Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory (Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology) 9780198818397, 0198818394

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OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY Series Editors Michael C. Rea Oliver D. Crisp

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OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY Analytic Theology utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy for the purposes of constructive Christian theology, paying attention to the Christian tradition and development of doctrine. This innovative series of studies showcases high-quality, cutting-edge research in this area, in monographs and symposia. PUBLISHED TITLES INCLUDE: Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God William Hasker

The Theological Project of Modernism Faith and the Conditions of Mineness Kevin W. Hector The End of the Timeless God R. T. Mullins Ritualized Faith Essays on the Philosophy of Liturgy Terence Cuneo In Defense of Conciliar Christology A Philosophical Essay Timothy Pawl Atonement Eleonore Stump Humility and Human Flourishing A Study in Analytic Moral Theology Michael W. Austin

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Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory KENT DUNNINGTON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Kent Dunnington 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959176 ISBN 978–0–19–881839–7 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

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To my mother, Paula And my grandparents, Velva and Marvin

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Preface In a memoir published shortly after his death, Paul Kalanithi recounts his final days as a young physician facing terminal cancer. Diagnosed at 35 with stage IV metastatic lung cancer, Kalanithi struggles to understand what could make his shortened life worthwhile. The memoir is laced with reflections on identity, for Kalanithi discovers that his illness threatens him with meaninglessness by sabotaging the story of Paul Kalanithi the brilliant young neurosurgeon. One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn’t lifealtering, it was life-shattering. . . . My life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close. I was physically debilitated, my imagined future and my personal identity collapsed, and I faced the same existential quandaries my patients faced. (Kalanithi 2016: 120)

Kalanithi is paralyzed by an inability to formulate a new identity that could make intelligible his remaining time. Who would I be, going forward, and for how long? Invalid, scientist, teacher? Bioethicist? Neurosurgeon once again, as Emma [his doctor] had implied? Stay-at-home dad? Writer? Who could, or should, I be? (Kalanithi 2016: 147)

Kalanithi’s description of the need to know who he could and should be in order to go on is a description in extremis of the process whereby all of us, or nearly all of us, attempt to make meaningful stories of our lives. We project onto our future some picture of the self we could and would be, and that picture orients the significant decisions of our lives. We are so well versed in this process that it usually goes unnoticed, but the formulation, rehearsal, and management of these self-ideals takes up much of our moral energy. The slightest alteration in our perceived possibilities triggers a lightningfast adjustment to the picture of who we could and should be, such adjustment seemingly required for us to go on. More significant alterations—a rejection letter in the mail, an unexpected pregnancy,

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a career-ending injury, a broken engagement—can derail us much longer, since our picture of who we are and will be requires farreaching revision if it is to sustain our future. In severe instances— chronic or terminal illness, the betrayal of a spouse, the loss of a child—our self-ideal is so completely shattered that we cannot move forward, wandering instead in a wasteland of confusion. This perpetual effort to construct for ourselves a sense of who we are and might be I call “the quest for identity.” I have for some time thought of this quest for identity, inevitable though it may seem, as mainly a temptation. I have thought of it, indeed, as the heart of pride. I have thought of these self-ideals, which are so abruptly snatched from us by the thieves of fortune and which we so assiduously remake, as like the garments in the Garden of Eden: pitiful attempts to cover our nakedness; necessary, perhaps, given our condition, but artifacts of our misery nonetheless and susceptible as all such earthly treasures to be devoured by moths and hollowed out by rust. I have thought that we will most certainly be freed from the quest for identity if our future is in God, and that we might taste that future even now just to the extent we abandon ourselves to God. I learned to think this way from the Christian saints, monks, mystics, and martyrs that appear in the pages of this book, but, long before I had encountered them, I learned to think this way from the saints who raised me. I can still remember the first time I gave my “testimony.” In the little churches that nourished my childhood faith, fledgling denominational splinterings of the Wesleyan–Holiness movement, Wednesday-night services were for testimonies. For a young child, going to the altar meant “getting saved,” but standing from the pew to give a personal testimony meant you were getting serious about walking with God. The people who instructed me in the faith loved to testify to their experience of God in their lives, but they otherwise shared little about their inner lives. My mother and my maternal grandparents—the saints who raised me, to whom I dedicate this book—are not easily brought to extended ruminations on their subjectivity, except, again, to describe how the Spirit is at work in them. In this respect, they resemble the early Christian saint Augustine, one of my main conversation partners in this book, sometimes mistakenly called the father of the modern memoir or autobiography. Such a description is a mistake, for Augustine had no interest in exploring

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his personal subjectivity, except as a way of finding his life in God and finding God present in his life. Our culture is opposed to any such reticence about personal subjectivity. We can think of little more interesting than the quest for identity, which is why quintessentially modern novels, as Paul Griffiths (2014: 226) observes, “occur almost entirely on the stage of their characters’ inner theater.” As such, modern readers are typically a little disappointed by Augustine’s Confessions. We think it would have been more interesting if it had not been written as a prayer. Although they would not have put it in these terms, I learned from the saints who raised me that my hope should be to make of my life a prayer, which is to say, a thing transparent to God, in which there is no “I” that could stand in the way of God’s light. It is no accident, I think, that I learned this in the Wesleyan tradition. In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Wesley (1872: 113) writes: For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with thee and by thee; as the air which is void and dark, is capable of being filled with the light of the sun, who withdraws it every day to restore it the next, there being nothing in the air that either appropriates this light or resists it.

I am modern enough that I struggle to delight in Wesley’s vision, let alone wholeheartedly to desire it. I am somewhat appalled by it. I suspect I am not alone here. Isn’t there something right and good about Kalanithi’s wish to forge a new and workable identity? Isn’t there something a bit too humble, indeed a bit servile, in Wesley’s apparent readiness to disappear? The reader will see that I share these questions. Indeed, much of the book engages a series of powerful modern and contemporary defenses of “proper pride” as a limit placed upon humility. Nevertheless, I cannot shake the sense that Wesley is right, that there is no such limit, and that what Wesley describes here would be the hope of someone characterized by full humility. This book is an effort to put such a radical perspective on humility into conversation with the best modern and contemporary thought about humility. Those who are suspicious of the radical perspective suggested here will find much to interest them in what follows. I began to work out some of the book’s ideas and arguments in the following articles: “Humility: An Augustinian Perspective,” Pro Ecclesia, 25/1 (2016), 18–43; “Is There a Christian Virtue Epistemology?”

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Res Philosophica, 93/3 (2016), 637–52; and “Intellectual Humility and the Ends of the Virtues: Conflicting Aretaic Desiderata,” Political Theology, 18/2 (2017), 95–117. Many people have helped me write this book. I began studying humility over the span of two research fellowships, one at St Louis University and one at Biola University, both of which were funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Matt Frise and Eleonore Stump were especially encouraging at St Louis University, and Stephen Pardue has been a helpful conversation partner ever since our time together as fellows at Biola. I benefited from a summer seminar at Calvin College, also funded by Templeton, where Kyle Bennett, Craig Boyd, Nathan Carlson, Aaron Cobb, Rebecca DeYoung, Kevin Timpe, James van Slyke, and Ron Wright each offered comments on drafts of earlier essays on humility. Several of my colleagues at Biola have interacted with parts of this book, including David Ciocchi, Doug Geivett, Pete Hill, Matt Jenson, Adam Johnson, Ryan Peterson, and Melissa Schubert. Tom Crisp and Gregg Ten Elshof have been especially inspiring colleagues and friends at Biola, and I thank them along with the rest of the Seal Beach round table who took time to read and comment on portions of the book: Jason Baehr, Michael Pace, Steve Porter, and Dan Speak. My best friend, Ben Wayman, as usual, read every word, offering helpful comments and consistent encouragement. Stanley Hauerwas’s influence on my approach will be evident, and I am grateful for his support and direction. Bob Roberts was a sort of elder statesmen of many of the Templeton-funded projects, and the opportunity to learn from him has been one of the highlights of the last few years. I interact with Bob’s work in this book more than with any other contemporary scholar’s. Although my engagement with his views is sometimes critical, it should be clear that I think his work on humility (and proper pride) is the most noteworthy. Finally, while writing this book I met, and courted, and proposed to, and married my wife, Rachel. To Rachel, and our daughter, Gemma: thank you for opening your hearts and your lives to me, for believing in me, and for surprising me with so much happiness. What an unimaginable gift.

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Contents Introduction: To Go Against Self

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1 Forgetting Christian Humility

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2 Remembering Christian Humility

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3 Mundane Humility

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4 Radical Christian Humility

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5 Humility’s Destiny

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6 Humility and its Discontents

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7 Becoming Humble

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Conclusion: The Task of Christian Virtue Theory References Index of Names Index of Subjects

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Introduction To Go Against Self

This book offers an account of Christian humility. More specifically, it offers an interpretation of the dominant stream of thought and practice about humility in early Christianity. The Christian tradition is, of course, not unanimous in its view of humility, and late-medieval treatments of humility often dilute the more revolutionary early Christian views. I stick resolutely to the early and most radical strand of Christian thinking about humility, which is found especially in Augustine and the early monastic tradition, using their most extreme statements as a test case for the account being developed. Throughout the book I use the descriptor “radical Christian humility” as a way of signaling this stream of the tradition. My goal is to provide an account of what most early Christians took humility to be. It is not my goal to invalidate other accounts of humility or even to show their inferiority. The exercise is comparative, but only for the purpose of bringing into starker relief the distinctiveness of a particular early Christian vision. The reader will be confused and disappointed if she is looking for a definition of humility that will silence every other and incorporate every conceivable intuition about what counts as authentic humility. There are many concepts of humility, bearing family resemblances. Perhaps one of them latches on to what real humility is, perhaps they all miss the mark in some important respect. I am not interested in trying to defend an account of radical Christian humility against any alternative account. I am simply interested in getting radical Christian humility into clear view.

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This interest was sparked by my attempt to understand contemporary (mostly analytic) philosophical treatments of humility alongside early and medieval Christian commentary on humility. Trying to bring these two bodies of literature into fruitful conversation convinced me that early Christian notions of humility are obscured by most contemporary philosophical theorizing. Saying that contemporary philosophical accounts of humility “obscure” early Christian understandings is different than saying they “reject” early Christian understandings. Many, indeed most, contemporary philosophical accounts of humility quite self-consciously reject what is taken to be the Christian view of humility, even though they admit that Christianity is responsible for making humility a central virtue of the moral life. What is taken by these contemporary theories to be the Christian view of humility is not, however, the Christian view, at least not in its earliest and most originating articulations. As Chapter 1 shows, the philosophical study of humility is hampered by historical forgetfulness. There are many reasons for that forgetfulness, but among them three are most determinative. First, early Christian texts do not offer “accounts” of humility in the philosophical sense; they do not set as their primary goal the clear analysis of a concept or the precise articulation of the core disposition of a virtue. Early Christians were more concerned to enjoin, teach, and narratively display the virtues than they were to define or carefully delineate them. By contrast, contemporary virtue ethics is mostly confined to the offering of such accounts. When contemporary theorists look to the Christian past for an account of humility, they find only an assortment of sayings that can too easily be pressed into some variant of a contemporary view. It often turns out that Christian humility so misconstrued is the perfect foil to whatever view is being set forth. I take a different approach, beginning with the (often strange) things that were said about humility and the (often strange) practices that were thought to conduce to humility in early Christian tradition, and working from there to develop an account of radical Christian humility. Second, because of what could be assumed by its intended audience, most early Christian commentary on humility does not make explicit the theological commitments that underwrite the view of humility being expressed. This is especially true in the early monastic literature, where even scriptural support is sparse, let alone extended theological rumination. I argue, however, that the most

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distinctive themes of early Christian theology—specifically the cruciform character of salvation and the triunity of God—underwrite the radical strand of early Christian thinking on humility. Because humility was so buttressed by theological convictions, it is appropriate to talk specifically of Christian humility. The account of humility set forth here makes less and less sense the more it is abstracted from a set of theological commitments unique to the Christian theological tradition. And, third, the influence of modern moral thought, especially David Hume’s, on our intuitions about the proper relationship between humility and pride is so decisive that we moderns can hardly believe what early Christians said about humility, or else we assume they must have been perverse. Because of Hume’s influence, this book focuses on the category of “proper pride” more than I originally envisioned. Significant portions of the book interact with the best contemporary defense of proper pride from a self-consciously Christian perspective. I challenge the dominant contemporary intuition according to which any account of virtuous humility will require a counterbalancing account of proper pride, although I share the set of concerns that underwrite this intuition, concerns powerfully expressed in feminist and womanist critiques of the legacy of Christian humility. I show how one can take those concerns seriously without rejecting a radical Christian understanding of humility. It is because the radical Christian approach to humility is so discordant with modern assumptions about virtue and its relation to human flourishing that my argument has the potential to display the difference Christ makes to the way Christians conceive of the moral life. Even though the book is an effort to reclaim a tradition of thought about humility that is obscured by contemporary philosophical virtue theory, I interact with virtue theory throughout. Some theological commentators allege it is a mistake to think of humility as a virtue, or to approach questions about the nature and value of humility from the perspective of virtue ethics (Louf 2000; Foulcher 2015). I understand the worry: there is indeed a profound tension between, on the one hand, the eudaimonism that frames classical thought about the virtues and, on the other hand, the severely selfsacrificial dimensions of early Christian humility. Abandoning the field of virtue ethics for a supposedly pure theological approach is a mistake, however, because it cordons off philosophical wisdom from theological wisdom and thereby misses an opportunity to see how

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Christ makes all things new, including our understandings of virtue, human flourishing, and human destiny. Humility names a human disposition that many have thought crucial for ultimate human flourishing. As such, it is the name of a virtue. Rather than abandon the field of virtue ethics altogether, I prefer to follow Augustine and allow this virtue theologically understood to challenge and unsettle traditional philosophical ways of thinking about the moral life. By showing how interesting it can be to put Christian theology in dialogue with contemporary virtue theory, I hope to show that it is a mistake to attempt to carry out contemporary philosophical virtue theory in a way that insists on the traditional distinction between theology and ethics. Although I will not often step back to ask broader methodological questions about the field of virtue theory generally, the conclusion of the book will do just that, and readers who find themselves distrustful of my approach should read the conclusion ahead of time. Although Augustine’s is the dominant voice in this book, it was the lives and sayings of the earliest Christian monks, the desert mothers and fathers, that triggered my original suspicions that we have lost track of radical Christian humility. In the fourth and fifth centuries , Christians fled to the Egyptian deserts in search of humility. They prized humility as a preeminent virtue: Abba Or said, “The crown of the monk is humility.”

(Ward 1975: 247)

John the Dwarf said, “Humility and the fear of God are above all virtues.” (Ward 1975: 90)

As the scripturally mandated form of discipleship: Abba John of the Thebaid said, “First of all the monk must gain humility; for it is the first commandment of the Lord who said: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ ” (Ward 1975: 106) Abba John of Lycopolis said, “The text of Scripture . . . says, ‘Whosoever humbleth himself shall be exalted.’ And so, my children, first of all let us discipline ourselves to attain humility, since this is the essential foundation of all the virtues.” (Ward 1980: 59–61)

And as the path to salvation: Amma Theodora said, “Neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true humility can do that.” (Ward 1975: 84)

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Amma Syncletica said, “Just as one cannot build a ship without nails, so it is impossible to be saved without humility.” (Ward 1975: 235)

No other character trait mattered more to these early desert Christians than humility. The classical quartet of cardinal virtues— courage, temperance, prudence, and justice—are barely mentioned in their sayings. The Christian trio of theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—combined are discussed less than humility. If they were extreme in their privileging of humility, the desert mothers and fathers were equally extreme in their formulations of the demands of humility. They did not offer definitions or philosophical accounts of humility, but they recurrently noted four practices that both engendered and expressed humility. First, the practice of submission: Abba Poemen said, “Do not do your own will; you need rather to humble yourself before your brother.” (Ward 1975: 189) Amma Syncletica said, “Obedience is preferable to asceticism. [Asceticism] teaches pride, [obedience] humility. . . . As long as we are in the monastery, we must not seek our own will, nor follow our personal opinion, but obey our fathers in the faith.” (Ward 1975: 234)

Second, the practice of steadfastness under physical suffering: A brother asked Abba Cronius, “How can a man become humble?” . . . . The old man said, “In my opinion, he should withdraw from all business and give himself to bodily affliction and with all his might remember that he will leave his body at the judgement of God.” (Ward 1975: 115) The old man said to Abba John the Dwarf, “Go, beseech God to stir up warfare so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.” So he besought God and when warfare came, he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, “Lord, give me strength for the fight.” (Ward 1975: 88)

Third, the practice of quietly bearing injustice: A hermit was asked, “What is humility?” He said, “It is if you forgive a brother who has wronged you before he is sorry.” (Ward 2003: 163) A brother took it upon himself to accept any charge made against his community, so that he even accused himself of fornication. Some of the monks, who did not know the truth about his life, began to murmur against him, saying, “This man does much wickedness and no work.”

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Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory The abbot, knowing the truth, said to the brothers, “I would rather have one of his mats with humility than all your mats with pride.” (Ward 2003: 168)

And, fourth, the practice of self-abasement: Abba Tithoes said, “The way of humility is this: self-control, prayer, and thinking yourself inferior to all creatures.” (Ward 1975: 237) A brother asked Alonius, “What is humility?” The hermit said, “To be lower than brute beasts and to know that they are not condemned.” (Ward 2003: 158)

In sum, for these earliest Christian monks, humility is the foundational virtue of Christian discipleship, essential to salvation, nurtured and expressed through willing submission, steadfast suffering, silence under injustice, and self-abasement. From the perspective of modern psychology or moral philosophy, such an ethical regime appears perverse in its valorization of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and selfhatred. The Sayings and Lives of the desert mothers and fathers read like one long assault on the stable, secure, and significant self presupposed as normative by most modern psychology and moral philosophy. Evagrius said: “To go against self is the beginning of salvation” (Ward 2003: 153). On its own, this is conventional wisdom; moral formation requires self-opposition. But to what end? Both ancient (Greek) and modern (psychological) wisdom has it that proper selfopposition is in service to a more integrated self. By successfully opposing some of their desires, conflicted moral agents slowly retrain their first-order desires into alignment with their second-order desires. This is no program of war on the self per se; rather war is to be waged on some aspect of the self—wayward desire, for example—that inhibits the efficient functioning of the self. The aim of such self-opposition is, therefore, better alignment between reason and desire in the psyche and, correspondingly, more harmonious and secure personal agency. This is not the kind of self-opposition envisioned by Evagrius, or the other desert ammas and abbas, however. One searches their sayings in vain for an endorsement of an integrated and powerful self, or for any notion that the monk’s quest for humility must be counterbalanced by a measure of proper pride and self-esteem. Their attacks on the self are relentless, and there is little discernible limit

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placed on those attacks. For instance, “Zacharias took his cowl from his head, and put it beneath his feet and stamped on it, and said, ‘Unless a man stamps upon self like that, he cannot be a monk’” (Ward 2003: 153). What is the recommendation here? Is Abba Zacharias enjoining destruction of the self entirely? This appears to lead to paradox, for the possessor of the virtue of complete humility would, by definition, cease to be a self. But virtues are attributes of selves, or so it seems. So the possessor of humility would then be, by definition, incapable of possessing the virtue of humility. The reductio is not beyond criticism, but it prompts a legitimate worry about whether or not the desert perspective on humility can be stated in a noncontradictory way. Perhaps the self-opposition is directed not at the destruction of the self, but rather at the forgetting of the self. Abba John of Lycopolis commends the monk who “has not only denied himself but even become forgetful of himself ” (Ward 1980: 62). Yet such a psychological state is too fleeting, one might think, to be constitutive of the psychological profile of a human virtue. Virtues are supposed to be stable character traits, so pegging the virtue to a rare and ephemeral psychological state is unpromising. This critique is not unassailable, either, but it raises a similar question about whether we can understand these desert sayings as anything other than metaphors or exaggerations. Rowan Williams (1991: 27) has described this strand of desert wisdom as a tradition committed to “unselfing.” It is a provocative phrase, and indeed I will adopt it as a description of the kind of account of humility to which I think early Christians were committed. The challenge is to see if it could be coherent to conceptualize a virtue of a person that in some meaningful sense does away with the self.1 I try to develop such an account of humility, an account I call

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An anonymous reader raises worries about anachronism here. Citing Charles Taylor’s thesis (1989: x) that the sense that we have “selves” with “inner depths” is a distinctively modern one, this reader worries that my account of radical Christian humility may obscure the conceptual shifts that attended the notion of “self ” from classical, through Christian, to modern ethics. This is a legitimate worry, the sort that attends every historical retrieval project. I offer three brief responses. First, Taylor’s thesis is itself contested, and I remain unsure whether the conceptual shifts are as clear and extreme as he alleges. Second, Taylor indexes the modern notion of self, particularly the sense of “inwardness,” to Augustine, my primary interlocutor as I develop an

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 . I argue that radical Christian humility really is about the stripping-away of the self insofar as the self is identified with what some psychologists call one’s ego ideal. The account has some formal similarities to a prominent contemporary view of humility, but some important differences as well. I also try to display the attraction of such an account of Christian humility from a theological perspective. In Chapter 1, I offer a typology of contemporary accounts of humility and show how contemporary virtue theorists have settled on a standard account of how humility might be related to Christianity. In Chapter 2, I show how Augustine’s thinking about humility problematizes the standard account of Christian humility, and also stretches the best contemporary accounts beyond the breaking point. In Chapter 3, I show how contemporary theorizing about humility is mired in what I call a “mundane” approach to the virtue, indebted especially to David Hume’s critique of Christian humility. In Chapter 4, I offer an account of radical Christian humility, distinguishing it from mundane accounts of humility. Getting clear on just what pride and humility have to do with the “self” is a central undertaking in this chapter, for unselfing is coherent as a description of a virtue only if there is a way of understanding the self such that losing it is consistent with flourishing. In Chapter 5, I show how radical Christian humility requires a distinctively Christian eschatology and theological anthropology for its intelligibility. Even if there is a coherent statement of Christian humility as unselfing, worries remain. The early monastic tradition enjoined strategies of self-opposition that conflict with dominant sensibilities about proper care for oneself. For instance: look for opportunities to submit your will to that of another; welcome the chance patiently to undergo physical suffering; make holy use of being wrongfully accused; consistently practice thinking the worst of yourself. Clearly this is bad advice for many; no loving parent would so instruct her child. But is it good advice for anyone? The dominant critique of this account of radical Christian humility. Whatever may be true of classical ethics, I think it fair to say that Augustine’s notion of the self was close enough to our modern notion that we can (with Rowan Williams) speak of his account of humility as an “unselfing” one, without equivocation. Third, one of the most prominent contemporary accounts of humility, the   account, leans heavily on the notion of “self,” without doing anything to define it. At the very least, I hope my efforts in Chapter 4 show how much work is required to get clear on what we mean today by “self,” let alone what the ancients might have meant.

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strand of purported wisdom on humility is that it undervalues human dignity in a way that motivates and reinforces self-hatred, apathy, and victimization. Chapter 6 offers a response to critiques of this kind. The response, briefly, is that the critiques show, not that the radical Christian understanding of humility is wrong, but that, like many virtues, radical Christian humility has a developmental trajectory. In the final chapter, I consider the effectiveness of the monastic directives to humiliation. Contemporary commentary on humility insists on a strong evaluative distinction between humility and humiliation: humility is good, humiliation bad. This distinction is not made by the desert mothers and fathers, who commend suffering, embarrassment, and false accusation as pathways to humility. How, then, should persons in pursuit of radical Christian humility suffer themselves to be humbled? Is it something to be sought through asceticism or merely awaited in senseless humiliation? Can ordinary people aim for humility in the ways prescribed by these radical monks? And, if we can hope for and actively pursue such humility in our own lives, can we enjoin it on others? Chapter 7 responds to these questions. The title of the book indicates a focus on Christian virtue theory, but it would be false advertising to say this is an essay about Christian virtue theory. I will rarely step back to offer commentary on my method or to canvass the field of virtue theory, except in the conclusion to the book. This is an essay in Christian virtue theory, however, in the sense that it exemplifies the conviction that Christianity makes a difference for how we think about the virtues. There are virtue theorists, including Christian virtue theorists, who do not think the particularities of Christianity (or of any distinctive religious tradition) matter for giving truthful accounts of the nature and value of the virtues. Even those who acknowledge that background beliefs do matter to virtue theory often fail to display in their own thinking and writing just how and how much such convictions matter. I hope this book will display how much theology can matter for thinking about the virtues. In the end, there is no distinctive field of investigation called “virtue theory.” Accounts of the virtues are derivates of our metaphysics, including our anthropology. We overlook this just to the extent that some metaphysical and anthropological commitments are so prevalent in our age that we forget they might have been otherwise— and could be. Such commitments are encoded in those supposedly

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universal intuitions that analytic philosophers are so skilled at pumping. The extent to which an account of any virtue seems intuitive is, therefore, less a litmus of its truth than of its corroboration with prevailing metaphysical assumptions. I can only ask the reader’s patience when the account of humility presented here seems beyond the bounds of good sense. Against the near-consensus of modern commentators who interpret early Christian statements about humility as a reflection of perversely low self-esteem, I will argue such statements are strange to our ears because they reflect the strangeness of a three-personed God whose resurrection life is the eternal act of cruciform charity.

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1 Forgetting Christian Humility INTRODUCTION My aim in this book is to clarify a certain strand of Christian wisdom on the concept of humility, and to show how this strand can be developed into a coherent account of humility that requires for its full display a distinctively Christian eschatology and theological anthropology. The account is different from any contemporary account but has interesting parallels with one of them in particular. And the account I develop draws the lines between humility and Christianity differently than contemporary commentators do. Contemporary humility discourse overlooks how thoroughly humility was once buttressed by specifically Christian claims. Given humility’s distinctively Jewish–Christian heritage, and given how unimaginable it would have been for classical pagans to consider humility a virtue, it is striking how eager contemporary thinkers are to translate humility into a secular idiom. After all, humility was not just any Christian virtue; it was the Christian virtue that most decisively represented an alternative to classical visions of human excellence. Aristotle, for instance, had only pity or contempt for the humble man (tapeinos—sometimes translated as “the lowly” or “the servile”—see NE 4.3; Pol. 4.11, 8.2) and his paragon of virtue, the magnanimous man, is happily self-assured, self-focused, and self-fulfilled (NE 4.3). Augustine, by contrast, found pagan virtues mere semblances of virtue just to the extent they were underwritten by the quest for honor and self-exaltation rather than by humility (civ. Dei 5.12). Indeed, for Augustine humility so opposed the ethos of Greco-Roman excellence that it continually threatened to undermine “virtue” (arête) as a meaningful moral category for Christians. (It was Luther, that early modern Augustinian, who went all the way here,

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denying the category of virtue outright in the name of Christian humility.) In short, introducing humility into the table of virtues triggered a reappraisal and reorientation of the entire tradition of thought about the virtues. And yet, humility is fashionable among contemporary virtue theorists, most of whom confidently assume humility can be extracted from its original theological context. My thesis is that such efforts to “modernize humility” (Sinha 2012) depend on widespread forgetfulness about the radical nature of humility as received and transformed by Christianity. This chapter develops that thesis in three stages. First, I provide an overview of contemporary accounts of humility, proposing that there are really five major options on the scene. Second, I provide an overview of what I call the standard account of Christian humility. Third, I provide several reasons to think this standard account false.

CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS OF HUMILITY Since Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), philosophers have shown renewed interest in the ancient philosophical tradition of reflection on the virtues. Two kinds of investigation emerged from this renewed interest: first, studies of the relevance of the category of virtue to moral, and, more recently, epistemological theory; second, careful conceptual inquiry into an array of specific virtues. Among the latter are a series of essays in which philosophers explore the nature and value of humility. As the literature has grown, a rich conversation among (mostly analytic) philosophers has developed around the virtue of humility. Summarizing the conversation is inevitably simplistic, but I think five major views have emerged. There are different ways of distinguishing the views, but two are especially helpful. First, views can be distinguished based on whether they offer descriptive or revisionary definitions of humility. Descriptive definitions aim to elucidate the core meaning of the word “humility” as it is used by competent contemporary language-users. Revisionary definitions, on the other hand, aim to champion an understanding of humility that, although perhaps novel, better serves contemporary moral needs. Second, views can be distinguished based on whether they place primary

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emphasis on the affective, behavioral, or cognitive dimensions of humility. Almost no one denies that humility (like any virtue) will have affective, behavioral, and cognitive features (the ABCs of any virtue, so to speak1), but typically one dimension is privileged as essential and as giving rise to the other dimensions. Is humility primarily about what you care about (affective), or about what you do (behavioral), or about what you think (cognitive)? It is striking how cleanly these distinctions map onto the contemporary philosophical attempts to pin down humility. The first wave of attempts conceptually to pinpoint humility offered descriptive, cognitive-focused definitions of humility; the second wave offered revisionary, behavioral-focused definitions of humility, and the third wave offered, and continues to offer, descriptive, affective-focused definitions of humility. There are exceptions to the trend, but that is the basic pattern. Here, then, are the five major views. I will cite those whose articulation of the view in question has been most influential, then note subsequently those whose views are in the same ballpark. Although hers was not the first contemporary attempt to clarify humility, Julia Driver’s essay “Virtues of Ignorance” (1989) invigorated the discussion and provided the point of departure for later efforts. In fact, Driver did not set out to address humility at all. Her essay was about modesty, and she clearly distinguished modesty from humility (Driver 1989: 378 n. 5). However, her definition of modesty has become so entrenched in the literature on humility that it counts as an important account of humility nonetheless.2 On this account, humility is one of the so-called virtues of ignorance, a virtue that requires an agent to believe false things about herself. : Humility is the disposition to underestimate your worth, skills, achievements, status, or entitlements.  has no supporters besides Driver. Two challenges have been lodged against it. First, there is something confused about making a human defect—error in judgment—an essential component 1

I learned this handy mnemonic from Dan McKaughan. Whereas Driver made a clear distinction between humility and modesty, others have claimed the two concepts are interchangeable. The modesty/humility distinction is a mess in the literature. For example, Driver (1989), Flanagan (1990), Ben-Ze’ev (1993), and Nuyen (1998) all offer accounts of modesty to be distinguished from accounts of humility, yet their views are treated by others as accounts of humility. I will follow suit. 2

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of a human excellence like a virtue. Second, if erring is required for humility, then humility could be cultivated only through selfdeception. Despite these alleged flaws,  is important because it puts center-stage a curious feature of the virtue of humility—namely, that there is something odd, if not paradoxical, about self-assertions of humility. Presumably, if humility is a virtue, the possessor of humility on Driver’s view would not think she possessed it—she would underestimate her virtue. It would be a point in its favor if an account of humility could explain what is odd about self-assertions of humility. One of the strengths of the unselfing account of Christian humility I will later develop is that it nicely explains the strangeness of self-assertions of humility. The other account of humility offered in the first wave of the humility conversation is still frequently presented in the literature as the dominant or common-sense view of humility, despite the fact that it has only two prominent defenders, Norvin Richards (1988) and Owen Flanagan (1990). (It continues to be set forth as the dominant view largely because it provides a clear foil to later views.) Richards and Flanagan disagree with Driver’s contention that humility requires an error in judgment, but they agree with her that humility is fundamentally a cognitive state. The humble person is defined by what she thinks of herself. -: Humility is consistent with accurate selfestimation; it consists of the disposition to resist the temptation to overestimate one’s worth, skills, achievements, status, or entitlements. Both  and - prioritize the cognitive component of humility, and this feature supposedly exposes both accounts to counterexamples. Roger is the second-best tennis player in the world, but he does not know it because his coach is always putting him down. He thinks he is about the tenth-best player in the world. He underestimates his tennis abilities. Still, his tennis game is all he thinks and talks about, and when someone does not acknowledge he is a top-ten player, he obsesses over the perceived slight. Most people would deny Roger is humble, which, the objector claims, entails that  is not the correct account of humility (after all, Roger does underestimate his tennis abilities). Suppose he gets a new coach who is less severe. He comes to realize he is in fact the second-best tennis player in the world. He is still obsessed with his tennis status, though, and has even more opportunity to feel slighted.

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He is not overestimating his tennis game (after all, he does not think he is the best), but this fact does not seem to secure his humility about it, which, the objector alleges, entails that - is not the correct account of humility either. Thus some have thought that emphasizing the cognitive dimension of humility misses what is essential in most common-sense notions of humility. It looks like Roger is “full of himself,” and it looks like neither underestimation nor nonoverestimation of his skills, achievements, status, and so on necessarily prevents this. Or perhaps not. Maybe the common-sense notion that humility is inconsistent with egocentrism is just a hangover from what Daniel Statman (1992: 430) calls the “pessimistic view” of human nature, inherited by Western civilization from Jewish and Christian religion. Statman argues such pessimism makes sense only given a low view of human worth in comparison to a God who is worthy of worship, and thus “humility is most intelligible within a religious frame of thought.” Does Statman mean that humility is no longer a meaningful virtue outside of religious contexts? Statman (1992: 432) answers: “Well, yes and no: yes, if one means by that a virtue consisting of a certain kind of (low) self-assessment; and no, if one means a disposition towards a certain kind of behavior.” Accordingly, the second wave of humility accounts, offered by Statman (1992), Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (1993), and Alex Sinha (2012), consists of revisionary definitions of humility aimed at reforming our notion of the virtue for contemporary, secular purposes. These accounts propose that how a person thinks of himself matters morally only insofar as it issues in behavior; thus humility should be understood as the virtue that prevents egocentric thoughts or attitudes from spilling over into egocentric behavior. : Humility is the disposition to refrain from arrogant and boastful behavior, especially from acting as though one’s real or imagined superiority grants one more extensive moral rights than anyone else. The problem with this account, according to some, is that it appears to change the subject altogether. No one doubts the disposition described is a valuable one, but does it have anything to do with humility? Suppose we scratched humility from the table of virtues altogether. Would we be left without resources for naming the disposition to resist the temptation to treat oneself as morally more

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entitled than anyone else? Not at all. The virtue of justice includes such a disposition.3 If the objection is successful, the lesson is that there are limits to how far a concept can be persuasively redefined. At the very least, those who would like to defend a revisionary account like  need to explain why we should redefine an old virtue instead of just name a new one—or redirect our attention to another old one, like justice. In the case of humility, the virtue has been historically entwined with the internal quest to subdue the ego. If such a quest is irrelevant or mistaken, then humility is probably not a virtue. The third wave of accounts of humility has focused more intently on the ego-subduing nature of humility. These accounts share in common an attempt to offer a descriptive definition of humility that privileges the affective. On these views, humility has to do primarily with our care or concern related to the self. Here is the first of the third-wave views.  : Humility is the disposition to have unusually low concern about one’s own worth, skills, achievements, status, or entitlements because of one’s intense concern for other apparent goods. There are a number of accounts in the ballpark of  , and each refines the definition above in ways that its author thinks best articulates the virtue and avoids counterexamples. I have put the definition in terms of concern, an approach taken by Robert C. Roberts and Jay Wood (2003), who have offered arguably the most influential low concern account. George Schlesinger (1993) offered the first low concern account, but he spells out the virtue in terms of attention rather than concern, as does Nicolas Bommarito (2013). G. F. Schueler (1997) and Michael Ridge (2000) describe the humble person as one who does not care about how much she is esteemed by others. Ty Raterman (2006), J. L. A. Garcia (2006), and James Kellenberger (2010) also offer low concern accounts; however, they think the emphasis should be placed not on a low concern about what others think but rather on a reluctance or lack of interest to evaluate oneself in terms of one’s goodness or excellence. There are 3

To be more precise, one should say: Given an egalitarian view of human worth, the virtue of justice includes such a disposition. Such caveats are required to get any definite behavioral entailments from virtues, because virtues are always embedded in larger perspectives that determine their import.

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many details and much variety here. What is clear is that low concern accounts have become the dominant contemporary philosophical view of humility. The final account is also part of the third wave, in that it locates humility primarily in the affective dimension, as a matter of having the right kinds of concerns about the self. To understand what motivates this final account, note that   characterizes humility as the absence of a certain class of concerns about the self.   sees humility as a negative virtue, one that emerges whenever a certain class of concerns is eliminated. Admittedly, these concerns have to be eliminated for the right reasons; for instance, Roberts contends that if someone gets a lobotomy and loses all concern about his own worth, skills, achievements, status, and entitlements, he does not thereby gain humility. As the statement of the account indicates, self-focus has to be crowded out by focus on other apparent goods for humility to be properly predicated. Still, critics maintain that the account falters by turning humility into a negative virtue. Here is a supposed counterexample to  , from Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, and Daniel Howard-Snyder. The counterexample is meant to show that humility cannot be cast purely as a negative virtue—that is, as a virtue whose essence is the absence of certain kinds of concerns. Consider the case of Professor P, who is an extremely talented philosopher who knows he’s extremely talented. He genuinely loves epistemic goods; indeed, his obsession with them drowns out any concern he might have otherwise had for status or entitlement. He simply doesn’t care about impressing others, nor does he take himself to be entitled to special treatment or to disrespecting others. Status and entitlement aren’t even on his radar. While extremely talented, Professor P is not perfect. When confronted with his intellectual imperfections or mistakes, his default response is to try to justify, cover up, or explain them away. He is notoriously bad at admitting when he has made a mistake or when one of his arguments is vulnerable to serious criticism. Professor P seems to be lacking in intellectual humility even though he is disposed to an unusually low concern for status and entitlement. (Whitcomb et al. 2017: 515–16)

The counterexample is supposed to demonstrate that humility does not arise simply when the wrong kind of concerns are absent; the right kinds of concerns need to be present as well. What kinds of concerns need to be present, though? Well, Professor P seems to lack

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the proper kind of concern about his failures, shortcomings, and limitations; in short, he seems concerned to deny or ignore them when he should be concerned to own up to them. This is the approach behind a final account of humility. The account was first offered by Nancy Snow (1995), though it has recently been refined by Whitcomb et al. (2017).4 Snow argues that what is central to humility is an appropriate attitudinal orientation to our limitations and deficiencies. “To be humbled,” Snow (1995: 207) argues, “we must acknowledge and care about our flaws.” Snow’s account might be summarized as follows: -: Humility is the disposition to be attentive to, care about, and respond appropriately to one’s limitations. This account is open to counterexample as well, and the debate between   and - is one of the more interesting debates in the humility literature today. The radical unselfing account of Christian humility I seek to develop shares the most in common with  , but I will later show how adjudicating between   and - requires taking a stance on a number of specific issues pertaining to ultimate human flourishing, which defenders of neither view have been willing to do.

THE STANDARD ACCOUNT OF CHRISTIAN HUMILITY Most, though not all, of the theorists just canvassed are non-religious. They are interested in providing an account of humility that can be at home in secular settings. Because humility emerged from a Jewish– Christian outlook, the virtue cannot simply be repristinated but must be recast as viable and salutary within a secular outlook. The challenge confronting secular virtue theorists is to give an account of humility that does not rely on presuppositions unique to a religious outlook. The first task for their project, therefore, is simply to identify the ways in which humility was at one point entangled with Christian presuppositions. 4 Theirs is an account specifically of intellectual humility, but it is easy to see how it would be extended as an account of humility simpliciter, and in fact it is being treated in the literature as an account of humility simpliciter.

