I am working on the manuscript for a new book, provisionally titled Having Soul. The point is to explore how we grow in compassion, and to explore this I am going to draw on centuries of Christian reflection.
One surprise for me was realizing how relevant medieval moral philosophy, in particular that of Thomas Aquinas, for setting up the discussion about what we can do to make our lives places where soul blossoms.
This week I have been working on temperance, and i was surprised to find humility listed as a sub-virtue under temperance, and even more by Thomas’ definition. Following below is an excerpt of the draft of the book chapter.
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One of the most curious things in Aquinas’ treatment of the virtues is how he categorizes other virtues underneath the main virtues. Such categorizations cause you to think of these other virtues differently and creatively.
Under temperance, we do expect to find sub-virtues like chastity and sobriety, but it is surprising to find humility and studiousness. Both deserve treatment.
By humility, Aquinas meant something very particular and unexpected. Humility, he said, restrains our disordered desires for what we cannot achieve.
That definition alone is stunning. Sometimes humility has been wrongly thought of as disliking oneself. Sometimes it has been thought of as having an accurate picture of oneself, a ground in truth.
In Aquinas, we find something entirely different. Humility is related to the desire achieve things for ourselves, externally or internally. A disordered desire wants more than is possible. It is easy to see how this is related to envy. I want to achieve what my social group achieves. I want to have what they have. I want to cut a certain image for myself. Or, internally, we might want to achieve a certain inner state of peace, of spiritual equanimity. Religiously, we might want to work out our salvation apart from the free gift of God. All this grasping for achievements beyond our ability humility calls in check.
In this way, humility is in fact about coming down to earth, to what is real, and possible, and healthy, and good for us to desire.
Where this gains a very specific meaning is in regard to our desire to live with soul. We are exploring the virtues like temperance ordered to this end, to make having soul possible for us.
Once we make having soul our aim in life, many other achievements that we could desire become impossible for us. If I make time to pause in my day, my week, my year, my life, to cultivate soul, I may have less time to cultivate business success, or to cultivate the lawn in front of my house.
Humility allows us to be content with having less, achieving less, perhaps accomplishing less within the overarching aim of opening our lives to Compassion.
Part of me wants to write that slowing down, facing into the pains of life, and tempering our desires will in fact make us more successful. We will be spiritual and have more achievements! There is some truth in this: when we slow down in prudence and face into the pain of life experimentally with courage, when we temper our appetites, then it’s likely that we will be more creative, more powerful in our leadership, more empathic and intelligent.
On the other hand, it is also true that we can’t have everything. And on the daily level, as we slow down, and as we take the time to face into discomforts and the suffering around us, we might have less time and energy for the full-steam ahead drive towards a whole range of possible successes and achievements. Choosing Soul means making other possibilities less important for us.
What is even more true is that if we fully engrossed in achieving the image we want for ourselves, if we are living in envy, trying to keep up with the successes of our social contexts, if we live in the spirit of grasping after our goals, we probably will not have the inner poise to know when to slow down, when to do less, when to turn into our pain. We will instead keep pushing towards goals while our Soul’s desire is stifled and starved.
Humility is a tempering of immoderate desires for achievements in the light of the large goal of having Soul. It not only keeps us grounded in the truth of who we are, it makes space for the Soul to breath.