On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

moral philosophers have long considered the virtue that opposes pride—humility—to be the foundation of all other virtues. John Chrysostom calls humility the “mother, and root, and nurse, and foundation, and bond of all good things: without this we are abominable, and execrable, and polluted.”5 Or as Peter Kreeft writes, “The greatest virtue keeps us from the greatest vice.”6 Without humility, without an understanding of our proper place within the order of creation, we cannot cultivate the other virtues. We cannot even come to Christ, or to true knowledge, apart from humility. Augustine wrote in one of his letters that the way to truth begins and ends with humility: In that way the first part is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility: and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction, not that there are no other instructions which may be given, but because, unless humility precede, accompany, and follow every good action which we perform, being at once the object which we keep before our eyes, the support to which we cling, and the monitor by which we are restrained, pride wrests wholly from our hand any good work on which we are congratulating ourselves.7 But do we know what true humility is? “Nothing is more deceitful,” says Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, “than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.”8 False humility so abounds that we often distrust humility when...