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There is striking agreement among contemporary secular philosophers who attempt to describe the entanglement of Christianity and humility. Each is convinced the essence of humility as understood within Christianity is a low self-estimate. Norvin Richards (1988: 253), for example, claims that, according to the traditional Christian view, “to be humble is to have a low opinion of oneself.” Daniel Statman (1992: 432) claims humility entered Western civilization through the Jewish and Christian religions, both of which took the virtue to consist in “a certain kind of (low) self-assessment.” G. F. Schueler (1997: 470) claims the “Christian view of the virtue called ‘humility’ accepts a ‘low-opinion’ account.” Stephen Hare (1996: 235) says of humility that “the term for many denotes low self-regard” and notes such an understanding of the term is connected to Christian theological assumptions. Throughout the secular literature, every attempt to trace the origins of humility ends up positing a low-estimate account of Jewish–Christian humility. Most often such a depiction of humility Christianly understood then becomes a foil for the theorist’s more enlightened contemporary view, which is, one suspects, part of the attractiveness of the depiction. Moreover, there is surprising agreement about what features of Christianity motivate the low-estimate definition of humility. There are in fact three recurrent narratives in the literature supposed to explain why humility-as-low-self-estimate follows from Christian convictions. I call these three stories the divine perspective story, the sin story, and the grace story. Here are representative samples of each. First, the divine perspective story: Because God and His works are so magnificent, whatever you are or have done is trivial by comparison, and your human pride in it is laughable. (Richards 1988: 255)

According to the divine perspective story, a low self-estimate is appropriate because of the asymmetry between divinity and humanity. No matter what we are or have accomplished, our being and doing pale in comparison to God’s. Christianity made humility all about low self-estimate in part because Christianity was obsessed with our smallness in comparison to God’s greatness. Second, the sin story: If humility is low self-esteem, where does this leave the rather splendid among us? . . . One answer is that actually there are no splendid human

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beings. . . . Luther believed that we are all so corrupted by Adam’s original sin as to be beyond redemption by any apparent virtues. (Richards 1988: 253)

According to the sin story, a low self-estimate is appropriate because we are quite bad. When we are honest, we realize there is nothing good in us. Accurate self-assessment entails a low opinion of oneself. Christianity made humility all about low self-estimate in part because Christianity was obsessed with how despicable we all are. Finally, the grace story: Nothing that is good about you is to your own personal credit: such things are only the particular gifts God chose to give you, for which you should be grateful but of which you cannot properly be proud. (Richards 1992: 578)

According to the grace story, when you do something good, it is only because God helped you do it. Thus to be proud of any good you have “done” or any virtue you have “developed” is foolish. Christianity made humility all about low self-estimate in part because Christianity was obsessed with how incapable we all are. These three motivational narratives are drawn from different writings of Norvin Richards, the contemporary secular philosopher who has written most about humility, but they recur throughout the literature. Just as there is no contemporary origin story of Christian humility that diverges from the low-estimate definition, neither is there any account of the reasons grounding Christian humility that tells a story other than the divine perspective story, the sin story, or the grace story. Call this contemporary philosophical memory of the nature and motives of humility Christianly understood the “standard account.” According to the standard account, Christian humility is a low self-estimate grounded by our recognition that we are small, despicable, and incapable. Clearly the account is cognitivist in orientation; it locates the essence of Christian humility in appropriate self-estimate. Indeed, it looks like a version of -, with religious beliefs setting the parameters of what would count as overestimation. It is not coincidental that the first (cognitivist) wave of humility accounts initially provided the standard account of Christian humility. They set up the standard account as a heuristic of sorts. The standard account provided the problem that secular redefinitions of humility would need to overcome—namely, if humility is a chastened self-estimate,

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but we no longer hold the views of human nature and divine agency that made low self-estimate seem appropriate, then what could humility be for us today? This was the recurrent background problem in first-wave contemporary debates about humility. On the one hand, we have the worry that low self-estimate is only truthful given certain questionable religious commitments. On the other hand, many secular philosophers want to maintain there is something morally valuable about a chastened view of human significance and achievement. For instance, such a chastened view aids selfrealization (Newman 1982: 283–4); makes us more forgiving, better judges of others, and better at setting realistic expectations for ourselves (Richards 1988: 259); reduces jealousy in the service of civil interaction (Driver 1989: 381); helps us overcome self-serving attributional biases (Flanagan 1990: 426–7); moderates unsubtle attributions of praise and reward (Nuyen 1998: 108); and makes liberal democracy possible (Button 2005: 851). We cannot truthfully believe ourselves to be lowly, yet in some sense we need so to believe if we are to be appropriately moral. The contemporary philosophical literature on the question of humility can be read as a series of attempts to resolve this paradox. The most common response among first-wave, cognitivist accounts of humility was simply to provide different stories about why it may still be accurate for human persons to hold a chastened view of their good qualities and accomplishments, no matter how relatively splendid they are. Norvin Richards, Owen Flanagan, and A. T. Nuyen all develop a variant of this response. The challenge they confront is how to make human nature and achievement seem modest without falling back on divine perspective, sin, or grace. They tackle the challenge by substituting secular analogues for each of these narratives. Thus the story of divine perspective is translated into the story of cosmic perspective. It is easy to imagine that the world’s fastest runner might be modest and know that he is. . . . He might think that being the world’s fastest human is not so important sub specie aeternitatis. (Flanagan 1990: 425)

The story of sin is translated into the story of human limitation. Being merciful [means] reacting in a tolerant, sympathetic way to behavior which was faulty and would ordinarily make one resentful and inclined to retaliate. Only the humble will react in this way. . . .

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Only they will think not “That so-and-so,” but “I might have done the same”; only they will think: “He’s only human—none of us are perfect.” (Richards 1988: 257)

And the story of grace is translated into the story of communal aid and luck. A modest sportstar acknowledges the role of the coach, the good advice of a mentor, the part played by the sponsor, the help received from fellow players, the contribution made by parents, spouse, and other family members, the support of loyal fans. Then there are other competitors, teammates, and finally luck. (Nuyen 1998: 107)

Taking into account the cosmic insignificance of our achievements, our propensity to failure, and the propitious circumstances that make our achievements possible, accurate self-assessment reveals that “ultimately, human value is pretty low” (Statman 1992: 429, summarizing the views of Richards and Flanagan). For , the standard view of the entanglement of Christianity and humility provides not only the basic problem to be solved, but also the categories that, when translated into a secular register, could solve the problem. Indeed, each of the major contemporary accounts of humility can be read as a strategy for resolving the problem caused by the historic entanglement of Christianity and humility—the problem that humility may require questionable theological commitments for its intelligibility. Suppose, as the standard account does, that Christian humility requires (a) truthfulness, which leads to (b) beliefs about one’s lowly status grounded in (c) stories of divine greatness, human sinfulness, and/or divine graciousness. Given this basic formula, the problem faced by contemporary secular humility theorists is how to formulate a version of humility that is available to non-religious people. -, as we have seen, refashions humility by substituting a secularized set of stories for (c). , on the other hand, refashions humility by abandoning (a), so that the truthfulness of what we believe about ourselves no longer matters.  refashions humility by erecting a boundary between personal achievement and moral worth. Thus there is no problem rejecting (b) and (c) and holding a (possibly truthful) high opinion of ourselves so long as that high opinion does not cause us to elevate our own moral rights over others’. Finally, both   and -

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refashion humility by contending that humility is not constituted by cognitive states like beliefs (b) but rather by affective properties such as what we desire or fail to desire, or how we direct our attention. Thus the loss of a metaphysical backdrop that could ground certain beliefs about our lowliness represents less of a threat to developing a secular account of humility. If the standard account of the relationship between Christianity and humility is true, then it looks, in fact, as though contemporary accounts can easily be disentangled from Christianity. What no one has seriously questioned, however, is the truth of the standard account of the relationship between Christianity and humility.

QUESTIONING THE STANDARD ACCOUNT There are two immediate reasons to be suspicious about the standard account of the relationship between Christianity and humility. First, in both Jewish and Christian thought, humility is arguably an attribute of God, but on the standard account it is not possible for God to be humble. Jewish philosopher Ronald Green (1973: 56) observes: “For Jewish ethics God is conceived not only as the source and sustainer of the moral life, but as its exemplar or archetype as well . . . But if humility is the principal virtue of the moral life then it is a virtue that must be predicated of God the moral exemplar.” The standard account of Christian humility, however, leaves us in the dark about how God could be the exemplar or archetype of humility. As infinite being, truth, beauty, and goodness, it would be impossible for God to hold a low estimate of God’s self. God cannot understand Godself as trivial by comparison to God; nor can God understand Godself as sinful; nor can God understand Godself as dependent upon the grace of God. None of the stories that on the standard account of Christian humility provide the rationale for a low self-estimate applies to God, nor is it easy to see how they could be translated so as to apply to God. If humility is low self-estimate grounded in divine perspective, sin, and/or grace, then God cannot be humble. Moreover, the theme of God’s humility intensifies within Christianity because of the claim that God became incarnate and was crucified. For instance, the humility of Christ is a recurrent theme in Augustine’s Confessions, as we will see in Chapter 2, and grasping

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hold of the peculiar nature of Christ’s humility is for Augustine the key difference between Christianity and every other philosophical or religious system. Granted, some Christian theologians claim humility is predicated of Jesus only in his human nature. Aquinas, for example, states: “To [God] humility is fitting, not as regards His Divine nature, but only as regards His assumed nature” (ST 2–2.161.1).5 Other Christian theologians such as John Macquarrie (1978) disagree. Martyred Trappist monk Christian de Chergé, made famous by the movie Of Gods and Men, concluded: “Not being able to find humility among humans, we need to look for it in God” (quoted in Foulcher 2015: 260–1). In Chapter 5, I will consider a way of predicating humility of the divine nature that not only is non-contradictory but also more deeply illuminates the telos of human humility. However, even if we follow the dominant tradition according to which humility is to be predicated of Christ only in his human nature, the standard account has problems. At the very least, Jesus cannot truthfully understand himself as a sinner, thus he cannot achieve the fullness of humility as expressed by the standard account. Yet, according to scripture, Jesus is our exemplar in humility (Phil. 2:5–8). It would be a bad result if Christian humility was not possessed perfectly by Jesus. So a shortcoming of the standard account is that it prevents us predicating humility of God, and it prevents us explaining how Jesus, in his human nature, is the perfect exemplification of human humility. Second, and relatedly, the standard account is suspect because it makes one and the same notion of humility equally at home in Jewish and Christian contexts. Everyone agrees the virtue emerged from both Judaism and Christianity, and part of the appeal of the standard view is that it fits within both Jewish and Christian theological categories. However, this is a reason to be suspicious of the account, for certainly the meaning of humility was transformed when a small band of Jews began to claim that God had become human and died a humiliating death on a cross. Trinity and cross are so implicated in early Christian visions of humility that notions of a “theistic” or “Judeo-Christian” humility are vague at best, most likely misleading. A third reason for being suspicious of the standard account is that it leaves mysterious why the virtue of humility presented a particular 5 For a clear contemporary argument against humility as an intra-Trinitarian reality, see Mansini (2013).

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challenge to pagan moral thought in the first place. As Jennifer Herdt (2008: 40) notes, “the tension between magnanimity and humility is often seen as capturing the basic tension between pagan and Christian conceptions of virtue.” Aristotle does not include humility anywhere in his table of virtues (if anything, it is a vice), but for Augustine humility is the centerpiece of Christian virtue. So crucial is humility to authentic virtue that Augustine argues in City of God that pagans cannot be genuinely virtuous because they cannot be humble (5.12). Rather, pagan virtues are “glittering vices,” entrenching more subtle forms of pride.6 If the standard account of Christian humility is true, it is not clear why this tension emerged at all. Why couldn’t pagan philosophers make the translations offered by contemporary defenders of , translating divine majesty into cosmic scope, sin into human limitation, and grace into moral luck? Why couldn’t early Christian theologians bridge the gap between pagan and Christian moral philosophy by proposing such translations to their pagan counterparts? After all, there is no reason to think Aristotle and his fellow pagans lacked notions of cosmic scope, human limitation, communal dependency, or luck. In fact, each of these themes is featured in the Nicomachean Ethics. The virtuous man knows that his achievements can come to naught because of things that happen long after he dies (1.11). He knows his nature places constraints on what he can achieve (2.6). He knows his ability to develop virtue is largely a function of the family and polis that nurtured him, and there are many who cannot achieve happiness because they are not so lucky as he (1.4). In other words, it seems that Aristotle has the ingredients for a chastened view of human potential and achievement. Indeed, it remains unclear to me why - accounts of humility should be considered accounts of humility rather than, say, magnanimity. Especially given the common view in contemporary secular accounts of humility that you must first have some excellence to be humble about (Slote 1983: 61–2), I see no reason why Aristotle’s description of the magnanimous man— “what he thinks he is worthy of accords with his real worth” (NE 4.3)—cannot do the work - theorists want humility to do. A “chastened magnanimity,” to coin a phrase, 6 Although Augustine never employed the phrase splendida vitia (see Herdt 2008: 45), it is a fitting condensation of his ambivalence about pagan virtue.

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might have all the advantages of a - account without risking a slide into the kind of self-effacement that Nietzsche, Hume, Spinoza, and, more recently, Richard Taylor (1985)7 fear humility entails. So there are several good reasons to suspect that the standard account of the relationship between Christianity and humility is false. Of course, those who propose the standard account are not attempting to mislead, but nor is the emergence of the standard account a mere accident, a kind of innocent forgetfulness. On the contrary, the standard account of the relationship between Christianity and humility is the outcome of a specific revision of the concept of humility for the purposes of the emerging modern state. Given that the secular project is wrapped up with the founding of the modern state, it should not be surprising if contemporary attempts to translate humility into a secular idiom depend for their intelligibility on certain historical developments surrounding the emergence of liberal political thought. Charting this development will be my task in Chapter 3.

CONCLUSION This chapter was an effort to make what currently seems commonplace seem, once again, strange. It should seem strange that humility is so popular these days, if we are in fact living in a post-Christian era. Aristotle would certainly find our interest in humility bizarre. Would that our fellow-citizens were magnanimous instead of vain, petty, and trifling. But humble? Why would we want that? Unless, of course, humility is no more than a chastened sense of one’s significance in the grand scheme of things. But the magnanimous man had that, too. Why, then, do so many who do not aspire to the way of Jesus, or even believe in God, remain enthused about the virtue of humility? Why do so many assume that humility is easily assimilated to a secular outlook? The standard account of Christian humility goes hand in hand with the easy contemporary affirmation of humility as a respectable middle-class virtue. But humility was the paradigmatic virtue of the one who was spat upon, mocked, and crucified; the ones who were 7 That Taylor is such a lonely voice in the contemporary scene is indicative of the widespread forgetfulness I allege.

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stoned, torn apart by beasts, and burned at the stake; the ones who fled into the desert to battle the demons, endure bodily affliction, and bear injustice. Why would we want a secular account of such a virtue? I suspect the preference for developing a secular account of humility has everything to do with the way in which Christian virtue has so singularly shaped the moral horizons of Western culture. Even if many no longer believe in Christianity’s God, they cannot help but believe in the moral world bequeathed by Christianity. The wish to leave that world behind is the source of the animus of Nietzsche and his heirs against humility. I do not have a stake in whether a revision of the concept of humility for secular purposes is available; arguably it has already been achieved. My aim is different: I want to show that humility as it was received and transformed within Christianity is incompatible with secular purposes just to the extent that it is a death sentence if Christian convictions about human destiny are false. In other words, I want to show that, on the Christian understanding of humility, it would be a mark, not of virtue, but of pitiful and contemptuous self-sacrifice, to pursue humility while disavowing a God who brings life out of death. The interesting question is why so many remain interested in humility who are not interested in discovering how the one who loses his life shall gain it.

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2 Remembering Christian Humility INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I engage Augustine to retrieve radical Christian humility and insert it into the contemporary discussion. After showing how the standard account of Christian humility fails to capture Augustine’s view of humility, I stay with Augustine, developing a rough interpretative sketch of his view of humility. Although his view is relatable to two contemporary accounts, it presses defenders of those accounts to clarify certain key concepts—namely, the concepts of self-concern and limitations-owning—in ways that are or would be resisted by defenders of those accounts. In other words, Augustine’s vision of humility does not sit comfortably either with contemporary memories of a bygone Christian humility or with prevailing contemporary accounts of humility. The conclusions are not all negative. To the extent that Christianity remains a significant determinant of contemporary intuitions about humility (and it does) and to the extent that Augustine is responsible more than anyone other than Jesus for shaping the Christian understanding of humility (and he is), we begin to understand why   and - both track contemporary intuitions about humility better than alternative, first- and second-wave views. Setting Augustinian humility alongside contemporary views illustrates not only how   fares best in the comparison but also how   and -, while drawing on Christian-shaped intuitions, both leave crucial questions unanswered in an effort to preserve their accounts as universally available. I treat Augustine as an authority because Augustine is the theologian of radical Christian humility. It is no coincidence that Augustine’s own conversion to the Christian faith was inspired by his reading of

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The Life of St Antony. From St Antony, the father of desert monasticism, Augustine learned the central place of humility in the Christian life. When asked by an acolyte, “What are the instructions of the Christian religion?” Augustine answered, “Always and only, ‘humility’” (Ep. 118.3.22). This preoccupation with humility evidences itself throughout Augustine’s vast corpus, especially in Confessions and City of God, where Augustine argues that Christian humility requires a rejection of classical conceptions of excellence/virtue (arête) and happiness (eudaimonia). No Christian thinker is more responsible than Augustine for placing humility at the center of Christian thought about human nature and destiny. Indeed, we might wonder whether a radical unselfing model of Christian humility would have persisted beyond the desert mothers and fathers had not Augustine, arguably the most influential theologian in the history of the church, formulated their radical ethic theologically so as clearly to draw the battle lines between classical and Christian ideals of human flourishing. The desert monks (notably John Cassian and Evagrius Ponticus), Augustine, Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, Simone Weil, and Thomas Merton, among others, are the guiding lights of a sustained tradition of Christian thought about humility, a tradition of thought that points us toward the account of radical Christian humility being developed in this book. And Augustine is the most prolific and eloquent of its defenders. More than any other virtue, humility has historically been a touchpoint for conflicting perspectives on whether or not classical and Christian values can be harmonized. Augustine and the tradition of thought that I follow in this book come down, more or less, on the negative side, denying that classical and Christian values can be harmonized. They champion Christian virtue over and against classical virtue, so to speak. Figures such as Machiavelli, Hume, and Nietzsche also come down on the negative side, but they champion classical virtue over and against Christian virtue. On the other hand, Aquinas is the preeminent Christian figure who responds affirmatively to the question of whether classical and Christian virtue can be married, albeit with great sophistication and many caveats. He attempts a harmonization in which Christian virtue perfects classical virtue without destroying it. Figures such as Hobbes and Kant, and indeed most of Enlightenment moral philosophy, also answer affirmatively, but pursue a synthesis in which classical virtue defangs and attenuates Christian virtue without setting it aside entirely.

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In Kant we find the flowering of these more irenic impulses, and in Chapter 3 I will explore Kant’s as the paradigmatic expression of the drift of Christian humility toward what I call “mundane humility.” These are broad strokes, of course, but it is helpful to have a lay of the land. One can better grasp many of the contemporary proposals about humility by thinking through where they fit in this loose schema. With this chapter, I place my account firmly in the camp of Augustine and those who followed him in thinking that the contrasts between Christian humility and classical pride were more instructive for Christian moral thought than any harmony that could be established between them.

AUGUSTINE AND THE STANDARD ACCOUNT OF CHRISTIAN HUMILITY The Confessions tells the story of Augustine’s tumultuous journey to God. Although the details of the story are unique to Augustine, the Confessions is intended to serve as a model of how one can move from restless anxiety to peaceful enjoyment of God. My claim is that, during the period of intense struggle preceding his full conversion to the Christian faith, the Confessions portrays Augustine as possessing all of the defining marks of humility according to the standard account of Christian humility—he has a low opinion of himself owing to his belief in God’s greatness, his own sinfulness, and God’s graciousness. And yet, the Confessions makes clear that Augustine believed himself to lack humility, despite possessing these marks. If this is so, Augustine’s account of humility is not adequately captured by the standard account of Christian humility. By the end of book 7 of the Confessions, Augustine has encountered Neoplatonism in “some books of the Platonists,” pinpointed the errors of Manichaeism, and intellectually converted to Christianity. Augustine confesses to God that, immediately upon his conversion, “I was astonished to find that already I loved you, not a phantom surrogate for you. But I was not stable in the enjoyment of my God” (7.17.23). Augustine has intellectually converted to Christianity but struggles to be emotionally and morally conformed. This becomes the defining struggle for Augustine in the time between his discovery of

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the books of the Platonists and his final conversion in a Milan garden. Time and again Augustine describes himself as stuck in a middle ground between intellectual assent to the Christian God and some more ultimate goal. “I was in no kind of doubt to whom I should attach myself, but was not yet in a state to be able to do that,” Augustine recalls. “I did not possess the strength to keep my vision fixed” (7.17.23). Why at this point in his journey, when Augustine is intellectually certain about the existence and attributes of the God of Christian revelation—“all doubt left me,” he reports (7.10.16)—is he unable to rest in, attach himself to, and keep his vision fixed upon God? The conventional answer to this question is that Augustine had a sexual habit that prevented him from surrendering completely to God, and indeed Augustine says as much: “I was caught up to you by your beauty and quickly torn away from you by my weight. . . . This weight was my sexual habit” (7.17.23). Augustine, however, sees his sexual habit as symptomatic of a deeper ailment, one that he explains immediately following the observation about his inability to rest in God: I sought a way to obtain strength enough to enjoy you; but I did not find it until I embraced “the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.” . . . To possess my God, the humble Jesus, I was not yet humble enough. I did not know what his weakness was meant to teach. (7.18.24, emphasis added)1

Augustine claims he had not yet grasped Christian humility in its fullness—he was not humble enough. It is not that his humility at this point is insufficiently intense; rather something is missing from his humility, something Augustine had yet to discover. He contrasts 1 The italicized sentence is Chadwick’s translation of non enim tenebam deum meum Iesum humilis humilem, nec cuius rei magistra esset eius infirmitas noveram. J. G. Pilkington’s translation from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers reads: “For I did not grasp my Lord Jesus,—I, though humbled, grasped not the humble One; nor did I know what lesson that infirmity of His would teach us.” William Watts’s Loeb translation reads: “For I, not yet humble enough, did not apprehend my Lord Jesus Christ, who had made himself humble; nor did I yet know what lesson that infirmity of his would teach us.” I include these translations because there is some debate about whether Augustine is claiming at this point still to lack humility altogether, or merely to lack sufficient humility. I suspect the latter is correct, but, either way, what follows is that the standard account does not capture what Augustine took to be the heart of humility. For what Augustine needs to attain to the humility of Christ is not a better cognitive grasp of God’s greatness or his own smallness, but something else entirely, something related to Christ’s weakness.

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his truncated humility with the perfect humility of Jesus. The aspect of humility that continued to elude Augustine, which he could not yet even understand, was the aspect specifically tied to the weakness of Jesus. “I did not know what his weakness was meant to teach,” Augustine confesses. “The mystery of the Word made flesh I had not begun to guess” (7.19.25). At this point in his journey, Augustine already possesses a low self-estimate, yet he claims to lack the humility he needs to enjoy God. He already believes the divine perspective story. He already possesses a strong awareness of the asymmetry between divinity and humanity, of his utter triviality relative to God. From the Neoplatonists he learned about the absolute distinction between creator and creature such that he cannot even claim to exist except by God’s constant preservation. “You raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being” (7.10.16). Describing God as “the immutable light higher than my mind . . . utterly different from all our kinds of light,” Augustine continues: “It was superior because it made me, and I inferior because I was made by it” (7.10.16). Augustine already believes the sin story, too. Indeed, the discovery of the immateriality of God gave him a concept of sin that left him no excuse; he was firmly convinced his iniquity was rooted in the corruption of his own will. At that time, Augustine recalls to God: “I found myself far from you ‘in the region of dissimilarity’ . . . and I recognized that ‘because of iniquity you discipline man’ and ‘cause my soul to waste away like a spider’s web’” (7.10.16). At that time as well, Augustine recalls, “I perceived that the darknesses of my soul would not allow me to contemplate [God’s invisible nature]” (7.20.26). And during the whole time between his intellectual and complete conversion, Augustine experiences consistent shame for his sinful lust for sex and worldly success. “My secular activity I held in disgust,” Augustine exclaims (8.1.2). Finally, Augustine already knows the grace story, too. His discovery of grace happens between his encounter with the books of the Platonists and his eventual conversion in the garden at Milan. He learned of grace, he explains, from Paul: “I began reading and found that all the truth I had read in the Platonists was stated here together with the commendation of your grace, so that he who sees should ‘not boast as if he had not received’ both what he sees and also the power to see” (7.21.27).

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In sum, before his complete conversion, Augustine had come to think of himself as categorically inferior to God, a sinner, capable of doing good only because of gracious divine assistance—yet he still lacked humility: he had not yet learned the way of “the humble Jesus” (7.18.24). This is sufficient to establish my claim—namely, that the standard contemporary account of the entanglement between Christianity and humility does not capture the nature of Christian humility, at least for Augustine. Augustine, the most authoritative theologian of the first thousand years of Christian thought, had all the marks associated on the standard account with Christian humility, yet claimed he lacked a crucial component of full humility. Moreover, he identifies that crucial component with the weakness of Christ, and it hardly makes sense to interpret the weakness of Christ as Christ’s particularly accurate awareness of his smallness in comparison to God, his sinfulness, or his dependence on grace. This conclusion leaves us with an obvious question. What did Augustine need to be humble? What was Christ’s weakness meant to teach? The Confessions is replete with clues that point us in a different direction than the standard account, that point us, in fact, in the direction of an unselfing account of radical Christian humility.

AUGUSTINIAN HUMILITY Augustine says that before his conversion he lacked the humility of the humble Jesus. In what sense? He did not deny God’s incomparable greatness. He did not deny his own sinfulness. He did not deny his need for divine assistance. Nevertheless, his pride, he says, was revealed by his unwillingness to submit to God, particularly God’s requirement of chastity, and he locates this unwillingness in a fear of relinquishing a cherished identity constitutive of his deepest self. If this analysis is correct, I should be able to show, first, that Augustine thinks humility is revealed through submission and, second, that submission requires the ongoing relinquishment of a cherished self-ideal. It is easy to show that Augustine thinks submission to God is the characteristic human expression of humility. His problem leading up to his conversion in book 8 is that, although he knows God commands chastity, he will not submit to God’s rule. And he says this is

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because he lacks the humility of Jesus. Humility and submission are explicitly linked throughout the Confessions. Augustine exclaims: “You [God] are my true joy if I submit to you,” but “in my arrogance I rose against you” (7.7.11). He describes the conversion of Victorinus as simultaneously taking on the yoke of humility and submitting to the cross (8.2.3). Recalling his conversion, Augustine prays: “You repressed my pride and by your yoke you made my neck submissive” (10.36.58). He claims he could not learn humility from the Platonic books because they did not command submission to God (7.21.27). And Augustine is clear about where he did learn of humility expressed in submission: from Christ who “‘humbled himself being made obedient to death, even the death of the Cross’” (7.9.14). The standard account of Jewish–Christian humility, along with the first wave of contemporary humility accounts, characterizes the virtue primarily as a cognitive disposition that levels the social playing field, but for Augustine humility is a disposition of the will that positions a person for right relationship with God. “The nub of the problem,” Augustine confesses, “was to reject my own will and to desire yours” (9.1.1). Augustine’s journey shows that having an accurate cognitive grasp of our lowly status is insufficient for humility; the will, particularly the affective component, must be transformed. For Augustine, humility is about desire. The crisis Augustine faces in book 8 is whether or not he can surrender those things that stand between him and God. He believes in the Christian God. He accepts the claims of the Catholic Church that Jesus is the way to salvation. He acknowledges he is a sinner with a corrupted will. He has second-order desires to align his life with the chastity that is part of Christian holiness. Yet he hesitates. “I hesitated to detach myself, to be rid of them, to make the leap to where I was being called” (8.11.26). Six times in book 8, Augustine describes his predicament as one of hesitation. He is hesitating to surrender his sexual habits, but why? The notion of “habit” can be misleading here because of its connotations, for us, of automatism or instinct, but Augustine is not wrestling with a physical compulsion. Rather, his sexual habit consists in a certain role that his sexuality plays in his own idea of flourishing and his own sense of identity. In short, he hesitates because it appears certain from the perspective of his habituated imagination that to abandon his sexual habits would be to abandon what he needs to be happy and who he fundamentally is. In other words, he is afraid of a certain kind of neediness and a certain

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kind of personal death. He hesitates because he does not want to be poor, and because he does not want to die. This is why Augustine most commonly associates the images of poverty and of death with his hesitation. They are for him the best way of imaging what it is like to experience one’s ideal self under threat. For example, Augustine describes the discrepancy between his intellectual and full conversion to Christianity in terms of the parable of the pearl in Matthew 13. “And now I had discovered the good pearl. To buy it I had to sell all that I had; and I hesitated” (8.1.2). To sell all that we have is to become poor, to give up everything we think we need to live. It is to enter into complete neediness trusting that there is a greater fullness on the other side of our neediness. Describing the conversions of two men who were friends of Ponticianus, Augustine returns to the theme of poverty. “And both men, already yours, were building their tower at the right cost of forsaking all their property and following you.” These men, Augustine explains, gave away everything they had (in particular their worldly ambitions) in exchange for a “great reward” (8.7.15). Indeed, the final push Augustine needed to break free of his hesitation was to recall the conversion of St Antony. “For I had heard how Antony happened to be present at the gospel reading, and took it as an admonition addressed to himself when the words were read: ‘Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ By such an inspired utterance he was immediately ‘converted to you’” (8.12.29). For Augustine, humility requires an entrance into poverty, and pride is rooted in fear of such poverty. Just as he associates his hesitation with a fear of poverty, so Augustine associates his hesitation with a fear of death. He explains that he is in bondage to this fear because he has been “handed over to the ancient sinner, the president of death, who has persuaded us to conform our will to his will” (7.21.27). Notice Augustine admits to being persuaded by the devil. This is no Manichaean “blame the devil” defense. Rather, the devil has power of persuasion over Augustine precisely because he has power over death; he is “the president of death.” Augustine locates sin, and pride as the root of sin, fundamentally in a fear of death. Thus his “old loves” hold him back by threatening death: “Do you think you can live without [us]?” they ask (8.11.26, emphasis added). Speaking again of his hesitation, Augustine explains, “my soul hung back . . . The only thing left to it was a mute trembling, and as if it were facing death it was terrified of

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being restrained from the treadmill of habit by which it suffered ‘sickness unto death’” (8.7.18). Augustine knew his sin was destroying him but he was terrified of being freed from his sin because he did not know how he could be himself without it. “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet,” Augustine prays (8.7.17). “I was hesitating whether to die to death and to live to life,” Augustine confesses (8.11.25). Poverty and death are clearly metaphors here. Augustine did eventually submit, but when he did he did not lose all his money, nor did he die. How then should we understand these metaphors of poverty and death? We can make headway by examining Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue in City of God. There, Augustine poses two critiques of pagan virtue. First, the supposed virtues of pagan life are merely means toward self-glorification—toward the pursuit of “glory, honor and power” (civ. Dei 5.12). Augustine notes that even the courageous death of the pagan warrior is funded by this quest for glory. “What else but glory should they love, by which they wished even after death to live in the mouths of their admirers?” (civ. Dei 5.14). Biological death is not the worst thing that can befall the pagan warrior; rather the worst thing that can befall the pagan warrior is that he be forgotten or that his legacy as courageous warrior be besmirched. Second, in insisting that virtue makes eudaimonia possible in this life, the pagans reveal their pride; for only a dogmatic commitment to human self-sufficiency could blind the pagans to the obvious fact that earthly life is a vale of misery. “Such is the stupid pride of these men who fancy that the supreme good can be found in this life, and that they can become happy by their own resources” (civ. Dei 19.4). Augustine therefore locates a quest for a secure and independent reputation and self-image2 at the heart of pagan virtue. This, he argues, is in fact the essence of superbia (pride): the quest for a selfimage that is secure even in the face of biological death—a kind of immortal identity—and a self-image that reflects self-sufficiency—a kind of identity that is free from any ultimate neediness. Immortality and self-sufficiency are thus the regulative ideals of the pagan self. For Augustine, Christian humilitas as the antithesis of pagan superbia is In this chapter, I use a cluster of words commonly associated with the self ’s “identity” interchangeably—self-understanding, self-concept, self-image, etc. In Chapter 4, I will clarify this murky terrain in order to say more specifically in what sense radical Christian humility is an “unselfing” view of humility. 2

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the rejection of these two impulses of pagan virtue. This is what Augustine had to learn from the weakness of Christ. From a pagan perspective, Christ’s weakness is expressed through his nonresistance against poverty and an ignominious death, and through his failure to stake his own claim for greatness apart from his Father. Put differently, pagan visions of moral formation cannot interpret the cross as anything other than a failure of the quest for immortality, nor can they interpret Jesus’s absolute dependence upon the Father as anything other than a failure of the quest for self-sufficiency. Augustine comes to see humility as the embrace of an alternative vision in which immortality and self-sufficiency as conceived by the best pagan thought are no longer constitutive concerns for personal flourishing. Notice that a low self-estimate is not sufficient for Christian humility as envisioned by Augustine. For suppose you are just bad at everything—no skills, no accomplishments, no status, no natural endowments. And suppose, furthermore, that you know this about yourself. Just because you have a low estimate of yourself, it does not follow for Augustine that you are humble. On the contrary, you may cope with your failure and inadequacy by incorporating that failure and inadequacy into a cherished identity. Accordingly, you may always tell self-deprecating stories about your failures, you may announce to others that you are unlovable owing to your many inadequacies, you may even resent the one who sees something good in you, since his positive estimation represents a threat to the identity you have formulated for yourself. Consider, for example, addicted persons who latch on to “addict” as an identity and react defensively to any suggestion that they may not be doomed to such a low self-image.3 Since low self-estimate is compatible with a concern for a stable and independent self-image, it is compatible with pride. Christian humility on Augustine’s account requires that we hold loosely to any cherished self-image, always on guard against the ways we use our self-image to insulate ourselves from the call to complete dependence upon God. Thus we almost always discover our humility, not by observing what we think of ourselves at any given time, but rather by observing how we respond to threats to what we think of ourselves at any given time. Our humility chiefly consists not in what 3 In Dunnington (2011), I examine the tension between Alcoholics Anonymous’s push for humility and its insistence that addicted persons claim “alcoholic” as a permanent identity.

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we think of ourselves but rather in the disposition of our wills toward the achievement, maintenance, and protection of cherished ways of thinking of ourselves. For Augustine, then, humility is fundamentally the absence of typical concerns for self-sufficiency and immortality. Freedom from such concerns makes possible complete submission to and dependence upon God. Pride, conversely, is reimagined by Augustine as the mirror image of this understanding of Christian humility. Pride is not essentially the aspiration to greatness but rather the aspiration to independence, self-sufficiency, and an immortal legacy. Thus for Augustine, but not for Aristotle, both the peasant and the king are susceptible to pride. The divine archetype of pride is Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, utterly self-contained, eternally self-sufficient, and blissfully entranced in perpetual self-enjoyment. The divine archetype of humility is the triune God of Christian confession, eternally at rest in interdependent and mutual relations of love. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though, into the theological explorations of Chapter 5. The form of the Confessions in general is meant to challenge the notion that we can truthfully tell the story of who we are—of our true selves—abstracted from God. Thus the Confessions exemplifies Christian humility in its refusal to speak of the self except in the mode of prayer. It is not simply that Augustine needs to give thanks for what God has helped him discover and accomplish; rather Augustine does not believe there is a “self ” he can truthfully identify abstracted from his ongoing journey to God. The Augustinian insight at the heart of my project is simply that there is no immortal, internally stable, independent self; the Unmoved Mover is an idol. The self is an ecstatic project, known only through relationship, which is to say, through service, prayer, and worship. Humility is the way from the inside to the outside; from introspection to service, prayer, and worship; from being self-possessed to being in Christ. How does such an account of humility sit with contemporary accounts?

