Empathy begins the process of connecting us with others, as we share their emotions. Our own life experience enables us to understand something of the life experience of others. That emotional understanding is the distinction we call empathy: “. . . the capacity to share the feelings of others . . .” “Empathy is a complex capability enabling individuals to…
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Value for Sunday of Week 05 in the season of Dormancy
Being Humble
Armed with a concept of justice based and centered on human worth and dignity, and aware of suffering and evil, we can begin to build a sound and enduring ethical system. Humility is an essential first step.
- Humility — true humility — is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues. It does not mean undervaluing yourself. It means valuing other people. It signals a certain openness to life’s grandeur and the willingness to be surprised, uplifted, by goodness wherever one finds it. [Jonathan Sacks, “On Humility.”]
- There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self. [Hindu proverb]
- This is true humility: not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. [Rick Warren]
- Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. [The Bible, Philippians 2:3-4.]
- I saw that we’re all doing the best we can. This is how a lifetime of humility begins. [Byron Katie]
- Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says “Everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved in the writing of this book.” [attributed to Carl Sagan]
Humility is a global and deferential virtue. It expresses a relationship between the self and others and/or the world. Thus, humility implies a respect for the views and aspirations of others, and also an awareness of our cosmic insignificance, as expressed in Carl Sagan’s “The Pale Blue Dot.” Being humble means seeing the value in others, and their worth; listening to and learning from others, and reading; asking questions; being willing to change; being moderate in tone and presentation; and helping others.
“Humility is the orphaned virtue of our age.” Rabbi Sacks argues that this is because our societies have been transformed from communities of friends into anonymous landscapes of strangers. The point bears watching but I am also inclined to think that success is a bitch-goddess, not only in its pursuit but also in its attainment: we who have lived well are inclined to think we gained access to a vast stock of material goods, technologies and services all by ourselves. Here, too, we are guided not by what is true but by what we wish was true. Too many of us act like the baseball player who starts out on third base and thinks he hit a triple. In the United States in particular, we are plagued by the idea that successful entrepreneurs are the best among us, when in fact they are merely the ones whose strategies and abilities were best suited to success in business; their success rests on the backs of countless numbers of people who have gone before them, the social, economic and political framework that protects property and allows businesses to exist and thrive, and those who labor now to establish and maintain that framework.
In our daily lives, too, we often forget our place among others and in the scheme of things. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the loss of close communities has diminished the value we attach to humility. Anything that disorients us among others or in the universe is likely to interfere with our sense of humility. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne; living this way is the beginning of humility.
Sacks writes that humility “is what opens us to the world.” This is an excellent statement of humility’s place in our Human Faith model. Before we can see others, we must empty our cup of ourselves. To see the world as it is, we cannot imagine self as a colossus astride the Earth. Humility is only a first step toward an ethical and spiritual life; but it is an indispensable first step.
Humility does not mean that we cannot do great things; just the opposite, humility is a foundation for greatness. Great people have no desire to boast because they live the quiet assurance that comes from understanding who they are and where they fit. Einstein insisted that he had only two ideas in his life; for him, an idea was something that no one else had ever considered. Two of the wealthiest men on Earth, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have vowed to return most of their wealth to the society from which it came. The great artist who sees genius as a gift must guard against seeing inborn talent as a personal reward, an inclination that the idea of talent as a “gift” encourages. In every case, our challenge is to remember our relationship to others and the world, and live accordingly.
When we focus on humility, we begin on life’s road anew. Suffering has stripped us bare. We have identified ourselves as living beings who seek justice and the avoidance of suffering. Now we set about to accomplish those ends. The first step in learning is to acknowledge that there are many things we do not know or cannot know; that there are many things we cannot do; and that the universe does not shape itself to conform to our desires. In this way, we can best appreciate what our framework is. This is not to suggest that this is the order in the development of knowledge beginning with early childhood; it is not. Instead, it is a framework for reconsidering what we know at this point on our calendar. This is the essence of humility in our model.
Its opposites include arrogance. Researchers have identified “three types of arrogance (individual, comparative, and antagonistic) and six components contributing to them, each logically related to the next. The components progress from imperfect knowledge and abilities to an unrealistic assessment of them, an unwarranted attitude of superiority over other people, and related derisive behavior.” Arrogance of all kinds is personally and socially detrimental.
Real
True Narratives
Leonardo made a point of not expounding much on religion during his lifetime. He said that he would not endeavor ‘to write or give information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by an instance of nature’ . . . [Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, (Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 512.]
- Everett Worthington, Jr., Humility: The Quiet Virtue (Templeton Foundation Press, 2007).
- Chris Lavers, The Natural History of Unicorns (William Morrow, 2009) is a narrative about fascination with a mythical creature.
