Humility and Pride

Reading these passages

In the Greek that the New Testament is written in, the word for humility was an insult.

Tapeinos and its relatives meant low, base, servile — the condition of someone who has no standing and cannot afford pride. Greek and Roman moralists used it of slaves and of the grovelling. It was not a virtue anyone aspired to, and no Greek philosopher recommended it. The virtue in that world was megalopsychia, greatness of soul: the proper self-regard of a man who knows his own worth.

The New Testament takes the insult and makes it a requirement, without apology and without redefining it into something more dignified. That is worth holding in mind on this page, because the passages here are not recommending modesty, which is a manner. They are recommending a position, and it is the low one.

The hymn behind the instruction

Two verses of Philippians 2 sit on this page, and they are the beginning of a sentence that does not stop where the page does. Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.

Then: Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus — and Paul drops into what most scholars take to be an existing hymn, quoted rather than composed. Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant.

The phrase rendered made himself of no reputation is one word in Greek, ekenosen — he emptied himself. It has generated centuries of argument about what exactly was set down, and the argument is not settled: some hold that divine attributes were laid aside, others that nothing was surrendered but everything was veiled, others that the emptying consists in the taking rather than in any subtraction — he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant. The grammar permits more than one and this page will not choose.

What matters for the instruction is the shape. Paul does not argue that humility is wise, or that it is rewarded, or that pride is unattractive. He points at somebody and says: that. The ethics are grounded in a biography, and the descent goes further than the instruction requires — obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, which was the execution reserved for slaves.

God resists

Two letters quote the same proverb, which suggests it was already a standard text. God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.

The verb is antitassomai, a military term: to draw up in battle order against. It is not that God declines to help the proud. It is that he arranges himself in opposition, which is a considerably stronger claim and an odd one to make about a disposition rather than an action.

Peter attaches an image to it that is easy to read past: be clothed with humility. The verb behind clothed is rare, and it refers specifically to tying on an apron or work garment — the covering a servant fastened over their clothes before labour. Peter had watched somebody do exactly that on the last night, and the choice of word is unlikely to be accidental.

Paul uses the same clothing metaphor in Colossians and puts humility in a list with four other items: bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering. None of the five is a feeling and all of them are described as things put on, which implies they are not native, and implies they can be forgotten in the morning.

Three things, and only one is inward

Micah reduces the whole of religion to a sentence, and it is the most frequently quoted verse in the prophets for good reason: He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Three requirements, and notice the verbs. Do justly — an action, externally checkable. Love mercy — a disposition, and the Hebrew word is chesed, covenant loyalty rather than pity. Walk humbly — a manner of going, which is neither a single act nor a feeling but the way the other two are carried out.

The third is the one that governs the others, and it is the only one addressed to a relationship: humbly with thy God. Micah is not recommending general lowliness of bearing. He is describing how to conduct oneself in company that outranks you infinitely, which makes humility there a matter of accuracy rather than of self-deprecation.

Where they put the feeling

The Colossians list opens with a phrase the King James translated literally and modern versions almost always soften: bowels of mercies.

The Greek is splanchna — the inward parts, the viscera. It is where the New Testament regularly locates compassion, and it is not a euphemism or a figure of speech that had gone stale. The ancient world put strong feeling in the abdomen, and the verb built from this noun is the one used of Jesus when he sees a crowd and is moved.

Modern English has kept the same instinct in a smaller way — a gut feeling, a sinking stomach — but it has moved the tender emotions upstairs to the heart, and translations follow. Something is lost in the move. Bowels of mercies describes compassion as something that happens low down and involuntarily, which is a different claim from kindness as a policy, and it sits oddly in a list of things Paul says to put on deliberately.

That tension runs through the whole verse and Paul does not resolve it. He asks for five things, all of them dispositions, all of them framed as garments. Some of them can be chosen and at least one of them cannot, and he lists them together anyway.

Submission, and then everyone

Peter builds a hierarchy and then dismantles it in the same sentence: Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility.

The first clause is conventional. Young defers to old; that is how the ancient world was ordered, and nobody in the audience would have blinked. The second clause is not conventional at all. All of you — which includes the elders — be subject one to another. Having named a direction, Peter immediately makes it run both ways.

It is worth noting who is writing. Peter is an apostle instructing elders, and he describes himself a verse earlier as a fellow elder rather than pulling rank. The letter goes to Christians scattered across five provinces under pressure from their neighbours, which is the situation in which a community most needs its hierarchy to hold. That is the moment he chooses to say the hierarchy is mutual.

Which comes first

Proverbs treats pride and humility as sequences rather than states, and the sequence is always the same. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.

These are not warnings that pride will be punished. They are observations about order — what tends to arrive after what. Proverbs reports it the way it reports that a borrower ends up serving a lender: flatly, as a pattern in the world.

The same structure runs positive: By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, and honour, and life. Honour is the outcome, not the starting point, and the proverb puts it second in the sequence rather than offering it as a motive. Which is a delicate position, because a person who takes the low place in order to be raised has not taken the low place.

Jesus states the reversal as a rule of the kingdom and leaves the timing open: And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. Both verbs at the end are passive. Someone else does the abasing and someone else does the exalting, and the sentence declines to say when — which is the only thing that stops it becoming a technique.