RECONSIDERING CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS If Augustinian humility can be identified with a contemporary account of humility, it will have to be with one of the accounts in the third wave, accounts that privilege the affective dimension. For plainly

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what you think and what you do are secondary, on Augustine’s view of humility, to what you desire, what you care about. After all, Augustine thinks you can hold an accurately low cognitive estimate of yourself and lack humility—he characterizes his pre-conversion self in just this way. And, although Augustine describes submission to the will of God as the evidence of humility, he does not identify submissive behavior with humility. Augustine is clear that the difference between pride and humility is a difference of fundamental desire: “The nub of the problem was to reject my own will and to desire yours” (conf. 9.1.1). Similarly,   and - place the affective dimension of the will in the center of their accounts of humility. The way to think through how Augustine’s view compares with   and - is to characterize the sort of affective stance that is constitutive of humility on each view. My thesis is that Augustine’s view of humility cannot be identified with either   or - without distorting those views beyond recognition. To identify Augustinian humility with -, we would need to say in what sense the Augustinian call to complete dependence on God can be understood as a call to limitationsowning. Recall that the definitive exemplification of Augustinian humility is submissive dependence upon God, dependence not just for our material existence, and not just for our moral development, but indeed for any sustainable self-understanding to which we may lay claim. In Chapter 4, I will develop these initial Augustinian insights into a more precise unselfing account of humility, but at this point I simply want to ask whether this kind of dependence can be properly construed as an exemplification of “limitations-owning.” If Augustinian humility is to be construed as a form of “limitationsowning,” what is meant both by “limitations” and by “owning” will have to be stretched beyond anything envisioned by Nancy Snow or other proponents of a - account. - is vague about the evaluative status of a “limitation.” Are limitations intrinsically bad—that is, are they definitionally things that we should wish to be without if possible? It appears so. Snow (1995: 205–7) variously describes limitations as “defects,” “flaws,” “errors,” “personal failings,” “personal deficiencies,” “personal weaknesses,” “personal inabilities,” and “personal inadequacies.” She gives four specific examples: a detective’s inability

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to solve a case, a husband’s failure to remember his wife’s birthday, a tennis player’s defeat in a match, and Einstein’s inability fully to comprehend scientific complexities. So it looks like the sorts of things the humble person must “own” are limitations, not only in the sense that they are things she cannot do or be, but also in the sense that they are things she should choose to do or be if she could. This understanding of limitations is borne out by the list of attitudes that Snow (1995: 207) says are appropriate to “owning” limitations. The humble are those who, with respect to their limitations, will: • “take them seriously” • “be disturbed by having them” • “be appropriately pained by, or . . . feel sorrow or dejection because of ” them • “deeply regret” them • “wish [they] didn’t have” them • “do everything possible to be rid of ” them • “regret yet accept” them • “do the best [they] can to control [them] and minimize [their] negative effects.” All the evidence points to the conclusion that, on , humility is an attitude of regret about, and effortful intention to overcome, personal shortcomings that one would be right to wish one did not have. This is hard to square with Augustinian humility. The limitations at the heart of Augustinian humility—the human inability to attain being, goodness, or a coherent self apart from God—are not limitations in the sense at issue for -, because they are not limitations the human person would rightly wish to be without. Indeed, for Augustine, the desire to be without these limitations is the essence of pride, and the pretense that one is free of them is the epitome of pride’s folly. Moreover, the proper attitude toward these limitations is not, according to Augustine, one of regret and effortful intention to overcome them. On the contrary, the proper attitude is trustful acceptance. Augustine identifies the humility of Jesus with Jesus’s glad dependence on the Father, Jesus’s utter freedom from disturbance, pain, regret, or sorrow about the fact that his existence, purpose, and

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identity are dependent on God.4 So, at first glance, it looks like trying to fit Augustinian humility into a - mold will so dramatically distort what is meant by both “limitations” and “owning” as essentially to undermine the view. Perhaps one way to get around this conclusion is to focus on how both the nature of the limitations in view and the nature of the appropriate attitude toward them shifts on Snow’s limitations-owning account of what she calls “existential humility.” For here, there is really only one limitation in view—finitude—and Snow nowhere suggests this is the sort of thing humans should wish to be without. Furthermore, Snow limits the kinds of affective response that are appropriate given an awareness of general human finitude. She indicates that coming to grips with “the limits of the human condition” should produce “a recognition of the insignificance of your concerns” (Snow 1995: 206). This, she says, may lead to a variety of affective responses including awe, admiration, and despair. “All of these reactions are compatible with being humbled in the existential sense,” she writes (Snow 1995: 206). Augustine would reject this conclusion, too. Despair at our insignificance is incompatible with Augustinian humility, since the effect of Augustinian humility is precisely trustful acceptance of our insufficiency given such insufficiency reflects our status as God’s creatures. It is interesting that Snow (1995: 208) follows up these remarks with the comment: “Differences in the ontological status of the reality extending beyond the self raise questions for my analysis of existential humility.” This comment provides a way forward, toward a vision of humility more amenable to Augustinian humility. Snow rightly observes that one might think what counts as a proper response to the relative insignificance of human aspiration has everything to do with the nature of the reality that exceeds it. That Snow does not develop this possibility is not an accident, however; she wants her account of humility to be universally available regardless of wide disparities in metaphysical commitments, which means that she must countenance despair about human insignificance as well as glad acceptance of human insignificance as equally appropriate to humility. Concluding her account of existential humility, Snow (1995: 209) writes, “to think too much of yourself and too little of values extending beyond the self is to lack proper humility.” A defender of  4 Jesus’s disturbance and sorrow in Gethsemane is a response to his experience of Godforsakenness—i.e. precisely to the feeling of complete independence from God.

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 will think that Snow is getting close at this point, for she seems to be suggesting that proper humility displaces the self from the center of concern. In fact, though, she cannot support this claim without offering a more substantive account of the metaphysical reality that exceeds human finitude. For suppose that the reality that exceeds us is brute, senseless, utterly devoid of beauty, goodness, or any other recognizable value. On such a supposition, one could think a great deal of oneself and very little of values extending beyond the self (since there are none) and be properly humble. One could, for instance, be profoundly aware of human finitude and insignificance, yet find no good reason to look beyond the self given the absence of value beyond the self. Such is a recipe for despair indeed. At least Snow is consistent in maintaining despair as an affective posture consistent with her account of humility, but she cannot then claim that proper humility decenters the self from one’s focus. Snow’s inability to provide an explanation of how grasping human finitude entails a lessening of focus on the self is problematic because she is committed to -. - is the view that what is fundamental to humility is ownership of limitations, which means that other marks of humility need to be explicable in terms of this fundamental feature. If absence of self-focus is required for humility, then Snow would need to explain how proper limitationsowning always entails or predicts a lessening of self-focus, and it seems to me that her account fails here.5 Insofar as - is consistent with a view of the humble person who remains concerned primarily with himself, as I have argued it is, then Augustinian humility cannot fit into a - mold.  , on the other hand, claims that what is fundamental to humility is the absence of certain kinds of concern about the self. According to its most influential and eloquent defenders, Robert C. Roberts and Jay Wood (2003: 271),   is the view that humility consists in “an unusually low dispositional concern for” the self, “where such concern is muted or sidelined by an intense concern for some apparent good.” There are a variety of modes of being excessively concerned with the self, among which Roberts and Wood (2003: 258) list “arrogance, vanity, conceit, egotism, grandiosity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, impertinence (presumption), haughtiness, 5 Whitcomb et al. (2017: 525–6) also attempt to show how limitations-owning can explain low concern, and face similar challenges.

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self-righteousness, domination, selfish ambition, and self-complacency.” Each of these vices names an improper kind of self-concern, and humility is present just to the degree these vices are absent. How does   square with Augustinian humility, then? Formally, they line up quite well. That is to say, both accounts identify humility with a certain affective stance one takes toward the self. Moreover, both accounts hold that humility lessens one’s focus on one’s own self-importance. Augustine, for example, identifies his growth in humility with his increasing unconcern about his status as an intellectual elite. And, when Augustine discovers that he still lacks the humility of Christ, he ends up identifying that lack of humility with his over-concern to maintain a grasp on his own cherished self-understanding. Specifically, he identifies his pride with an ongoing concern to be an autonomous and self-sufficient self. In this connection, it is interesting to note that in their revision of their account of humility, Roberts and Wood (2007: 236) add one more vice to their list of vices of pride that humility removes: “hyperautonomy,” which is “a disinclination to acknowledge one’s dependence on others and to accept help from them.” For Augustine, something like hyper-autonomy is the heart of pride, although Augustine would want to ask why the qualifier “hyper” is necessary, as we shall see. From an Augustinian perspective, and indeed I think from the perspective of the broad tradition of Christian thought on humility, there is no formal contemporary account of humility that can compete with   for an approximation of the essence of humility. Augustinian humility is indeed, as   maintains, fundamentally about the displacement of the ego from one’s personal vision, and about the way such displacement is both fostered by and makes room for a vision of other goods that are more important, both in their own right, and for our personal flourishing. I say “an approximation,” however, because   is not a purely formal account. That is,   does not merely say humility consists in the absence of improper self-concern. It goes beyond this formal account and tries to say what kinds of selfconcern, specifically, are improper and (importantly) what kinds are not. In this sense, it is giving more than a purely formal account, and for good reason. It is helpful to know that humility has to do with avoiding improper self-concern, but we rightly want to know which kinds of self-concern are improper and which (if any) proper. So it is

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a credit to   that it attempts such a specification, and in recent work Roberts has gone to greater lengths to specify what kinds of self-concern are incompatible with humility, and why. It is the substantive features of   that, I will argue, put it at odds with radical Christian humility, and showing this will be the burden of Chapters 3 and 4. Radical Christian humility, I will argue, sets, not low self-concern, but no self-concern as the regulative ideal in the pursuit of humility.

CONCLUSION Augustine places the humility of Christ at the center of his account of Christian holiness, and he acknowledges that leading up to his conversion he could not grasp the mystery of Christ’s humility. Augustine’s conversion is possible only when he comes to terms with the radical nature of Christ’s humility—namely, Christ’s utter dependence upon the Father, his being utterly without any sense of personal importance abstracted from his relationship to the Father. I argued that this Augustinian humility far outstrips the standard account of Christian humility, which locates humility in an accurate low estimate of the self rooted in an appreciation of God’s grandeur, human sinfulness, and gracious divine assistance. Then, in the concluding section of the chapter, I tested how an Augustinian view of humility fares with respect to the two most prominent, third-wave contemporary accounts of humility, - and  . - squares with Augustinian humility in that both place humility primarily in the affective domain, in what human beings most fundamentally care about. There is something right about -, to the extent that humility is evidenced by a certain kind of appropriate affective posture toward human limitations. From an Augustinian perspective, however, - is ultimately mistaken, because it offers no account of how the reality that exceeds human finitude could justify human persons in gladly accepting their limits without fear or despair. In short, the moral significance of both “limitations” and “owning” remain too indeterminate. Furthermore, to the extent that - requires the self to dwell on its various limitations, taking their measure and developing

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the right posture toward them, it remains too self-involved to capture Augustine’s understanding of humility. Like  , Augustine thinks humility has to do primarily with freedom from self-focus. At a sufficiently abstract level, then,   and Augustinian humility are versions of the same formal account of humility, which is why   will occupy much of our attention throughout the remainder of the book. We could call such an account a “proper concern” account. According to a proper concern account of humility, humility is a measure of the propriety of one’s concerns for self. An account so formal, however, leaves us with the obvious questions: which kinds of self-concern are proper and which improper, and what differentiates between them? Answering this question forces us to consider difficult questions about human nature and purpose. From a Christian perspective, eschatology and theological anthropology deeply inform what differentiates proper from improper self-concern.

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3 Mundane Humility INTRODUCTION “Mundane humility” is an umbrella term meant to capture a set of commitments that shaped and continues to dominate contemporary thinking about humility. The commitments are mundane in that they focus primarily on humility’s role in protecting the equal dignity of persons. By contrast, Augustine was focused primarily on humility’s role in befitting a human person for union with God; the social importance of humility is at best secondary for Augustine (see Cavadini 2009: 679). Whereas Augustine treated humility as a prerequisite to right relationship with God, modern commentators treat humility as a prerequisite to right relationships among fellowcitizens. Whereas Augustine focused on humility’s connection to eternal goods, modern commentators focus on humility’s connection to the immanent goods of human sociability. This shift explains our present forgetfulness about radical Christian humility. My goal in this chapter is to demonstrate how this shift has determinatively shaped contemporary thought about humility. In order to get the theological dimensions of Christian humility back into the discussion, we need first to understand how and why they were sidelined. Julie Cooper (2013) suggests that Thomas Hobbes is responsible for revising the early Christian understanding of humility.1 The problem for Hobbes, Cooper explains, was “the political liabilities of radical Protestant humility.” “Given that Protestant exhortations 1

Cooper (2013: 54) lauds the redefinition of humility inaugurated by Hobbes and refined by Spinoza and Rousseau because she believes it provides an alternative to the ethos of aristocratic glory, on the one hand and, on the other, the Augustinian ethos of what she calls “radical Protestant humility.”

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to humility failed to temper—and may have encouraged—seditious claims of conscience during the English Civil War, Protestant humility leaves something to be desired as a political disposition” (Cooper 2013: 54). In other words, humility defined as submission to the will of God is politically dangerous because it can be used to justify supposed edicts of conscience over the demands of a political sovereign. In opposition, Hobbes argued that subordinating political authority to divine authority, although it seems humble, actually betrays pride because it presumes humans can know the will of God. Hobbes needed to tame humility in a way that, on the one hand, removed the threat of conscience-driven sedition, but, on the other hand, maintained the chastening impulses that could check the kind of aristocratic glory-quest Hobbes feared as the other main cause of warfare. Humility for Hobbes is no longer conceived as a virtue that facilitates divine–human relationship; rather, Hobbes transforms humility into a social virtue meant to inculcate the knowledge of finitude Hobbes thought was a precondition for sustainable collective agency. Hobbes redefines pride as an inaccurate self-estimate that violates the precept “that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature” (Lev. 1.15.21). Conversely, he redefines humility as the virtue of those who are sufficiently aware of their finitude and vulnerability that they acknowledge every other human person as a natural equal. Theological arguments do not disappear from Hobbes’s articulation of the virtue. Rather, Hobbes undercuts the Augustinian emphasis on submission to the will of God by a reading of Job in which God’s unfathomable power and inscrutable will are highlighted. God’s power and immortality remain a point of comparison against which human agents can recognize their own essential limitation and vulnerability (thus the divine perspective, sin, and grace stories are given a central place), but this recognition is now put to work for immanent political purposes. For Hobbes, God matters for an account of humility only insofar as the unfathomable gap between God and ourselves puts all human beings on an equal footing. Notice that, in both the standard contemporary account of Christian humility and in Hobbes’s, Jesus is absent. Whereas in the New Testament, in the early martyrs, in Augustine, and in the early monks, humility is resolutely indexed to the life of Jesus, specifically Jesus’s submission to God even to the point of death (Phil. 2:8), Hobbes made Jesus

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immaterial for a religious account of humility. Such a transformation is on display in the contemporary efforts to recall Christian humility. Hobbes’s objective was straightforwardly political: to redefine humility into an immanent virtue grounding social equality among the ruled and absolute subservience to the sovereign state. Among the inheritors and champions of modern political liberalism, this objective ramified into a broader set of ambitions: to make humility compatible with social enterprise, with economic productivity, and with an emerging construal of the inviolable dignity of the human person. Such a conception of humility is elegantly developed by Immanuel Kant, and his perspective continues to influence the best contemporary accounts of humility, including  . In the first section of this chapter, I develop Kant’s understanding of humility, with particular attention to his thoroughgoing accommodation of the Humean critique of humility. I isolate four commitments central to Kant’s project, each of which shapes Kant’s thinking about humility in decisively mundane ways. Next, I argue that   remains wedded to a set of Humean/Kantian assumptions about the self—assumptions that, in the final section, I show are not shared by the radical strand of early Christian thought about humility. The chapter directs our attention to one decisive question, which we will then take up in detail in Chapter 4: what is the status of “proper” or “virtuous” pride in a Christian account of humility?

KANT’S MUNDANE HUMILITY Immanuel Kant famously credited David Hume for rousing him from his “dogmatic slumber.” It is customary to trace Hume’s influence to Kant’s metaphysics, but Hume powerfully influenced Kant’s moral philosophy as well. In particular, Kant was impressed by Hume’s scathing critique of the “monkish virtues,” including humility, and his corresponding rehabilitation of pride as a necessary virtue for moral formation and the moral life. Hume rejected the Hobbesian view that human beings are inveterately selfish. He argued instead for a natural principle of benevolence within human nature, evidenced by the way in which parents care for their children. The problem is that this natural benevolence is restricted; rarely does it reach beyond the family. Thus, if humans are

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to be morally fit for a wider social life, their natural benevolence must be supplemented. What is needed is a kind of reimbursement for the losses to self-interest that are incurred when we extend benevolence beyond immediate kin. Pride plays this supplemental role in Hume’s moral thought. Hume defines pride as “that agreeable impression, which arises in the mind, when the view either of our virtue, beauty, riches or power makes us satisfy’d with ourselves.” He defines humility as “the opposite impression” (T 2.1.7.8). Thus pride for Hume has the self as its object, and the experience of pride gives a person a clearer and more positive image of him- or herself. Since otherdirected virtues are socially lauded when we display them, such display produces pride in us. We are energized to act benevolently beyond the kinship circle by the allure of the pleasurable experience of pride. If pro-social behaviors did not occasion such pride, we would lack the reimbursement we require for sacrificing our immediate self-interest in benevolence to others. Humility, according to Hume, has exactly the opposite effect; the experience of humility is that of a negative or less assured sense of self. If virtuous actions really did produce humility in us, then they would diminish us in our own eyes, and we would lack the motivation to pursue them. Thus Hume claims no one really believes that the humility, which good-breeding and decency require of us, goes beyond the outside, or that a thorough sincerity in this particular is esteem’d a real part of our duty. On the contrary, we may observe, that a genuine and hearty pride, or self-esteem, if well conceal’d and well founded, is essential to the character of a man of honour. (T 3.3.2.11)

For Hume, any disposition or practice that weakens, confuses, or obscures a strong sense of self-satisfaction is socially disadvantageous. And this, he alleges, is precisely the case with many historically lauded practices or “virtues.” He lists “celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, and solitude” as examples, and announces: “We justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices” (EPM 9.1). Kant rejects Hume’s transfer of humility into the “column of vices.” According to Kant (1997: 16): Humility presupposes a correct estimation of self, and keeps it in bounds. We have more reason to observe imperfections than perfections, since they are more numerous, and the contemplation of

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perfections can very easily do harm. Humility is therefore not a monkish virtue, as Hume believes, but already needful even in natural morality.

As the quotation suggests, Kant took it as his task to provide an account of humility that even Hume could accept. With Hume, Kant considers it sufficient to dismiss a particular conception of virtue by labeling it “monkish” (1997: 16, 129, 163, 429), or what the “monks do” (1997: 364), or “pure monastic virtue” (1997: 375). He sets out to define humility in a way that rescues it from monastic presumptions. In developing his account of humility, Kant accepts and buttresses four features of the Humean critique of humility. First, Kant agrees that a sufficient account of humility will depend on what is available to natural reason, rather than leaning on speculative theology. Second, Kant agrees that, if humility is to be vindicated as a virtue, it must be consistent with an agent’s secure sense of self, what Kant calls variously “noble pride,” “self-esteem,” or “dignity.” Third, Kant agrees that, if humility is to be vindicated as a virtue, it must be consistent with the pursuit of honor. And, fourth, Kant agrees that, if humility is to be vindicated as a virtue, it must be shown to be consistent with mundane earthly flourishing. It is because his account of humility is undergirded by each of these commitments that I call it an account of “mundane humility”: it is grounded by mundane natural reason, credits a mundane notion of the moral self based on our differentiation from the animals as independent and selfconscious beings possessed of reason and freedom, assumes (with Hume) that honor is a necessary motive for moral action given our mundane condition of excessive self-love, and takes as its scope of efficacy mundane earthly flourishing. Kant’s moral philosophy, which has had and continues to have an enormous impact on contemporary ethics, is luminous and inspiring. One cannot take in his vision without feeling ennobled. I do not take myself to be critiquing Kant—for example, by attempting to show that his perspective is corrupting or internally inconsistent. I have, instead, three aims: to reveal a set of commitments that are characteristic of mundane humility, then to show how those commitments remain operative in the   account of humility, and finally to show how radical Christian humility does not appear to share these commitments. I turn now to the writings of Kant, specifically his Lectures on Ethics (1997) and part 2 of The Metaphysics of Morals (1964), to show how Kant’s own account of humility relies on the four features listed above.

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First, Kant contends that a sufficient account of morality, including the virtues, will depend on what is available to natural reason, rather than lean on speculative theology. Kant’s contention builds on a distinction he makes between natural religion and speculative theology. Natural religion is “religion within the bounds of mere reason” (1964: 163). It is all that is needful for a moral life and salvation. It consists of two parts: (1) morality, which is not given through divine commands but rather discovered through reason (and used to judge the legitimacy of purported divine commands), and (2) the concept of God that is required by morality—namely “a supreme being, who is holy in His laws, benevolent in His government, and just in His punishments and rewards” (1997: 95). Speculative theology, on the other hand, includes all those claims of revelation that go beyond what can be discovered through reason. Having made this distinction, Kant insists that speculative theology is utterly irrelevant to morality. “Natural religion should properly furnish the conclusion to ethics, and set the seal on morality” (1997: 95). “Speculative knowledge is needed only to satisfy our curiosity, but if religion is at issue, and what is needful for acting and omitting, we no longer require anything more than what can be discerned and perceived through sound reason” (1997: 96). For example, “The doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, has no practical relevance at all, even if we think we understand it” (1979: 65, emphasis in the original). Thus, for Kant, the virtue of humility is neither made intelligible nor justified on the basis of theology. Rather, that there is a virtue of humility should be evident to natural reason. How so? Natural reason reveals the moral law as perfect and unconditionally binding on every person, but natural reason also reveals to each person separately that he or she persistently falls short of the perfect ideal. For Kant, humility is the disposition to acknowledge oneself as lacking in comparison to the perfect and unconditionally binding moral law. Thus Kant’s definition of humility: “The consciousness and feeling of one’s insignificant moral worth in comparison with the law is humility (humilitas moralis)” (1964: 100). Hume’s mistake, Kant thought, was to imagine that humility requires us to compare ourselves to others and find ourselves wanting. Such comparisons, Hume notes, often require dishonesty. Even worse, such comparisons motivate servility, self-denigration, and laziness. If the virtue of humility does indeed require a consistent low estimate of ourselves in comparison with others, Kant contends,

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then Hume is right to disparage it. But Hume mistook an analogue of humility for the real thing. “A low opinion of one’s person in regard to others is not humility; it betrays, rather, a petty soul and a servile temperament. Such imagined virtue, which is merely an analogue of the real thing, is a monkish kind of virtue, and that is quite unnatural” (1997: 129). Far from requiring self-abasement, Kant continues, the virtue of humility is not only compatible with self-esteem, but indeed requires it. This leads us to the second commitment that Kant takes on board in order to square his account of humility with the Humean critique. Kant contends that the very same insight that makes humility possible—our rational perception of the moral law—also necessitates self-esteem because there is an inviolable nobility in discovering ourselves to be the kinds of beings who have access to the ideal of moral perfection. True humility follows inevitably from our sincere and strict comparison of ourselves with the moral law (its holiness and strictness). But along with it comes exaltation and the highest self-esteem, as the feeling of our inner worth (valor), when we realize that we are capable of this inner legislation, and the (natural) man feels himself compelled to reverence the (moral) man in his own person. By virtue of this worth we are not for sale at any price and possess an inalienable dignity (dignitas interna) which instills in us reverence (reverentia) for ourselves. (1964: 100)

Thus humility and “the highest self-esteem” coexist comfortably in the virtuous person and indeed reinforce one another. Elsewhere, Kant describes this “self-esteem” and “inalienable dignity” as “noble pride.” For if we compare ourselves with the holy moral law, we discover how remote we are from congruity with it. This low opinion of our person arises, therefore, from comparison with the moral law, and there we have reason enough to humble ourselves. But in comparison with others, we have no reason to entertain a poor opinion of ourselves, for I can just as well possess worth as anyone else. This self-esteem, then, in comparison with others, is noble pride. (1997: 129)

There is, of course, ignoble pride, which consists of finding one’s own worth through a comparison with the imperfections of others (1997: 17; 1964: 135).2 These forms of ignoble pride are vices. In general, 2 Given that humility is the recognition of shortcomings in comparison with the moral law, it would seem natural to think that pride is the denial of any such

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though, Kant rejects the traditional opposition of humility and pride, arguing instead that a sense of dignity, pride, and self-esteem is natural to human agents just to the extent that such agents recognize in their own self-representation that they are special, distinct from the other animals in that they have access through reason to the perfect moral law and access through freedom to meritorious moral action. In her book on Kant and the Ethics of Humility, Jeanine Grenberg (2005) makes much of Kant’s explicit anthropology, rightly noticing that most contemporary philosophical treatments of humility avoid providing an account of human nature because of a latent naturalism. Such an account is necessary, Grenberg contends, if humility is supposed to be a virtue that helps us recognize the gap between our actual and our ideal selves: no clear anthropology, no intelligible human ideal. This is philosophically tricky, Grenberg admits, because so much of the contemporary discussion of humility consists precisely in an attempt to rescue humility from the supposedly mistaken anthropology of Christianity. Grenberg sees Kant grounding his account of humility in an anthropology that, though substantive, would be hard to challenge. His is not an anthropology, like those that can be found within speculative theology, that relies on “indefensible” claims. On the contrary, it postulates merely “plausible characteristics of human nature” (Grenberg 2005: 22)—namely, human uniqueness consists in reason and will, and humans, owing to excessive self-love, universally fail to exercise their will in accordance with the demands of reason. Thus, human perfection would consist in the overcoming of excessive self-love in a perfect knowledge and performance of the moral law. I consider this a “mundane” account of human nature just to the extent that it takes for granted that the self-representation of “normal” human persons—and this may require further qualifications: normal modern, liberal, European persons, perhaps—can be unquestioningly trusted as the transparent key to human nature and destiny. It is this understanding of the human person’s true nature and destiny that radical Christian humility challenges. We move on to the third feature of mundane humility. In addition to grounding humility in natural reason and squaring it with proper shortcoming. Instead, Kant (1964: 100) labels such a denial moral arrogance, reserving ignoble or improper pride specifically for the disposition to augment one’s worth through interpersonal comparison.

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pride, Kant argues that humility is compatible with the pursuit of honor. In his Lectures on Ethics, Kant distinguishes the love of honor from self-esteem/dignity/noble pride.3 The latter accrue to all human beings the moment they know themselves to be “capable of this inner legislation” of the moral law. Thus a person need not comply with the moral law in order to have self-esteem/dignity/noble pride. On the other hand, honor accrues only to persons who comply with the moral law. “True honour . . . rests on the worth that is conferred only by morally good conduct” (Kant 1997: 399). It is important that such worth is conferred by morally good conduct, and not by other people who notice our morally good conduct. Kant draws a distinction between pursuing honor and pursuing the honorable opinion of others. Only a fool does the latter, Kant says, because in the first place others’ opinions are irrelevant to true honor, and, in the second place the pursuit of praise tends to foster others’ contempt instead. Kant contends that it is a duty to pursue the true honor that is conferred by morally good conduct. Indeed “the love of honour is the highest duty of humanity to oneself, so little capable of abridgement, that is has to go further than love of life” (Kant 1997: 399). Why is the love of honor the highest duty of humanity to oneself? Because only if we privilege the worth that is conferred by moral conduct over every other value will we have the moral motivation to resist temptation and stick resolutely to our duty. Thus Kant follows Hume in regarding persons as capable of acting in a consistently moral way only insofar as motivated by the quest for honor. Hume remarked that even “the most rigid morality allows us to receive a pleasure from reflecting on a generous action” (T 2.1.7.8). Hume again: “Whatever we call heroic virtue, and admire under the character of greatness and elevation of mind, is either nothing but a steady and well-establish’d pride and self-esteem, or partakes largely of that passion” (T 3.3.2.13). Kant agrees. Perhaps there are less corrupt beings who do not require the pursuit of honor to motivate consistent moral action, but human beings do. “The pursuit of honour will perhaps be totally suspended in beings somewhat higher than ourselves; with us, it is still useful as a counter to great immorality, and to stiffen our resolve against extreme laziness, and this is needed for the lesser morality of mankind” (Kant 1997: 20).

3

He conflates these in The Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1964: 135).

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Kant’s concession to the “lesser morality of mankind” points us to the fourth and final commitment that leads me to characterize Kant’s as a view of mundane humility—namely that he resolutely indexes the virtues to what makes for a satisfactory moral life here and now. Rejecting moral outlooks that insist on relativizing and thereby diminishing the goods of earthly flourishing, Kant (1997: 19) comments: “We have to enjoy these things in this world, and the all-too-abundant talk of eternity must not tear us away from time; eternity should serve merely to diminish the evil of this world, but not to lessen its joy.” Put differently, Kant rejects an approach to the moral life that begins with a speculative picture of eschatological human flourishing and works backwards to specify the human virtues. Natural reason reveals what flourishing looks like, and the only impediments to such flourishing are weak wills, natural evils, and the injustices done to us by other persons. Eternity will remedy these impediments, but it should not cause us to question or revise our picture of human flourishing. Hume claimed that the “monkish virtues” like humility are rejected by “men of sense” because “they serve no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society” (EPM 9.1). If Kant thought this were true of humility, he would follow Hume in transferring humility to the table of vices. Kant, however, does not think this is true of humility. Rather, combined as it must be with self-esteem and love of honor, humility will make a person a more valuable member of society by conferring an “equalizing perspective on persons” (Grenberg 2005: 193). It is especially significant to note that, for Kant, humility does not promote an increased dependence upon others, or upon God. If humility did promote such increased dependence, this, for Kant, would be evidence of its civic disvalue, and thus evidence against its status as a virtue. For Kant, the dignity that is a necessary correlative of humility is inconsistent with extreme dependence and pushes always in the other direction, toward greater and greater independence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Kant’s insistence on the moral disgrace of begging. The theme is persistent throughout Kant’s ethical writings. In fact, Kant characterized as undignified beggars those who would plead for God’s mercy or pretend they are completely dependent upon God for moral rectitude. But because men have believed that, however far they might go in welldoing, they would still always be defective in their own eyes, far more

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than in those of God, they have supposed that God must do everything in them, or pardon all their sins; and hence they have employed external means, to solicit this from God and obtain His grace, and thus have gone over to begging. (Kant 1997: 115)

The goal of a dignified moral agent is independence from others to the greatest extent possible. Begging is thus emblematic of the undignified moral agent, and, insofar as humility and self-esteem are correlates of each other, begging is inconsistent with proper moral humility. “Shun poverty, and seek your own welfare,” Kant (1997: 424) counsels, “else you will become a beggar.” By begging, a man displays the highest degree of contempt for himself, and so long as people still have some feeling, it tends also to be the last step that they take. It is a man’s obligation to exert himself to the utmost to remain a free and independent being in relation to others; but as a beggar he depends upon the whims of others, and sacrifices his selfsufficiency. (Kant 1997: 351)

Indeed, Kant thinks the state should “restrict open begging as much as possible” because “a poor man who begs is constantly depreciating his personhood and abasing himself ” and Kant (1997: 431) fears the sight of such beggars will encourage others to neglect their own worth Kant is not merely opposed to extreme indigence. He repeatedly counsels against accepting favors from others, even our friends. It is “contrary to the true love of honour,” Kant (1997: 424) claims, “to accept benefits, since the worth of humanity in our own person is thereby diminished, and we let ourselves be put by the other into a state of dependency.” Of his five guidelines for establishing “a perfect friendship,” the first is not to burden our friend with our requirements. This lies quite beyond the bounds of friendship. It is far better to bear evils willingly than to demand relief from them. We must never let him fear that we may request something from him, on grounds of friendship; on the contrary, he must be quite convinced that he will never be called upon to benefit us. (Kant 1997: 414)4 4 In proscribing dependence between friends, Kant goes even further than Aristotle. The megalopsychos “cannot bear to live in dependence upon somebody else, except a friend, because such conduct is servile, which is why all flatterers are of the lowest class, and humble people are flatterers” (NE 4.3, emphasis added). Note the irony. Aristotle assumes extreme dependence is the mark of the humble, and therefore

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Similarly, Kant counsels that, if we are ill or dying, we should suffer quietly and not burden our friends with our suffering. Such occasions provide opportunities for the practice of patience and courage, Kant claims, but it never occurs to him that humility would be relevant to human fragility. The distance between Kant and the early Christian tradition on this point could not be more dramatic. Recall, for example, that Augustine came to understand the humility of Christ as demanding a radically different posture toward poverty and death—namely, the humble person is the one who has come to peace with his own ineradicable neediness and frailty, rather than continually denying them through the endless pursuit and maintenance of an ideal of immortality and self-sufficiency. Or consider the long-standing monastic affirmation of the grace of poverty, culminating in Francis of Assisi’s founding of a religious order of mendicants who witnessed to Christ by begging for their daily sustenance, thereby reminding others of their true destiny as beggars living eternally from the gifts of God. So, to summarize: Kant does indeed reject the monkish virtue of humility. Such a virtue depends for its justification on eschatological speculation; it leaves no room for proper pride or the love of honor; and it debilitates a person from the pursuit of a robust and independent earthly flourishing. By contrast, he posits a humility grounded by mundane natural reason, conducive to a mundane notion of the autonomous moral self, with concessions to our mundane condition of excessive self-love, and aimed resolutely at a mundane picture of civic flourishing. Such are the contours of a decidedly mundane humility. Inspired by Hume, Kant formulates humility as a virtue befitting the modern, liberal, and individualistic self. He denies that humility requires the backing of a peculiarly Christian metaphysics, and he seeks to show how proper humility need not undermine the quest for selfsufficiency and material security presupposed by the economic arrangements of emerging modern societies. Perhaps most importantly, whereas monastic humility was forever trying to displace the self from the center of personal consciousness, Kant argues that humility need not distract human persons from the project of

disparages humility. Kant insists that humility is a virtue, but only if it is made incompatible with dependence.

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self-perfection, understood as the full actualization of the self as an independent and reflexive center of rational agency.

LOW CONCERN AND MUNDANE HUMILITY In this section, I will argue that   falls short as an account of radical Christian humility, because it remains too closely wedded to many of the themes that motivated Kant’s reformulation of humility in the wake of the Humean critique. Because Kant’s Humean assumptions are so commonplace, their shaping influence on contemporary accounts of humility is easily overlooked. For instance, contemporary moral philosophers assume an account of humility should have broad human appeal regardless of speculative metaphysical commitments; they assume an account of humility should affirm the self-conscious dignity and proper pride of the humble person; and they assume an account of humility should show how humility is valuable in the workaday world of family, civic, and commercial life. By contrast, the tradition of thought on humility running through the desert mothers and fathers and Augustine does not share these assumptions. A radical unselfing account of Christian humility will challenge these assumptions, but, because it is so close in many respects to  , I need to show how   remains committed to these assumptions in order more clearly to differentiate   from the account I will set forth. I am going to focus primarily on how   remains committed, with Kant, to carving out space for proper pride and the love of honor in moral formation and the ongoing moral life. I am less confident about whether   insists that the nature of humility is evident to natural reason alone, or that the value of humility is sufficiently explained by its contributions to mundane personal and civic life. Roberts and Wood, the leading defenders of  , do not say much along these lines. I will just make the following two observations about how those features of Kantian mundane humility relate to  , before moving on to focus on the more obvious connections between   and mundane humility. I focus especially on Roberts and Wood’s   account, not only because it is most frequently cited, but also because they see themselves as offering an account that is at least partially

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inspired by Christian commitments. This makes their account especially interesting as a test case for how deeply Christian commitments might be thought to matter for an account of humility. Observation one: unlike Kant, Roberts and Wood do not suppose that, in general, the virtues are straightforwardly evident to natural reason. On the contrary, they argue that “different conceptions of the human person and his place in the universe yield strikingly different pictures of proper human functioning, and thus of the virtues” (Roberts and Wood 2007: 67). For example, If we think of ourselves as redeemed from sin by God and destined for an “eternal weight of glory,” courage and humility and other virtues will be quite different than if we thought of ourselves as simply mortals in an indifferent universe. Because of the belief that we are creatures of a loving God, we are encouraged to stress our dependence and thus our interdependence in a way that Aristotle, for example, does not. (Roberts and Wood 2007: 66–7)

So the particular concern of Kantian mundane humility to make the account transparent to universal human reason is not shared by Roberts and Wood. They lament that the tight connection between specifications of the virtues and contestable world views “is often hidden from view, in the writings of philosophers about the virtues, either because they do not admit the contestability of the conception on which their own analysis rests, or because their analyses remain too abstract to bring out the special features” (Roberts and Wood 2007: 67). I agree, and in fact my own challenge to the   view will involve an effort to display how that very account remains dependent on a view of human nature that is challengeable from the perspective of Christian theology. To put the matter pointedly, I worry the defenders of   may be guilty of the offense of which they accuse other virtue theorists—namely, a failure clearly to tie specific features of their account of humility to commitments peculiar to Christianity. Admittedly, they take Jesus to be the supremely virtuous person, and they find in the Jesus of Scripture what they take to be clear exemplifications of the virtues they specify. However, it is not always clear their accounts of the virtues depend on Jesus for their intelligibility. Rather, they seem to offer an account of humility meant to stand on its own and then find it being exemplified in the life of Jesus. Kant (1997: 355) uses a similar method, stating that, although the moral ideal is available to natural reason,

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“it is rendered practical, if we conceive thereunder a person adequate to the Idea, or an ideal, just as Christ, for example, is presented to us as an ideal.” So, despite the fact that Roberts and Wood acknowledge, unlike Kant, that specifications of the virtues depend to some degree on what is “speculative,” it remains unclear to me exactly how dependent their own account is on peculiarly Christian commitments. Observation two: it is unclear whether the value of humility for Roberts and Wood is dependent on how well humility so construed would contribute to mundane workaday flourishing. On the one hand, when they try to support the value of humility so understood, they appeal mainly to how the virtue matters for the smooth functioning of a just social order. Their description of what makes humility valuable places them squarely in the lineage of mundane humility. They say that humility may be regarded as virtuous for at least two reasons. First, the concern for status often weakens and confuses more important concerns, with bad behavioral and epistemic consequences; humility as a motivational configuration leaves the more important concern pure and free of such interference. Second, in some moral outlooks—in particular, highly egalitarian ones like Christianity—the concern for status is regarded with moral suspicion. Hierarchical human relations may be necessary to social order, but high status does not motivate the best sort of person. (Roberts and Wood 2007: 241)

On the other hand, they claim that, if humility turned out to be disadvantageous, such a result would not imply that humility is not a virtue. Rather, they suggest (among other possibilities) that the way to explain this outcome might be by showing how the community as a whole is so corrupt that “some vices actually become more ‘functional’ than their counterpart virtues” (Roberts and Wood 2007: 252). In this respect, Roberts and Wood acknowledge the possibility that some virtues may, given the corruption of the world, poorly suit an agent for a normal life of mundane flourishing. Nevertheless, on the whole this latter possibility does not often arise in their writing, even when considering such specifically Christian virtues as humility. In this respect, and unlike Augustine, they see a strong continuity between earthly and heavenly flourishing such that Christian virtue need not be expected to produce scorn or apparent failure in the daily life of the Christian.

