Classes are over!!! and I’ve survived. My Independent Project thesis continues until May and I’ll be taking two more classes beginning in January, but for now there is a much welcomed break.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a virtue that has gone out of favor, if I can put it that way. Are virtues ever “in favor”, such that they are eagerly embraced? Be that as it may, my thoughts have been about the virtue of humility, and the place it holds in the monastic architecture of the “good life”.
Humility has never been much in favor, and is an idea very much misunderstood, I think. The image of the monk bent and submissive is a common one and one that is instinctively rejected today as the negation of personality and an unhealthy loss of individuality. This image of the monk reinforces the negative stereotype of the institutionalized, passive, indeed humiliated person subject to the whims of whatever authority commands his obedience. Such an understanding of humility, which, it must be admitted, had its adherents in some times and places, is rightfully rejected.
But such an understanding of humility is not humility at all, and it is hard to imagine how it ever gained any intellectual currency. Humility, as Michael Casey, a Cistercian monk of Tarawara Abbey in Australia has written, is etymologically of the same root as earth, humus, and connotes, among other things, a going down to the essential substance of reality, to the place out of which all things grow. It is being in consonance with the truth, beyond which no good thing can come, for to be removed from truth is to be in the dark, subject to the whims of one’s own desiring, unconnected from the source of reality.
To be in touch with the source requires a clarity of sight that comes only through an acceptance of my limitations. By being open to the truth that has its origin outside my own self, means, by definition, admitting that I am in need, that I don’t have all the answers, that I am vulnerable, and prone to self delusion at best and often self destruction. Sadly, many destroy their lives in a state of complete unreality, out of touch with any sense the paths they walk are leading them into a land of forgetfulness so complete that truth seems strange and the twisted seems self-evidently normal. All we have to do is turn on the television and see the parade of naked kings, endlessly, one after another.
Monks have been practicing the art of humility for centuries, and there are some very powerful documents from monastic literature that can help us all, monk and non-monk, to “remember” where we come from and of our ontological dependence. The first of these, of course, is The Rule of Saint Benedict, but there are many others, such as John Cassian’s Conferences and Institutes, which Benedict relied upon, as well as the traditions of the desert fathers and mothers, whom Cassian had studied and learned from, as well as St. Bernard’s writings and many others. In our own time Michael Casey himself has written an excellent book on the subject, A Guide to Living the Truth: Saint Benedict’s teaching on Humility, which I recommend enthusiastically.
How is this related to Christmas? Well, if Jesus is who the Church claims him to be, namely the only Son of God, Logos of all creation, the source from which all things come, then I can imagine there has been no humility more deserving of the name than his birth as a human being to a poor Semite couple in the backwaters of Galilee. We have a friend and a teacher in him.
Merry Christmas!
