THIS delightful little book seeks to rescue humility as a key moral virtue. The author is Professor of History at Kean University, New Jersey, academic editor of the Paulist Press, and a regular commentator on the Roman Catholic Church. He is inclusive in style, jargon-free, and easily read.
What he offers is an introductory survey of the tensions that the concept of humility has faced over the past two-and-a-half millennia. Within hubristic Graeco-Roman culture, he suggests, humility was typically regarded as weakness and tantamount to humiliation, and yet Plato and Aristotle valued it more positively.
In contrast, in medieval Europe, some promoted intellectual humility, under the influence of the remarkable 11th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, then under the Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali in the following century, and especially, a century later, under St Thomas Aquinas, who was influenced by both, but added his own subtle analysis of the tension between humility and pride.
Finally, in the Enlightenment, David Hume and Edward Gibbon both returned to Graeco-Roman rejections of humility, while Immanuel Kant took a more “enlightened” position.
Bellitto rightly insists that humility is not simply a Christian virtue (either in theory or in practice). It is (or should be) a characteristic of all the Abrahamic faiths that compare fallible human virtues with God’s overwhelming virtue. In addition, for him, purely secular claims in the modern world would be improved by a proper attention to humility — offering as a telling example Prince Albert’s “stunning arrogance” when he claimed in 1849 as the Crystal Palace Exhibition was being constructed: “Man is approaching a more complete fulfilment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world . . . to conquer nature to his use.”
Pointing to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to Hitler’s Third Reich, and now to human-induced climate change, Bellitto sees much evidence that scientific humility (which he detects, surprisingly, in Darwin’s writings) is needed for the religious and non-religious alike.
He also argues that a lack of humility has been instrumental in the ongoing tribulations of Churches over safeguarding. Somewhat unwisely, he claims at one point that “you cannot fake humility.” But his examples of safeguarding cover-ups (drawn from Roman Catholic examples) suggest otherwise. Some of the most notorious examples of ecclesiastical cover-ups, across denominations, have been unnoticed at the time because of the ostentatious humility of serial priestly and even episcopal perpetrators.
He does, though, praise the formidable St Teresa of Ávila’s wise recognition that imposed monastic humility could too easily become a means of coercion. He also praises the equally formidable Pope Benedict XVI’s “astounding” decision to retire — after recognising his own physical frailty — as evidence “that humility is still a virtue”.
There is much more that could be written at greater depth about humility, but this book offers a very engaging introduction, which finishes with a flourish: “Humility’s time has come again.” I hope that indeed it has. Ecclesiastical, scientific, and political leaders alike would surely do well if they followed Pope Francis’s example and practised greater humility . . . but, sadly, all too often they do not.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent and Editor of Theology.
Humility: The secret history of a lost virtue
Christopher M. Bellitto
Georgetown University Press £20
(978-1-64712-376-5)
Church Times Bookshop £18