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I turn now to the place of proper pride in the   view. Here, I suggest, we find both the tightest link between   and mundane humility, on the one hand, and, on the other, the heart of the difference between   and the unselfing view of Christian humility that I will lay out in Chapter 4. In their early essays developing the   view, Roberts and Wood (2003, 2007) say little about the virtue of pride. They do indicate in a couple of passages that, although humility requires an unusually low concern for self-importance, it does not require no concern whatsoever, but they do not develop this thought. They admit that “it is hard to say exactly what constitutes an excessive concern to put in a good appearance for the sake of social importance” (Roberts and Wood 2003: 260), but they do not attempt to precisify the distinction between proper and excessive concern. One might suppose, then, that the line, wherever it should be drawn, between proper and excessive concern, would make room for a proper pride that would not count against humility. But they never say this. More recently, though, Robert Roberts and Ryan West have written an essay that does seek to spell out how proper pride is compatible with a   view of humility. The essay is entitled “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride,” and, because it sets forth what I take to be the best alternative view of Christian humility to the one I propose, I will interact with it extensively in the remainder of the book. In the essay, Roberts and West (2017: 101) argue for “a virtuous form of pride that combines easily with genuine humility.” They argue, furthermore, that “Jesus could be taken to be the New Testament’s paradigm, not only of virtuous humility, but also of virtuous pride” (Roberts and West 2017: 101). In the remainder of this section, I want simply to set forth their view and close with some comments about how it rehearses the same concerns about the self that motivated Kant’s mundane humility. In Chapter 4, in the course of differentiating a radical unselfing model of humility from  , I will raise some critical questions about whether Roberts and West have sufficiently clarified their view and supported the claims they make on its behalf. Roberts and West (2017) set out to distinguish virtuous or proper pride from vicious or improper pride, and then to make a case for the value of proper pride. On their view, the key to distinguishing virtuous from vicious pride is to see the distinction between what they call “self-importance,” on the one hand, and “personal importance” on the other (2017: 102). The distinction is not crystal clear, but I will

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try to clarify what seems to be in view. They first identify “three general areas of human selfhood”: the self as agent, the self as entitled, and the self among other selves (2017: 101). Each of these areas of human selfhood is necessary to the pursuit and realization of human goods. People achieve goods by doing things, which often requires entitlements or forms of self-display that permit interpersonal comparison. Take, just as an example, the human good of scientific research. The realization of the goods of scientific research would be unlikely without human agents (scientists) who through self-display make possible interpersonal comparisons that justify entitlements—for instance, entitlements to grant funding for research. Now for the distinction between “self-importance” and “personal importance.” “Self-importance” is importance that is sought independently of the goods of agency, entitlement, display, or interpersonal comparison. “Personal importance” is importance that is necessary for the realization of the goods of agency, entitlement, display, or interpersonal comparison. Let me formulate an example to try to make out the distinction. Imagine two scientists: Scientist A cares wholeheartedly about research project x, both for its intrinsic interest and for its value to the broader community. Because of these values, and because she is confident in her abilities, she wants to be the one to pursue project x. This requires her to display her talents and abilities to the grant-funding board, which she does. She receives the grant entitlement and is gratified. Scientist B cares about research project x, but mainly because he knows being awarded the grant and making a significant finding will bolster his reputation in the scientific community. He is not necessarily indifferent to the intrinsic interest and social value of the work, but these goods are subservient, for him, to the good of finding himself in the spotlight. Thus he exaggerates his talents and abilities to the grant-funding board, making empty displays of his intelligence when invited for the grant interviews. He is eventually denied the grant and filled with envy for Scientist A, who received it. According to Roberts and West, Scientist A is motivated by a proper pride that is grounded in her sense of personal importance: confidence in her abilities, a secure sense of agency, aspiration, pride in her work, and a sense of dignity and self-respect. Indeed, were she not possessed of such proper pride, she would probably lack the personal gumption to win the grant. Scientist A’s own sense of “personal importance” is a means for the pursuit and achievement of the

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goods of scientific research. Scientist B, on the other hand, is motivated by vicious pride: selfish ambition, an arrogant sense of entitlement, vanity, and envy. For him, project x and the attendant grant funding are “vehicles of self-importance” (Roberts and West 2017: 102), means for putting himself center-stage looking down on others. “Personal importance” is a necessary means for the achievement of human goods; “self-importance,” by contrast, is an end in itself, a kind of importance that is not subservient to the goods of human excellence. This way of putting it, however, remains confusing, since it could be taken to suggest that the distinction is between kinds of importance. In fact, the distinction is just a measure of the degree of concern about one’s importance. So long as one’s concern about one’s importance is less intense than one’s concern about the goods of human excellence, one is in the realm of “personal importance.” But when one’s concern about one’s importance outstrips one’s concern about the goods of human excellence, one has crossed over into the realm of “self-importance.” And, for Roberts and West, concern for one’s “personal importance” amounts to proper pride, whereas concern for one’s “self-importance,” amounts to improper pride. If the sense of personal importance constitutive of proper pride is necessary to the achievement of human goods, then we see why proper pride is valuable, worthy of inculcation and development. Here we glimpse a strong connection between   and the Humean critique that gave rise to the set of concerns I have called mundane humility. Along with Hume and Kant,   assumes that some level of concern about the self is necessary for normal and fruitful human agency. In particular, it is perfectly appropriate to be concerned to have a stable and secure sense of one’s importance as an agent. Positive self-regard is considered fundamental to human agency, signaled by Roberts and West’s description (2017: 109) of proper pride as “a proper and genuine satisfaction of a basic human need,” “the kind of reflection-dependent self-construal that object-relations dynamic psychologists theorize to be the basis of a healthy self-concept.” In other words, human beings need to be able to undertake a self-survey and experience positive self-regard in order to act well consistently. Roberts and West interestingly acknowledge that there may be cases in which consistent, effectual agency is underwritten not by proper pride but some other concern, such as love or justice. However, they imply this is rare, reminiscent of Kant’s concession to the “lesser morality of mankind.” Most of the time it is

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proper pride that buttresses our agency, for, in most cases, were there not such proper pride, we would be immobilized by the vices of humility: “deep dispositional shame, social insecurity, timidity, glory intolerance, obsequiousness, servility, defeatist lethargy, slovenliness, pusillanimity, and the like” (2017: 118). So the picture here is one in which, if not absolutely necessary, reflexive self-assessment normally precedes and accompanies most of our actions, and a positive selfassessment is a prerequisite to proper functioning as a human being. Instead of distorting human agency, proper pride enhances and completes it; instead of corrupting one’s sense of entitlement, proper pride grasps and serves real entitlements for good reasons; instead of empty self-display and invidious comparison, proper pride, by self-respect and a sense of dignity, disposes to intelligent purposeful self-display and makes needed and appropriate comparisons for essential reasons. (2017: 109)

Relatedly, Roberts and West consider the pursuit of honor to be an appropriate motivation for the moral life, but they interpret Jesus as recommending that we be motivated by the quest for our heavenly Father’s honor rather than the honor of other human beings. They interpret Jesus’s frequent promise that “your Father who sees in secret will reward you” as an assurance to the disciples that, even when they are not being praised by other persons for their good works, they can rest in knowing that they will be praised by God. Such praise is important, Roberts and West (2017: 117–18) suggest, because it is in the approval of another that the agent “feels her own glory, thus begetting confidence in her value, a basic security in her agency, and a serenity about her entitlements that gives her flexibility about claiming them.” Hence, the right pursuit of honor and the development of proper pride are mutually reinforcing. The virtuous person acts, in part, in pursuit of divine approval, and the expectation of such divine approval enhances the person’s self-regard in such a way that she experiences herself as a more confident and secure agent. My highlighting of the way that a positive self-survey and the pursuit of honor function in Roberts and West’s account is not an attempt to point out a self-evident shortcoming. Far from it. I think they are working with an eminently defensible modern moral psychology. I draw attention to these features only to set into better relief, in Chapter 4, an alternative. I do not think that proper pride and the pursuit of honor are self-evidently vicious. Indeed, I think both Kant

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and Roberts/West help us see why so many have taken Hume’s rehabilitation of proper pride to be a genuine advance, a course correction from the wrong turn taken by Christianity’s valorization of “monkish” self-effacement.

EARLY CHRISTIAN REJECTION OF THE PROPER PRIDES I do not want to exaggerate the overlaps between Aristotle, Hume and Kant, and Roberts/Wood/West. There are differences throughout, but this much they share in common: they all believe that moral formation and the successful moral life require proper pride and the proper pursuit of honor. Aristotle, Hume, and Kant could each endorse Roberts and West’s claim (2017: 109) that: Virtuous prides such as self-confidence, secure agency, aspiration, pride in one’s work, sense of dignity, self-respect, personal authority, pride in one’s associates, and secure collegiality, are excellences with respect to the same dimensions of character with respect to which the vices of pride are defects.

In a significant strand of Christian tradition, however, affirmations of these “virtuous prides” are lacking. Often, they are expressly undermined. In this book’s Introduction, I gave several samples of the strange things the early desert ammas and abbas had to say about humility. Here, I want to cite several more sayings, not only from the desert monks but also from the broader early monastic and martyr traditions, in order to underscore the opposition between the view of an excellent self assumed by mundane humility and the view of an excellent self at play in the early Christian tradition of radical humility. From that tradition, we hear little of self-confidence. Instead we hear: “Do not take much notice of your abba, and do not often go to see him; for you will get confidence from it, and start to want to be a leader yourself ” (Ward 2003: 168). And in Benedict’s Rule we read: “The sixth step of humility is that a monk is content with the lowest and most menial treatment, and regards himself as a poor and worthless workman in whatever task he is given” (RB 7.49).

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We hear little of secure agency. Instead we hear of Abba Cronides that “such was the humility which he had guarded right into old age that he considered himself a nonentity” (Ward 1980: 106). Ignatius of Antioch says: “I shall be a Christian only when the world sees me no more” (quoted in Jensen 2012: 147). And Abba Moses counsels: “Unless you think in your heart that you have been shut in a tomb for three years, you cannot attain to self-loss” (quoted in Foulcher 2015: 65). We hear little of aspiration. Instead, a hermit says: “I never push myself up above my station; and I am untroubled when I am put in a low place” (Ward 2003: 163). And “the eighth step of humility is that a monk does only what is endorsed by the common rule of the monastery and the example set by his superiors” (RB 7.55). We hear little of pride in one’s work. Instead we are told of “a nobleman’s daughter, who was possessed by a devil. Her father asked a monk for help. The monk said to him, ‘No one can cure your daughter except some hermits I know: and if you go to them, they will refuse to do it from motives of humility’” (Ward 2003: 153). And Abba Arsenius is held up as an example because “he never wanted to discuss any question about Scripture, though he was wonderful at expounding it when he wanted to, and that he was very reluctant to write anyone a letter” (Ward 2003: 151). We hear little of a sense of dignity. Instead we are told of the monk who, when he entered into the community, said to himself: “You and the donkey must be alike. The donkey says nothing when he is beaten” (Ward 2003: 157). And in Benedict’s Rule we read: “The seventh step of humility is that a man not only admits with his tongue but is also convinced in his heart that he is inferior to all and of less value” (RB 7.51). We hear little of self-respect. Instead Bernard of Clairvaux says: “If you examine yourself inwardly by the light of truth and without dissimulation, and judge yourself without flattery; no doubt you will be humbled by your own eyes, becoming contemptible in your own sight as a result of this true knowledge” (quoted in Foulcher 2015: 1). And a monk who has been wronged by his brother is advised: “Even if he has sinned against you, think in your heart that you have sinned against him” (Ward 2003: 169). We hear little of personal authority. Instead we are told of Abba Theodore that, “after he was ordained deacon in Scetis, he refused to minister in the services but escaped to various places to avoid having to do so” (Ward 2003: 154). And Macarius told this story about

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himself: “When I was a young man, and living in my cell in Egypt, they caught me, and made me a cleric in a village. Because I did not want to minister, I fled to another place” (Ward 2003: 155). It appears, then, that monastic and other early Christian encomiums to humility are aggressively opposed to the picture of the human person advanced by classical moral philosophy, rehabilitated by Hume and Kant, and adopted in revised form by Roberts/Wood/ West. These early Christians appear to enjoin the path of humility as precisely a rejection of the quest for a secure sense of self that can underwrite effectual moral agency and enable a person to remain selfconfident and self-sufficient throughout the storms of life.

CONCLUSION The moral status of so-called proper or virtuous pride is the central issue. From Hume to the present, proper pride has been defended as a necessary component of moral formation and consistent moral agency. Humility, whatever it is, should not imperil such pride. This makes so much sense that we moderns hardly know what to do with the early Christian rejection of proper pride. There are at least four ways to try to make sense of the early Christian data. First, one could dismiss these uncomfortable sayings as exaggerated rhetorical flourishes and try to press early monastic tradition back into a mundane view of humility. This fails to take the tradition seriously in its own right. Second, one could accept the sayings at face value but reject the suggested view of humility as an unfortunate episode in Christian history of which we should repent. This is the most common response; Roberts and West (2017: 100), for instance, blame this strand of the Christian tradition for giving us a view of humility “as marked by deep shame, social insecurity, timidity, defeatist lethargy, servility, low ambition, and the like.” Third, one could interpret these early monastic pronouncements as evidence of an  account of humility, according to which the monks are mistaken about their real worth, but being so mistaken is precisely what it means to have humility. This would make their view of humility subject to the same objections that plague the contemporary  account.

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My approach, instead, is to take the tradition at face value and assume for exploratory purposes its coherence, asking what kind of metaphysical backdrop, what kind of anthropology, and what vision of human flourishing is finding its expression here. I begin from the assumption that the monks and other early Christians in their wake really did believe that humility required a radical abandonment of self in the several ways they describe. If you begin with the anthropology and vision of flourishing at work in mundane humility, and read the early monastic tradition on humility from this vantage point, it can only appear perverse. That is because, I will argue, early monastic Christianity was not approaching humility with the same account of human nature and human flourishing. I argue that the monks meant what they said. The path of humility, which leads to our beatitude, calls for the relinquishment of precisely what contemporary psychology and virtue theory tells us is necessary for the moral life— namely, pursuit of a secure sense of self. It will take all of Chapters 4 and 5 to develop these claims.

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4 Radical Christian Humility INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I set forth what I take to be the account of humility at work in early Christian commentary on humility. It became clear in Chapter 3 that the issue of pride, and whether it is ever proper or virtuous, is central. Thus, in this chapter, I work toward a statement of radical Christian humility by bringing into sharper focus the essence of proper pride. Only by clarifying precisely why self-confidence, aspiration, secure agency, and the other forms of so-called proper pride are thought to be forms of pride can we begin to see why, so understood, they appear problematic from the perspective of radical Christian humility. The account of radical Christian humility advanced here is at odds with prevailing orthodoxies about the flourishing of the individual person. It may appear so foreign to our sensibilities about and our hopes for human persons—ourselves especially, but others as well— that the reader will wonder why, even if such a view is conceptually coherent, anyone would want to entertain it. In response, I argue in Chapter 5 that a radical unselfing account of Christian humility makes better sense once Christian doctrines of the cross and the Trinity are allowed to shape our perspectives on theological anthropology and the eschatology of the self.

THE ESSENCE OF PROPER PRIDE To advance toward an account of what I have been calling the radical unselfing view of Christian humility, we need to get clearer on what

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we mean when we talk about the “self,” and on the way in which humility and pride are “concerned” with the self or can be taken as “construals” of the self. As a first step in this direction, I want to raise some questions about Roberts and West’s account of proper pride. Pressing their view for clarity will get us into a position from which we can better grasp in what sense the “self ” is, and is not, involved in proper pride. In their efforts to differentiate the proper pride of ambition from the improper pride of selfish ambition, Roberts and West (2017: 103) propose: The less subordinate or conditional the envisioned accomplishment is to the personal importance of the agent, the more virtuous the ambition (pride) would be; whereas the more the agent wants the envisioned accomplishment abstractly or only for the sake of his own importance, the more the ambition will be a vicious pride, a seeking of selfimportance by way of his agency.

Here we are invited to imagine a continuum, with the improper pride of selfish ambition at one extreme and the proper pride of virtuous ambition at the other. The extreme of improper pride would be a case in which the agent wants the envisioned accomplishment only for the way it contributes to his own “self-importance”; he cares not at all for the good of the accomplishment in its own right. Suppose, to return to our two scientists, that Scientist B cares about the research project only because he knows being awarded the grant and making a significant finding will bolster his reputation in the scientific community. He is utterly indifferent to the intrinsic worth and humanitarian significance of the work. Here we have an extreme case of the vice of selfish ambition according to Roberts and West. Now, how should we characterize the other extreme, the extreme of perfectly virtuous ambition? A proposal jumps to mind. Since the corrupting feature in Scientist B’s case was his concern for how the accomplishment would bear on his own importance, let’s remove such concern entirely. Will this give us a characterization of proper ambition? According to Roberts and West, it will not. Remember that, for Roberts and West, perfect humility does not require the complete absence of concern about one’s importance; rather it requires an unusually low concern about one’s importance. In distinguishing proper from improper ambition, Roberts and West say it is perfectly appropriate for one to care about the connection between an

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accomplishment and some sense of one’s importance. Namely, they say it is perfectly appropriate for someone to want to be the agent of the accomplishment in question. “If her ambition matures toward virtuous pride, she will grow in the depth of her understanding and appreciation of the goal and so subordinate her personal importance as its agent to the goal’s intrinsic value (without ceasing, however, to care about being its agent)” (Roberts and West 2017: 103, emphasis added). Roberts and West do not say much about what caring to be an agent of some act has to do with proper pride. So, to try to home in on what they might have in mind, let us imagine two versions of Scientist A: Scientist A1 cares wholeheartedly about research project x, both for its intrinsic interest and for its value to the broader community. She is confident that she could do a good job on the research project, but she knows others are competent too. So long as the project is done well, she’ll be glad. Whether it’s done by her or another competent person matters not to her. Scientist A2 cares wholeheartedly about research project x, both for its intrinsic interest and its value to the broader community. She is confident that she could do a good job on the research project, but she knows others are competent too. Still, she would like to be the one to do project x, and she’ll be disappointed if she is not. For Roberts and West, Scientist A2 is the one with proper ambition. Scientist A1, because she has no concern with being the agent of project x, lacks ambition altogether on their view, and in this respect is less virtuous than Scientist A2. Scientist A1 may in fact be plagued by one of the “vices of humility” (Roberts and West 2017: 118), perhaps pusillanimity. In any event, what is plain is that the concern to be the agent of some fine achievement is required for perfect ambition. It remains unclear what makes this concern—the concern to be the agent who achieves some goal—a form of proper pride. The mere fact that Scientist A2 cares about being the agent of project x is not enough to tell us if that care is a form of pride, whether proper or not. We need to know more about why she cares. For instance, suppose she wants to be the agent of project x because it will allow her to spend a year close to her aging grandparents. I see no reason to

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consider that a form of pride, whether proper or not. Or suppose she wants to be the agent of project x because she needs the work to feed her family. I see no reason that kind of concern to be the agent of an act amounts to a form of pride, either. Or suppose she wants to be the agent of project x just because it would be enjoyable. That kind of concern to be the agent of an act does not look like pride, either. So not just any motivating concern to be the agent of some act will count as a form of pride. So, again, what kind of concern to be the agent of some act counts as a form of proper pride on Roberts and West’s view? The distinction between personal importance and self-importance is again the key here. Only if Scientist A2 cares about being the agent of an act at least in part because of a concern about her importance are we in the domain of pride. Remember, it is supposed to be the concern about personal importance as opposed to self-importance that demarcates proper from improper pride. So, in order to state what it is that makes Scientist A2 properly ambitious and properly proud, Roberts and West need to say something like this: “Scientist A2 wants to be the one to do research project x, and she will be disappointed if someone other than her does it, because doing project x gives her an opportunity to experience her own importance.” That is clearly a concern that counts as a form of pride. It is the way in which her concern to do project x is a concern about her own personal importance (as distinguished from her “self-importance”1) that makes the concern a form of pride. What makes her desire to do project x into a form of prideful ambition is exactly the way her doing of the project will feature in a certain kind of positive self-survey. Were this element of reflexive positive regard absent, we would have no reason to characterize her posture as an instance of pride. What makes her desire to do project x into a form of properly prideful ambition, according to Roberts and West, is that her desire for a positive self-survey upon performance of the project, although present, is less dominant in her thought-life than her desire for the goods intrinsic to the project itself. This way of putting it is not meant to sow suspicion. Roberts and West are exactly right that most moral outlooks do grant that it is appropriate and good when our actions, entitlements, interpersonal 1 Remember, though, that “personal importance” and “self-importance” are not distinct kinds, but rather distinct ratios, of concern about one’s importance (relative to concern about other goods).

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comparisons, and public displays provide us with opportunities to experience ourselves as important. Such experiences are widely considered constitutive of self-formation. It is by and through such experiences that we both fashion and discover “who we are,” gradually establishing a “sense of self ” and a more secure assessment of our capabilities and limitations. The more established our sense of self and the more secure our sense of agency, the more relaxed and capable we become, thereby making our lives more enjoyable to ourselves and more useful to others. It is precisely this “sense of self ” that Roberts and West (2017: 105) have in mind when they claim that the various forms of proper pride contribute to “the kind of reflection-dependent selfconstrual that object-relations dynamic psychologists theorize to be the basis of a healthy self-concept.” So this is a first important clarification about Roberts and West’s project: their legitimation of proper pride is straightforwardly a legitimation of proper concern to experience one’s own importance, at least in part because such experiences are essential to proper self-formation and ongoing moral excellence.

“SELF” AND “IDENTITY” To clarify in what sense the view I want to propose is a view of “unselfing,” and in what sense   is opposed to an unselfing view of humility, it will be helpful to parse the various ways we use the language of “self.” “Self” is an ambiguous concept, to say the least. Contemporary psychologists June Tangney and Mark Leary (2012), in the Introduction to their Handbook of Self and Identity, helpfully distinguish five different meanings of “self ” that regularly appear in psychological literature and in contemporary discourse. Much confusion arises from a failure to differentiate between them. (1) “Self” means “person.” Such a meaning is evident in a locution such as “self-mutilation.” (2) “Self” means “personality,” the sum of a person’s features that make him or her psychologically distinct. Notice that, in this usage, one could possess a “self ” while yet lacking a self-concept, or even self-knowledge, as would be true of very young children. (3) “Self” means “phenomenological subject.” One is a self in this sense so long as one has access, through introspection, to the

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Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory “what-it’s-like-ness” of one’s experience. This is the “I” of Descartes’s cogito. (4) “Self” means “set of beliefs and desires that indicate what is important or essential to who I am.” The majority of our “self ”-locutions pick out this meaning, and it is the one that receives the most attention in contemporary usage. We are dealing with this meaning in a host of locutions: self-affirmation, self-disclosure, self-esteem, self-concept, self-understanding, self-representation, self-ideal, fragmented self, unified self, etc. This notion of “self ” is also at play in much contemporary usage of the word “identity.”2 (5) “Self” means “executive agent.” It names that feature within us capable of choice.

To say that humility is about proper concern for the self is to say that humility involves the proper posture toward the set of reflexive mental states constitutive of the self in meaning (4) above. The other four meanings of “self ” are irrelevant to a proper concern account, and it is no part of an unselfing account of humility to set as an ideal the loss of the (1) person, or of (2) personality, or of (3) selfconsciousness, or of (5) executive agency. In what sense does an unselfing account of humility set as an ideal the loss of the self in the sense of meaning (4)? To get a clear answer to this question, we need to drill down within this category of “self ” locutions. There is nothing approaching an accepted lexicon of these terms, but I want to provide a topography of the terrain they are meant to map onto. And I would like to fix the use of several of these terms throughout the rest of the book so the reader will know just what I have in mind. I have access to a wide variety of mental states that have me as their object. Among those are beliefs about myself. Many of those beliefs have no bearing whatsoever on my sense of self. For instance, I believe I can smell the difference between a grapefruit and an orange, but I could hardly care less. That belief seems ancillary to who I am; it is hard to imagine it entering into any account I would provide about myself. Many other of those beliefs have great bearing on my sense of 2 The sense of “identity” here is different than the sense it carries when philosophers speak of “personal identity.” The philosophical question of personal identity is about the self of meaning (1)—what is it that makes me the same person over time?

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who I am. For instance, I believe I am a skilled public speaker. Were I to discover that belief to be utterly false, I would care a great deal. Other beliefs are in between. If someone challenged my belief that I can make on average eight out of ten shots from the “free throw” line on a basketball court, I would be a little bothered, but not greatly so. Additionally, I have many desires for myself that line up in a similar pattern. I have a desire to eat a cheeseburger for dinner, but if someone belittles that desire, it won’t matter to me that much. I also have a desire to be a faithful spouse, and if someone belittles that desire, suggesting it is not a worthy project, it will matter a great deal to me. I will have to object strongly and consider ending the conversation. And then there are desires in between. I have a desire to become a vegetarian, and if someone challenges it, I will want to take that challenge seriously without ending the conversation. So, as in the case of beliefs about myself, desires for myself can be measured in terms of how important they are for who I take myself to be, or who I think I want to become. I can reflect on what I take to be true of myself and what I desire for myself. This reflexivity is the basis of self-knowledge, but also, of course, of self-deception. The array of reflexive attitudes that make possible self-knowledge and self-deception are constitutive of my “sense of self ” only when they are reflexively organized for specific purposes. Indeed, if I cannot organize these reflexive attitudes, I cannot be said to have a sense of self at all, but only a random collection of reflexive beliefs and desires. So how do we organize our reflexive attitudes in such a way that we come to have a “self ”? Here things get complicated. Because I need a “sense of self ” for different, sometimes competing, purposes, there is not a unitary organizing principle. I will describe four ways in which reflexive attitudes can be organized to provide a sense of self, and then comment on the relationships between them. Although still too simplistic, this refinement will reveal how much ambiguity remains in the notion of “self ” picked out by meaning (4), and in the notion of “self-concern” at the heart of the   view. We have to clear up this ambiguity to make progress in understanding how pride is a certain kind of concern for the self or a certain kind of selfconstrual. Pride is not just any self-concern. If humility is an antidote to (improper) pride, we have to get clear on what sorts of self-concern are constitutive of pride. Here, then, are four ways in which I might be concerned about my “self.”

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(4a) First, there are beliefs and desires that matter to my sense of self insofar as they bear on the extent to which I feel known by others. When we tell our stories to others, we select a set of items to share because we believe that others will know us only to the extent they know these things about us. These self-reflexive beliefs and desires are on a continuum: the extent to which we feel truly known by others is a function not only of how much they know about us, but also of how relatively important the things they know about us are to our own sense of what is required for our being understood. Let us call the collection of reflexive beliefs and desires that bear on my sense of being understood by others my self-understanding. (4b) Second, there are beliefs and desires that matter to my sense of self insofar as they bear on my sense of the kind of agent I can be. We are continually presented with a range of possible actions overwhelming in scope. We could simply select actions at random, with no rhyme or reason, but this would undercut our sense of being an intelligible agent. Christine Korsgaard (2009: 1) argues that human actions are distinct from mere acts because they are done for the sake of ends, and as such they constitute agents’ “practical identities.” Since our actions are done for the sake of ends, in doing them we constitute a story about who we are. It is true, of course, that in acting we select ends and thereby narrow the story that can be told about who we are, but the reverse is true as well: what we care about, the ends with which we identify, enable us to select which actions to perform. Along these lines, Robert Adams (1987: 448) has argued that most of the time even basic ethical principles plus non-normative facts about our situation underdetermine the actions we should perform. Adams claims that we need an ordering principle to know how to act when our situation is so underdetermined. He describes the needed ordering principle as a “vocation”—that is, a sense of who we are called to be in the world and of what goods, specifically, are given to us to love (Adams 1999: 301–2). Thus some among our reflexive beliefs and desires matter to our sense of self because they are both selected by and selective of the actions that we perform. Following Adams, let us call the collection of reflexive beliefs and desires that bear on my sense of agency my vocation.3 This collection, 3 One common (especially Protestant) notion of vocation sees it as a distinctive and discernible calling that God places on an individual’s life. I am not using the word in this sense. I suspect this way of understanding vocation is often at cross-purposes

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too, is arrayed along a continuum. My belief that I am a spouse and my desire to be a faithful spouse are more central to my vocation (I hope) than are my belief that I am a good public speaker and my desire to improve at public speaking. (4c) Third, there are beliefs and desires that matter to my sense of self insofar as they provide occasions for a positive self-survey that enhances my own sense of distinctive personal importance. There are two key notions here: personal importance and distinctiveness. It may be that the notion of distinctiveness is redundant because it is already included in the notion of personal importance. That is, it may be that I can feel important only insofar as the good-making feature I detect is somehow distinctive to me over and against some relevant other(s). Intuitions differ here, so I want to cash this category out by including both notions and take it as possible that there are reflexive beliefs and desires that highlight my personal importance but not distinctively so. My belief that God loves me may serve as an example here; maybe it makes me feel important to reflect on God’s love for me, but it does not make me feel distinctively important (since God loves everyone). And clearly there are reflexive beliefs and desires that highlight my distinctiveness but not my personal importance. For example, my love of buttermilk distinguishes me from many others, but I experience no sense of personal importance when I reflect on that desire of mine. The class of reflexive beliefs and desires that provide a sense of distinctive personal importance is the class that psychologists refer to as an “ego ideal” (see Wurmser 1981: 72–3). James Kellenberger (2016: 15) refers to it as a “pride ideal,” because it is the particular sense of self that is connected to pride.4 Attaining to this ideal occasions an experience of my own distinctive importance over against others (pride), whereas failure to attain the ideal occasions an experience of loss of relative importance over against others (humiliation). So, for instance, if being the best basketball player at my school is part of my ego ideal, I will experience pride if I win the Most Valuable Player award at the end of the season, humiliation with growth in humility insofar as it tends merely to put a supposedly divine imprimatur on an ego ideal. 4 I found Kellenberger’s book Dying to Self and Detachment after completing the initial draft of this book. Kellenberger’s thesis is that there is a distinctively religious kind of humility characterized by a radical form of detachment and loss of self. His perspective is closer to my own than anything else in the contemporary literature on humility.

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if I get cut from the team before the season even begins. Thus pride is a specific kind of concern for the self; it is a concern for one’s own distinctive importance. Put differently, pride is a particular kind of self-construal; it is a construal of oneself as distinctively important. Let us call the sense of self comprised by the class of reflexive beliefs and desires that can be the occasion of pride or humiliation one’s ego ideal. And, of course, the reflexive beliefs and desires that make up one’s ego ideal are on a continuum as well; some can be abandoned without requiring much significant revision of the ideal, whereas others are so central that abandoning them requires wholesale revision. (4d) Finally, there are beliefs and desires that matter to my sense of self insofar as they provide occasions for a positive self-survey that enhances my own sense of worth, without enhancing my sense of distinctive personal importance. Prime candidates for this class are beliefs and desires that fail to distinguish why I matter over and against others (for example, “I am loved by God”) or that fail to offer me any possible leverage for taking personal credit (for example, “my mother loves me unconditionally”). Let us call the sense of self comprised by this class of reflexive beliefs and desires one’s sense of self-worth. To recap: the “self ” of meaning (4) above comprises at least four different senses of self: (a) one’s self-understanding, (b) one’s vocation, (c) one’s ego ideal, and (d) one’s sense of self-worth. Obviously, there is overlap among the many beliefs and desires that make up each of the four senses of self, but there need not be exhaustive overlap, and probably never is. Highly negative reflexive beliefs are often included in one’s self-understanding without being included in any of the other three senses of self: that I was bullied as a child may be crucial to my self-understanding without constituting any part of my vocation, my ego ideal, or my sense of self-worth. Relatively trivial aspects of one’s vocation may be excluded entirely from the other three senses of self: that I have a knack for detail may guide my decisions about how best to serve in my church without factoring into my self-understanding, my ego ideal, or my sense of self-worth at all. The more ridiculous or petty aspects of our ego ideals rarely migrate into our other three senses of self: it may be part of my ego ideal that I have a full head of hair without that being part of my selfunderstanding, my vocation, or my sense of self-worth. And I have already indicated how one’s sense of self-worth can come apart from

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one’s ego ideal: I know my fundamental worth is rooted in God’s love for me, but I cannot manage any experience of pride reflecting on that, nor would I experience humiliation if I came to believe I was not loved by God. Each of the senses of self can become the focus of a “selfing” project. For instance, we can develop our sense of self by (a) questing after greater self-understanding, (b) questing after a more robust or clear vocation, (c) questing after an attainable ego ideal, or (d) questing after a deeper sense of self-worth. All sorts of fascinating relationships can emerge between the differing quests, but in order better to understand mundane humility’s insistence on a place for proper pride, we need to see how the quest after an ego ideal typically has a privileged relationship with respect to the other quests. The quest for the ego ideal typically motivates the other quests, controlling and constraining them in ways that suit its own purposes. Let me explain. The ego ideal motivates and constrains our quest for selfunderstanding because any tension between some component of our self-understanding and some component of our ego ideal is an occasion of humiliation. For instance, if it is part of my self-understanding that I am an indecisive person, and if it is part of my ego ideal that I be a decisive leader, reflection on my self-understanding will be an occasion of disappointment and humiliation. The ego ideal-induced experience of humiliation will then motivate a quest for revision, either of my self-understanding or of my ego ideal. How to revise? There are at least two ways. First, I might “flip the script,” and manage to valorize indecisiveness, incorporating it into my ego ideal. Perhaps I latch on to Emerson’s famous quip that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and that allows me to reinterpret my indecisiveness as a mark of my intelligence: I just see the nuances that other dolts overlook in their myopic single-mindedness. Notice how people or people groups who have long been shamed or humiliated for some characteristic or behavior can suddenly flip the script and take pride in that characteristic or behavior, by incorporating it into a revised ego ideal. This is what happened, for instance, in the “black power” movement. So, when my ego ideal generates a dissatisfaction with my self-understanding, flipping the script can allow me to come to peace with my self-understanding by revising my ego ideal. Alternatively, when confronted with this gap between my ego ideal and my self-understanding, I might revise my vocation so as to aim at being a more decisive agent. Now my ego ideal is driving a double

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revision: it motivates a revision of my vocation in service to a revised self-understanding. If this revision succeeds, and I grow in habits of decisiveness, I gain a new self-understanding, a new story to tell about myself: I used to be a very indecisive person, but that is not who I am today. Here again, the ego ideal is the engine that leverages a revision of vocation in service to an alignment between self-understanding and ego ideal. Conversely, the formation of our vocations can be constrained by our ego ideal whenever we have the conviction that we should be a certain kind of agent but recognize that being such an agent cannot occasion an experience of pride. The most obvious example here is setting it as a goal for oneself to become a genuinely humble person. By definition, there is a tension, if not an incompatibility, in setting humility as part of one’s ego ideal (though appearing to be humble can easily be made part of one’s ego ideal), and thus the most significant barrier to setting one’s sights on true humility is the recognition that success would mean an increasing diminishment of one’s ego ideal. It is easier to grasp this dynamic by thinking about more specific expressions of humility. One expression of humility is a willingness vulnerably to share one’s failures with a trusted other, but it is no part of anyone’s ego ideal to be known as a failure. Thus, forming the intention to become the kind of agent who will confess one’s failures to a trusted other meets resistance because such a vocation is in tension with an ego ideal. Here again, there is the option of flipping the script and valorizing confessions of failure, thereby incorporating failure into one’s ego ideal (as seems to happen in some especially cynical expressions of contemporary stand-up comedy or tell-all memoir). Of course, such revision in the ego ideal taints the revision of one’s vocation, since failure has been transmuted now into a different kind of success. The iterations here are layered with incredible complexity; deft novelists are the best chroniclers of the perpetual entwinement of self-understandings, vocations, and ego ideals, and of the way in which the ego ideal is nearly always in the driver’s seat. What of the sense of self-worth? How does the ego ideal motivate and constrain one’s quest for a sense of self-worth? A fully attained ego ideal may drown out the need for a sense of self-worth. After all, if I have unfailing assurance that I am distinctly and uniquely important, I may not feel the need to know my worth in a way that can sustain me even when my distinctive importance is undermined.

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However, repeated failure to attain to one’s ego ideal often throws one back into a quest for self-worth. This is especially true when one’s ego ideal appears permanently unattainable and no attainable revision is imaginable. Conversely, a deep and abiding sense of one’s self-worth (again, as opposed to one’s distinctive personal importance) can free one from the quest for an attainable ego ideal and/or from the quest to attain one’s ego ideal. However, there is a human propensity to elevate the quest for attainment of an ego ideal over the quest for a sense of self-worth. Why? Because we are ego-driven creatures, inclined toward rank-ordering, which the ego ideal serves. We want to be the best, or at least better than some; we want to be uniquely important in some way. In theological terms, we are fallen creatures who prefer to merit love and glory on the basis of some distinctive excellence rather than receive them as free gifts. Owing to this bent in our nature, the ego ideal does not sit comfortably with the sense of self-worth. Theologically: self-worth is a gift of grace, and we are resistant to grace. To the extent that we have an ego ideal, the gift of graced self-worth may feel like a humiliation. We need a way of denoting the fact that our various selfing projects are typically driven by the ego ideal, because it is as a challenge to ego ideal-driven selfing projects that radical Christian humility can be understood as a recommendation of “unselfing.” That is, radical Christian humility recommends unselfing insofar as it recommends the termination of the quest for a unitary self organized around the attainment of an ego ideal. Most of the time we are actually questing after a unitary and pleasing sense of ourselves, the quest is ego idealdriven. This is because we experience a kind of fragmentation or misfit any time one of our senses of self cannot be harmonized with our ego ideal, and because our best possible response is either to revise the ego ideal or to leverage the ego ideal to energize revision in one of our other senses of self. The reason that proper pride remains central in accounts of mundane humility is because our ego ideals do the lion’s share of the work in forging unity among our various senses of self, and mundane humility fears that, if the ego ideal is proscribed, the very possibility of a “healthy self ” goes with it. Let us call the sense of self achieved when there is a unity among one’s self-understanding, vocation, and ego ideal one’s identity. (I leave sense of self-worth out of the equation here, because, as was just explained, it can float quite free of these other selfing projects.)

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One achieves an identity—a sense of being one clearly demarcated, unitary self—by aligning one’s various senses of self through various selfing projects. This is the holy grail, so to speak, of modern psychology’s notion of a healthy self, indicated by the commonplace that everyone seeks to be a “whole” person. For these reasons, I denote the ego ideal-driven selfing project as the quest for identity. Of course, the quest for identity, which is ego ideal-driven, is not the only possible kind of selfing project. I want to preserve the possibility that we may “quest” after a sense of self-worth, or a vocation, or selfunderstanding without being driven by the ego ideal. Indeed, I think the perfectly humble person is precisely one who may possess an adequate self-understanding, vocation, and sense of self-worth without the ego ideal ever entering in—that is, without any resort to pride of any kind. When I speak of the quest for identity, I have in mind specifically the quest for a unitary sense of self in which one’s ego ideal is fully integrated with one’s self-understanding and one’s vocation.

