How and why to be humble

Masculinity means accepting reality

When athletes talk about the importance of staying humble, men rarely resist the message. Yet when Christianity stresses the importance of humility, men misunderstand it as grovelling. It’s not. Humility doesn’t tell us not to desire greatness. It tells us to be modest in our desire of greatness.

But modern men struggle with this. As Tyler Durden moaned in Fight Club,

“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

Secular liberalism, with its delusion of infinite progress, says that we can be whatever we want to be. If a man can become a woman, he can be a rock star, right? No, he can’t. And humility is the virtue by which we realise our own shortcomings. Doing this sincerely stops us desiring more greatness than we deserve.

And this is how we avoid pride. Pride isn’t the recognition of excellence. It’s the disordered desire of our own personal excellence. For example, perhaps we seek status or accomplishments we don’t deserve. Or perhaps we want to acquire virtue without dependence on God. The proud man has an exaggerated opinion of his own worth and mistakenly imagines he really is as great as he wishes to be.

Lucifer turned away from God because he decided that subjecting himself to God was an insult to his own excellence. That’s why he rebelled against God. And Adam and Eve fell through pride in wanting to be like God in knowledge. The other angels apart from Lucifer also fell through pride. It was the first sin. That’s why pride is called the queen and mother of the seven deadly sins.

Humility involves understanding our infirmity and inferiority by comparing ourself not only with God but also with other men. Sport is most men’s first experience of this. Some people are genetically gifted, and no amount of training will ever get you close to them. When you recognise your limitations, you don’t strive for what you’re unsuited for. “Follow your dreams” is not a loving thing to tell a short person with dyspraxia who dreams of playing in the NBA.

But even the NBA player must acknowledge his short, dyspraxic neighbour as his better in one sense. And that is because what the NBA player has from himself is less than what the latter has from God. It is not against humility for him to acknowledge his gifts. But he must remember he didn’t give them to himself.

Humility also acknowledges authority. A king, for example, should bow to God before everyone, but he shouldn’t bow to men. That would demean him and detract from his authority, and humility doesn’t demand it. In Moral Theology, Callan and McHugh also apply this principle to fathers:

“If the offender is a superior, an apology is never necessary, lest by abasing himself he lose the prestige which his office should have. Hence, if a father has used harsh language to his child, it would not be seemly for him to ask the child’s pardon, but he should show some mark of kindness to heal the wound.”

Humility, then, is about reality — seeing ourselves as God sees us, neither more nor less. Men of genius like Aquinas and Aristotle would have lived badly if they’d spent their lives doing menial labour rather than benefiting mankind with their intellectual work. It wouldn’t have been humble for them to allow themselves to be guide by false teachings.

Humility is the foundation of the spiritual life because God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). Without humility, we can’t acquire the other virtues because the obstacles to the other virtues are removed by humility. Humility leads to heaven, and pride leads to hell.