On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Pride is always a way of not seeing oneself properly, whereas humility is “self-knowledge perfected.”11 And if knowing oneself is not already difficult enough (indeed, even impossible given the deceitful nature of the human heart), true humility requires not only an understanding of oneself but also an understanding of objective reality outside of oneself.

For O’Connor, both her audience and her subject matter reflect conditions characteristic of what she termed a “Christ-haunted” culture. There are various qualities of such a society, bereft of Christ, but one quality that stands out is pride. Not the most obvious kind of pride, perhaps, but the kind that is most difficult to detect and therefore to shake: that quiet and persistent pride of placing faith in oneself.

All that matters is that you come. And when you do, your virtues—those good deeds and good manners and good things in your possession—will count for nothing. But until you have enough humility to accept that, you will never be able to come.

Christ degraded himself, stooped low, and gave up his rightful and lofty place in heaven in order to share our humanity with us. Both the literal and the accumulated meaning of humiliation capture Christ’s action. Christ’s own humiliation is the evidence moral philosophers give to explain why the virtue of humility is central to the good life.

“True love presupposes humility; without humility, the self comes to occupy all the available space and sees the other person as an object . . . or as an enemy.”42 Indeed, while love is the “finest fruit of virtue,” humility is its root.

For, Hannah Anderson notes insightfully in Humble Roots, “As much as humility frees us from condemning ourselves, it also frees us from condemning others.”

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.”

knowing what we are good at and what we are not, doing what we are supposed to do and not what we aren’t, being what we are supposed to be and not what we aren’t, is the essence of true humility.

The good life begins and ends with humility.