LOW CONCERN AND THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY   remains an account of mundane humility because it approves a necessary role for the ego ideal in the quest for identity.   distinguishes between “personal importance” and “selfimportance,” but it should be clear that the “importance” at issue in each case is the sense of distinctive importance associated with the ego ideal. One is driven by the supposedly proper pride of “personal importance” when one’s ego ideal provides motivational impetus to pursue some good that one considers even more important than personal aggrandizement; one is driven by the supposedly improper pride of “self-importance” when the attainment of one’s ego ideal is the dominant end of one’s action. In either case, though, the ego ideal provides the animating energy. The attempt to preserve a role for proper pride is rooted in the recognition that our selfing projects are almost always ego-driven. This is the Humean insight at the core of mundane humility generally, and   specifically. Even if   sanctions some role for the ego ideal, it is clear that   targets the ego ideal for chastening.   rightly recognizes that, as ego-driven creatures, we are consistently tempted to spend large chunks of our thought-life searching

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introspectively for reflexive beliefs and desires from which we can build a cache of distinctive personal importance. And   suggests that humility is displayed by engaging in this sort of activity much less than most people do. Much less in what sense? That is not entirely clear. There are at least two options. Either (1) we are to spend much less time focusing on and constructing our ego ideals, or (2) we are to select significantly fewer of our reflexive mental states for inclusion in our ego ideals. We can see, of course, how these two senses of “much less” would probably correlate. The person who needs less reflexive material to constitute her working ego ideal will probably need much less time constructing, pursuing, and maintaining it; conversely, the person who finds many other things more interesting than herself and therefore worthier of her attention will probably require much less reflexive material to construct an attainable ego ideal. Although   targets the ego ideal as that which must be disciplined and curtailed for growth in humility, we have seen that the view does not proscribe the ego ideal altogether. After all, for Roberts and West, there are virtuous forms of pride, those forms of pride that make up one’s sense of “personal importance.” The task for the person who would be humble, then, is to chasten the ego ideal in such a way that it occasions only proper and virtuous pride, never improper and vicious pride. But why think there is proper pride at all? Roberts and West’s argument for the existence of proper pride goes like this. (1) Self-confidence, aspiration, self-respect, and the rest are good things. Furthermore, (2) they are forms of pride. Therefore, (3) there are forms of pride that are good and virtuous. But what about premise (2)? Do self-confidence, aspiration, self-respect, and the like have to be forms of pride? Return to my earlier examples. I am confident in many of my abilities. My confidence in my ability to x is constituted by my belief that I can do x well. Thus I am confident in my ability to speak articulately in public, to make on average eight of ten free throws, and to be able to smell the difference between a grapefruit and an orange. The beliefs that constitute these various confidences vary in their importance to me. My belief that I can smell the difference between a grapefruit and an orange is hardly important to me at all. At least I don’t think it is. (It is easy to be mistaken about these matters.) On the other hand, my belief that I can speak articulately in public is very important to me. If I discovered tomorrow that I could no longer speak articulately in public, I would be devastated. Over time, I would

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have to refashion my ego ideal. Now, am I proud of my ability to smell the difference between a grapefruit and an orange? Not at all. Am I proud of my ability to speak articulately in public? Yes, obviously. I have confidence in myself that I can smell the difference between a grapefruit and an orange, as well as confidence in myself that I can speak articulately in public, but only the latter of these is a prideful self-confidence. So premise (2) is false. One can have selfconfidence without pride, because one can have confidences that do not figure into one’s ego ideal. A puzzle arises here. If what I have said is true, it turns out that most people are, for example, proud of the fact that they can walk. That is exactly right. Most of us are proud of the fact that we can walk. We don’t often think about our pride in our ability to walk for two reasons: first, because it seems utterly secure, and, second, because it is not an ability that differentiates us from many other people. If we were not proud of the ability to walk, though, why would it be humiliating suddenly to lose it? Although it seems odd to say “I’m proud of my ability to walk,” it does not seem odd at all to say, “When I could no longer walk, I felt profoundly humiliated.” The insight here is that introspection is generally inadequate for discovering the scope of our ego ideals. Usually, we need to suffer loss before we can correctly ascertain what is included in them. Relatedly, I suspect that much of what Kant called a sense of self-worth or dignity is, in fact, quite clearly a form of pride. Kant thought that my knowledge of myself as a rational agent should ground my sense of dignity, but my abilities as a rational agent are typically a source of pride. Those elderly persons in the early stages of dementia discover this with especial force when they experience humiliation and embarrassment (rather than mere sorrow) as they undergo a progressive loss of mental acuity. The distinction between prideful and pride-free confidence is especially easy to overlook in Roberts and West’s presentation (2017: 109) because they speak of “virtuous prides such as self-confidence” as though self-confidence is always a form of pride. But it is not. A similar distinction can be made with respect to every other example they give of the virtuous prides: “secure agency, aspiration, pride in one’s work, sense of dignity, self-respect, personal authority, pride in associates, and secure collegiality” (Roberts and West 2017: 109). One can be secure in one’s agency without holding one’s agency dear as a component of one’s ego ideal; one need only possess the selfknowledge that one is capable to act. One can aspire to do great things

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without holding dear one’s accomplishments as a component of one’s ego ideal; one need only have confidence in one’s abilities and a vocation that provides agential direction. One can take great joy in one’s work without taking pride in one’s work—that is, without making one’s work a component of one’s ego ideal. And so on for the others: one can know one’s personal authority without feeling pride in it; one needs only to know one’s abilities and the context in which those abilities may or may not be pertinent. One can claim one’s entitlements without pride; one need only know one’s status and recognize, by consulting one’s vocation, when it is relevant to what needs to be done. One can take joy in one’s associates without feeling pride in them; one need only be delighted by their goodness. What makes each attitude potentially distinct from pride is the way in which my beliefs about or desires for myself need not be included in a cherished ego ideal. One final example: consider what is involved in taking pride in one’s children. It is more than simply delighting in their excellences. To take pride in one’s children is to have an experience in which their excellences in some way or other bring to mind one’s own excellences. That is why the excellences of other people’s children are rarely an occasion of our pride, whereas the excellences of ours are: because they are our children, and their excellences (we think) reflect our excellences. But why should we not merely delight in their excellences? To sum up:   preserves the formation, ongoing development, and maintenance of one’s ego ideal as not only a permissible, but also a necessary and good, aspect of the moral life, even as it tries to minimize the extent to which the quest for identity dominates our field of vision. That humility requires unusually low concern for one’s skills, achievements, entitlements, status, and so on should not obscure that, on  , there is a proper and needful level of concern about just these things for the sake of securing one’s ego ideal. Thus for   the task is to try to say where exactly the line should be drawn between proper and improper concern about one’s ego ideal, and why. Nevertheless, it is because   preserves the ego ideal and the quest for identity as an essential good of the moral life that it remains firmly in the category of mundane humility.5 5 Christian defenders of a mundane understanding of humility sometimes appeal to Aquinas’s rehabilitation of Aristotle’s category of magnanimity for support. The idea is that magnanimity is basically “proper pride,” and therefore Aquinas is a

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AN ACCOUNT OF RADICAL CHRISTIAN HUMILITY We are finally prepared to state the radical unselfing view of humility. The way to make sense of the radical strand of Christian thinking about humility, the strand that we have located especially in the monastic tradition and those, such as Augustine, who were deeply influenced by it, is by seeing that, for them, what exactly is to be overcome through the process of sanctification is the quest for identity: the personal need to develop, clarify, attain, maintain, and secure an ego ideal, and to bring one’s self-understanding and vocation into alignment with that ego ideal. In Chapter 6, I will argue that such a position is perfectly compatible with the insight that the formation of an ego ideal is developmentally essential to moral formation. The radical unselfing view of Christian humility, however, holds that our destiny is not merely to have a chastened ego ideal, one that rarely triggers our concern for self-protection or self-promotion; rather, our destiny is to relinquish our ego ideals entirely through the gradual discovery that we are utterly secure in God’s love and need to expend absolutely no energy ensuring ourselves of our distinctive personal importance. It makes sense, I think, to call the radical unselfing view of humility  .  : Humility is the disposition to have no concern to develop, clarify, attain, maintain, or safeguard an ego ideal, because of a trust that one’s well-being is entirely secured by the care of God. Like  ,   is formally a proper concern account. It differs materially from   as an account of humility, in three ways. First, it specifies with greater precision proponent of proper pride (and of a correlatively mundane view of humility). This is mistaken, for, although Aquinas thinks it proper to act for the sake of honor, nowhere does he indicate any interest in the importance of one’s sense of distinctive personal importance for the ongoing moral life. He does think that both self-confidence and self-knowledge are crucial to the moral life, but, as I have shown, one can grant the importance of self-confidence and self-knowledge without granting the need for proper pride. Nowhere does Aquinas use the language of proper pride. And, since one can set out to do excellent things without being motivated by pride (Aquinas thinks caritas (love) should be the motive), it seems mistaken to me to conflate Aquinas’s magnanimity with proper pride. In fact, insofar as magnanimity is infused, it cannot be a form of pride, as I will explain in Chapter 6.

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the kind of self-concern that humility challenges. Humility does not challenge the concern for self-understanding, or the concern to establish a vocation, or the concern to gain a sense of one’s fundamental self-worth per se; humility challenges the concern for the formulation and attainment of an ego ideal, and the way in which this concern typically motivates and constrains other kinds of selfing projects. Second, it puts the level of ideal self-concern regarding the ego ideal at zero instead of low. And, finally, it specifies a different proper motive behind the proper level of concern. Whereas   specifies an intense interest in other apparent goods as the proper motive,   specifies trust in the care of God as the proper motive. Most specifications of the virtues are regulative ideals, meaning that the virtues are rarely perfectly exemplified. They are exemplified in degrees that approximate the perfect ideal. That is especially the case with  . Indeed—as will become clear in Chapter 5—since the regulative ideal of humility is formulated eschatologically, it is not only unlikely but impossible that one would attain to perfect humility in this life. On  , no one is perfectly humble in this life. However, people are more or less humble depending on how unconcerned they are with their own distinctive importance, and for what reasons. The exemplar of earthly humility would be someone who rarely thought of her distinctive importance, rarely felt the need to rehearse to herself or others what makes her especially important. The exemplar of earthly humility could very well be confident, aspirational, ready to grasp entitlement, full of joy in her work, and so forth, but her thoughts would very rarely touch on her own ego ideals. The exemplar of earthly humility would be someone who exemplified these dispositions because of a relatively secure and consistent confidence that her flourishing as a person was entirely secured by the love of God.6 6

An anonymous reviewer points out that Roberts says something very much like this in an early essay on humility. In a chapter on humility in his book Spiritual Emotions, Roberts (2007: 88–9) says that Christianity is “eminently well qualified to engender the evenhanded, deep self-confidence that I am calling ‘humility’ ” because it provides a “basis of self-acceptance other than our success in competition with others”—namely, “that God loves me for myself—not for anything I have achieved, not for my beauty or intelligence or righteousness or for any other qualification, but simply in the way that a good mother loves the fruit of her womb.” I wish I had known of this lovely chapter earlier. I wonder if Roberts believes his more philosophical work on humility and proper pride is congruent with it. For instance, this essay seems to provide a different motivation for humility than the “intense concern for other goods” that is part of his   account. Moreover, in this essay Roberts (2007: 90)

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We can back off this exemplification in several ways to imagine varying degrees of humility. Most obviously, the less freed up from concern about one’s distinctive importance a person is, the less humble he or she is. Can we state a threshold at which one is sufficiently unconcerned about one’s distinctive importance as to deserve the attribution of “humble”? I doubt this is possible, for the same reasons that it would not be easy to state how much self-concern counts as an “unusually low” amount. The distinction Roberts and West make between “self-importance” and “personal importance” may be one way to mark a threshold, but even here matters will be vague. Does a person need never to pursue a sense of importance as an end in itself to count as humble, or just rarely? The best we can do is identify a disposition. If a person is disposed to recognize the pull of the ego ideal and try to subdue its influence, the person is more or less humble, depending on the rate of success. The motive matters, too. In terms of predicating humility of ourselves or others, this is the difference between   and   that probably matters most. For  , the motive that makes for humility is an intense concern with other goods. This is to guard against the counterexample that, for instance, a person could be humble just by receiving a lobotomy that destroyed whatever parts of the brain are responsible for concern for the self. No, the motive has to be right. For  , however, the ideal motive is “a trust that one’s well-being is entirely secured by the care of God” rather than an “intense concern for other apparent goods.” To see the difference, imagine two children: one is free of any felt need to secure her importance because of her complete trust in a parent’s love, the other is free from any felt need to secure her importance because she is so intensely focused on the workings of the solar system. On my view, the first child has a closer approximation to ideal humility because her freedom from self-concern is rooted in rest in another’s love, rather than in the way other concerns simply crowd out her concern for self. So one way we can back off the ideal of radical Christian humility is by imagining other conditions wherein a describes the humility of the Christian as “a self-confidence so deep, a personal integration so strong, that all comparison with other people, both advantageous and disadvantageous, slides right off him.” In his later writings, Roberts appears to want to call this self-confidence a form of (proper) pride, but it is not clear to me how confidence so described is a form of pride at all. Even so, this chapter raises for me the worry that I have misunderstood what Roberts means by pride.

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person’s secure sense of self-worth can free him from the pervasive demands of an ego ideal. The loving support of parents, friends, or a church community are obvious candidates here. When persons are freed up from the quest for identity because they know they have nothing to prove to gain others’ love, they are exemplifying humility. What about a Buddhist who has abandoned the identity quest, not because she is secure in her self-worth, but because she does not think she has a real self in any sense at all? Here the motivational component seems to be lacking, which suggests a distinctively Buddhist conception of humility that probably cannot be assimilated to   or  . Why think it more characteristic of Christian humility that lack of identity questing is motivated by rest in the care of another rather than in intense concern for other apparent goods? The short answer is because this seems to be the motive behind Jesus’s complete freedom from pride, so I will have to delay developing this point further until Chapter 5. Suffice it to say here that I think   specifies a degree of humility but one that is less than ideal both in its specification of the proper amount of self-concern and in its specification of the proper motive for displaying the proper amount of self-concern. No one in this life (except Jesus) consistently attains to perfect freedom from an identity quest for precisely the right reasons, yet we do occasionally encounter saints whose freedom from self-concern is so excessive as to seem otherworldly. By all reports, the late Christian philosopher Dallas Willard (1935–2013) embodied to a remarkable degree the strange kind of freedom from self-concern that, I have been arguing, is the heart of Christian humility. Willard once said that “one sign of maturity are the thoughts that no longer occur to you,” and the many who knew him attest that Willard was so free from the typical ego-laden affect and commentary as to seem from “another time-zone.” To be in his presence was to experience “the unhurried, humble, selfless attention of a human being who lived deeply in the genuine awareness of the reality of the kingdom of God” (Ortberg 2013). Many reported having a sort of spiritual experience in his presence, despite the fact that he was not the least bit charismatic. Willard himself would have had no interest in such an encomium. He was reportedly impatient with writings that idealized other human beings, especially him. Nevertheless, I think it is no accident that so many who knew Willard felt the need to appeal to his rootedness in a different reality in order to express his remarkable

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humility. This is no mundane humility, but one indexed to God and a future in God. If we take the humility of someone like Dallas Willard as exemplary of Christian humility, then   is the ideal.   is on the right track as a proper concern account, but it sets the bar too low, so to speak, if we want the virtues to hold before us ideals of human excellence. This might seem a bit pedantic. Look, the critic may say, you yourself admit that the complete absence of self-concern is practically unattainable, and that low self-concern is therefore probably the best we can hope for in this life; why keep insisting no self-concern is what ideal humility really is. The answer here has everything to do with what motivates this book—namely, the question of the relationship between the virtues and our conceptions of the way the world is and the destiny of human persons. If you think, as I do, that arguments about the virtues are one of the ways in which communities carry out their disagreements about the way the world is and the destiny of human persons, then you will think, as I do, that it is shortsighted to plump for an account of a virtue just because such an account sets an achievable bar. That is simply to miss part of why the virtues matter. Formally, then,   and   are both versions of what I earlier called a “proper concern” account. Still, I think it is clear how important is the difference between the two. On   the moral task of the one who would become virtuous is to find the line between self-importance and personal importance, between improper and proper pride. Put differently, it is to thin out the identity quest, such that one spends considerably less of one’s thought-life curating and protecting those beliefs and desires that make possible the pleasures of pride in an ego ideal. On   the moral task of the one who would become virtuous is to get over himself or herself entirely, to become utterly free of every concern for distinctive personal importance. This extreme, seemingly absurd, moral goal is, I contend, the explanation for the extreme kinds of statements we find in early Christian commentary on humility. It is a testament to the substantive difference between these two accounts that on   the monastic counsels appear perverse or at least deeply mistaken whereas on   they seem wise if frightening nonetheless.   is genuinely an account of mundane humility. This is not a criticism, rather it is a way of pointing out how   is wedded to a mundane account of human nature and human perfection. On the other hand,   is wedded to a very different account of

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human nature and human perfection, an account that it is the burden of Chapter 5 to display. I want to reiterate that it is no part of my account that a humble person must lack self-knowledge. Nor is it part of my account that a humble person will lack a vocation or a sense of self-worth. Mine is not an unselfing view in these senses. As I have already indicated, self-knowledge (or something in the neighborhood) is required for self-confidence, aspiration, entitlement serenity, and so on; a vocation is required for intelligible action; and a sense of self-worth is part of what motivates authentic humility. On my view a perfectly humble person may know the things she is good at, may know she is an authority on many things, may know she is able to accomplish things through her agency, and may know she is deserving of the respect of others. None of these will be a form of pride, whether proper or not, because they will not factor into a cherished ego ideal. Such a humble person may be full of self-confidence, aspiration, and secure agency, but completely lacking in pride. Incidentally, the distinction between confidence and prideful confidence can help us resolve one of the long-standing paradoxes about humility. I mentioned in Chapter 1 that an adequate account of humility should be able to explain the apparent paradox in self-attributions of humility.   explains our intuitions perfectly. The claim “I am humble” appears contradictory insofar as the claim reports the attainment of some component of a person’s ego ideal. The claim “I am humble” need not appear inapt, however, as long as it is a claim of mere self-knowledge. We really do have an awareness, though never very clear, of how concerned we are with securing and maintaining our ego ideals. This awareness gives us some measure of our humility. And thus it may be possible for a person to claim humility in a noncontradictory way, especially if in response to a question. Just as I can know my abilities without taking pride in them, so I can know (more or less) my degree of self-concern without taking pride in it.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have tried to clarify the account of humility that I think is at work in the unselfing impulses of the early Christian tradition. I have done so by trying to differentiate a  

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account from  , and in order to do that I needed to show how   remains committed to a certain set of assumptions and worries about the self that were raised by Hume and built into Kant’s account of what I called “mundane humility.” In particular, I wanted to reveal how   is committed to the crucial importance of the ego ideal as a necessary aspect of moral formation and the ongoing moral life. I then sought to clarify an alternative vision of humility, one that denies the necessity of the pursuit or possession of an ego ideal to a fully mature moral agent. Admittedly, such a denial is strange. In the first place, it is difficult to imagine how consistent moral agency is possible without the ongoing experience of supposedly proper pride. Furthermore, the awareness of ourselves as creatures with unique and distinct importance appears to be one of the chief pleasures of being human. Without it, life would seem to be far less interesting and beautiful. We all want to be special, and to know ourselves as such. For these reasons, it is difficult for us to take seriously the claim that loss of concern about our own distinctive importance could feature in the perfection of the human person. This is what is so attractive about  . Admittedly, excessive self-focus prevents us from attending to the many good things necessary both for justice and for a full enjoyment of life. A complete absence of ego, however, would prevent us from attending to one of the many good things that appears essential to a full enjoyment of life—namely, the experience of ourselves as unique and important. So even if   is a coherent psychological disposition, it is not easy to see why it would be an especially valuable one. I suspect my account of humility will be met with the same kind of resistance with which the monastic counsels of self-forgetting and self-abandonment are met: namely, this is a counsel of despair that can be dismissed only as a sad vestige of servility and self-loathing. Thus I need to explain what could have prompted the desert mothers and fathers, Augustine, and many other early Christians to think that liberation from the quest for identity might be necessary for, even constitutive of, the journey into beatitude.

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5 Humility’s Destiny INTRODUCTION New Testament statements about humility focus intently on one event: Jesus’s willing death. The paradigmatic statement is in Philippians 2, wherein those who follow Jesus are encouraged to imitate his humility, a humility expressed most fully in his willingness to die on the cross. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:5–8)

As noted in Chapter 1, contemporary memory of Christian humility generally omits this key context for New Testament and early Christian attempts to grapple with humility, a hint that the memory is likely a false one. According to this memory, peculiarly Christian humility is supposed to be buttressed by three doctrinal features of Christianity: the transcendent greatness of God, the sinfulness of fallen human creatures, and God’s offer of grace despite human failure. In fact, these are not the doctrinal features of Christianity that explain why so many pre-modern Christians shared Augustine’s conviction that “almost the whole of Christian teaching is humility” (cited by Aquinas, ST 2–2.161.2). Rather, as I began to illustrate in Chapter 2 with a reading of Augustine’s Confessions, this preoccupation was motivated first and foremost by Jesus’s peculiar embrace of poverty and death. The meaning of “humility” evolves throughout the Hebrew scriptures (Wengst 1988). In the earliest texts, humility is simply a

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description of the material poverty of the lowly, in a way that parallels the Greco-Roman usage of humility—tapeinos/humiliores named the lowly underclass of society who were of no interest to the few wellbred elites whose privilege allowed them to aspire to arête. Later strata of Hebrew scripture use humility-locutions in a more spiritualized and ethically positive way, suggesting in fact a solidarity between God and the lowly, humiliated ones. However, the New Testament affirms humility as the key indicator of a person’s kingdom readiness: “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus taught (Matt. 18:4). The New Testament, in fact, coins the word tapeinophrosune to describe the character trait of humility, a word altogether new. All of this because humility came to be seen as the defining characteristic of the self-emptying life and death of Jesus. Even if the willing self-emptying of Jesus is the unmistakable context for the most radical strand of early Christian thinking about humility, as I mentioned in the Introduction it is not as though we have clear accounts, in the contemporary analytic–philosophical sense of the term, of how Jesus’s willing death on a cross matters for the concept of humility. Often, as in the sayings of the desert monks, there is no explanation given at all for why humility is the taproot of the Christian life; the sayings are focused on exhortation and inspiration, with a minimum of dogmatic or even exegetical support. And even, as in Augustine, when humility is connected directly to the life and death of Jesus, the connections remain allusive and dramatic rather than systematic. In this chapter, though, I want to clarify how Jesus’s Trinitarian cross-and-resurrection life underwrites a   account of humility. The   view of humility set forth in Chapter 4 contends that perfect humility is complete freedom from the quest for identity because of a trust that one’s well-being is entirely secured by the care of God. As such, the perfectly humble person may altogether lack a clear ego ideal or the sense of a unitary, integrated self—in short, may lack that whole suite of attitudes about the self that are generated and sustained by the concern to establish one’s own distinctive importance. Such a person will lack “proper pride,” not because he will be self-deprecating or servile, but simply because he will lack any interest in his own importance. He will not take pride in his work, in his associates, in his family—indeed, he will not take pride in anything, since pride is about securing one’s own distinctive

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importance. His attention and concern will be entirely focused elsewhere than on his own importance. Admittedly, such a posture seems humanly unattainable, so psychologically opposed to our ego-bound lives as to be a fantasy or dream. But it is not a fantasy or a dream, it is an ideal. And, as Simone Weil (1955: 79–80) reminds us, even if an ideal is as unattainable as a dream, it “differs from the dream in that it concerns reality.” The person of Jesus Christ, specifically his life unto death, is the reality that grounds the ideal of radical Christian humility. In this chapter I argue that a radical unselfing account of humility makes sense as we begin to grasp the relationship between Jesus’s cross and resurrection and understand this relationship as revelatory of both the Trinitarian life of God and of human destiny. Because there are no early Christian accounts of humility in the sense this book aims to provide, I cannot simply turn to the sources, so to speak, and lay out conclusive evidence that Christian humility was interdefined by doctrinal commitments to the moral implications of the cross, the Trinity, and our eschatological future. There are indications of this in Augustine, some strikingly clear, but I do not simply want to exegete Augustine (or anyone else). Rather, I want to offer an organized set of theological proposals that could make intelligible how a   view of humility—which I am convinced we do clearly find in Augustine, the early martyrs, early monasticism, and elsewhere— counts as a disposition of human flourishing. I make no claim to originality in my interpretations of the meaning of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, or of its relationship to the Trinitarian divine life. I have come to think these thoughts not only from Augustine and other early Christian thinkers, but also from more contemporary theologians, several of whom will appear in citations. The fresh thing here is my attempt to connect theological thought to the virtue of humility more insistently than contemporary efforts have done, but I do not pretend that this particular way of drawing the connections is the only or the obvious one. Many of the theological moves I make in the chapter are contested within Christian theology. My goal is to provide an example of how Christian virtue theorists might engage theology, allowing Christian scripture and theological claims to shape their descriptions of the virtues more determinatively, and conversely, allowing their characterizations of the virtues to sift scriptural interpretations and weigh theological claims.

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Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory CRUCIFIXION, EUDAIMONIA, AND BEATITUDE

In the Confessions, his most extended reflection on humility, Augustine says he could grasp the humility to which he was being called only as he came to understand “the humble Jesus” (7.18.24). He repeatedly associates the humility of Jesus with two interrelated themes: Jesus’s condescension to serve us (1.11.17, 7.9.13, 7.9.14, 7.18.24) and Jesus’s meekness and weakness (7.9.14, 7.18.24, 7.21.27). In one passage, he explains that these were the two essential insights he could never have learned from the best of classical wisdom, the books of the Platonists. In reading the Platonic books I found expressed in different words, and in a variety of ways, that the Son, “being in the form of the Father did not think it theft to be equal with God,” because by nature he is that very thing. But that “he took on himself the form of a servant and emptied himself, was made in the likeness of men and found to behave as a man, and humbled himself being made obedient to death, even the death of the Cross so that God exalted him” from the dead “and gave him a name which is above every name . . . (Phil. 2:6–11)—that these books do not have. . . . Those who, like actors, wear the high boots of a supposedly more sublime teaching do not hear him who says “Learn of me, that I am meek and humble in heart, and you shall find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:29). (7.9.14, emphasis added)

This is a key Augustinian insight into how Jesus’s display of humility offended the best of Greek and Roman thought, but it is not at all obvious why service should be linked to weakness and thereby to humility. After all, pagan ethics was not opposed to service. On the contrary, liberality is a virtue and the megalopsychos is one who lavishes benevolence upon others. Far from being linked to weakness, service on the pagan conception is linked to strength. Because I am strong, because I am secure, because I am sufficient, I may serve you without loss to myself. This is, in fact, the common-sense picture of generosity, what we typically call charity or philanthropy: giving of excess. Service flows from excess and is thus a mark of power and selfsufficiency. Precisely because my own needs are met and my own future is secure, I should consider using my excess for the good of others. Pagan wisdom valorized something like this picture of generosity and service, so why should Augustine link the service of Jesus to weakness and, ultimately, to humility? Isn’t this precisely backwards? The weak are those who need service; the strong are those who serve.

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Try as we may, we cannot obscure the fact that in the New Testament Jesus assaults this distinguished tradition of servicefrom-strength. Occasionally, he appears to affirm it: “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none: and he who has food, let him do likewise” (Luke 3:11). More often, however, he trespasses the conventional boundary that justifies keeping what I need and giving only from excess: “From him who takes away your cloak do not withhold your coat as well” (Luke 6:29). When the rich young ruler asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus does not tell him to engage in philanthropy, to give from his ample surplus. Instead: “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Mark 10:21). Like that young ruler whose countenance fell at this invitation, we may take offense at Jesus’s disregard for the line between what we need to survive and the excess we may relinquish without imperiling our own livelihood. But there is no getting around it: “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had” (Luke 21: 3–4). Jesus does not condemn philanthropy, but he makes clear that his disciples are called to a different kind of service, a service that imperils their lives because it gives away that which they seemingly need to survive. These teachings make sense only against the backdrop of crossand-resurrection; otherwise, they are folly (1 Cor. 15:19). The cross displays that Jesus was not exaggerating for rhetorical effect, or to bend the warped stick of human selfishness far enough in the opposite direction that it would end up straight (Aristotle, NE 2.9). On the cross, Jesus gave of himself all the way to death, erecting no limit to his self-expenditure. It was in part because Jesus recklessly challenged the respectable line that preserves the self against complete diminution that even the good religious people of his day could not abide him. For instance, when Jesus heals the lame man on the Sabbath, we ought not to suppose that the Pharisees were against healing. They would have happily healed this man, and surely the man could have waited one more day. Rather, they had turned the Sabbath into a method for preserving the self against the relentless demands of the law (Ramsey 1950: 55). They were practicing “self-care,” and yet Jesus condemns them. Jesus came to die. Jesus willed to die (John 10:18). The New Testament is adamant about this. We obscure it two ways: either by

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restricting his death to a tragic outcome of human sinfulness or by limiting it to his own unique mission, a necessary exchange with the Father to right the scales of justice. Although Jesus’s death may be both these things, it is not only these. Jesus wills to die insofar as he wills to serve in the way he does. His death is the predictable outcome of his way of serving. Jesus came to empty himself in service to us, transgressing every respectable line between the bare necessities and expendable excess. “Take up your cross” are his words of invitation to the same mode of service. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 16:24–5). “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me” (John 12:24–6). “Eternal life” is Jesus’s word for the good life. It is Jesus’s correlate to the pagan eudaimonia. To grasp the disruptive insight contained in Augustine’s observation that the humility of Jesus is perfectly expressed in Jesus’s service unto death and his corresponding “weakness” from the perspective of pagan strength, consider how preposterous these New Testaments texts would appear to someone steeped in the classical eudaimonistic tradition. The fundamental claim of this tradition is that human excellence is attainable only by securing goods that enable an agent best to weather the assaults of fortune and the destruction threatened by death. There is disagreement within that tradition about precisely which goods are required. Aristotle, for instance, thought a person needed material wealth, friends, a long life, and personal virtue (with virtue being most important). The Stoics, on the other hand, sought to make eudaimonia less vulnerable to contingency by proposing that the virtues were sufficient for a life of human flourishing. Nevertheless, the tradition as a whole not only takes personal felicity as its aim, but also presumes that the key to such felicity is accumulating the right kinds of personal possessions, whether these be material possessions, relational possessions, or characterological possessions (virtues).1 1 “The central excellences of character reside, so to speak, in the person; they are states of the person. Activity in the world is their perfection or completion; but if activity is cut off there is still something stably there, an underlying core of good

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This is eminently sensible. How else would one begin to think through how a person could attain to flourishing except by asking what that person needed to possess in order to secure the fullest possible life? Aristotle’s magnanimous man is instructive here. We may react negatively to Aristotle’s picture of the megalopsychos, but Aristotle is being honest about the best a person could hope for given the inevitability of debility and death. Such a person would need good breeding, personal beauty, material wealth, good friends, a character that deserved the praise of others, and, most importantly, the reflective knowledge of himself (always “himself ”) as one who, because he possessed these goods, was as secure as humanly possible against the threat of suffering and ignominy (NE 4.3). What is unimaginable from this outlook is that one would willingly divest oneself of the very things needed to preserve the possibility of a successful life. Is Socrates, or are the Stoics, a counterexample since they recommend a life of divestment in comparison to Aristotle? Not at all. Socrates and the Stoics simply disagree with Aristotle about the possessions necessary for flourishing. Aristotle thinks you need not only characterological, but also material and relational possessions, whereas Socrates and the Stoics think characterological possessions are enough. They all operate with a fundamentally acquisitive approach to the good life, seeking self-sufficiency unto happiness as the ideal. They just disagree about the scope of what must be acquired for such self-sufficiency. Jesus did what was preposterous in the light of this classical wisdom about flourishing. He abandoned the quest for selfsufficiency and set out to expend himself unto death. He died young, destitute, friendless, and dishonored. He forfeited his life, his access to material goods, his network of relationships, and his “virtues” in unrestrained love and service to his neighbor. Here the critic might object that he did indeed relinquish his “virtues” but not his virtues. Certainly he was not a respectable moral agent in the eyes of his contemporaries, but we know in retrospect, the criticism runs, that he was possessed fully of the true virtues—courage, generosity, patience, kindness, and so on.

character whose natural expression is in the excellent activity. The core is not invulnerable; but it is relatively stable, even in the absence of activity” (Nussbaum 2001: 343).

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This gets to the heart of the matter. The question is whether to call “virtues” those dispositions in Jesus that are completely opposed to the form of the virtues as they had hitherto been understood. John Milbank identifies precisely this tension in any effort to “translate” the classical virtue tradition into a Christian register. In a way, [Christian virtue] is not virtue in the antique sense, because the very formality of arête and virtus is itself permeated by the content of preferred virtues, which are mainly of a heroic kind, and therefore ultimately related to victory in some sort of conflict. Is virtue that is in no sense fundamentally a victory, still virtue at all? The point is arguable, and it is not possible to keep separate the levels of form and content of virtue. (Milbank 2006: 333)

Milbank’s description of the ancient virtue tradition as a “heroic” one recalls what I have been signaling by focusing on the ways in which the virtues are personal possessions meant to ensure some type of victory in the face of death. Jesus does not possess virtue at all, in this sense. He lays claim to absolutely nothing, not even his personal virtue, as a final heroic stand against the violence of the universe. To the extent that Jesus possesses virtues, those virtues differ formally from classical virtues in that they are continually received from the outside, never laid claim to as something possessed, and thereby definitive of his fundamental being.2 Jesus died with nothing, no material possessions, no secure friendships, no heroic virtues, nor even the possession of a secure spirituality. Jesus’s cry of God-forsakenness on the cross is trivialized if not understood as the display of that poverty of spirit that, Jesus had taught, would characterize those who inherit the kingdom of God. As Robert Jenson (1973: 40) puts it, Jesus “retained no escape lines back into respectability, or even into an inner secure position with God; ‘My God,’ he would finally say, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’” This presents a crisis to those who would take up their cross and follow Jesus, as he invited his disciples to do. For taking up the cross means, we have seen, abandoning every possible strategy for securing oneself against the threat of annihilation. How, then, can the cross be the way to eudaimonia?

2 For this distinction, and for so much in what follows, I am deeply indebted to the work of Arthur McGill. See especially McGill (1987, 2013).

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Augustine, as one steeped in the eudaimonist tradition, confronted this problem. On the one hand, Augustine shares with his pagan predecessors the view that human persons always act in pursuit of their supreme good. The good human life therefore maintains a selfreferential character. Recall the opening lines of the Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (1.1.1). On the other hand, Augustinian humility embraces the way of the weak Jesus, who in love abandons every possible strategy of self-enhancement and self-protection. So we have, on the one hand, a summons to follow the personal longing for happiness to its ultimate resting place in God, but, on the other hand, a constant suspicion of a self that would attempt to preserve its own future and significance. These impulses appear incompatible: how can I at one and the same time pursue my ultimate happiness and abandon any effort to lay claim to those things I would need to secure such happiness? This problem is a familiar one in Augustinian scholarship,3 and it is precisely here that we begin to see how Augustine’s Christianity pushed Greek eudaimonism to the breaking point. The problem of Augustine’s eudaimonism is to explain how it is possible that relinquishment of everything I need to be a flourishing person—material possessions, relational possessions, spiritual possessions, life itself— can be the path to . . . another kind of flourishing. Augustine’s Latin translation for eudaimonia was beatitudo, and we do well—as I shall throughout the rest of the book—to distinguish beatitudo from eudaimonia as a way of marking this different vision of flourishing. Beatitudo (beatitude) is especially apt to mark this difference, since it prompts us to remember the startling, cruciform picture of blessedness in the Beatitudes themselves. Although Augustine’s moral vision retains a formal similarity to that of his eudaimonistic predecessors, its content is often dramatically opposed. Nowhere is this clearer than in his recommendation of radical humility as the path to beatitude. The kind of humility recommended by Augustine is radical in the sense that it calls for the complete renunciation of the quest for 3 Oliver O’Donovan calls it the problem of self-love in Augustine. He points out (1980: 1) that it is a problem Augustine inherits directly from the gospels, for the apparent contradiction is encapsulated in the gospel paradox, “Whoever would save his life will lose it” (Mark 8:35). Jennifer Herdt calls it the problem of Augustine’s “reconceived eudaimonism” (2008: 46), arguing: “Even if Augustine’s ethics share the eudaimonistic form of ancient pagan ethics, his characterization of the supreme good does redefine the boundaries of that eudaimonism” (2008: 52).

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identity. This   account is coherent as a description of an excellent human disposition, however, only if there is a way of understanding the self such that it is consistent with personal flourishing to leave off the whole quest for identity that seeks to secure the self ’s distinctive importance. The puzzle is to understand how Jesus’s complete abdication of any identity quest, an abdication called crucifixion, can be a way to beatitude. But did Jesus actually abdicate the quest for identity?

HUMILITY, RESURRECTION, AND EXALTATION According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Jesus did not actually abdicate the quest for identity; he only pretended to. Nietzsche alleged that Jesus, spurred by his resentment of the powerful Romans who kept the Jewish people under their thumb, pulled off a stunning “transvaluation of all values”4 whereby weakness became the new strength, humility the new pride. Jesus did not, according to Nietzsche, actually abandon the quest for power, glory, honor, and a secure way of ensuring his preeminence. On the contrary, Jesus pursued those standard pagan ends with stunning fury and ingenuity. That Jesus was supposed by his followers to have been resurrected was the final coup d’état of his transvaluation campaign, according to Nietzsche. Just observe, says Nietzsche, how resurrected life comes to function in Christian thought. Resurrection comes to name the Christian hope that one day Christians will have the last laugh, looking down from heaven upon their unbelieving enemies burning in hell. Nietzsche (2000: 485) quotes “an authority not to be underestimated in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. ‘In the kingdom of heaven,’ [Aquinas] says, meek as a lamb, ‘the blessed will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them’” (emphasis in original).5 In other words, “resurrection,” “kingdom of heaven,” and “kingdom of God” are code words that betray the Christian lust for domination and strength. “An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values” is a subtitle to Nietzsche’s book The Will to Power. 5 Nietzsche is quoting Aquinas from the Supplement to the Summa Theologica, question 94, article 1. 4

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As such, Christian “humility” is but a fraudulent disguise of invincible pride. There’s no doubt that these weak people—at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their “kingdom” is to arrive—they call it simply “the kingdom of God,” as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! Only to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death—in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can also win eternal recompense in the “kingdom of God” for that earthly life “in faith, in love, in hope.” (Nietzsche 2000: 484)

Nietzsche is arguing that Christian “humility” is a hypocritical strategy of power. He alleges that the naturally weak and lowly Jesus leveraged humility to gain power over the naturally strong. Before humility was valorized as a virtue by the Jews—quintessentially by the Jewish Jesus—humility was a reflex strategy of the weak for minimizing the violence brought against them by the strong. “When it is trodden on a worm will curl up. That is prudent. It thereby reduces the chance of being trodden on again. In the language of morals: Humility” (Nietzsche 1968: 26). The Jewish–Christian valorization of humility, Nietzsche contended, converted such displays of weakness into a positive power grab. Now natural strength was vilified and natural weakness dignified, the former characterized as a vice called pride and the latter transformed into a positive virtue called humility. The humble no longer sought merely to survive the aggression of the weak, but rather, through the projection of a moral reversal called “resurrection,” the weak, who would be resurrected to eternal life, could claim victory over the strong, who would be resurrected to eternal torment. The nature of Jesus’s eternal resurrection life is therefore the key to Nietzsche’s critique of Christian humility, a critique that I consider the most powerful modern critique even though it has not received as much attention as David Hume’s. Is Nietzsche right that the “eternal life” that Christians believe they will inherit is really just the way Christians console themselves that one day, by and by, they will be the winners, the strong ones, those who are finally shown to be of the utmost personal importance? Nietzsche’s critique stands or falls depending upon how Jesus’s eternal resurrection life should be construed. For, if eternal resurrection life means good looks, perfect health, a big house, an impressive

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character, and a winsome personality, forever and ever amen, then Nietzsche is exactly right, and humility is but a ploy of pride. Many of us have been trained to think of “heaven” in something like these terms, as a place where we can finally have securely and without threat everything that we have always wanted. It is never quite clear what God has to do with such a place, except to hand out the tickets. Such an understanding of our destiny is demonic just to the extent that it rehearses exactly the illusion from which Jesus came to free us—namely, that our happiness rests in possession. This is why Nietzsche’s charge of ressentiment hits so close to home, and sadly explains so much of Christian history. If weakness, meekness, and humility are really in service to strength, power, and pride—as appears to be the case in so many descriptions of the Christian “afterlife”—then the whole thing is a ruse. In opposition to Nietzsche, I contend that Jesus did not call us to humility as a strategy for attaining a future pride. Jesus was not saying: in humility, relinquish your claim to your distinctive personal importance now, but eventually you can stake a claim to it as finally and forever vindicated and established. The humility of Christ is not a clever strategy for achieving the proud triumph of the resurrection. On the contrary, Christ was resurrected as the eternally crucified one, exalted as the eternally humbled one. “The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). His nail-pierced hands and spear-pierced side belong to Christ’s eternal body, because resurrection does not erase or even compensate for the suffering and loss incurred through self-expenditure. Rather, resurrection is a new way of being alive, a way that is not threatened by self-expenditure, but is indeed constituted by self-expenditure. “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). We often read this passage in a way that merely substantiates Nietzsche’s critique. For, if it is true that resurrection life means the eradication of all death and dying, of all loss and self-expenditure, then Nietzsche is right: Christ’s summons to a life of self-sacrifice is merely a ploy for an eternal life of self-possession. But the passage does not say that death and dying, loss and self-expenditure, will be eradicated. It says death will be swallowed up, which is to say incorporated into a larger reality. It says death’s victory and sting will be removed, which is to say that we will discover that we have nothing to fear from dying, loss, and self-expenditure.