Visual representations:
Humility’s opposites:
- Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017). “Richard White’s history of late-19th-century America describes a country lashed by greed and brutality.”
- Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) “shows how he is remaking the office itself in his own image.”
Two memoirs illustrating the arrogance of neo-cons from the Bush 43 administration:
- Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, 2011).
- Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (Threshold Editions, 2011).
Jumping to conclusions:
- Costica Bradatan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (Harvard University Press, 2023): “Against the emollient platitudes of self-help, Bradatan encourages actual, painful humility — what Iris Murdoch called a 'selfless respect for reality.'”
- Karin Roffman, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017): “‘I have always been averse to talking about myself and so I don’t write about my life the way the confessional poets do,’ he has said.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Everett L. Worthington Jr., Don E. Davis & Joshua N. Hook, eds., Handbook of Humility: Theory, Research, and Applications (Routledge, 2016).
- Mark Alfano, Michael P. Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility (Routledge, 2020).
- Jennifer Cole Wright, The Virtues: Humility (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- David E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery (Oxford University Press, 2002).
- Norvin Richards, Humility (Temple University Press, 1992).
- Andrew Murray, Humility: The Beauty of Holiness (1896).
- Jörg Weber and Johannes Vohlkampf, The Depth of Humility: Commentaries on the Gnostic and Buddhist Concept of Humility (South Asia Books, 1996).
- Michael Casey, A Guide To Living In the Truth: Saint Benedict’s Teaching on Humility (Luguori Publications, 2001).
- Jonathan Sacks, "On Humility."
Immanuel Kant argued that we have no knowledge of things in themselves. To him, this was not an argument for idealism but epistemic humility.
- Rae Langton, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford University Press, 1998).
- Jeanine Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption, and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
From the dark side:
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic's name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be had at the Café Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Café Voltaire, that good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes at the Barrière de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the Barrière du Compat. He knew the best place for everything; in addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was not to be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the air of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand. All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony. This was his axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass." He sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. "They are greatly in advance to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: "There is a gibbet which has been a success." A rover, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly: "J'aimons les filles, et j'aimons le bon vin." Air: Vive Henri IV. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume III – Marius; Book Fourth – The Friends of the A B C, Chapter I, “A Group Which Barely Missed Becoming Historic”.]
"Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past, into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. . .” [H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine” (1895).]
“What ails you, eh? Are you cold? Are you frozen? Ah, what a one you are, sitting there so silent like a little owl! Why, you should have told me long ago that you were cold. Come ... lie on the ground ... stretch yourself out and I will lie ... there! How’s that? Now put your arms round me?... tighter! How’s that? You shall be warm very soon now... And then we’ll lie back to back... The night will pass so quickly, see if it won’t. I say ... have you too been drinking?... Turned out of your place, eh?... It doesn’t matter.” And she comforted me... She encouraged me. May I be thrice accursed! What a world of irony was in this single fact for me! Just imagine! Here was I, seriously occupied at this very time with the destiny of humanity, thinking of the re-organisation of the social system, of political revolutions, reading all sorts of devilishly-wise books whose abysmal profundity was certainly unfathomable by their very authors—at this very time, I say, I was trying with all my might to make of myself “a potent active social force.” It even seemed to me that I had partially accomplished my object; anyhow, at this time, in my ideas about myself, I had got so far as to recognise that I had an exclusive right to exist, that I had the necessary greatness to deserve to live my life, and that I was fully competent to play a great historical part therein. And a woman was now warming me with her body, a wretched, battered, hunted creature, who had no place and no value in life, and whom I had never thought of helping till she helped me herself, and whom I really would not have known how to help in any way even if the thought of it had occurred to me. [Maxim Gorky, “One Autumn Night” (1895).]
Novels:
- Barbara Hofland, Humility: A Tale (1868).
Not humility:
The senator above mentioned was a clever man, who had made his own way, heedless of those things which present obstacles, and which are called conscience, sworn faith, justice, duty: he had marched straight to his goal, without once flinching in the line of his advancement and his interest. He was an old attorney, softened by success; not a bad man by any means, who rendered all the small services in his power to his sons, his sons-in-law, his relations, and even to his friends, having wisely seized upon, in life, good sides, good opportunities, good windfalls. Everything else seemed to him very stupid. He was intelligent, and just sufficiently educated to think himself a disciple of Epicurus; while he was, in reality, only a product of Pigault-Lebrun. He laughed willingly and pleasantly over infinite and eternal things, and at the "crotchets of that good old fellow the Bishop." He even sometimes laughed at him with an amiable authority in the presence of M. Myriel himself, who listened to him. [Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book First – A Just Man, Chapter VIII, “Philosophy after Drinking”.]
