What is Humility? St. Peter of Damaskos

(Philokalia Vol. III, G.E.H Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware)

Humility is acknowledged as the greatest of all virtues, the prerequisite for salvation, “the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit, the gateway to the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, to dispassion.”

What is humility and how can we view it in the 21^st century when we have, apparently, forgotten its original Christian meaning?

Over the centuries many have come to equate humility with humiliation, weakness, lack of self-confidence and even contempt for oneself.

In the Christian framework, however, humility leads to dispassion rather than self-hatred. We are freed from passion and, hence, we are no longer dependent on others’ praise or contempt to feel uplifted or humiliated.

Strength is often viewed as success in getting our way, eliciting admiration, or imposing our will on others. While these may give temporary relief, they do not lead us to inner peace and union with God.

Paradoxically, it is only by lowering ourselves that we are uplifted:

…without humility his road is full of pain and his effort useless. Humility bestows complete repose upon whoever possesses it in his heart, because he has Christ dwelling within him.

Humility is not second nature to us. St. Peter makes it clear that acquiring humility is not a passive act of resignation but a fierce fight against the grain—-against our desires, passions, habits, assumptions, and norms of thought and behavior.

St. Peter believes that humility is achieved by first embracing suffering. Acceptance of suffering has a foundational role in the path toward theosis. This acceptance, however, is the opposite of acquiescence or hopelessness. We are active agents on our path to salvation rather than cogs in a mere transaction. We do not simply accept suffering to gain salvation as a reward, St. Peter tells us, but “to press forward actively and deliberately to embrace the sufferings of Christ.”

That is, by accepting suffering, we gain humility and empathy and ascend to a higher level of theosis, or union with God.

To acquire humility, one must have achieved knowledge and discrimination. St. Peter has already warned us about our vulnerability to delusion. When our mind is filled with self-absorbed thoughts, opinions, and conclusions we cannot perceive the world or ourselves clearly and dispassionately:

But above all it is the offspring of discrimination, the virtue that illumines the farthest reaches of the intellect.

A state of humility is also a state of continuous learning and discovery. Instead of laboring to justify ourselves, impress others and impose our will and opinion, we can look at the world with fresh,= eyes and open heart to always discover things that we do not know.

But he who has tasted spiritual knowledge knows at least to some extent that he is ignorant, and so his knowledge becomes for him a source of humility.

In becoming aware of his own weakness and ignorance, he recognizes that he has now learned what once he did not know; and this allows him to see that just as he used not to know these things, and was unaware that he did not know, so there are many other things which he may later be able to learn.

The opposite of humility is pride. Unlike humility, it distances us from God as it puffs us up with delusions and invests our most precious resources in total immersion in, and reaction to, the external world. As an example of pride, Peter brings up he Pharisee who thanked God loudly for being superior to others:

The Evangelist-or, rather, God, who knows men’s hearts- was right to say that he spoke ‘to himself’, for the Pharisee was not speaking to God. Even though orally he did seem to be speaking to God, yet God who knew his self-applauding soul says that he stood and prayed not to God but to himself.

Without humility and the dispassion it leads us to, no matter how lofty or clever our words, we find ourselves going in endless circles, talking to no one but ourselves and never reaching our true destination.