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Under the condition of sin, death is the outcome of self-expenditure and self-loss. We may put the matter in a way that is, or rather appears to be, tautological: (under the reign of sin) death is the outcome of dying. The resurrection puts the lie to this tautology. Death is not the inevitable outcome of dying, because death is not the inevitable outcome of self-expenditure and loss. Death is swallowed up in resurrection, which is to say that death is revealed to be an imposter, not the true outcome of a life of self-sacrifice. The sting of death is removed, which is to say that we can live as unto death without fear. We will go on sacrificing ourselves eternally. We will go on expending ourselves in service eternally. To put the matter most controversially: we will go on dying forever in heaven. Radical Christian humility makes sense as a disposition of genuine beatitude against the backdrop of such an eschatological view of the destiny of human persons. If, however, our eternal hope is finally to be exalted in much the same terms in which the pagans hoped for exaltation, then humility is ultimately as useless to us as it was to them. If our eternal beatitude is simply the freedom—once and for all—from loss or sacrifice, the paradise of forever-secure possession, then Nietzsche is right and radical Christian humility is a ruse. This, however, is not the Christian vision of human destiny. Christ’s “eternal life” is not Plato’s “immortality,” nor is it the paradise of Islam. No doubt it is often understood in these ways, and when it is then radical humility becomes unintelligible as a disposition of genuine human beatitude. But, the objector might reply, the seminal text of Philippians 2 is itself clear that humility is no part of our eternal destiny. Because of Jesus’s humility, that text says, “God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name” (Phil. 2:9). Humility, therefore, is merely preparatory and in no way characteristic of human perfection. In response: Christ’s exaltation is not the reward for his humility, but the fulfillment of it. Exaltation is not the recovery of secure self-possession, nor the final liberation from self-sacrifice. Exaltation is the revelation of perfect self-giving love as true life. Christ’s exaltation is the display that Christ’s humility has a future. As such, Christ’s exaltation just is Christ’s humility shown to be eternally life-giving rather than death-dealing. It is his humility established as the norm of eternal life. “Heaven,” “eternal life,” “abundant life,” “the kingdom of God”—these are meant to describe our strange future as partakers and participants in the humble love

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that led Jesus all the way to the cross. These descriptors of our eschatological future say that we will forever be giving our lives away and receiving them anew. As a way of warding off the continual temptation to understand Christian destiny in a pagan framework, we ought to describe the Christian hope for eternal life as the hope for cross-and-resurrection life, rather than the hope for (mere) resurrection, let alone immortality. The powerful philosophical question raised by Nietzsche is whether there really is an escape from the classical logic of eudaimonia, a logic according to which the virtues are by definition modes of self-assertion and self-enhancement. Nietzsche claims there is no escape: humility has been simply smuggled into the ancient quest for dominance. The central question is whether the New Testament reveals a mode of human flourishing that overturns classical eudaimonism, or whether it is simply a ressentiment-laden manual for showing the weak how to game the old system. It is true that much of our theology (including our theology of “heaven”) frequently slips back into a pagan understanding of flourishing and thereby makes radical humility appalling. The fact that so many people have been derailed by Nietzsche’s critique is evidence that much Christian moral formation is fundamentally pagan insofar as it amounts to yet another attempt to avoid poverty and dying. But I have tried to suggest that this is an unfortunate distortion of Jesus’s promise of eternal life. Nietzsche’s critique fails if our destiny is in fact Jesus’s cross-and-resurrection life, a life of eternal participation in the God who is self-sacrificial love.

TRINITY AND SELFHOOD If Jesus’s cruciform life is the exemplification of radical Christian humility, what are we to make of Roberts and West’s claim (2017: 110) that Jesus is the paragon of proper pride? The New Testament . . . depicts Jesus as virtuously proud: he acts with confidence, assertively leads and commands his disciples, teaches with authority, debates his critics with independence of mind, serenely both claims and forfeits his entitlements, courageously faces a painful and ignominious death in the interest of the highest conceivable achievement,

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has a high view of his identity and makes explicit his compassionate commitment to human beings of every stripe and tribe.

I argued in Chapter 4 that inferences like this—from acting with confidence to being proud, from assertively leading to being proud, or from claiming entitlements to being proud—are question-begging. We have first to know the reasons that motivate such confidence, or such leadership, or such claims to entitlement before we can know whether we are in the domain of pride, let alone proper pride. Given the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, it seems far more likely that what motivates Jesus to act with confidence, to lead, and to claim entitlements is not pride, but love. Roberts and West’s claim that Jesus is a paragon of pride is certainly at odds with the tradition, so we will need more evidence than what they have given us to be moved. We would need evidence about Jesus’s psychology in order to support claims about Jesus’s proper pride. Have Roberts and West identified features of Jesus’s psychology to support the claim that he exemplifies proper pride? They tell us very little about Jesus’s psychology. At one point (Roberts and West 2017: 110) they attribute “independence of mind” to Jesus, at another they claim that Jesus has a “secure sense of himself ” (2017: 110), and at another they claim that Jesus was “aware of his dignity” (2017: 115). How do they know these things? The form of the inference seems to be something like: Jesus does x, x expresses proper pride, proper pride has psychological correlate y, therefore Jesus possesses y. But, once again, these inferences beg the question, since behavior is not necessarily indicative of a dispositional or psychological state. The gospels tell us relatively little about Jesus’s psychology. In the synoptics, what we learn directly of Jesus’s psychology is that he considers himself “meek and lowly” (Matt. 11:29), that he frequently experienced compassion (Matt. 15:32, Mark 5:19, inter alia), that he experienced sorrow (Matt. 26:38, Mark 14:34), and that he experienced anger (Mark 3:5). Jesus has much more to say about himself in John, but most of it can hardly be thought to reveal anything about his psychology; rather he is constantly identifying himself with his mission: I am the shepherd, I came to save the sick, I came to give my life as a ransom, and so on. Nevertheless, when we do hear about what Jesus “thought of himself,” what he might have considered to be fundamental to his “identity,” it is, to say the least, strange.

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Contrast what Roberts and West (2017: 110) say of Jesus’s self-concept: He acts with confidence, assertively leads and commands his disciples, teaches with authority, debates his critics with independence of mind, serenely both claims and forfeits his entitlements, courageously faces a painful and ignominious death in the interest of the highest conceivable achievement, [and] has a high view of his identity

with what Jesus says about himself in John: I can do nothing on my own authority (5:30). If I bear witness to myself, my testimony is not true (5:31). My teaching is not mine (7:16). He who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory (7:18). I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me (8:28). I and the Father are one (10:30). The Father is in me, and I am in the Father (10:38). The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works (14:10).

Admittedly, it is hard to know how to characterize the selfunderstanding that Jesus reveals here, but it seems strangely unlike the “healthy self-concept” characteristic of contemporary psychology and assumed by most accounts of proper humility and pride. Indeed, Jesus seems hardly to possess unitary identity at all insofar as an identity typically demarcates oneself from others. Even less so does Jesus appear to have an ego ideal to which he can refer to establish his own distinctive importance. Jesus seems to understand himself as an exemplar image of the Father, without ever staking claim to an attribute, outlook, or motive that is uniquely his own at all. Passages such as these gave rise to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and, in what is left of this chapter, I want briefly to explore how the doctrine of the Trinity might liberate us from overconfidently imputing modern psychological ideals to Jesus. The core conceptual challenge confronted by the doctrine of the Trinity is not, contrary to popular reports, how God can be both three and one at the same time. The core conceptual challenge is how God can be simple (without parts) and yet distinctively Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Augustine as well as Athanasius, Anselm as well as Aquinas, all held to divine simplicity. Only such a simple being, they believed, could possess the metaphysical ultimacy that Christians say God has; only such a being could be the eternal, unchanging source of all there is. For suppose God were composed of parts;

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suppose there was a multiplicity of being in God. That would make God less metaphysically fundamental than God’s parts, and it would require a further metaphysical explanation for why the parts were composed in just such a way. In other words, divine simplicity was thought to be required to guard the metaphysical primacy of God. But, if God must be simple, without distinct parts, how can God be distinctly Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Arius dealt with this problem by denying that the Son is the same substance as the Father, in other words by denying the co-equal divinity of the Son. The Father alone is supremely divine, which means the Son is not a “part” of God. At the other extreme, the Sabellians or “modalists” dealt with the problem by denying that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are genuinely distinct in God; they contended that “Son” merely refers to one of the ways in which we experience the one God. Nicaea rejects both of these solutions. It affirms that the Son shares the same divine substance as the Father, thereby rejecting the Arian solution, and it affirms real difference between the Father (who is unbegotten) and the Son (who is begotten), thereby rejecting the Sabellian solution. But how, then, can God be thought of as simple? This is the conceptual challenge that Augustine took up in a seminal text of Trinitarian theology, de Trinitate. Here is the crucial claim Augustine makes in an effort to resolve the conceptual challenge. If what is called Father were called so with reference to itself and not to the Son, and what is called Son were called so with reference to itself and not to the Father, the one would be called Father and the other Son substance-wise. But since the Father is only called so because he has a Son, and the Son is only called so because he has a Father, these things are not said substance-wise, as neither is said with reference to itself but only with reference to the other. (de Trin. 5.6)

Augustine says that the Father is called Father in reference to the Son, but not in reference to itself. And similarly for the Son and the Holy Spirit. What does this mean? It means that “Father” designates nothing distinctive to the being of the Father—thus “Father” is not said “substance-wise.” How is it that “Father” does not pick out something substantively unique about the Father? Because the Father gives his entire being to the Son in the eternal generation of the Son. The substance of the Father therefore cannot help to distinguish the Father from the Son. The perichoresis of the Trinity is characterized

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by the complete donation of the being of one to the other. This is why God’s entire essence or substance is possessed by each of the triune Persons. Put differently, the triune Persons are constituted wholly by their relations to one another. There is nothing “left,” so to speak, to characterize the distinctiveness of the Father except his being the Father of the Son, nothing distinctive about the Son except his being eternally begotten of the Father, and so on.6 At the core of Augustine’s defense of Nicene orthodoxy is the effort to envision the divine Persons as real (not just modes of God, as the Sabellians thought) and yet entirely bereft of any claim to possess distinctive being that is not shared entirely with the other triune Persons. This may provide a way of thinking about the humility of God. Augustine mentions “the humility of God” in de Trinitate 4.4, but most likely Augustine thinks of humility as rightly predicated of God only in the human nature of the Son. This, clearly, is Aquinas’s view (ST 2–2.161.1). But why should we not think of God as essentially humble? Why should we not, for example, say that the triune God is the archetype of humility insofar as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are utterly free from the concern to establish a claim to their own distinctive being and importance over and against the others? From the perspective of the best natural theology of the day, such a God would have seemed to lack the internal clarity and stability to which the excellent human being, exemplified by Aristotle’s megalopsychos, should aspire. We cannot easily remember how strange it must have seemed to the pagan world to hear that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and to discover in the unfolding of Trinitarian theology that this was no mere metaphor or rhetorical flourish but an expression of that in God which most commands our worship and emulation. Such a God unsettles classical notions of selfhood, wherein the goal of virtue formation is to possess a stable and secure identity that can differentiate one from others and ensure one’s personal significance. But the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit appears to lack such an identity. So perhaps there is sense to be made of the notion of the humility of God. Regardless, Jesus clearly is our exemplar in humility, according to Christian scripture, and I am suggesting that his Trinitarian life provides a clue to Jesus’s humility. Jesus lays claim to no special

6

I owe this way of thinking about Augustine’s resolution to Long (2016).

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significance of his own that could distinguish his own importance from that of the Father or the Holy Spirit. And, moreover, the one thing that does differentiate him is not something he can possess but something he must continually receive—namely, his standing in the relationship of “begotten of the Father.” To circle back now to the odd sayings of Jesus, especially those in John, we can at least begin to see the radical kind of self-understanding to which Jesus may be testifying when he says such strange things as “I and the Father are one.” Jesus is not simply reporting that he is on the same page as the Father, or that he has a personal relationship with the Father. Rather, Jesus is telling us something about the character of his own “self.” He stakes claim to no reality that is utterly and decisively his own. Thus Arthur McGill (1987: 50) characterizes the personhood of Jesus as ecstatic. Jesus’ oddity lies in the fact that there is no moment when, to himself or before others, he is simply the reality which he possesses, no moment when he is simply his own self, so that he has to execute a special shift of attention in order to become aware of God. Rather, in the act of knowing himself, he also knows God, immediately. He knows the constituting activity of God as the constant and ongoing condition of his own being. Jesus never has his own being; he is continually receiving it. No reality at all is ever conferred over to him as his own and made the content of some secure identity. He is only as one who keeps receiving himself from God. He is always a son. Herein lies the ecstatic character of Jesus’ identity.

Jesus’s dependence upon the Father was so fundamental to his selfunderstanding that he could not even be tempted by the possibility of pride, since he could not identify any work or attribute that was distinctly “his own.” He has no ego ideal because he has no interest in determining his own significance over and against that of the Father, and therefore there is nothing in his psychological profile that could rightly be identified as “proper pride.” Nothing I am saying here requires either social Trinitarianism or a relational account of the metaphysics of the human person, to name two currently popular research programs. With Sarah Coakley (2002), I am not sure either of those programs “works,” and it is instructive that, in book 7 of de Trinitate, Augustine rejects both. Nevertheless, I do think the Trinity invites us to reconsider what is essential to the human person. Specifically, it invites us to consider whether full-fledged selfhood requires an ego ideal. Since Jesus never

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has “his own” being—since his being is always received in full from the Father and then given back to the Father in full through his life of service to others—it never occurs to him that he might need to establish his independence or his distinctive personal importance. Compare this with Kant’s view that human perfection consists in the full actualization of the self as an independent and reflexive center of rational agency. Human subjectivity is thus central to our distinctive excellence, according to Kant. Any form of humility that would downplay or ignore our self-representation as free and independent moral agents is characterized by Kant as false, servile, and undignified. And yet Jesus shows no interest in his own subjectivity, nor does he ever characterize himself as a free and independent moral agent. Thus we see why resting in the love of another instead of intense concern for other apparent goods is the proper motive of radical Christian humility. If intense concern for other goods must displace self-concern, then it is always a matter of competition between my identity quest and the significance of other goods. This competition we do not find in Jesus.7 Rather, we see in Jesus how his complete dependence on the Father frees him up to be intensely concerned for others with no competition whatsoever from his need to secure his own well-being or significance. What Kant wanted to root out of his account of humility—complete dependence upon another—is the basis of Jesus’s humility. And there is an important practical lesson in this. The way to pursue humility is fundamentally though the deepening of relationship, through finding ourselves loved and secure in the love of others, most especially and ideally the love of God.

CONCLUSION Taking the New Testament seriously as the revelation of something new challenges some of our most basic moral presuppositions. 7 Of course, this is not to say that an intense concern for other goods is irrelevant to our pursuit of humility. The attempt to become more involved in outward-facing concerns may indeed be a way in which we can grow in humility. By growing in our concern for other people, other causes, and so on, we often discover that we do not need to be so vigilantly concerned about ourselves. This is all to the good, but it is just a tool, and a quite limited one.

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In particular, thinking about the New Testament depiction of the cross and resurrection of Christ challenges our presuppositions about what could possibly be included in an account of human flourishing, and thinking about Jesus’s Trinitarian life challenges our notions of the necessity of identity and the boundaries of the self. Of course, these two themes are inextricable. The kinds of selves we are or should be has everything to do with the kind of future for which we can hope. The perichoretic life of the Trinity is the metaphysical ground of Jesus’s cross-and-resurrection-shaped life. Contemporary attempts to “remember” Christian humility appropriately seek to connect humility to features of the Christian story, but they have selected the wrong features. The transcendence of God, the sinfulness of humanity, God’s gracious love for us nonetheless— important though they be, these are not the features of the Christian gospel that propelled a frighteningly radical humility into the moral universe. Rather, the cross and resurrection of Christ as the revelation of the triune life and as the call of all who would participate eschatologically in that life—these are the features of the Christian story that make intelligible the radical unselfing account of humility that we find in the pages of early Christians from Augustine to the martyrs and down through the monastic tradition. Put differently, I hope this chapter has displayed how radical Christian humility makes sense as a virtue if Jesus’s Trinitarian life is the archetype of perfected selfhood and if cross-and-resurrection is the archetype of personal flourishing. In the Conclusion, I will have a bit more to say about how an exercise such as the one undertaken in this chapter belongs in a study of “virtue ethics.” In Chapter 6, I turn to the most prominent contemporary critique of Christian humility, for this critique implies that, in trying to make Christian humility more radical, strange, and demanding than it already is, I am moving entirely in the wrong direction.

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6 Humility and its Discontents INTRODUCTION Arguing for a radical unselfing account of humility puts me at direct cross purposes with contemporary theorizing about humility. Recall that my purpose is in part to reclaim early Christian perspectives on humility, taking as the test case those extreme sayings of the desert monastic tradition that reject entirely the quest for a secure identity organized around an ego ideal. I noted in Chapter 3 the way those passages are dismissed by contemporary theorists, including Christian theorists, as moments in a lamentable episode of Christian history. Rather than attempting to reclaim early Christian perspectives on humility, most contemporary theorists see as part of their task rescuing humility from its historical imprisonment in a self-denigrating and self-effacing outlook. This attempt to rescue humility from its Christian past is a response to a history of critique. In Chapter 5, I explored one of the two most significant modern critiques of humility, Friedrich Nietzsche’s. In this chapter, I explore in greater depth the other, David Hume’s. I touched on the basics of Hume’s critique in Chapter 3, but a refresher might be helpful. Hume argued that pride is the only psychological force able consistently to motivate people to act against their primitive self-interest. Pride energizes human benevolence, which is naturally limited to a very close kinship circle, to move beyond that natural limit and thereby make civil life possible. In other words, pride is the psychological force that underwrites the kind of other-regarding behavior that we moderns take to be the mark of the moral (as opposed to the merely prudent). Insofar as pride is essential to moral formation and consistent moral action, humility is a pseudo-virtue, a “monkish virtue” that should be struck

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from the table of virtues. I tried to show how Hume’s critique was taken on board by Kant, who redefined humility to make it compatible with Humean pride. I tried furthermore to show that this same strategy is at work in contemporary accounts of what I called mundane humility, including the   account. Since I am attempting to defend a radical unselfing account of humility, one in which there is no place for “proper pride” alongside ideal humility, I need to deal directly with Hume’s critique. It would be bad news indeed if my view of humility made it impossible to account for moral formation or consistent moral action. Contemporary feminist thinkers, especially feminist/womanist theologians, have developed an important variant of the Humean critique. If, as Hume contends, humility is destructive of the proper pride essential to moral formation and consistent moral action, then humility can be used as a tool for repression and subjugation. For suppose there are societies in which a power hierarchy would be threatened if those at the bottom of the hierarchy were permitted to develop robust moral agency. In such a hierarchy, those in power have incentive to suppress the development of such moral agency, since it would pose a threat precisely to their own claim to superiority. If humility does indeed stunt and attenuate the development of strong moral agents, then a tradition that valorizes humility offers a perfect tool to those in power who need some means of preserving the status quo. Contemporary feminists observe that—given the ascendance of a Jewish–Christian moral horizon—the contingently strong are now in a position to recommend humility to the contingently weak as a way of keeping them in their place. Thus, in patriarchal societies, men hypocritically celebrate the humility of women. By valorizing the character trait that keeps women in a position of subjugation, men increase their grip on power. Men need not actively oppress women; rather they train women to embrace their own oppression in the name of saintly humility. This indirect oppression is even more insidious than direct oppression, because the oppressors have duped the oppressed into understanding their inferior position as evidence of deeper virtue. It is the worst kind of victimization in that the victim is robbed of the perspective that would be necessary for resistance. And, of course, such a manipulative use of humility is not restricted to patriarchal abuse. It can be used by any powerful group against any marginalized group. Here again, my own account of humility seems to be in the worst possible shape because of my rejection of proper pride as a necessary

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correlate of virtuous humility. Indeed, we should see the contemporary insistence on pairing humility with proper pride as partly an effort to avoid the Humean critique in its feminist form. Proper pride is supposed to provide the secure sense of personal significance that puts the lie to patriarchal attempts to valorize the self-effacement of women. Insofar as my own account of humility rejects proper pride as a necessary correlate of virtuous humility, it appears to lack any resources for resisting the kind of oppressive use of humility to which feminists have so powerfully drawn our attention. The remaining sections in this chapter attempt to respond to the Humean critique, especially the feminist variants. We have much to learn from these critiques, but I will argue that they have led contemporary Christian thinkers to an over-hasty rejection of a radical unselfing view of humility. There are important resources in the Christian past that help us formulate responses to these critiques, responses that, I hope to show, take the critiques seriously without allowing them to foreshorten our vision of humility’s destiny in such a way that we make humility less radical than it really is.

HUMILITY AND OPPRESSION In this section, I will focus directly on the feminist version of Hume’s critique. I think of the feminist critique as a version of Hume’s critique because, with Hume, feminists are concerned about the way that humility can undercut the formation of robust moral agency. Feminists add to the Humean critique the striking observation that the undercutting function of humility is often systematically deployed against those in a social system whose subjugation is useful to those in power. I focus specifically on the feminist critique because, as I hope my treatment will show, I embrace their aspirations. Feminist attacks on the virtue of humility are not as direct as one might suppose.1 I have yet to find a feminist theorist who attacks humility simpliciter. What is more common, instead, is a critique of the tradition of thought according to which selfsacrifice, self-effacement, and self-loss are held up as moral ideals. 1 For the best overview of the feminist critique of humility, see Pardue (2012, 2013).

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Early feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for instance, notes that “men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women . . . and in order to keep it in healthy working order they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible” (quoted in Hampson 1988: 239). Humility comes in for censure only insofar as humility is supposed to involve this valorization of self-loss. Rosemary Radford Ruether (1983: 186), for instance, does not reject humility outright, but rather a “male ideology of pride and humility” that envisions pride as selfassertion and humility as self-effacement. Virtue for women demands a new sense of pride, not in the male sense of “lording it over others” but in the sense of basic self-esteem. Without basic self-esteem one has no self at all, as a base upon which to build an identity or to criticize past mistakes. The whole male ideology of pride and humility has to be reevaluated by women.

Similarly, Daphne Hampson attacks a male model of virtue according to which virtue is measured by the extent to which the self can be decentered and relinquished. According to Christian tradition, Hampson (1988: 237–9) claims, salvation consists in not being centred in self but centred on God. It is as though men have known only too well their problem, and so have postulated a counter-model. The opposite from what was to be desired becomes what is virtuous. Instead of a model of the self which is isolated, self-sufficient, and independent in its power, we have a model of the self as broken for others, connected, and indeed not a “self ” existing in itself at all. It is a paradigm of sacrifice of self leading to nurture of others. I want to suggest that this paradigm, which men may have found useful, is inappropriate for women. Feminist women seemingly reject it with unanimity. . . . The gospel of powerlessness has been appropriated by those to whom it should never have been directed. . . . One sees that the very notion of God which Christians have held serves to re-enforce that sexism. . . . The only exit (other than atheism) is to change one’s conception of God.

It probably is true, Hampson observes, that men have a problem with self-assertion and the quest for an identity organized around a secure ego ideal, but all “feminist women” know this is not a women’s problem. As Valerie Saiving (1960: 37) claims, not pride but rather the “underdevelopment or negation of the self ” is the original sin for women.

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What, exactly, is the critique of humility in view here? How can we understand these feminist observations about the difference between the fundamental problem for men and the fundamental problem for women as amounting to a critique of humility? Here is the argument I suspect is in view when contemporary humility theorists talk of the “feminist critique of humility.” (1) Some accounts of humility valorize self-effacement and selfloss as the core of the virtue of humility, and depreciate the quest for self-esteem and a secure sense of distinctive personal importance as the antithesis of the virtue of humility. (2) Men have championed these particular accounts of humility, either because they rightly perceive that they have an ego problem (Hampson, Saiving) or because they maliciously want to undermine women’s efforts to secure the kinds of self-esteem and self-sufficiency that would put them on equal footing with men (Cady Stanton). (3) Either way, insofar as these accounts of humility are prescribed as normative only or primarily for women, they reinforce the power differential between men and women and block women from developing the robust moral agency that would be needed to flourish and to overthrow patriarchal injustice. (4) Therefore, such accounts of humility should be rejected. Furthermore, to the extent that such accounts of humility are entangled with theological claims meant to show that humility so understood is mandated for all, those theological claims should be rejected as well. The argument, as I have already noted, can be expanded to encompass power differentials more broadly: unselfing models of humility tend to reinforce power differentials and rob the marginalized of the perspective and attributes they need to flourish and to resist the injustices of the powerful; they should therefore be rejected. I want to make three observations about the argument as a lead-in to the next section, where I will propose a developmental account of humility meant to reframe the problem in view here. First, the argument is supposed to apply only to those accounts of humility that valorize self-effacement and self-loss as the heart of the virtue. Most, if not all, contemporary accounts of humility therefore survive this critique. Perhaps  has a problem here, since it

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seems to recommend a systematic underestimation of one’s personal worth, but the other models, including  , make a point of emphasizing that humility need not imperil a secure sense of self and the suite of psychological attributes that constitute the proper prides. It is not accidental that these accounts all emphasize proper pride as a necessary correlate of a virtuous humility; they are all formulated in part to survive the critique leveled here. So the   account, which rejects proper pride as a necessary correlate of virtuous humility, is very much in the dock. I will need to find another way of responding. Second, premise (3) is undeniably true. I have no interest in denying that accounts of humility such as the one I defend here have been used unjustly, both unintentionally and intentionally, to silence, stultify, and subjugate women and other disempowered people. I need look no further than my own religious community to see examples of the damage that has been done to women in the name of a holy and submissive humility. I admire those who have attempted to rethink humility in such a way that it might never again be used in these damaging ways, and I defend an unselfing view of humility with trepidation, fearing that, no matter what I say, it could contribute to the persistence of such abuse. I can only hope that what I have to say in the remainder of the chapter can be seen as a clear and uncompromising challenge to that tradition of abuse. The third observation I want to make about this argument is that it is not valid. The conclusion simply does not follow from the premises. What follows from the premises of the argument is, rather, that an unselfing account of humility should not be prescribed as normative2 for women or others who find themselves in a position of weakness and marginalization with respect to some other person or group of persons. This is a conclusion with which I heartily agree, but it does not entail the claim that an unselfing account of humility is ultimately false, to be rejected outright. Even so, the conclusion that an unselfing account of humility ought not to be mandated as normative for 2 We can make a distinction between what is normative at a time and what is normative all things considered. It may be normative all things considered for every would-be physician that they know all the organs in the human body, but it is not normative at the time preceding their first Anatomy class. If it were, they would be blameworthy for not knowing all the organs in the human body before their first Anatomy class, and that is clearly false. In the remainder of this chapter, when I say “normative,” I mean normative at a time.

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women or other disempowered people is an instructive one, because we often think all virtues are such that they can be recommended and even felicitously instilled through training at all times and places, for all people. But this is false.

A DEVELOPMENTAL ACCOUNT OF HUMILITY My claim in this section is that both the Humean and the feminist critique of humility mistake a penultimate good of human flourishing for an ultimate good of human flourishing. They rightly identify the moral importance of proper pride but fail to contextualize it as a concession to our fallen condition. Both critiques correctly identify proper pride as a boon to successful moral formation and consistent moral action, but they mistakenly idealize proper pride and reject unselfing accounts of humility outright. In her book Putting on Virtue, Jennifer Herdt (2008: 318) lauds Hume’s recovery of pride as a powerful and necessary impetus for moral formation. “Hume rightly acknowledges the place played within moral development by pride and by our desire to be loved, by our desire for a positive self-perception, and by our concern for others’ perception of ourselves. He rightly sees that a virtuous character can become over time capable of sustaining itself without positive reinforcement from others.” Herdt explains that Hume “regards persons as capable of acting in a consistently virtuous way only insofar as motivated by pride, that is, by the desire for a positive self-survey. He does not see how pride could ever be transcended.” There are two claims here: first, that proper pride is necessary for moral development, and, second, that proper pride is necessary for consistent moral action. Crucial to my defense of the   account of Christian humility is the observation that these two claims come apart. I affirm the first claim, but I deny the second; I affirm the necessary role of proper pride in moral formation, but I deny the necessary role of proper pride in an ongoing and consistent life of virtuous action. Let us consider the first claim. Why is proper pride necessary for moral formation? Consider a typical instance of childhood moral development. Suppose young Cole is not sharing his toys with his brothers. How does a good parent respond? At least three responses are available. First, the

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parent may punish the child: “Go to time out!” Second, the parent may reason with the child: “How would you like it if your brothers did not share their toys with you?” Third, the parent may begin to inculcate an ego ideal: “Cole, good boys share their toys.” The first two responses, though valuable, are limited. Punishment, if it is not replaced by a more advanced form of moral formation, will turn Cole into nothing but a Pavlovian animal. Where the threat of punishment is not present, Cole will lack the motivation to share. (Here we see the effectiveness of the threat of divine punishment as a tool of behavioral control, but also its flaw as a tool of deep moral formation.) The second response, reasoning, is also limited, both because of the power of temptation and habit in the face of reason, and also because reason does not always transparently disclose right action. By far the most powerful response available to the parent is to inculcate an ego ideal in the child: “Good boys are not greedy; Good boys share their things.” How is an ego ideal inculcated? At first, through instruction: “Good boys share.” Then, through praise. Cole shares his toys and the parent responds with delight: “I knew you would share your toys, Cole. I’m so proud of you. You’re such a good boy.” In turn, Cole delights in himself; in sharing his toys he has become a source of delight and pride for his parent, whom he loves and wants to please. Perhaps another time Cole comes to report to the parent: “I shared my toys with my brothers!” and again, Cole is celebrated by the parent. Later, Cole’s tendency publicly to display and report on his sharing behavior will be challenged by the parent: “Cole, you don’t have to tell me every time you share. Sharing is just what we do. It’s who we are. It’s not good to brag about it.” Here the ideal is being inculcated at a deeper level, and Cole is being encouraged to be his own celebrant. If the formation succeeds, Cole internalizes sharing behavior as intrinsically worthwhile, as a behavior that can figure into his own positive self-survey even if it is seen by no one except him. Ideally, Cole so internalizes as part of his ego ideal that he is a sharer that he can resist the pressures of shaming or threat. Perhaps Cole’s friends make a game of keeping a toy from Cole’s little brother, egging Cole on to play a part in the prank. If Cole resists and instead shares with his little brother, it will be because the pleasure Cole experiences at his positive self-survey outweighs the displeasure he experiences at the censure or ridicule of his friends (assuming it is not out of fear of the parent’s watchful eye, or out of the anticipation of receiving praise

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upon bragging to the parent about his behavior). Cole has developed morally into a sharer, and the engine of that moral development is the way he has come to take pride in himself as one who shares. I want to flag one more observation about this process, an observation that will become important a bit later. It is crucial for moral development that the parent not make his or her love for Cole contingent on Cole’s behavior. For, if Cole believed that he had to become a sharer to receive or elicit his parent’s love, the withholding of such love would effectively function as a punishment, and Cole would not be able to develop as a self-regulating moral agent. The parent’s unconditional love provides a substrate of personal security that can survive wholesale reworkings of Cole’s ego ideal. Just to the extent that Cole thinks his being loved by his parent is contingent on his performing the right behaviors, he loses the freedom to develop an ego ideal of his own. So the good parent will develop Cole in such a way that his moral behavior flows primarily from a specific selfunderstanding and ego ideal, while at the same time freeing up Cole to revise his identity over time, even in ways that might disappoint the parent. We typically move through our lives as moral agents by way of such a revision of our ego ideals. Our “values” change by way of a revision of the ideal self we would be. A parent loses her only child and thereby loses almost her entire sense of moral calling; if she is to go on, she must replace her primary ego ideal as loving parent with a different one, one that can fund her efforts to embody it through the energy of a positive self-survey. If she cannot generate an alternative ego ideal, she will likely lack the resources to make of her life a coherent moral story. This is an intense example, but we all consistently revise our identities in response to the contingencies of our lives. Often we do not grasp the importance of some feature of our ego ideal until it is taken from us. When it is taken from us, our ability to undertake a positive self-survey is threatened just to the extent that we can no longer see it as a real possibility to embody our ideal selves.3

3

One of the contributions of virtue theory to moral philosophy has been its insistence that our moral possibilities are more tightly linked to our characters— including our sense of who we ideally are—than to the application of a decision procedure to our moral options.

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Suppose something like the story I have told of moral development is accurate. And suppose, furthermore, that something like the story I have told of how we typically attempt to make morally coherent stories of our lives is accurate. In both cases, proper pride is crucial, for proper pride simply is our pleasurable experience of positive selfregard when we identify our moral action as conforming to an ego ideal. If this is the role played by proper pride, how could it ever be conducive to virtue fully to relinquish the quest for an identity? In other words, does not a   account of humility undercut the very possibility of both moral development and consistent moral action over time? My response is a simple one. Pride is not the only available motive for virtuous action. Another available motive is love, and the   view of Christian humility that I am trying to reclaim and defend takes it as axiomatic that the proper Christian motive of virtuous action is not pride, but love. Recall Hume’s original reasoning: pride is necessary to motivate benevolent action beyond the immediate kinship circle because natural benevolence is extremely limited. In other words, pride is necessary because there is a shortage of love. From a theological perspective, however, this cannot be the last word. There is indeed a shortage of love, but this is a consequence of the devastation sin has made of our world. Left to our own devices after sin, there is clearly a shortage of love. But we have not been left to our own devices. We may, by turning to God, have the love of God shed abroad in our hearts. We may, that is, begin the return to our truly natural condition, in which all creatures elicit our love, because they are lovely, because they are loved by God. I have veered from child psychology to theology, but I think this switch in perspectives is necessary to see why a Christian understanding of the virtues is so often in tension with accounts of the virtues that take our typical limits as “natural.” From a theological perspective, such limits may be aberrations, aberrations that may require certain concessions, but that should not be allowed to limit our moral horizon. To put the matter in terms familiar in the tradition of virtue theory, I am making a distinction between acquired and infused virtue. Augustine claimed that pagan virtue was motivated by a prideful form of self-love, and our examinations of the arguments of Hume and Kant show that this is not simply an insult. Hume and Kant follow Aristotle in supposing that the moral energy necessary for consistent lives of virtue is indeed positive self-regard at one’s

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distinctive importance, proper pride that takes pleasure in the discovery that one is in conformity with an ego ideal. For Augustine, though, prideful love of self is not the motive of Christian virtue; humble love of God is. Using Aquinas’s well-worn terminology, we can put the matter more technically: pride is the form of acquired virtue, love (charity) the form of infused virtue. The language of “infusion” can be misleading. The infused virtues are not magically injected. The term is helpful, though, for underlining the fact that the infused virtues cannot be acquired through training and habituation. Aquinas: “Charity is in us neither naturally, nor through acquisition by the natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father and the Son, and the participation of whom in us is created charity” (ST 2–2.24.2). Thus it would be not only futile but damaging to attempt, though repetition reinforced by punishment and praise, to instill in a child the infused virtue of humility, or infused courage, or infused temperance, or any of the other infused virtues. Why? Because the infused virtues are animated by the graced love of God and they require for their intelligibility some hope in a supernatural end. It is a matter of definition that the infused virtues cannot be inculcated through training, because training cannot infuse the love of God that makes those virtues what they are.4 We can say more here by considering the debasing effects of an attempt to inculcate through the normal mechanisms of habituation those infused virtues whose intelligibility requires some understanding of and hope for a supernatural end. To ask of anyone that he carry out actions that he lacks the capacity to see as consistent with his flourishing is to make of him a slave. The slave cannot consent in freedom to his actions just to the extent he is unable to understand those actions as partly constitutive of his summum bonum. Thus he must find other motives for those actions. Fear is most customary here, but resentment and hatred are available too. Such habituation is the opposite of moral formation. It destroys a coherent sense of self just to the extent that the agent cannot own the ideal he is being demanded to embody. This is part of what makes slavery inhumane. It desecrates the underlying unity between an agent’s action and (perceived) flourishing that is constitutive of moral agency. Of course, 4 The infused virtues can, of course, be exercised and thereby refined and strengthened once given.

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a slave may find higher motives to serve his master as an exercise of his moral freedom. For instance, the love of God may motivate such action. The slave-master, however, can neither demand nor inculcate a form of service that amounts to free moral action. This does not mean the slave-master cannot so distort the slave’s selfunderstanding as to make it appear that the slave acts freely, but such a slave is in an even more pitiful and inhumane position than the one who serves out of fear. This explains the powerful revulsion we experience at depictions of the so-called house negro, in comparison to his fellow slaves, whose service is mingled with fear and contempt for the slave-master. The authority figure who enjoins and attempts to inculcate infused humility in a subordinate is in precisely the position of the slave-master to the slave. Should the subordinate somehow internalize the demands or expectations of the oppressor, she participates in her own subjugation in a way that is even more inhumane than if she obeyed with fear and contempt. Therefore, feminist thinkers are exactly right: an unselfing account of humility ought not to be made normative for women or others who are marginalized. But we must go further. An unselfing account of humility ought not to be made normative for anyone.5 Such humility, since it is an infused virtue, is discovered and consented to through the action of God in a person’s life. None of this, of course, is meant to imply that we can know beforehand who may be caught up in such supernatural love. There is no reason to think this does not happen to women, or to children, or to any others who belong to marginalized groups. The point is that humility so understood is simply abused if it is enjoined or inculcated through the traditional means of moral indoctrination and habituation. It is often overlooked in critiques of the monastic virtue tradition that the monastic vocation is voluntary, undertaken by one who is so gripped by the love of God that he or she seeks the wisdom of others to conform his or her life to that love. If the monastery were mandatory, it would not be a vocation of freedom but a sentence of slavery.

