7
The first thing that we should recognize is that our understanding of humility has
been shaped by religious thought and practice in fundamental ways. In both the Jewish
and Christian traditions humility is an essential spiritual quality that prepares the
righteous believer to stand in an appropriate relationship of awe, obedience, and worship
to a creator God.
7
In both Hebrew scripture and the New Testament humility is a quality
of spirit aimed at combating the greatest and most debilitating form of human sin: pride
or vanity. The Psalms testify to this (Psalms 51:17), as do the proverbs of Solomon:
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling. It is better to be of
a humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud.”
8
The constitutive
role of humility in fostering a proper relationship of subjection, gratitude, and reverence
to God is also clearly at stake in the story of Job. The Book of Job, a touchstone text for
an understanding of the religious sources of humility, shows (among other things) that
humility and humiliation are, in this specific context, more than just etymologically
related; they are fused together by a transcendental frame that structures man’s essential
dependency on God. When Job finally learns this extraordinarily hard lesson he
exclaims: “Behold I am insignificant.”
9
This is only a later articulation of the same
appropriately humbled disposition that Abraham feels in seeing himself, as through the
eyes of God, as “but dust and ashes.”
10
Humus, the Latin root of humility, means of the
earth, or soil.
For later Christian writers, humility played a central role in disciplining believers
into proper forms and attitudes of repentance and reverence. This can be seen in St.
Augustine, St. Bernard of Clarivaux, and Thomas Kempis, as well as in more modern
figures like Martin Luther, Robert Bolton, and Richard Middleton. For Luther, once man
Convention