Novels and stories from humility’s dark side:
- Monica West, Revival Season: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2021): in “her atmospheric, layered debut, Monica West probes that annual rite, when evangelicals are called to go forth and preach to all nations. West steeps her tale in a rich broth of religious ardor and personal betrayal.”
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818): a cautionary tale about the limits and potential dangers of science
Poetry
If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere,
From being No one up to being Someone,
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary god
Whose mercy to you rather than to others
Won’t bear too critical examination.
[Robert Frost, “The Fear of God”]
Other poems:
· Roald Dahl, “The Pig”
· Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
· Robert Frost, “The Aim Was Song”
· Alfred Austin, The Door of Humility (1906).
· Edgar Lee Masters, “Professor Newcomer”
· Edgar Lee Masters, “Wallace Ferguson”
· Roger McGough, “First Day at School”
Books of poems:
- Alfred Austin, The Door of Humility (1906).
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) (c. 1151) (approx. 66-92’) (recordings) is a morality play written and set to music by the twelfth-century Benedictine nun and composer Hildegard von Bingen. In it, the soul is “eager to skip life and go straight to heaven” but then learns virtue and accepts earthly life. The most obvious aspect of humility in the story is patience but because the context of the story is life itself, we can see all aspects of humility: modesty in not reaching beyond what is possible, taming belief to conform to reality, forbearing from rash action, gaining the attitude of equanimity and becoming more mindful. The deferential tone in Hildegard’s music also puts this work under the global category of humility. Linked are recorded performances by Seraphic Fire, Vox Aminae, Ensemble Belcanto, Cantorio Alberto Grau, and Sequentia; and live performances in Los Angeles in 2015, Basil in 2012, and Zurich in 2013. Other of Hildegard’s works, which all reflect Hildegard’s unadorned and humble style include:
- Jerusalem (approx. 68’): performance by Sequentia;
- Hortus Deliciarum (approx. 67’): performance by Discantus; and
- Dendermonde Codex (first part is approx. 60’): performances by Dous Mal, and Psallantes.
Other works:
- John Luther Adams, Clouds of Forgetting . . . Clouds of Unknowing (1991/1995) (approx. 61’)
- John Adams, Christian Zeal and Activity (1973) (approx. 10’) (recordings)
- Henry Purcell, Fantasias for Strings (Fantasias for Viols) (1680) (approx. 51-54’)
- Purcell, 10 Sonatas in Four Parts (1697) (approx. 75’) (recordings)
- Antoine Forqueray, pieces for viol (five suites) (1747) (approx. 49’)
- Christopher Tye (c. 1505-1572), consort works, such as on this disc by Jordi Savall (79’)
- Lowell Liebermann, Frankenstein, Op. 130 (2016) (approx. 119’): a ballet based on Shelley’s classic novel
- Malcolm Dedman, Reformation (2019) (approx. 11’): the composer prefaces this piano piece with the following statement: “Bigotry and dogmatic adherence to ancient beliefs have become the central and fundamental source of animosity among men, the obstacle to human progress, the cause of warfare and strife, the destroyer of peace, composure and welfare in the world.”
- Thomas Lupo, Fantasias (ca. 1620-1630); album by Fretwork (64’)
Erlend Apneseth is a Norwegian hardingfele (fiddle) player, whose sparse sounds evoke the Norwegian countryside in winter. His trio consists of “fiddle player Erlend Apneseth with guitarist Stephan Meidell and drummer Øyvind Hegg-Lunde”. So far, they have given us nine albums.
Other albums
- Wayne Escoffery, “The Humble Warrior” (2020) (63’): “Escoffery shows he is not only a reliable sideman in groups large and small, but has the skills to take his music to the spotlight as leader of his own ensemble. He gives his bandmates ample space to sparkle.”
- Peter Phillips & The Tallis Scholars, “Robert Fayrfax: Maria plena virtute” (2024) (60’) presents four antiphons with the sound of humility.
- Jeff Bird, “Felix Anima: Jeff Bird Plays Hildegard of Bingen” (2018) (48’): “Bird’s decades-long passion for von Bingen’s music has enabled him to create a new brilliant sound mix of medieval and modern arrangements for instrumentations that all just work perfectly to the final harmonica closing fade.”; “Jeff Bird Plays Hildegard von Bingen: vol. 2” (2025) (39’): “The melodies on this recording are drawn from ORDO VIRTUTUM, Hildegard's morality play.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
Visual Arts
- Chinese symbol for humility
- Fra Filippo Lippi, Madonna of Humility with Angel and Donor (1430)
- Jacopo della Quercia, Madonna of Humility (c. 1400)
Two perspectives on humility
Film and Stage
- Sullivan’s Travels: a wealthy film director sets out to aid the poor and ends up among them
