8
has recognized how helpless he is in fulfilling God’s commandments without the
intervention of grace, and he recognizes nonetheless that the “law must be fulfilled so
that not a jot or title shall be lost, otherwise man will be condemned without hope,” then
Luther argues, “being truly humbled and reduced to nothing in his own eyes, he finds in
himself nothing whereby he may be justified and saved.”
11
This, for Luther, was the
proper psychological/spiritual point at which one might finally stand in an appropriately
abject relationship to God and so receive, without of course warranting, grace. In a
related way Robert Bolton, in his Helpes to Humiliation (1603), counsels Christians that
there can be no repentance or hope of salvation without humiliation before God and
recognition of the greatness and vileness of man’s sin. For Bolton, to be humble means
to “get a base esteem of thy self.”
12
For St. Bernard, following Augustine’s definition,
humility is a virtue “by which a man has a low opinion of himself because he knows
himself well.”
13
As these brief examples testify, humility has long been understood as an
epistemological quality that pertains most directly to and seeks to infuse a certain kind of
self-knowledge and self-appraisal. This is worth reflecting upon because, as most of the
Christian authors cited above warned, “scientia inflat,” or, “knowledge makes
arrogant.”
14
Hence, humility is first and foremost a knowledge of self that serves to
check the dangers of pride inflamed by the pursuit of knowledge. The importance (and
simultaneous dangers) of the pursuit of the right kind of self-knowledge is a theme that
one can track from the Garden of Eden to more contemporary writings on humility.
15
What is important to stress here is that humility, in this broadly religious/theistic sense,
always means and requires more than modesty or a realism about one’s talents, skills, or
Convention