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character and such modes of action. To be sure, this is a question that becomes all the
more pressing in the modern period,
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but Montaigne helps us to see that humility has
become a problem prior to the rise of secularism and well before anyone thought to
structure political societies by the right over the good. The more thinkers like Montaigne
looked into the self for sources and motives of moral character and virtue, the more he
found the habitual pulls of self-love, vanity, and pride instead. Which is to say, although
Montaigne does not extend the logic of his argument this far, that humility does not exist:
it can only be a false, counterfeit coin for beings of interest and pride. At most, humility
gives us an instrument (a la hypocrisy) to better serve our interests, even where (or
especially where) those interests include a desire to be counted among the virtuous.
Along with Montaigne, a host of other Christian authors were anything but
sanguine about the prospects or even the very meaning of humility in human life. This
represents a gradual but marked shift in the understanding of the possibility and merits of
humility during the modern period. Whereas pre-modern figurations of humility were
understood as difficult but salutary gains in self-knowledge, that same inward turn toward
self-knowledge now pushes the idea of humility further beyond our grasp. The French
Huguenot Jean La Placette, in his Traité de l’orgueil (1643) provides a wonderfully apt
description of humility’s impossible and self-contradictory status for man that nicely
captures the nature of this problem:
It is very difficult to see in others faults from which one is oneself free, or to
perform any good action, without some secret applause. Even humility very often
begets pride; we applaud ourselves for being humble; and when, after profound
meditation, we arrive at the conclusion that we are nothing, either before God or
Convention