God, some of it ritualized and public and some spontaneous and private. The word in the New Testament translated as “worship” means “to bow the knee,” as before royalty. In the context of kings and generals, sovereign power demanded reverence and awe. To bow the knee in worship was a position of vulnerability exposing oneself to blessing—or decapitation—by the king.
A ritual that is better understood is what we Adventists call “The Ordinance of Humility.” This is the ritual washing of the feet of another person, combined later with the Communion Service or Eucharist.
During Jesus’ time, visits to someone’s home would begin with the washing of the visitor’s feet by the host, a ritual that had both practical and symbolic value where most people wore sandals or were barefoot as they trudged up and down the dusty roads. Today’s ritual, where performed, is almost purely symbolic. No one would ever commit the social faux pas of showing up at church barefoot for the Ordinance of Humility.
Our usual practice when I was younger was for the men and boys to gather in one room of the church while the women and girls found another room. You would ask someone if you could wash their feet, or you’d wash the feet of your father or brother.
We were encouraged to participate with visitors or people we did not know. This resulted in a curious intimacy not usually shared with strangers. For me, the act of going down on one knee before someone else and washing their feet—especially someone I did not know well—was not a lowering of status but a breach of a rather starched etiquette. It had the benefit of breaking down barriers and giving one freedom to reach beyond the familiar and the comfortable. It got one’s attention by challenging the bland expectations of the congregant and forcing him or her to think about the relation of humility to the value of others.
In the New Testament stories, the disciple Peter resists the washing of his feet by Jesus. The reversal of roles—the teacher serving the student—horrifies Peter. But Jesus makes it clear that leadership, especially in religion, calls for humility. I am among you as one who serves, he said, with the clear implication they were to do the same.
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If there is an entrance point to a human spirituality in these politically and religiously fraught days, it is through humility. Just realizing that we don’t have to know everything, win at everything, or even pretend to anything, is liberating. It’s more than that, of course. Humility reorients our self-identity away from grasping to accepting. “Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be opened to you.” To be humans of the earth, without pretense or pride, simplifies one’s life.
Humility clarifies our limitations without crippling the reach of our imagination. And it is humility which liberates us from envy and jealousy. It is not too proud to accept the gift of hope.
Freely given service through humility renders irrelevant the perks of power, levels hierarchies, and cleanses the spirit for the upsets, the reversals, the unexpected in a life. Perhaps the Ordinance of Humility is a foretaste of that, a reminder of what could be if we are strong enough to bow the knee without fear or guile.
If I am to think my way to a sober estimate of myself, as Paul says, it calls me to regard myself without external comparison. This is me standing naked before God and the world, just as I am. The “measure of faith” that God deals to each of us is ours alone, understood by no one but ourselves. The one thing we can be sure of, if we can believe it, is that God’s estimate of us, unclouded by the past tense, is forever forming and reforming out of the deepest, dearest, image of our potential.
Barry Casey has published in Adventist Society for the Arts, Brevity, Faculty Focus, Lighthouse Weekly, Mountain Views, Patheos, Spectrum Magazine, The Dewdrop, and The Purpled Nail. His collection of essays, Wandering, Not Lost: Essays on Faith, Doubt, and Mystery, was published by Wipf and Stock in November 2019. He writes from Burtonsville, Maryland. Email him at: [email protected]