5 Normative at a time, that is (see n. 2 for this distinction).   humility is normative all things considered for everyone. This is true of all infused virtues, including infused love. The kind of love that is necessary to love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself is normative all things considered for everyone, but not normative at a time for everyone. This is a controversial view. See Dunnington (2019) for a defense of it.

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Feminist thinkers are correct that Christian moral formation is often a form of subjugation. In an effort to inculcate humility, Christian authority figures mandate forms of behavior and selfdisplay that the agent cannot believe or hope are consistent with her summum bonum. To give a simple, but non-trivial example, imagine a young girl whose expressions of delight and satisfaction in her accomplishments are always met by the reproach of her parents that she should be more “humble.” “After all, God’s glory, not your own, is all that matters.” To please the parents, the young girl must curate her behavior so as to give the appearance of extreme modesty. If she has no personal conviction that her public expressions of delight and self-celebration will ultimately inhibit her joy, then her parents have merely made of her a slave. She grows into a woman constantly censoring herself, primarily for the purpose of producing an acceptable form of public display. She has certainly not grown in humility. On the contrary, her parents have shaped her into a person even more obsessively concerned about herself than she was as a selfcelebrating little girl. I therefore agree with everything the feminist critique alleges, except the conclusion. Moral formation requires the development of a strong sense of self, accompanied by the suite of psychological dispositions that make up the forms of proper pride. Furthermore, consistent moral action over time typically requires such a robust moral self, resting on the supports of proper pride. And, therefore, it would be damaging and destructive to enjoin upon or make normative for others any disposition that would imperil the development of a robust moral self so understood. All of this seems exactly right to me. And yet, our destiny as children of God is to be freed by love of the need for any pride, whether proper or not. That, too, seems clear to me. I must conclude, then, that proper pride is a penultimate good, and any account of humility that insists on proper pride as a correlate is an account of humility that does not have our supernatural end adequately in view. If this is right, we are in a position to relate the   and   accounts of humility more systematically than heretofore. Both accounts, as I stated in Chapter 4, are proper concern accounts; both identify humility with the agent’s having the proper amount of concern about her own personal significance, for the proper reasons. Stated in the most formal terms, then, humility just is the proper concern for one’s own personal significance, such

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proper concern being the result of proper motives. However, as we observed, such a definition is so abstract as to be uninformative.   and   differ as proper concern accounts in that they set different standards for the amount of self-concern that is proper and for the motives that should generate the proper amount of concern. Now we see that the two are related developmentally. To put the matter technically again,   is the acquired natural virtue of humility, and   is the infused natural virtue of humility.6   can be instilled through training and habituation, because it is possible for anyone without the aid of supernatural love to come to see how low self-concern can be partly constitutive of his or her mundane personal flourishing. This is the form of humility that is proper for parents to inculcate in their children, teachers in their pupils, and so on.   cannot be instilled in this way. It is a gift of grace and can be developed only as the love of God makes possible ever greater relinquishment of one’s own felt need to secure one’s own distinctive significance through the construction and maintenance of a pride-inducing identity. Given its special status as an infused virtue and one that should not be enjoined or made normative for others, a question arises about why we should attend to the virtue at all. This will be my focus in Chapter 7 and in the Conclusion, but before turning to that question I want to spell out with a bit more care the so-called vices of humility and draw attention to a confusion that has entered into the discussion of them.

THE VICES OF HUMILITY The Humean critique and its feminist variant both suggest that an unselfing account of humility distorts robust moral agency by 6 I take a Thomistic view here. Infused humility is a natural, as opposed to a supernatural, virtue because of the way it builds upon and deepens a virtue that makes sense even apart from a view of the supernatural end. Thus, a person with acquired natural humility has an advantage of sorts when the love of God transforms her view to encompass a supernatural end. A person who has developed a consistently low degree of concern for self is in a privileged position when the love of God brings into view that person’s destiny of complete surrender of self to God. Similarly, a person with acquired temperance is in a privileged position with respect to the exercise of infused temperance (the characteristic action of which is fasting), as compared to someone who has no virtue of acquired temperance.

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proscribing those proper forms of pride that are essential to moral development and consistent virtuous action. One of the ways of articulating the dangers of a view of humility that proscribes proper pride is by drawing attention to the so-called vices of humility, vices such as pusillanimity, servility, social insecurity, deep personal shame, and obsequiousness. The basic idea is that proper pride is required to protect against these vices. Just as the mundane virtue of humility displaces improper pride, the vices of humility are displaced by proper pride. The line between the proper and improper prides is drawn by asking what really does make possible the kind of moral agency that contributes to mundane personal flourishing. Someone who is selfishly ambitious will not experience full human flourishing, but nor, on the other hand, will someone who is pusillanimous and lacks proper ambition. So selfish ambition is improper pride, whereas proper ambition is (obviously) proper pride. In their article on “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride,” Robert Roberts and Ryan West attempt to map the terrain of the virtuous and vicious prides, relating them in turn to the vicious and virtuous forms of humility. The effort is laudable, because they attempt to carry out in a more systematic way an important project to which others have merely alluded, the project of showing how virtuous pride and virtuous humility reinforce one another, and furthermore how, in the absence of virtuous pride, humility is prone to be deficient. They present the virtuous and vicious forms of pride and humility as all clustering around three dimensions of human selfhood: the self as agent, the self as entitled, and the self in relation to other selves. The vices of pride include those of distorted agency (selfish ambition, domination, hyper-autonomy), of corrupt entitlement (arrogance, presumptuousness), and of deformed sociality (vanity, pretentiousness, snobbery, self-righteousness, invidious pride, and envy). The virtue of humility consists in the absence of these vices of pride. So long as one is free of these vices, one possesses the virtue of humility. Freedom from the vices of pride (which amounts to possession of the virtue of humility), however, is not sufficient to guarantee that one does not also possess the vices of humility. The vices of humility include the lack of secure agency (defeatist lethargy, slovenliness, pusillanimity, low ambition), the lack of secure entitlement (glory intolerance, servility), and the lack of a secure sense of social standing (deep shame, social insecurity, timidity). How, then, are these vices to be avoided? Roberts and West think that typically the vices of

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humility are avoided through the possession of the virtuous prides: secure agency (proper ambition and aspiration), entitlement serenity (personal authority and self-confidence), and a secure sense of social standing (sense of dignity, self-respect, pride in associates, secure collegiality). Roberts and West make no claim to have provided an exhaustive or even very precise delineation of these interrelated virtues and vices. They define only a few, and often their lists have different members. What is important to their overall argument is the structural relationship between the various virtues and vices. They propose a logical relationship between the vices of pride and the virtues of humility: the virtues of humility simply are the (intelligent) absences of the various vices of pride. It might be tempting, then, to think that a similar logical relationship holds between the vices of humility and the virtues of pride. Perhaps the vices of humility simply are the absences of the various virtues of pride. In other words, perhaps pusillanimity simply is the absence of properly prideful ambition. If this were the case, it would put my own account of humility in a bad position, since my own account leaves no room for any of the proper prides. As such, were there a logical relationship between the vices of humility and virtuous prides, I would be stuck with the unfortunate conclusion that radical Christian humility brings along with it all the vices of humility. Roberts and West, however, do not claim such a logical relationship, and in this they are astute. They deny that humility, in the absence of the supports of proper pride, must necessarily have vicious correlates. “While humility can be importantly supported by pride, it can also be supported by other virtues, in the absence of any very impressive degree of pride. It can find support in justice or love, virtues that do not essentially refer to the self ” (Roberts and West 2017: 114). Given this acknowledgment, I remain puzzled that Roberts and West explain the perfect humility of Jesus by suggesting it was buttressed by proper pride, rather than by love, but in any event the point I want to make is that the   view of humility cannot be said to entail the presence of the vices of humility. One may lack anything correctly described as the proper pride of ambition without falling prey to pusillanimity, because one may be motivated to great acts through love rather than pride. In fact, though, my case is stronger. No only may   humility be free of the vices of humility; it must be free of the vices of humility.

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To see why, recall our earlier discussion of young Cole. I pointed out that an essential component of Cole’s moral development is the unconditional love of the parent. For, if the parent’s love is conditional on Cole’s good performance, then the parent’s potential withdrawal of love serves as a threat of punishment that prevents Cole from growing as a moral agent. There I focused on the way in which the parent’s love provides Cole the security to fashion his own moral identity, internalizing it as his own rather than a merely conditioned response to the parent’s offering or withholding of love. Note, however, a related important feature of the parent’s unconditional love. So long as Cole is within the reach of the parent’s unconditional love, his absolute security is guaranteed. He has nothing to fear, even from his abject failure. So long as Cole is within the reach of the parent’s love, servility, deep shame, defeatism, timidity, and the other vices of pride simply have no basis. For the basis of these vices is precisely fear that one lacks the resources to secure one’s own well-being. Here again, we see how the use of the proper prides in moral development is a concession to the failure of love. On the one hand, it is because Cole himself is deficient in love that he may need the proper prides to motivate his own virtuous behavior over time—he will need the pleasure of positive self-regard to “fund,” as it were, his other-regarding selfexpenditures. On the other hand, it is because the world for which the parent is preparing Cole is not a place of unconditional love that Cole will need to become, in a sense, the guarantor of his own sense of personal security. Put differently, the unconditional love of a parent is not sufficient to secure Cole’s natural end. If Cole cannot convince himself that he has resources to secure his own flourishing in a hostile world, then that flourishing will be glaringly insecure, and the vices of servility, pusillanimity, deep shame, and so on will find a definite foothold. Now recall the   view: humility is the disposition to have no concern to develop, clarify, attain, maintain, or safeguard an ego ideal, because of a trust that one’s well-being is entirely secured by the care of God. The humble saint, one who approaches ideal humility, simply finds no basis for the vices of humility just to the extent she knows herself to be absolutely and unconditionally secure in the love of God. Whereas a parent’s love can never secure our natural end, the love of God can (and does) secure our supernatural end. As such the virtues of pride are irrelevant for our beatitudo. Motivated by the

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love of God infused in her heart, the humble saint does not need proper pride to energize her life of virtue, and, secured by that same love, she does not need the virtues of pride to guard against the vices of humility.

CONCLUSION It is no part of our destiny that our proper response to God and all God’s creatures will be funded or supported by pride. Jesus had no proper pride, nor will anyone who is drawn by grace into the love that is Jesus’s eternal submission to the Father, and the Father’s eternal gift of his being to the Son. The value of the   account of humility is in part that it forces us to grapple with those features of our present life, even our present lives of virtue, that are vestiges of our estrangement from this divine love. Because the doctrine of the incarnation insists that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, it is tempting to impute to Jesus every characteristic that we think of as “naturally” human, especially insofar as those characteristics feature in our own moral development and ongoing moral agency. This is a theological mistake. Consider, for instance, Maximus the Confessor’s argument that Jesus had no freedom of choice, such freedom itself being a function of our estrangement from God.7 Freedom of choice, Maximus argued, is necessary, given sin’s effects of ignorance, uncertainty, and doubt. Because we are not perfectly united with God, we will the good not by necessity but rather by choice. Such freedom of choice makes possible our sin, but it also, importantly, makes possible our turn to God despite our distance from God. Freedom of choice is therefore a good, indeed a good essential to our salvation. It is a penultimate good, however, since our destiny is to be deified and thereby brought near to God in such a way that, though we continue to will our actions in God, we no longer need to deliberate and choose. Maximus argued that, because Jesus is not estranged by sin from God, Jesus willed the good without choosing the good. Because Jesus was one with the Father, for example, he willed to drink the cup but he did not choose to drink the cup. And, since 7 I am grateful to my colleague Ryan Peterson for pointing out the structural analogy between Maximus’ argument and the argument of this chapter.

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Jesus is the revelation of deified humanity, Maximus argued that the elect would lack freedom of choice in heaven, though they would continue to will everything in God. Maximus’ argument is controversial and complicated (see McFarland 2007), but it is a fine example of how careful theological thought can disrupt customary assumptions about what is essential to human agency and flourishing. It illustrates the method I have tried to pursue in this book, of putting theology before anthropology. I have made an argument similar to Maximus’. I think the proper prides are goods, essential to the formation of virtue in our fallen condition, but they are penultimate goods. They are not part of our destiny, and those radical Christians who sought to love God and neighbor with no support except the outpouring of divine love in their hearts have much to teach us about the nature and value of the humility of Jesus. Of course there is danger in articulating and defending such humility as the ideal. The danger is documented by those contemporary feminists who draw our attention to how the monastic ideal has been used to subjugate women and other marginalized groups. It would be similarly dangerous to deprecate the power of choice and attempt to undermine it in others. There is danger too, though, in rejecting or ignoring the radical unselfing model of humility expressed in the lives and words of the desert monks, for, if such a humility describes the humility of Jesus, to ignore it would be to blind ourselves to our call and destiny.

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7 Becoming Humble INTRODUCTION Although the hope to leave behind the quest for identity is foreign if not offensive to modern sensibilities, it is not a strictly early Christian hope. For instance, Thomas Merton and Simone Weil, two of the most influential and recognizable Christian saints of the twentieth century, express such a hope. According to Merton (1961: 7), We must remember that this superficial “I” is not our real self. It is our “individuality” and our “empirical self ” but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The “I” that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true “I” that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the vesture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and unknown “self ” whom most of us never discover until we are dead.

Emily Esfahani Smith (2016: 47) describes how Merton came to see his ultimate felicity in terms directly opposed to the modern quest for identity: Unlike in the modern world, Merton realized, where excellence is defined by standing out and attracting attention, in the monastic world excellence is defined by one’s obscurity. The more a person’s individuality has been destroyed, the closer he is to the higher reality that he seeks. Merton concluded that he, too, wanted to die in this manner.

Similarly, Simone Weil (1947: 33), who died in the obscurity that Merton longed for, expresses a desire “to surrender the ‘I’ for love’s sake.” “The self,” Weil (1947: 41) wrote, “is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God,” lines reminiscent of

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Wesley’s declaration that we are but voids waiting to be filled by the love of God. In a letter written just before her final departure from France, a year before she would die at the age of 34, Weil (1951: 17) wrote to her friend, the Catholic priest Father Perrin: “My greatest desire is to lose not only all will but all personal being.” By “personal,” Weil (1947: 38) means everything in us that insists upon being distinct from God. “To be proud,” she wrote, “is to forget that one is God.” Whatever we make of the language here, I think it clear that both Merton and Weil were hoping for something far more radical than a low self-concern counterbalanced by proper pride and a secure sense of distinctive personal importance. They were trying to find their way into the state I have called radical Christian humility, wherein all concern for the self ’s distinctive importance is gone and there is only the vision and love of God. That Thomas Merton and Simone Weil are still read and admired by many Christians suggests there may be others who seek freedom from the quest for identity. What is the way to such humility? How can it be achieved? The short answer is: it cannot. But more can be said. Ancient Christian sources, especially monastic sources, are replete with wisdom about the way to radical Christian humility. I have nothing myself to add to this wisdom, but I do want to lay out in a more orderly way what seem to me to be the central insights of that tradition, and to deal, as well, with some of the puzzles raised by it.

HUMILITY AND GRACE It is commonly accepted that the greatest challenge presented by Christianity to classical Greco-Roman ethics was the introduction of grace. Whereas the best classical thought claimed it was within the reach of (at least some) human persons to achieve moral perfection drawing only on the resources of their own intelligence, will, and communal support, Christian thought denied this claim. That much is true, but I think this commonplace has obscured the many other ways in which Christianity disrupted the landscape of classical moral thought. Indeed, I have argued that, in an effort to understand the central role played by humility in early Christian moral thought, we do better to focus on the ways in which Christianity challenged reigning

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views of the nature of the human person and of human flourishing. The appeal to grace as the distinctive contribution of Christian moral thought often sidelines these other dramatic revisions. Still, it is true that Christian theology claims that we are unable to attain to our ultimate end, or to develop those personal characteristics that best orient us to that end, without the aid of supernatural grace, a claim that I readily approved in Chapter 6 by drawing a distinction between acquired and infused humility. What, however, does it mean to say that humility is the gift of grace, something not to be achieved merely through the resources of intelligence, will, and communal support? Here we enter one of the most vexed controversies in Christian theology, the root of some of the deepest divisions in Christian history— Augustine from Pelagius, Protestants from Roman Catholics, and Arminians from Calvinists. I do not want to get derailed here—I lack the space, and the mastery, to deal extensively with the question of the relationship between human effort and grace, either in general or as it pertains specifically to virtue theory.1 I propose, instead, to focus specifically on the question of what it could mean to say that humility is a gift of grace, and to allow the resources of Christian wisdom about humility to guide us in arbitrating between the options. Here are four claims that might be in view when it is said that humility is a gift of grace. No doubt there are more, nor are all of these mutually exclusive, but the following four at least get the obvious options on the table: (1) Humility is imparted through direct divine causality; nothing from the human side matters. (2) Humility is developed through normal habituation, but such habituation can be a sensible undertaking for persons only if they possess some vision of their supernatural end, which vision is itself a gift of grace. (3) Humility is developed through habituation, but the habituation is graced, meaning it does not rely on the normal mechanisms of habituation. (4) Humility is imparted through direct divine causality, but persons can “position” themselves to receive it. 1

The finest treatment I know of these issues is Herdt (2008).

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Andrew Pinsent (2011: 263) appears to have claim (1) in view when he writes: “A self-help book entitled How to be Humble or Teach Yourself Humility would miss the entire point—though, of course, within the history of Christianity there have been many attempts to systematize the stages in the acquisition of humility.” Pinsent says the point that would be missed by offering instructions for the acquisition of humility is that humility is a gift and thereby “not, in fact, within our power to acquire.” The claim that humility is not within our power to acquire is expressed by all four claims above, but only (1) explains why it would be a complete misstep to offer any guidance about the acquisition of humility. Pinsent himself acknowledges that Christian tradition abounds with practical wisdom about how one may acquire humility. If (1) is true, then St Antony, Evagrius, Cassian, Benedict, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas have all “missed the point.” So I reject (1). Whatever it means to say that humility is a gift of grace, it does not mean that humility is imparted in such a way that human habituation or orientation is utterly irrelevant. This, I think, is one of the dangers of “infusion” language; it has the sound of a magical injection that some receive and others do not, we know not why. The overwhelming testimony of early Christian wisdom about humility is that human beings may participate in some way in their journey into the humility of Jesus. That leaves us with (2), (3), and (4), and with the basic question of whether, on the human side, humility requires habituation or some other form of participation with grace. One reason to suppose that habituation is in view is because so much of the wisdom about humility comes from the ascetical tradition, a tradition that is focused largely on repetitive practices.

HUMILITY AND ASCETICISM There is no shortage of suggestions in ancient Christian wisdom about practices one may undertake to grow in humility. In my reading of the desert fathers and mothers alone, I count over forty specific recommendations. Here are some of the more creative ones: • renounce all private ownership • do manual labor • expose yourself to the natural elements

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live in solitude renounce your family wear dirty, stinky clothes wear a habit tell yourself that you are the worst renounce elite education submit to insult or harsh treatment obey seemingly worthless or foolish commands practice forgiveness practice chastity accept reproof honor others publicly expose your frailties and failures

We see here examples of the four major themes of the desert ascetics of humility that I outlined in the Introduction: the practices of submissive obedience, self-abasement, steadfastness under suffering, and the quiet bearing of injustice. In his Rule for the monastery, St Benedict takes up each of these themes, amplifying them in ways commensurate with communal, rather than solitary, monastic life. The “ladder of humility” in the seventh chapter of his Rule is unquestionably the most influential postbiblical Christian text on humility. The Rule itself is the most wide-reaching monastic rule in the Christian tradition, and the ladder of humility specifically is treated as authoritative in works such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s On the Steps of Humility and Pride and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Benedict did not invent the ladder from scratch; he was already drawing on a long tradition of monastic wisdom about humility, most particularly John Cassian’s ten “indications” (indiciis) of humility.2 Benedict says that the monks are to ascend the twelve steps of the ladder through practice, trusting that God will grace such practice. He depicts the ladder of humility as akin to “the ladder which appeared to Jacob in his dream, by means of which angels were shown to him ascending and descending.” The ladder, then, is the way to heaven, and Benedict says that the rungs on the ladder are ones that we should mount by our “ascending actions,” 2 For an excellent history of the development and influence of Benedict’s “ladder,” and an attempt to reclaim several monastic perspectives on humility, see Foulcher (2015).

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trusting that “the Lord will raise it to heaven” (RB 7.6, 8). The ladder has twelve rungs, and I will paraphrase them briefly before moving on to make several observations about the ladder and the broader ascetics of humility. Benedict gives the impression that these steps should be ascended in order, such that, if any of the steps are skipped, one is sure to falter. Other commentators seemed not to think the order so important. Interestingly, Aquinas reverses the order (ST 2–2.161.6). Here, then, are the steps, paraphrased, but not omitting what is offensive to modern ears in Benedict’s words: 1. One should keep the fear of God before one’s eyes, remembering that those who don’t will burn in hell for their sins, and life everlasting is prepared for those who do. 2. One should seek not to further one’s own will, but instead to further the Lord’s will. 3. One should submit to one’s Superior in all obedience. 4. One should patiently and quietly accept the hard, distasteful, and even unjust consequences of obedience. 5. One should confess to one’s abbot all of one’s evil thoughts, and any evils secretly committed. 6. One should be content with being given the lowest and most dishonorable tasks, reminding oneself that one is a bad and worthless worker. 7. One should both confess and believe that one is lower and less honorable than everyone else. 8. One should do nothing over and above what is sanctioned by the Rule and by the example of one’s elders. 9. Out of love for silence, one should speak only when asked a question. 10. One should not be quick to laugh at the slightest provocation. 11. When one speaks, one should speak gently and seriously, with only a few carefully chosen words. 12. One should carry oneself with a lowly bearing: head bowed, eyes on the ground, imagining oneself before the judgment seat of God. Note two extensions of the wisdom of the desert in Benedict’s ladder. First, Benedict is concerned about the control of speech in a way that

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is less evident in the desert tradition. This makes sense. In a community, our best strategies for self-promotion typically involve the way we talk with one another, so learning how to curb such tendencies is a powerful way of subduing the self. Second, Benedict is particularly concerned about the apportionment of work: take the lowly task (step 6) and do not try to impress by going above and beyond your assigned labor (step 8). Benedict understands how much our sense of distinctive personal importance is wrapped up in the work we are seen to do. Even so, the basic emphases of the desert remain: obedience, selfabasement, and the quiet bearing of suffering and injustice are the way to humility. Before commenting on what all of this amounts to as a program of habituation, I want to address two of the most common objections to the ladder’s suitability for would-be practitioners today. Objection one: Benedict advises us quietly to accept injustice (step 4), but we should not accept injustice against ourselves. Objection two: Benedict advises us to think we are the worst of all people (step 7), but we should not do that because it is almost always false and we should not cultivate self-deception. I alluded in Chapter 6 to my basic response to the first objection. Benedict does not advise us to do these things. He is not advising just anyone, not even just any Christian. He is advising monks who have voluntarily entered into a monastic community. He is advising us only insofar as we voluntarily enter into a program of spiritual formation shaped by monastic wisdom. Nor, furthermore, does Benedict allow that the abbot, or any other monk, has a right to do injustice to others: the abbot is not to “make any unjust arrangements, as though he had the power to do whatever he wished” (RB 63.2). Benedict simply knows that injustices, whether real or perceived, are inevitable, and he assumes a monk may accept injustice without thereby doing further injustice. Surely this is right. Suppose my housemate accuses me of leaving dirty dishes in the sink, but I know I have not done so; someone else must have. It may be unjust for my housemate so to accuse me (though ignorance may excuse his culpability), but there is no injustice if I accept the reproach instead of challenging it. Nor would it be unjust if the members of the house voluntarily entered into a way of life that included as a spiritual practice the acceptance of unjust reproaches, as a means of correcting the excessive human tendency toward self-defense and self-justification.

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The second objection is trickier. Is Benedict endorsing a program of willful self-deception? Must the faithful monk convince himself he is the worst of all people when he knows full well he is not? Here we should consider the aims of monastic life. The aim of monastic life is to participate as much as is humanly possible in the eschatological kingdom, wherein there is absolutely no hierarchy of personal rank because God loves everyone the same, irrespective of difference. Benedict’s Rule reminds the monks that “God shows no partiality among persons” (2.20, citing Rom. 2:11). This, of course, is not the way the world runs, and for good reason. In the world, we have to secure our own natural good, and this requires the division of labor according to people’s abilities and merits. This was unavoidable in the monastery as well. The Rule assumes the abbot will assign work responsibilities on the basis of the monks’ varying abilities and merits (63.1). Why, then, is the monk counseled to ignore his own particular excellence within the community, telling himself instead that he is the worst? Benedict knows that our own knowledge of where people rank in various pecking orders, knowledge that is essential to the survival of ourselves and others in the world, is nearly impervious to the general reminder that we are all equal in God’s eyes. We know this from personal experience. I, for one, affirm that we are all equal in God’s eyes, yet that affirmation seems to have almost no effect on my persistent interest in how I rank vis-à-vis others. And I am not merely interested in how I rank as a scholar, or as a teacher, or as a basketball player; I want to know how I rank as a person. Benedict is seeking some strategy for actually making a dent in our relentless interest in rank-ordering and our seeming inability to prevent the necessity of task-specific rank-ordering from spiraling into the tendency to rank overall importance. Insofar as we seem hopelessly bound on rankordering, he advises a strategy of reframing, whereby, every time I catch myself interested in rank-ordering, I find a way of putting myself at the bottom. And Benedict thinks I have a ready tool for such reframing, because I have access to the causes of my own sin in a way that I lack with respect to anyone else. I may know that others have committed worse sins than me, but I know nothing of their inner lives, nothing of their specific challenges, heartaches, confusions, and fears. I know my own inner life, though, and when I review it seriously, I find nothing there that could justify me in ranking myself above another person. So reframed, I can truthfully say, there is no one worse than me. This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer has in mind in his

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commentary on the Apostle Paul’s claim to be the “worst of sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15). “There can be no genuine acknowledgment of sin that does not lead to this extremity. If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all. My sin is of necessity the worst, the most grievous, the most reprehensible.” Why? “Brotherly love will find any number of extenuations for the sins of others; only for my sin is there no apology whatsoever” (Bonhoeffer 1954: 96). And growth in holiness will not make this reframing more difficult, but easier, if, as Abba Matoes says, “The nearer a man draws to God, the more he sees himself a sinner” (Ward 1975: 143). I now want to ask whether the various practices adumbrated in the monastic tradition amount to a program of habituation into humility. Recall that we are trying, in part, to understand what it means to say humility is a gift of grace. We ruled out the claim that (1) humility is a gift of grace because it is unilaterally imparted by divine causality, with nothing on the human side mattering at all. Now we are considering the other possible ways of understanding this claim, two of which include the possibility of habituation as the path to humility, whether that habituation is graced by being oriented to a vision of the final end that is itself given by God’s grace, or whether it is graced in some other way. There is a difficulty with the claim (2) that normal habituation is the means to radical Christian humility, even if the end in view is established by way of a supernatural gift of the vision of one’s proper end. To see it, imagine what would be involved in undertaking one of these practices—say confession of evil thoughts and secret sins—as a means of growth in humility. How would I do that? Think of how normal habituation works. I set for myself an image of the person I would become, and then I strategize a means of growing into that kind of person. The means is a practice or a set of practices that I undertake in order to develop the dispositions characteristic of such a person. I want to be a great basketball player: I set myself that goal; I devise a set of practices meant to develop in me the dispositions of a great basketball player; then I repetitively practice. Integral to the whole process is the way in which the image of myself as a great basketball player makes the habituation intelligible by providing its fundamental rationale. To use the language set out in Chapter 4, setting “basketball player” as part of my vocation is what makes intelligible my devotion of considerable time to practicing. Even more important, typically, is

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that I also set “excellent basketball player” as part of my ego ideal. Typically I find the “energy” to commit to hours of tedious practice only because of the prospect of securing my own distinctive importance through the attainment of this component of my ego ideal. This is why it would be extremely difficult, if not hopeless, to make a great basketball player of someone who does not valorize great basketball players and envision his own glorification in becoming great. The only alternative motive to pride, typically, is the threat of punishment. So the default mechanism for developing dispositions through habituation is to leverage the energizing power of an ego ideal.3 The same would be true for habituating humility through the normal mechanisms. “Through the confession of secret sins I want to become the kind of person who is humble.” Thus, I set “humble person” as part of my vocation and part of my ego ideal. This will not work, however, especially on a   account of humility: “Through the confession of sins I want to attain my ego ideal of being someone who is utterly free from the concern to attain an ego ideal.” Insofar as normal habituation works by leveraging an ego ideal, then normal habituation cannot be the means by which we arrive at the goal of being humble. Normal habituation cannot help but be a strategy of personal improvement, and for that reason normal habituation cannot be the whole story about the human side of growth in humility. Note that this problem is not as serious on a   account of humility. Obviously   still requires that the agent not be overly focused on himself, but, given the concession to proper pride, there is no reason to rule out normal habituation as the primary means for developing humility understood as  . Habituation is only especially problematic on a   view, because   asserts that the ideal of humility is freedom from the quest for identity, which of course includes the very setting of ego ideals as a means to leverage habituation. 3

Pride does not have to motivate the habituation process from beginning to end. Over time, the appeasements of pride may be replaced by love of the internal goods of the practice, as Alasdair MacIntyre (2007: 188) argues. MacIntyre says that, if you want to teach a child how to play chess, you should begin by offering the child candy or some other external reward. You do this, though, in the hope that by continuing to play chess the child will discover “the goods internal to the practice of chess,” and those goods will provide reasons for playing chess that displace the reasons provided by the external reward. This seems right to me. I would want to note only that pride is a more enticing incentive than candy, and that we tend to underestimate how often pride remains an overriding motive (even when we have glimpsed more intrinsic goods).

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Grace may help here. Perhaps grace allows us to organize habituating practices around a desired vocation, without tying that vocation to an ego ideal. Put differently, grace may make it possible that we are motivated by love to habituate ourselves in pursuit of a vocation, without falling back on ego ideal-generated pride as a motivating energy. This is one way of understanding what would be involved in possibility (3), wherein grace energizes habituation so that it does not have to rely on the normal mechanisms. But it is precarious. The default is strong. Pride is such a reliable motive, always ready to step in. The monastic tradition, despite being full of practical advice about how to grow in humility, is keyed into this problem. Laced throughout early Christian writings about humility is the recognition that the very attempt to pursue humility through an ascetic regime may be counterproductive, may indeed produce pride exactly because of the way the desire for humility can become but a desire to be an even more impressive self than one already is. For instance, one of the recurrent themes in the desert monastic tradition is the claim that the demons are excellent ascetics. If the demons are excellent ascetics, the texts suggest, then ascetic practice cannot be a guaranteed route to humility. A hermit said: “Even if our mouths stink from fasting, and we have learnt all the Scriptures, and memorized the whole Psalter, we may still lack what God wants, humility and love” (Ward 2003: 111). If ascetic practices alone are insufficient for the human pursuit of the humility of  , then sense (2) of the claim that perfect humility is a gift of grace is insufficient. For, even if the ideal is constrained by a vision of the supernatural end, normal habituation cannot do the trick insofar as it must leverage an ego ideal to energize its activity. This leaves us with two possible senses in which humility is a gift of grace: either (3) it is a gift of grace insofar as it is achieved through a special kind of graced habituation, or (4) it is a gift of grace insofar as it is imparted through divine causality to those who are appropriately “positioned” to receive it.

HUMILITY AND HUMILIATION Bernard of Clairvaux says: “Humiliation is the only way to humility, just as patience is the only way to peace, and reading to knowledge. If you want the virtue of humility you must not shun humiliations.

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If you will not suffer yourself to be humbled, you can never achieve humility” (quoted in Foulcher 2015: 233). Bernard’s claim is at odds with contemporary thought about humility, which draws a clear value distinction between humility and humiliation, the former always good (unless it is a “vice of humility”) and the latter always bad (see, e.g., Kupfer 2003: 263–5; Garcia 2006: 430–1). Humiliation can never be salutary on such a view. I, too, draw a distinction between humility and humiliation, but I think that Bernard is right that humility without humiliation is a fantasy. Coming to understand why will help us gain some clarity on what it means to say that humility is a gift of grace. Let me begin by making a distinction between suffering and humiliation. One is suffering when one is in a state of affairs that produces such displeasure that the desire to have the state of affairs changed is a persistent one. If I had a migraine right now, I would be suffering, but my presently sitting on a hard chair is not suffering, even though, come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind a cushion. The hard chair is not causing me suffering, because whatever displeasure it may be causing, if any, is so minimal as rarely, if ever, to enter my consciousness. A migraine, on the other hand, is a cause of suffering. Humiliation is any form of suffering that violates our identity in a way we cannot easily repair. Any time an event lowers us in our own eyes, we experience a momentary disequilibrium, but very often we are able to incorporate the event into our life story without any substantive reworking of our identity. We do this by attending to some other, perhaps more or less forgotten, aspect of our identity that can incorporate the lowering event that initially surprised us. We typically describe such events as “humbling” (as opposed to “humiliating”). An example: “I was humbled by the outpouring of affection on my birthday” indicates that I was reminded, by that outpouring of love, just how much gratuitous, unearned kindness I enjoy in my life. The experience is “humbling” only if that reminder reveals a forgetfulness about my undeserving status. But it would be odd to say: “I was humiliated by the immense outpouring of affection on my birthday,” because the reminder that I am loved beyond my strict deserts is not a radical assault (in most cases) on my self-understanding. Other events, by contrast, lower us in a way that stops us short and places us in crisis. These “deep” violations of our identity disorient us, throwing us into a state of intense discomfort and displeasure; we continually replay them in our minds, and they generate anger,

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consternation, fear, despair, and many other negative emotions. As such, all humiliation is a form of suffering, but not all suffering is a form of humiliation. Why call a deep violation of one’s identity “humiliation”? We call it a humiliation to express the way in which it lowers us in our own eyes, bringing us to the ground, to the humus. We suddenly experience ourselves as being far less important or impressive than we thought we were. We describe experiences as humiliating when they reveal us to ourselves in a way that we hate to acknowledge. It makes no sense to say, “It was humiliating, but it didn’t bother me at all.” An experience is humiliating only if we think it suggests something about us that we deeply want not to be true. So all humiliation is a form of suffering that challenges our sense of identity. In the Preface, I relayed the story of young neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi, who at the age of 35 was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He narrates how devastating such a diagnosis was to his identity, because it immediately cancelled out almost his entire ego ideal. Events humiliate us by violating our ego ideal, by revealing either that we were absurdly mistaken in thinking we had attained it, or that it is unattainable for us. Humiliation is prerequisite to graced Christian humility, because it steals from us that which, owing to the natural way in which we try to make our lives meaningful, we are unable freely to relinquish. Remember the contradiction at the heart of the notion of willing through the normal mechanism of habituation to become the kind of self with no ego ideal. The contradiction reveals our inability to undertake identity relinquishment as a project of moral growth typically conceived. Humiliation, however, can tear from us that which we cannot willingly relinquish. The severity of the humiliation is measured in terms of the amount of work and time it takes to begin refashioning an ego ideal, one that can in some way incorporate or repress the truth that has been revealed through humiliation. Typically, humiliation does not bring humility. Rarely does humiliation bring humility. That is because the natural reaction to humiliation is to begin immediately the work of refashioning an ego ideal, one that, though it differs from the earlier ideal, is nevertheless capable of energizing our future action through pride (whether proper or improper). Thus in most cases humiliation triggers the reconstitution of an ego ideal through an identity quest. In some cases, though, the destruction of one’s ego ideal is so thoroughgoing and deep that we cannot envision how to go on.

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For this reason, extreme tragedy or suffering tends to paralyze those it afflicts. What happens then? Most people are derailed and destroyed by extreme humiliation. Simone Weil draws attention to this crucial point in her writings on malheur, commonly translated as “affliction,” which is the French word Weil uses, more or less, for what I am calling extreme humiliation. Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death. . . . [It leaves] a being struggling on the ground like a half-crushed worm, they have no words to express what is happening to them. . . . A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. . . . Human beings can live for twenty or fifty years in this acute state. (Weil 1951: 68–70)

Weil believes, and I agree, that extreme humiliation can be the crucible of humility, but, before discussing that, I must linger on Weil’s point that extreme humiliation typically produces a state that can only be considered subhuman, exactly because it destroys the most powerful natural tool human beings have for flourishing—an ego ideal that can motivate and make meaningful a course of moral action. In other words, extreme humiliation, in so completely devastating one’s identity, reduces one to a subhuman existence. “That is why,” Weil (1955: 70) says, “those who plunge men into affliction before they are prepared to receive it kill their souls.” And since we never know when others or ourselves are prepared to receive deep humiliation, we would never be morally justified in wishing or bringing humiliation on another or upon ourselves. Because of the fact that deep humiliation is almost always destructive of personal well-being, we can neither valorize it nor use it in a soulmaking theodicy. Most people are destroyed by deep humiliation. Its horror cannot be minimized by pretending that it is normally a cause for moral formation and spiritual growth. It is normally the opposite. Nevertheless, Weil, along with the tradition of Christian wisdom on humility, testifies that humiliation and affliction can be a crucible of radical humility. In Weil’s famous line (1947: 81): “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.” And although I think there is something dangerous in such exhortations, we see the tradition’s “use” for affliction and humiliation in comments like this from the desert:

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“Go, beseech God to stir up warfare so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.” So [Abba John the Dwarf] besought God and when warfare came, he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, “Lord, give me strength for the fight.” (Ward 1975: 88)

I question the wisdom of such exhortations for two reasons. First, it is presumptuous for anyone to assume they are ready to encounter deep humiliation. How many of us have fantasized about how we would handle extreme crisis or tragedy with equanimity and courage only to discover that we are overcome by it? Second, by pursuing affliction as a strategy of humility, the monk may well find himself back in the closed circle of normal habituation. For suppose the monk’s prayers were answered, and “affliction” were sent? Would it really be humiliation if it were something that the monk was already prepared to incorporate into his spiritual pursuit? The reason that deep humiliation robs us of ourselves is exactly that it is senseless, it cannot easily be incorporated into our self-understanding or our ego ideal. As Stanley Hauerwas (1974: 43) warns: “When we try to use our suffering as a means of purification, we only increase our self-fascination.” There is, then, simply no moral justification for wishing humiliation on anyone, including ourselves. Nevertheless, when we are stunned and uprooted by deep humiliation that we could have never wanted, we may be positioned to grow in humility. The crucial question I must answer to bring this section to a close, and to try to understand in what way Christian humility is a gift of grace, is how humiliation can be an arena for the reception of the gift of humility. The key lies in Weil’s observation that, in the midst of self-undermining humiliation, “there is nothing to love.” Why should this be? There are still people in need of love. Why should it be that the identity-destroying character of humiliation threatens the ability to love? Here again, the insights of Hume are so pertinent. Remember why a secure identity, one that can be the source of a positive selfsurvey, is crucial for natural moral development and consistent moral action. It is because such a self-survey gives us the energy to extend our benevolence beyond immediate self-interest. In the absence of such pride, Hume thinks, we can only attempt to survive. We lack any motivation to risk ourselves in the care of others, anything that could compensate for the loss to our self-interest that is accrued through service to others beyond our immediate kinship circle. Furthermore, remember how important it is that a child develop such a secure

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identity, since the unconditional love of a parent is insufficient to secure his natural felicity. The world threatens him at every turn. If he cannot find something in himself worthy of love, all of the vices of humility set in: deep shame, servility, social insecurity, and lack of aspiration. Identity-destroying humiliation leaves us no resources for love: we cannot love others because we lack an identity that could generate pride sufficient to counterbalance such risk,4 and we cannot love ourselves because that in us which we had thought was worthy of love has been destroyed. And yet, we may go on loving. We may go on loving because God loves us, and that is enough. That sounds simplistic, no doubt, but it is the heart of the matter. The love of God is not motivated by pride, nor is it founded on something independently lovable in the recipient. It is utterly unconditional and utterly self-abandoning. And that love is always available to us. We may find ourselves secure in God’s love, and we may find that we can go on loving others even though we lack an ego ideal sufficient to energize such love. Here I think we stand to learn the most from those persons with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, whose willingness to receive and give love depends in no way whatsoever on their ability to represent to themselves an idealized self or a self worthy of love. The testimony of those who have learned to live in friendship with the severely intellectually disabled is that they learn from their disabled friends how to love in a way that is completely disconnected from performance and from the projection of a lovable self. In short, they learn how to love without pride. Many of these persons live in L’Arche communities, and I take as one example the testimony of Henri Nouwen, whose intellectually disabled friend, Adam, taught him the nature of supernatural love. I am convinced that somewhere deep down Adam “knew” that he was loved. He knew it in his very soul. Adam was not able to reflect on love, on the heart as the center of our being, the core of our humanity where we give and receive love. He could not talk with me about the movements of his heart or my heart or the heart of God. He could explain

4 It may seem odd to speak of loving from the motive of pride, but there is no problem here as long as we draw a distinction between the action of love (seeking the good of another) and the motive of love (being drawn to the good of another). We can love from a variety of motives, including pride and love.

