The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

188 chapter 14But as Thomas Merton put it, “Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. ...A humility that freezes our being and frustrates all healthy activity is nothumility at all, but a disguised form of pride.” 15 That’s Satan’s repeatederror. He thinks humility before God is self-abnegation, and a pridefulself is his little god. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, says he. No,Satan, wrong again. Humility is seen erroneously as the opposite of a worldenjoyingspirit. Satan thinks of it as merely an inconvenience to the questingwill. Confusion about humility is widespread. If you are a candidate forthe priesthood in the Episcopal church, you will fear that your “discernmentcommittee” assigned to test your calling will turn out to be itself a site ofenvy and pride, engaging in hazing under a demand that you be “humble.”What may be bothering Satan is the feminine quality of humility. Feministtheologians such as Valerie Saiving, Judith Vaughan, and RosemaryRuether have been observing for decades that humility has a womanlycast, and that the corresponding sin of excess against the spirit is preciselyself-abnegation—as Saiving put it in 1960, “triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness;lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others forone’s own self definition; . . . in short, underdevelopment or negationof the self.” 16 It is a point that John Stuart Mill made in his feminist blastof 1869: “I believe that equality of rights would abate the exaggerated selfabnegationwhich is the present artificial ideal of feminine character.” 17Excess in self-abnegation is to humility as excess in pride is to greatsouledness.Together the two virtues balance and complete each other. Ontheir own, without the other, they are not virtues at all, but rather the characteristicfemale sin against the spirit and the characteristic male one.True humility is not undignified. Uriah Heep is most umble, but of coursehas merely the semblance of the virtue. He esteems, or more accurately feignsto esteem, only rank. That is undignified. “But how little you think of therightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Fatherand me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys. ...They taughtus all a deal of umbleness. . . . We was to be umble to this person, and umbleto that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always toknow our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such alot of betters!” 18True humility on the contrary is democratic, looking for the best in people,and often finding it. In theological terms, it is to answer the witness ofGod in any other person, whether he is the heathen or does profess Christ.