17
ancient Romans with the sixteenth-century Christians of the Italian peninsula,
Machiavelli argues that: “Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men,
rather than men of action. It has assigned as man’s highest good humility, abnegation,
and contempt for mundane things, whereas the other identified it with magnanimity,
bodily strength, and everything else that conduces to make men very bold.”
42
For
Machiavelli, the central place accorded to humility within the Christian tradition may
prove to be salutary for individual salvation, but it is ruinous as a more general quality
within the world of the saeculum. In this worldly setting, humility is an effeminate,
weak, and ultimately irresponsible quality because humble political subjects
pusillanimously hand themselves and the world over “as prey to the wicked, who run it
successfully and securely since they are well aware that the generality of men, with
paradise for their goal, consider how best to bear, rather than how best to avenge, their
injuries.”
43
In this respect, the critical contributions of Nietzsche dovetail with those of
Machiavelli. Nietzsche’s critique is a more thoroughgoing rejection since Machiavelli
still allowed (esoterically?) that the Christian religion has “taught us the truth and the true
way of life.”
44
Nietzsche’s analysis confronts humility not only as an obvious dimension
of slave-morality and its psychology of resentment, but as a quality that introduces an
insidious threat to human vitality, change, and growth. With a strikingly blunt
“improvement” on Christian scripture (Luke 18:14), Nietzsche points to the subterranean
connections between humility and human pride that we have already discussed. Where
Jesus says, “He who humbleth himself shall be exalted,” Nietzsche’s “improvement” to
this command, (or we might say Nietzsche’s psychological reinterpretation of what this
Convention