Humility: That Word Doesn't Mean What You Think it Means

Divine Reverberations in True Humility

For most of my Christian life, I defined humility something like, “thinking less of yourself, thinking less about yourself, and placing others - especially God - before yourself.”

I began rethinking this notion of humility a few years ago when reading about how White enslavers would talk about the pride, lack of humility, and “uppity” attitude of the people they enslaved. I thought to myself, What? How can an enslaved person be prideful but the one who enslaves them isn’t?

At that point, I realized that a lot of our rhetoric around humility and pride actually serve the status quo of our society. When oppressors get to judge who is prideful or humble, then we are not going to get accurate definitions of those words. And it’s not surprising, therefore, that humility gets defined as something like, “thinking less of yourself, thinking less about yourself, and placing others - especially God - before yourself.”

In short, when humility is defined in order to protect social hierarchies (rich above poor, whites above blacks, men above women) then we are getting a skewed definition of humility.

Speaking of men over women, earlier this year I was reading Elise Loehnen’s On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good. Therein she articulates (much better than I can) that women have historically experienced this same kind of hierarchy-maintenance around the word humility. In a patriarchal system, humility is defined by submission to the patriarchal norms. In other words, humility is defined in a patriarchal world around male preferences and hierarchies. It’s all skewed for women like it is for Black people.

So I began to think: What would happen if we defined humility apart from hierarchy maintenance?

To answer something like this, it’s often helpful to read outside one’s current cultural system and biases. The Cloud of Unknowing was my go-to and it provided an excellent definition:

Humility is nothing else but a [person’s] true understanding and awareness of [themself] as [they] really [are].¹

This definition was liberating for me as a white man but also allows for historically oppressed people to still live into the divine virtue of humility while also resisting their oppressors. Elise Loehnen does just this when she recites this definition of humility:

The word humility derives from the Latin word humilitas, which means ‘of the earth.’ To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become - to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It’s not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either.²

The objective of humility is not to be less, think less of yourself, think of yourself less, automatically put yourself below others. The objective of humility is to be yourself. To be who God created you to be. To be that person unapologetically and confidently. To help others become who God created them to be. To love God right where you are, in all your faults and fantasticisms.

When we hear someone discuss humility, we are free to ask ourselves: Who does this definition benefit? Who gets to define who is humble in this definition?

The truly humble person can stand next to a mirror and see only themselves exactly as they are staring back. Selves loved by God. Selves worthy of love. Selves with dignity…even dignity that looks prideful to those in power.

1. The Cloud of Unknowing, 65. The brackets are because I had to filter out the masculine pronouns of the translator…and, likely, author.

2. Glennon Doyle in Elise Lohenen, On Our Best Behavior. 111.