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nothing to me in words. But his heart was there, totally alive, full of love, which he could both give and receive. (quoted in Reinders 2008: 370)

Nouwen’s is one of many such testimonies. Should we dismiss them since we cannot understand, precisely, what it would mean to say that Adam loved Henri? What theological warrant could we have for saying that Adam—whose essential being as an image-bearer of God consists precisely in his being related to God by love, and nothing more—cannot be a recipient and bearer of supernatural love? I cannot see any theological warrant for such a conclusion, and here I think we find a picture of the way in which God’s love can be communicated to, and through, us even when we do not know who we are. It is tempting to think Adam cannot be a sharer of divine love because Adam lacks rationality—that in the human person which is often supposed to ground the imago dei. I follow Robert Jenson (1999: 58) in refusing to locate the imago dei in some set of features supposed to be intrinsic to human nature. Adam is in the imago dei because he is especially loved by God, and, as the recipient of such love, Adam can be, also, a conduit of God’s love to others. To be a human being fully at rest in the love of God and capable of sharing that love without any vestige of pride is inexplicable except as a possibility of grace. And my conclusion, difficult though it is to envision, is that we may rest in God’s love and share God’s love freely without any concern whatsoever for fashioning, pursuing, protecting, or maintaining a secure identity. Remember that humility is a disposition. It is not part of my claim that one who is ideally humble will lack any and every form of an ego ideal, only that she will lack the disposition assiduously to fashion, pursue, protect, and maintain such. It may be impossible for an intellectually able human being this side of beatitudo to avoid the assemblage, over time, of an ego ideal, however thinly or thickly. There is nothing in my account that says a humble person must resist or fight off an ego ideal. Indeed, as I have already shown, there is normally a performative contradiction in such efforts. The ideally humble person will simply have no concern whatsoever for investing in an ongoing identity quest, and therefore she will be the one who can go on loving and resting in God’s love come what may. We grow in humility when we discover that God’s love can carry us even when we do not know who we are. This is what it means to say

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that humility is the gift of grace. As such, senses (3) and (4) of the claim that humility is a gift of grace are the most appropriate ones. To be pathways to humility, ascetic practices must be reoriented by grace away from the pursuit of an ego ideal. In fact, they must be oriented by grace toward the dissolution of an ego ideal, toward the kinds of humiliation that can arrest our indomitable identity quests. When they are so graced, they provide opportunities to go on loving in the midst of humiliation. We “position” ourselves to receive the gift of radical Christian humility when, in the midst of humiliation, we do not turn from the love of God. Radical Christian humility, then, is achieved not through normal habituation, but rather by finding ourselves in a position, through humiliation, to let God’s love sustain and energize us when there are no available human resources for love. Ascetic practices can be graced modes of preparation for such opportunities. They can train us into greater and greater comfort with the kind of disappointment and disequilibrium that comes when our identity quests are interrupted or sabotaged. If such a graced ascetical regime is successful, we may be more prepared to fall back on the supernatural love of God when humiliation comes and our identity is snatched from us. Though limited, there is something preparatory in the little humiliations that are brought about through ascetic practices. The relationship between such practices and the reception of Christian humility is parallel to the relationship between   and  —that is, between acquired and infused humility. The one who through habituation has trained herself to rely less and less on a cherished identity in order to live and love will be less overthrown, possibly, when that identity is torn away.

CONCLUSION I have said little in this book about Christian worship, an omission that may appear strange, given the trends in contemporary theological ethics. It is methodologically popular today to locate all of the resources for the Christian moral life within the context of the liturgy. Depending on how that project is construed, I am sympathetic. I think the actual habituating force of ecclesial life is more limited than is often portrayed; nevertheless the liturgy contains a

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counter-narrative that can reorient Christian vision. Nowhere is this truer than in the Eucharist, the center of Christian worship, and so I want to conclude by remarking on how the Eucharist displays (and indeed embodies) the humility of God into which we are invited. Among the many distortions of Christian theology, one of the most pernicious is the claim that God intends to make us “whole persons.” It is pernicious because we cannot help but understand it, and indeed it is often presented, as the promise that God will give us a restored and secure identity finally freed from the threat of self-expenditure, diminution, and brokenness; that is, as the promise of eudaimonia in the classical sense. This, I think, is a false gospel. The gospel, instead, is that we may go on loving in the midst of these threats, because God’s love is not appropriately understood as an excess made possible by secure self-sufficiency. If this latter were the gospel, then we would worship the Arian, and not the triune, God. On the cross, Jesus was not a “whole person.” He relinquished every possible means by which he could lay claim to his own security. And this was not a momentary lapse from an otherwise self-secure mode of being. “The lamb was slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). Here I think Roman Catholic theology is right to understand the Eucharist as the ongoing self-sacrifice of Jesus. Protestant theology that approaches the Eucharist as a memorial of a bygone exchange tends to insulate us from the death of Jesus, as though we are not, also, called into that death. In the Eucharistic body of Christ, Jesus gives of himself without reserve so that we may live. We consume his body so that we may be consumed by it; we assimilate his body so that we may be assimilated into it. This is God’s love, unbounded and unthreatened by self-expenditure, diminution, and brokenness. It is that love, which we take into our very bodies, that can sustain us through the loss of identity that is characteristic of humiliation and, indeed, that falls to every human person sooner or later. From the natural perspective, the Eucharist is the humiliation of Christ. From the divine perspective, it is the humility of Christ. When Christians gather at Eucharist, they are to learn that, just as the resurrected Christ is the crucified One now and eternally broken for them, their own humiliation and brokenness may become, because of who God is, the site of their participation in the eternal, humble love of God.

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Conclusion The Task of Christian Virtue Theory

The core of this book is a refreshed account of the virtue of Christian humility. I claimed that the original clash between classical and Christian virtue was generated by the introduction of humility to the table of virtues. Partly because of late-medieval theological attempts to close the gap between classical and Christian ethics, and partly because of the elision of political liberalism and Christianity, it is easy to forget how offensively strange Christian moral philosophy once seemed. I have sought to display how contemporary virtue theory fell into such forgetfulness and to assemble a series of reminders of just how radical early Christian humility was. The methodological aim of my argument has been to display what it might look like for Christian virtue theorists to engage the field without bracketing their theological commitments, but instead keeping those commitments front and center in an effort to show the difference Christ makes to everything, including the field of moral philosophy. One odd feature of contemporary virtue theory is that many virtue theorists are avowedly Christian yet they rarely indicate how being Christian matters for what they think about the virtues or virtue theory generally. They appear to want to provide an account of the virtues that will be compelling to anyone. Put differently, they often appear to honor the distinction between theology and ethics. If this book seems like an awkward contribution to the field of virtue theory, it is because I reject such a distinction in trying to think about the virtues. To conclude this book, I want to explain why such an approach should matter for the field of virtue theory generally, and not just for

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those Christian virtue theorists who, perhaps, could be interested in the way their own theological commitments might pertain to how they think about the virtues. Even if secular virtue theorists reject the conclusions of this study, I think they should welcome the contributions of “Christian virtue theory” to the field because of the way such contributions can reveal metaphysical and political commitments that typically go unstated and unexplored by many who think and write about the virtues. In order to articulate a vision for the work of Christian virtue theorists, I want to consider the kinds of philosophical questions that first launched virtue theory back onto the philosophical scene, and then observe how those questions have unfortunately receded from the center of the discussion. In After Virtue, first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) argued that the prevailing methods of analytic philosophy are insufficient in the domain of moral philosophy. He imagined a world in which the language of natural science is in disarray because, owing to some catastrophe, scientific knowledge itself has been largely lost. He observed how powerless conceptual analysis would be to reveal the disorder of the situation. MacIntyre contended that contemporary moral terms are in such a state of disarray. So disconnected are our moral concepts from the various metaphysical, political, and cultural backdrops that once foregrounded them that pure analysis of how they are currently used by speakers only deepens our confusion and ensures the interminability of disagreement. Instead of performing conceptual analysis, MacIntyre argued, we must examine the inescapably traditioned character of all moral discourse, working to recover those practices and political contexts that give specific moral concepts their significance. MacIntyre privileged virtues in part because they are “thick” moral concepts; the intelligibility of virtue concepts is more obviously linked to social practices and political arrangements than is the intelligibility of supposedly tradition-neutral concepts such as “duty” or “utility.” After Virtue jumpstarted the contemporary revival of interest in the virtues, but not everyone learned the same lesson from MacIntyre. Theologians like Stanley Hauerwas learned from MacIntyre how to explore the tradition-dependence of virtues as a way of resisting the universalizing demands of political liberalism. For instance, Hauerwas and Charles Pinches (1997: p. vii), in a book entitled Christians among the Virtues, claim that “our differing accounts of the virtues rest on differing claims about the way things are,” and that, since

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Christians have different metaphysical commitments than seculars or liberals, they will understand the virtues differently as well. Owing to the influence of Hauerwas and others in the field of theological ethics, several of the moral virtues have received careful genealogical treatment of the sort that can illuminate and energize new forms of ethical and political imagination (see, e.g., Leithart 2014). Most philosophers, however, have not been as interested in MacIntyre’s emphasis on tradition-dependence. Moral philosophers have learned from MacIntyre that virtue might provide an alternative focus for moral theory; perhaps virtues, rather than moral laws or consequences, deserve pride of place in an ethical theory (see Hursthouse 1999). Epistemologists have similarly latched onto virtue as an alternative source of theory construction, giving rise to the field of “virtue epistemology” (see Zagzebski 1996). Now that the initial stage of theory construction is over, philosophers are beginning to inquire about particular virtues, humility among them. The typical method, however, for arriving at an account of particular virtues is to pump intuitions in the way that analytic philosophers are well trained to do. In other words, contemporary philosophical virtue theory often overlooks or rejects MacIntyre’s emphasis on tradition-dependence. The result is that contingent intuitions get codified as universal windows into the way things are. I hope the argument of this book has revealed the way in which contemporary humility theorists, for instance, assume without question a mundane view of human anthropology and human flourishing that is problematic if early Christian claims about the virtue of humility are true. It is precisely the assumption of such a mundane view of human anthropology and flourishing that makes it difficult for those theorists to countenance the radical humility voiced by those such as the desert mothers and fathers as anything other than a sad exercise in self-contempt. I hope to have shown that, given an anthropology informed by Trinitarian thought, and a vision of flourishing informed by the pattern of Jesus’s cross and resurrection, these early Christian claims about humility are not embarrassing but challenging, and possibly inviting. The lesson to be learned here is that contemporary virtue theorists too easily abdicate their responsibility to articulate clearly what vision of human anthropology and human flourishing underwrites their accounts of the virtues. Even those who acknowledge that accounts of the virtues will differ depending on such tradition-dependent

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considerations often fail to allow such considerations to disrupt their theorizing. They proceed as though they might uncover an account of the virtues that would satisfy anyone regardless of differing convictions about fundamental reality. To give an example of this tendency, consider the following statement made by two of the finest contemporary virtue theorists, Robert Roberts and Jay Wood, both of whom are Christians. In their book Intellectual Virtues, Roberts and Wood (2007: 23) claim that “virtues presuppose one or another metaphysical or world-view background.” They observe, however, that “the prospect of securing universal agreement about [such backgrounds] is dim.” One might expect, then, that they would propose developing an account of the virtues that is self-consciously contestable, but instead they follow up these observations with the remark, “However, several of the virtues that we will discuss . . . broaden minds and civilize intellectual exchange.” The implication seems to be that, despite the fact that specifications of the virtues rest on particular metaphysical commitments, Roberts and Wood aim to spell out the virtues in a way that everyone will recognize as salutary. This “however” is problematic. Roberts and Wood seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They acknowledge the virtues are rooted in particular metaphysical backgrounds, but then proceed to offer an account of the virtues based on little more than the shared commitment to broaden minds and civilize intellectual exchange. Is this commitment itself rooted in a contested metaphysical background, or have they found one commitment that transcends such conflict? The “however” could be read as a tacit admission that the accounts of the virtues they will provide remain at a superficial level, such that the accounts would not exhaust, but would nevertheless be included in, various more tradition-dependent specifications of the virtues. Yet I wonder if the real explanation for the “however” is that Roberts and Wood believe we still operate within an intellectual culture sufficiently shaped by Christianity that their readers, whether religious or not, will carry intuitions about the moral life consonant with Christian thought. It is not clear to me that we do live in such a world. Even if we did, it is not clear these inherited intuitions can be justified without recourse to Christian theology, in the manner of this book’s argument. In any event, I hope to have shown in this book how  , the view developed by Roberts and Wood, is grounded more than they may recognize in fundamental commitments that are contestable from the perspective of Christian theology.

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One of the aspects of my argument that may seem frustrating is that the account of humility I set forth as ideal seems so impracticable and inaccessible, both because of the way it is dependent on supernatural grace and because of the way it requires specific theological convictions for its intelligibility. I do not believe that one must be a confessing Christian to be drawn to such an account, but there is no reason to think the account will be widely attractive. Virtue theorists might object that it is simply unhelpful (if not unkind) to specify a virtue in such a way that it will appeal to so few. Most folks have strong intuitions that humility is exemplified across a wide spectrum of human persons, that humility is broadly appealing, and therefore that any account of ideal humility that does not have such appeal is obviously confused. Yet I have repeatedly emphasized the humanly unattainable status of radical Christian humility, to the point in Chapter 6 of saying it should not be enjoined on anyone. Isn’t this just a waste of everyone’s time, an excuse for theological titillation and theoretical nitpicking? This objection raises the issue of the proper aims of virtue theory, and I want to conclude the book by exploring two possible responses I might offer to this objection, one irenic and the other polemical. Fair enough, the irenic response runs, my theologically informed account may well be irrelevant to many, and therefore it is uncharitable for me to characterize such humility as ideal. At most, my account has uncovered a particular character trait—call it  —that a few may find conforms to their own preferred vision of human flourishing. Differing accounts of humility are linked to differing desiderata for the virtues generally, so, rather than trying to offer an account of ideal humility, I should be content to describe one humility among others. At the very least, such a method has the merit of revealing in greater detail the underlying desiderata that drive differing accounts of humility, and that is enough. What grates is the attempt to position other accounts of humility as somehow subsidiary or penultimate to my own, so I should cut that out. So runs the irenic response. The polemical response is that such an irenic posture is actually ideological. My problem with the irenic response is that it expresses an underlying political commitment to bracket metaphysical and religious disagreement in service to liberal civility. For, by suggesting that there is no privileged account of a given virtue but rather each person or community may select the account that fits with a preferred

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outlook, or a preferred selection of desiderata, we effectively insulate virtue theory from the threat of fundamental disagreement. Such a strategy fails to acknowledge the way in which virtue-talk has historically been linked to the deepest communal commitments, the commitments that are non-negotiable from the perspective of a community’s core wisdom. The virtues have never included any and every character trait that conduces to some form of human success, however foreshortened. Rather, the virtues name particular character traits isolated by a community for special study and praise because of the role such character traits are thought to play in helping members of the community achieve the fullest flourishing possible. Virtue-talk has long been political in this way. It has long been a way of contesting alternative and opposed pictures of the way things are and the way things ought to be. Consider, for example, Augustine’s denial in City of God and elsewhere that the best pagans were genuinely virtuous. Augustine argued that what the pagans call virtues “are inflated with pride, and are therefore to be reckoned vices rather than virtues” (civ. Dei 19.25). Exactly because pagan virtue was in service to a politics of glory rather than a politics of humility, Augustine had to deny that what passed as pagan virtue was genuine virtue. Glory they most ardently loved: for it they wished to live, for it they did not hesitate to die. Every other desire was repressed by the strength of their passion for that one thing . . . That eagerness for praise and desire of glory, then, was that which accomplished those many wonderful things, laudable, doubtless, and glorious according to human judgment . . . The great things which were then achieved were accomplished through the administration of a few men, who were good in their own way . . . Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love of intelligible beauty, but by desire of human praise, or, at all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are not indeed yet holy, but only less base. (civ Dei 19.25)

Note Augustine does not deny the character traits admired by the pagans are in some meaningful sense good character traits. It is partly because of these character traits, Augustine argues, that Rome rose to a position of political preeminence. Such character traits, Augustine says, repressed baser lusts, and allowed Rome’s greatest men to accomplish “wonderful things, laudable, doubtless, and glorious according to human judgment.” Such men are “good in their own way” even if they are neither holy nor exemplars of true virtue.

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Although Augustine did not use the phrase, we can understand why later interpreters would say Augustine attributed to the great pagans splendida vitia, glittering vices. To see how the irenic response curtails the importance of virtuetheoretic discourse, suppose Augustine had taken the irenic line: “The pagans have their virtues and we ours; there is no agreeing on the matter because we are just after different things.” Well, yes, but Augustine would never have adopted such a strategy because for him the virtues were conduits to genuine truth, beauty, goodness— that is, to beatitudo. The virtues were thus a primary site of contestation, and polemics exactly at this point were necessary to reveal that the deep metaphysical and political disagreements that separated communities mattered profoundly in the day-to-day lived reality of those communities. Augustine recognized that to speak of the virtues was to set forth a picture of the ideal human posture toward the world, and thus he argued “there is no true virtue except that which is directed towards that end in which is the highest and ultimate good of man” (civ. Dei 5.12). Notice that Augustine does not opt out of virtue categories entirely, in the way Luther eventually would. This was a constant temptation for Augustine, because, as I hope the argument of this book has shown, Christianity pushed classical eudaimonism to or beyond the breaking point in numerous ways. Augustine continued to use the category of virtue, however, because that is how his pagan predecessors had come to approach the question of “the highest and ultimate good of man.” We certainly can delimit the aim of virtue theory such that it has nothing of interest to say about the “highest and ultimate good,” but it is not clear anything is to be gained by doing so. Virtuetalk has typically been concerned with specifying those character traits that align human persons in the most far-reaching and lasting ways with how things really are. The critic will say that of course virtue-talk has been and can be so freighted, but it need not be. The point I wish to make is that the push for a more modest or truncated role for the virtues is not politically neutral. The push to limit virtue-talk to a more mundane, less metaphysically wrought level is itself more attractive, given a commitment to make the virtues work for liberal democratic projects. That is, given the liberal project of making community life possible absent any widely shared commitment to a robust vision of human flourishing, accounts of the virtues are more attractive and amenable

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the fewer metaphysical and religious commitments they take on board. At the extreme, the virtues come to describe a set of character traits that permit people who share nothing in common to live together without allowing their disagreements to erupt into violence or hostility. To reiterate, I am not objecting to the value of the character traits being described under the various definitions of humility (except perhaps ). Rather, I am pointing out that the irenic stance, though tacitly apolitical, tends to undercut those who would insist on more particularist or robust conceptions of the virtues. It tends toward the development of a moral language untethered from the metaphysical and religious disagreements that divide us. The religious person has good reason to resist exactly this kind of defanging of the particularist moral commitments she has, including the very particularist renderings of the virtues. She might with good reason, for example, deny that   expresses the ideal of humility—good character trait though it surely is—and hold to a theologically determined account of humility. I think secular theorists should care about such defenses just to the extent they do not want their work to be a mere ideological adjunct to contemporary political presumptions. In the end, of course, what matters most is not whether or not this study “counts” as an exercise in virtue theory. This is an academic work, but its central questions are vital to a life of Christian faith. What does it mean to die to self? Could it be, and how could it possibly be, that dying to self is somehow for my good, as Jesus promises? Making some headway with those questions, I am convinced, forces us to think about the nature and value of humility for Christian life. What matters most is whether the argument of this book has been sufficiently disciplined by the cross and resurrection of Jesus to permit a glimpse of the hope of everlasting self-abandonment into the love that is the Trinity.

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References Pre-Contemporary Sources Where possible, I have cited these sources by abbreviated title, which is noted parenthetically below. These in-text citations use Arabic numerals to denote the various books, chapters, subsections, etc., of the work cited. So, for example, I cite the fourth article of the third question in the prima secundae partis of the Summa Theologiae as ST 1–2.3.4 instead of Summa Theologiae IaIIae.Q3.A4. Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae (ST), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981. Aristotle, Politics (Pol.), trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE), trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edn. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. Augustine, Confessions (conf.), trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans (civ. Dei), trans. R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Augustine, De Trinitate (de Trin.), trans. Edmund Hill OP, 2nd edn. New York: New City Press, 2015. Augustine, Letter (Ep.) 118, trans. J. G. Cunningham, in Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, First Series, vol. i., ed. Philip Schaff. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1886. Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of St Benedict (RB), ed. Timothy Fry OSB. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Lev.). Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM). Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (T). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Kant, Immanuel (1964). The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kant, Immanuel (1979). Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary Gregor. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Kant, Immanuel (1997). Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich (1910). The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, books 1 and 2, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy. London: T. N. Foulis. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968). Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2000). On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Peter Gay. New York: Random House. Ward, Benedicta, SLG (1975) (ed.). The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. Ward, Benedicta, SLG (1980) (ed.). The Lives of the Desert Fathers. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. Ward, Benedicta, SLG (2003) (ed.). The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks. London: Penguin. Wesley, John (1872). A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill Press, 1966.

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Pardue, Stephen (2013). The Mind of Christ: Humility and the Intellect in Early Christian Theology. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Pinsent, Andrew (2011). “Humility,” in Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, ed. Michael Austin and R. Douglas Geivett. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 242–64. Ramsey, Paul (1950). Basic Christian Ethics. Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1993. Raterman, Ty (2006). “On Modesty: Being Good and Knowing it without Flaunting it,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 43/3: 221–34. Reinders, Hans (2008). Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Richards, Norvin (1988). “Is Humility a Virtue?” American Philosophical Quarterly, 25/3: 253–9. Richards, Norvin (1992). “Humility,” in Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker. New York: Garland, i. 578–9. Ridge, Michael (2000). “Modesty as a Virtue,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 37/3: 269–83. Roberts, Robert C. (2007). Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Roberts, Robert C. and Ryan West (2017). “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride,” in The Moral Psychology of Pride, ed. Jay Adam Carter and Emma Gordon. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 99–121. Roberts, Robert C., and Jay Wood (2003). “Humility and Epistemic Goods,” in Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 257–80. Roberts, Robert C., and Jay Wood (2007). Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1983). Sexism and God Talk. Boston: Beacon Press. Saiving, Valerie (1960). “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979, 25–42. Schlesinger, George (1993). “Humility,” Tradition, 27/3: 4–12. Schueler, G. F. (1997). “Why Modesty Is a Virtue,” Ethics, 107/3: 467–85. Sinha, Alex (2012). “Modernizing the Virtue of Humility,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90/2: 259–74. Slote, Michael (1983). Goods and Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Emily Esfahani (2016). “Fetters and Freedom,” New Criterion, 35/2: 45–7. Snow, Nancy (1995). “Humility,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 29/2: 203–16. Statman, Daniel (1992). “Modesty, Pride and Realistic Self-Assessment,” Philosophical Quarterly, 42/169: 420–38.

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Index of Names Adams, Robert 78–9 Anscombe, Elizabeth 12 Anselm of Canterbury 110–11 Antony the Great 29–30, 36, 140 Aquinas, Thomas 23–4, 30–1, 87n, 95, 104–5, 110–12, 126–7, 140–2 Aristotle 11–12, 24–6, 39, 57n, 60, 66, 87n, 99–101, 112, 126–7 Arius 111 Athanasius of Alexandria 110–11 Augustine of Hippo 1, 4, 7–8n, 8, 11–12, 23–5, 29–49, 58–9, 61, 88, 94–8, 100, 103–4, 110–15, 126–7, 139, 162–3 Baehr, Jason 17 Battaly, Heather 17 Benedict of Nursia 29–30, 66–7, 140–5 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron 13n, 15 Bernard of Clairvaux 29–30, 67, 140–2, 147–8 Bommarito, Nicolas 16–17 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 144–5 Button, Mark 20–1 Cassian, John 29–30, 140–2 Cavadini, John 47 Coakley, Sarah 113–14 Cooper, Julie 47–8 Driver, Julia 13–14, 20–1 Evagrius Ponticus 6–7, 29–30, 140 Flanagan, Owen 13n, 14, 20–2 Foulcher, Jane 3–4, 141–2n Francis of Assisi 58 Garcia, J.L.A. 16–17, 147–8 Green, Ronald 23 Gregory the Great 140 Grenberg, Jeanine 54, 56 Hampson, Daphne 120–1 Hare, Stephen 19

Hauerwas, Stanley 151, 158–9 Herdt, Jennifer 24–5, 103n, 123, 139n Hobbes, Thomas 30–1, 47–50 Howard-Snyder, Daniel 17 Hume, David 3, 8, 25–6, 30–1, 49–53, 55–6, 58–9, 64–6, 68, 84, 93–4, 105, 117–19, 123, 126–7, 130–1, 151–2 Hursthouse, Rosalind 159 Jenson, Robert 102, 153 Jesus Christ 3–4, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 32–9, 41–2, 44–5, 48–9, 58, 60–2, 65, 91–2, 95–115, 132, 134–5, 140, 155, 159, 164 Kalanithi, Paul 149 Kant, Immanuel 30–1, 49–62, 64–6, 68, 86, 93–4, 113–14, 117–18, 126–7 Kellenberger, James 16–17, 79–80 Korsgaard, Christine 78–9 Kupfer, Joseph 147–8 Leary, Mark 75 Leithart, Peter 158–9 Long, D. Stephen 111–12n Louf, André 3–4 Luther, Martin 11–12, 19–20, 29–30, 163 Machiavelli, Niccolò 30–1 MacIntyre, Alasdair 145–6n, 158–9 MacQuarrie, John 23–4 Mansini, Guy 23–4n Maximus the Confessor 134–5 McFarland, Ian 134–5 McGill, Arthur 102n, 112–13 Merton, Thomas 29–30, 137–8 Milbank, John 102 Newman, Jay 20–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 25–7, 30–1, 104–8 Nouwen, Henri 152 Nussbaum, Martha 100n Nuyen, A.T. 13n, 20–2 O’Donovan, Oliver 103n

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Pardue, Stephen 119–20n Pinches, Charles 158–9 Pinsent, Andrew 140 Plato 107 Ramsey, Paul 99 Raterman, Ty 16–17 Richards, Norvin 14, 19–22 Ridge, Michael 16–17 Roberts, Robert C. 16–17, 43–5, 59–68, 71–5, 85–7, 89n, 90, 108–10, 131–2, 159–60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 47–8n Ruether, Rosemary 120 Saiving, Valerie 120–1 Schlesinger, George 16–17 Schueler, G.F. 16–17, 19 Sinha, Alex 12, 15 Slote, Michael 25–6 Snow, Nancy 17–18, 40–3 Socrates 101

Spinoza, Baruch 25–6, 47–8n Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 119–21 Statman, Daniel 15, 19, 22 Tangney, June 75 Taylor, Charles 7–8n Taylor, Richard 25–6 Weil, Simone 29–30, 96–7, 137–8, 149–52 Wengst, Klaus 95–6 Wesley, John 137–8 West, Ryan 62–8, 71–5, 85–7, 90, 108–10, 131–2 Whitcomb, Dennis 17 Willard, Dallas 91–2 Williams, Rowan 7–8 Wood, Jay 16–17, 43–5, 59–62, 66, 68, 159–60 Wurmser, Leon 79–80 Zagzebski, Linda 159

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Index of Subjects agency 6, 63–8, 71–2, 74–6, 78–9, 86–7, 93–4, 118–19, 121, 127–8, 130–2, 134–5 ambition 43–4, 63–4, 66–8, 71–5, 85–7, 93, 130–2, 151–2 analytic philosophy 2, 9–10, 12, 96, 158–9 anthropology 8–11, 46, 54, 69, 71, 134–5, 159–60 relational account of 113–14 asceticism 4–5, 9, 140–7, 153–4 aspiration see ambition autonomy see independence beatitude 69, 94, 103–4, 107, 133–4, 153, 163 begging 56–8 Benedict’s Rule 66–7, 141–5 benevolence 49–50, 117–18, 126, 151–2 character trait 7, 95–6, 161–4 Christianity 1–2, 8–9, 11–12, 18–27, 29, 34, 54, 60–1, 65–6, 69, 95, 103, 138–40, 150, 157, 160, 163 cross 2–3, 23–4, 34–5, 37–8, 71, 95–104, 107–8, 114–15, 155, 159, 164 crucifixion see cross death 27, 35–8, 58, 95–104, 106–8, 155 dependence 25, 37–42, 44–5, 56–60, 113–14 desert mothers and fathers (desert ammas and abbas) 4–9, 29–30, 59, 66–8, 94, 96, 117, 135, 140–3, 147, 150–1, 159 destiny 3–4, 27, 29–30, 41–2, 46, 54, 58, 88, 92, 97, 105–8, 119, 134–5 dignity 8–9, 47, 49, 51, 53–6, 59, 63–7, 86–7, 109, 131–2 disposition 2, 4, 15–16, 35, 38–9, 50, 88–90, 94, 97, 102–4, 107, 109, 129, 145–6, 153 ego 15–16, 44–5, 82–4, 91–2, 94, 96–7, 121

ego ideal 7–8, 79–94, 96–7, 110, 113–14, 117, 120, 123–7, 133–4, 145–54 entitlement 62–3, 74–5, 86–7, 89, 93, 109–10, 131–2 equality 47–9, 56 eschatology 8, 11, 46, 56, 58, 71, 89, 97, 107–8, 115, 144 ethics see moral philosophy Eucharist 154–5 eudaimonism 3–4, 29–30, 37, 98–108, 155, 163 exaltation 104–8 finitude 42–3, 45–6, 48 flourishing 3–4, 8, 18, 29–30, 35–8, 44–5, 51, 56, 58, 61, 69, 71, 89, 97, 100–1, 103–4, 108, 114–15, 123, 127–31, 133–5, 138–9, 150, 159–64 glory 37, 47–8n, 48, 65, 82–3, 104–5, 162 grace 19–23, 25, 33–4, 48–9, 82–3, 95, 127, 129–30, 134, 138–40, 145, 147–8, 151–4, 161 habituation 127–30, 139–40, 143, 145–7, 149, 151, 153–4 heaven 104–8 honor 11–12, 37, 51, 55–6, 58–60, 65–6, 87n, 141–2, 104–5 human excellence 11–14, 25–6, 29–30, 64, 92, 100, 137 human perfection 53–4, 58–9, 92–4, 107–8, 113–14, 138–9 human purpose see destiny humiliation 9, 80–3, 86, 147–55 humility acquired 129–30, 139, 154 as a civic virtue 20–1, 47, 56, 58–60 as a divine attribute 23–4, 39, 112 as a “monkish” virtue 49–53, 56, 58, 117–18 as low self-estimate 19–21, 23, 32–3, 38–40, 45, 52–3

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humility (cont.) as mundane virtue 8, 30–1, 47–69, 81, 83–4, 87, 91–4, 117–18, 129–31, 159, 163–4 as normative 121–3, 128–30 as pseudo-virtue 104–7, 117–18 as regulative ideal 44–5, 89–93 developmental account of 8–9, 88, 121–30 egalitarian account 15–16, 22–3 feminist critique of 3, 118–31, 135 in classical thought 11–12, 24–5, 29–31, 68, 95–6, 98, 100–1, 157 infused 129–30, 139, 154 in Hebrew/Jewish thought 11–12, 18, 23–4, 95–6, 105 in pagan thought see in classical thought in secular thought 11–12, 15, 18–23, 25–7, 157–9, 164 limitations-owning account 17–18, 22–3, 29, 39–43, 45–6 low concern account 16–18, 22–3, 29, 39–40, 42–6, 49, 51, 59–66, 72–3, 75, 77, 84–94, 117–18, 121–2, 129–30, 138, 146, 154, 160, 164 motivational component of 89n, 90–1, 93 no concern account 7–8, 88–94, 96–7, 103–4, 121–3, 126, 128n, 129–30, 132–4, 146–7, 154, 161 non-overestimation account 14–15, 20–2, 25–6 radical Christian account see also no concern account 1–4, 7–9, 12, 18, 29–30, 34, 37–8n, 44–5, 47, 49, 51, 54, 59, 66, 71–94, 97, 103–4, 107–8, 114–15, 117–19, 132, 135, 138, 145–6, 150, 153–4, 159, 161 standard Christian account 8, 12, 18–27, 29, 31–5, 45, 48–9 underestimation account 13–15, 22–3, 68, 121–2, 164 unselfing account see also no concern account 7–9, 13–14, 18, 29–30, 34, 37–8n, 40, 62, 71–2, 75–6, 83, 93–4, 97, 115, 117–19, 121–3, 128, 130–1, 135 vices of 64–5, 73, 129–34, 151–2

identity 34, 35–8, 41–2, 75–94, 96–7, 103–5, 109–10, 112–15, 117, 120, 125–6, 129–30, 133, 137–8, 146–55 importance distinctive personal 79–80, 82–94, 96–7, 103–4, 106, 110, 113–14, 121, 126–7, 138, 142–3, 145–6 personal vs. self- 62–5, 72–5, 84 incarnation 23–4, 134–5 independence 37–9, 44, 56–9, 108–10, 113–14, 120, 131 injustice 5–6, 26–7, 121, 141–3 interpersonal comparison 53–4, 62–3, 74–5, 82–3, 144–5 liberalism 20–1, 26, 49, 58–9, 157–9, 161–4 love 64–5, 87n, 88–91, 109, 114, 125–30, 132–5, 137–8, 147, 151–5 magnanimity 11–12, 24–7, 87n, 101 meekness see weakness monasticism 1–3, 8–9, 51, 58–9, 66–9, 88, 92–4, 97, 115, 117, 128, 135, 137–55 moral consistency 55, 64–5, 68, 74–5, 94, 117–18, 123–31, 151–2 moral development see moral formation moral formation 37–8, 49, 59–60, 66, 68, 88, 93–4, 108, 117–18, 123–30, 133–5, 149–52 moral philosophy 4, 6, 7–8, 25, 30–1, 51, 125n, 157–8 natural end 133–4, 144, 151–2 natural reason 51–2, 54–6, 58–61 Neoplatonism 31–3 obedience 5–6, 34–5, 39–40, 48–9, 141–3 oppression 118–23, 127–9 ordinariness 9, 142 pagan ethics 11–12, 24–5, 37–8, 98, 100, 104–5, 107–8, 112, 126–7, 138–9, 162–3 patriarchalism 118–19, 121 possessiveness 100–8 poverty 35–8, 56–8, 95–6, 99, 102, 108 practical identity see vocation practices 2, 5–6, 8–9, 140–7, 158 pride as motivationally indexed 73–4, 84, 109

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/11/2018, SPi

Index of Subjects as penultimate virtue 123, 129, 134–5, 161 in one’s associates 66, 86–7, 96–7, 131–2 in one’s children 86–7 in one’s work 63–4, 66–7, 86–7, 96–7 proper 3, 6–7, 49, 53–4, 58–9, 62–8, 71–5, 81, 83–7, 89n, 92–4, 96–7, 108–9, 113, 117–19, 121–35, 138, 146, 149 virtues of 66, 86–7, 131–4 pusillanimity 64–5, 73, 130–3 repression see oppression resurrection 96–7, 99, 104–8, 114–15, 159 Roman ethics see pagan ethics self 75–84 -abasement 6, 53, 141–3 -confidence 66, 71, 85–7, 93, 131–2 -display 62–5, 74–5, 129 -esteem 6–7, 9–10, 50–1, 53–7, 120–1 -expenditure 6, 27, 99, 106–7, 119–20, 133, 155 -interest 49–50, 117–18, 151–2 -love 51, 54, 58, 103n, 126–7 -respect 63–7, 85–7, 131–2 -sacrifice see self-expenditure -survey 64–6, 74, 79–80, 123–5, 151–2 -understanding 40, 44, 76, 78, 80–4, 88–9, 110, 112–13, 125, 127–8, 148, 151 -worth 53–5, 57, 80–4, 86, 88–91, 93 service 39, 95, 98–101, 107, 113–14, 151–2

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servility 11–12, 52–3, 57n, 64–5, 68, 94, 96–7, 113–14, 130–3, 151–2 shame 64–5, 68, 130–3, 151–2 silence 6, 50, 142–3 sin 19–25, 33, 36–7, 45, 48–9, 95, 107, 115, 126, 134–5, 144–5 social Trinitarianism 113–14 speculative theology see theology Stoicism 100–1 subjugation see oppression submission see obedience suffering 5–6, 8–9, 58, 101, 106, 141–3, 148–51 supernatural end 103, 123, 127–30, 133–4, 137, 139, 145, 147, 163 theological ethics 154–5, 157–9 theology 2–4, 7–9, 12, 19, 22, 24, 29–30, 47–9, 51–2, 54, 60–1, 82–3, 95–115, 121, 126–7, 134–5, 139, 155, 157–64 Trinity 24, 52, 71, 97, 108–15 virtue acquired 126–7 as political 157–64 as tradition-dependent 9, 158–60 infused 126–7 virtue epistemology 12, 159 virtue ethics see virtue theory virtue theory 2–4, 9–10, 12, 69, 115, 125n, 157–64 vocation 78–84, 86–9, 93, 145–7 weakness 32–4, 37–8, 98, 100, 103–6, 108–9 well-being see flourishing worship 39, 154–5