On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Kindness is like love. The love we have for family members takes different forms. It is not all Christmas mornings and movie nights. But it is always seeking and celebrating the good of that person. The same is true of kindness.

Aquinas calls envy “sorrow for another’s good.”7 Unless the relationship is marred by some dysfunction, it is natural for us to celebrate a family member’s happiness or success. When something good happens to someone in our family, it is like it has happened to us. We share in that good rather than envy it. To seek and celebrate the good for others is then to treat them as family in this way. This is what it means to be kind.

If kindness means treating someone like family, then kindness must include all the varieties of ways that family members show love for one another through the entire range of circumstances, conditions, and situations they find themselves in. Sometimes loving a family member requires gentleness. Sometimes toughness. Often forbearance. Always honesty and truth.

Niceness has no inherent link to truth. Indeed, being connected etymologically to ignorance, niceness might have no connection to truth at all. Even the current sense of nice—agreeable or pleasant—can be at odds with the truth. The truth is often not pleasant or agreeable. A mere acquaintance might be nice enough to say that your new hairstyle is attractive even if it isn’t, but a true friend—someone who is more like family—would be kind to point out that another style is more suited to you. The virtue of kindness simply cannot be separated from truth.

“a harsh truth can be compassionate in the sense that it speeds us along from falseness to truth,”

But kindness, in its inherent connection to truth, must be grounded in the real. And in a postvirtuous culture, the foil that offsets kindness will be very dark indeed. It takes little for a glimmer of kindness to burn bright in such an age. One psychoanalytic study of kindness suggests, “Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization, that if we no longer believe in God—in a Being who is himself invulnerable and so is capable of protecting us—we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other.”12

Pride may be simple and it may be human, but it is a devastating vice. The root of pride, according to Aquinas, is lack of submission to God; pride, therefore, is “the beginning of all sin.”3 Pride is the sin attributed to the fall of Lucifer, who sought to ascend to the throne of God and be equal with the Most High (Isa. 14:12–15). Pride is the sin of Adam and Eve, who sought, in eating the forbidden fruit, to be like God (Gen. 3:5). The New Testament teaches that “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble” (1 Pet. 5:5; cf. Prov. 3:34).

humility the “mother, and root, and nurse, and foundation, and bond of all good things: without this we are abominable, and execrable, and polluted.”

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.

The ancient root from which we get the word, along with its sister humble, means “earth” or “ground.” Eugene Peterson explains, “This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust—dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.”9 Implicit in the word humility is the acknowledgment that we “all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Eccles. 3:20). Like the earth itself, the humble person is lowly. The person of humility is—literally and figuratively—grounded. Thus humility is the recognition that we are all human—another word that comes from the same root—and that none of us are God. Remembering our position as earthly creatures who are not gods is the essence of humility. The virtue of humility, most simply defined, is an accurate assessment of oneself. And, of course, it is impossible to assess oneself rightly apart from God.

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.

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

In Waiting for God, Simone Weil draws a distinction between suffering and affliction. In Weil’s terms, suffering involves physical pain, but affliction involves the anguish of the soul. Weil contrasts the deaths of the martyrs with the death of Christ to show the distinction between suffering and affliction: “Those who are persecuted for their faith and are aware of the fact are not afflicted, although they have to suffer. They only fall into a state of affliction if suffering or fear fills the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution. The martyrs who entered the arena, singing as they went to face the wild beasts, were not afflicted. Christ was afflicted.”

“Pride looks down, and no one can see God but by looking up.”

Christ’s own humiliation is the evidence moral philosophers give to explain why the virtue of humility is central to the good life.29

Of course, every humiliation of ours is but a pale shadow of Christ’s humiliation. Comparing whatever we go through to what he did puts our afflictions in proper perspective. This is the beginning of humility. Humility is not, therefore, simply a low regard for oneself; rather, it is a proper view of oneself that is low in comparison to God and in recognition of our own fallenness.32 “Humility is thinking less about yourself, not thinking less of yourself.”

the “ironic biblical principle that humility ultimately results in exaltation.”34 The paradox of humility is that through it we are exalted (Matt. 23:12). And the paradox of pride is that through it we fall—a

Because “gratitude recognizes and prizes the work that another does and who the other is,”35 gratitude requires humility.

“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.

before there can be salvation, there must be recognition of guilt as well as sorrow for that guilt, which leads to humility or the “proper valuing of oneself in light of the real relationships one encounters.”

“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.”48 But gaining humility—knowing who we are—isn’t only about degradation and lack. It is about the exaltation offered in the freedom of knowing who we are and who we were created to be.

But the truth is that 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.

“But dear God please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it. If I am the one to wash the second step everyday, let me know it and let me wash it and let my heart overflow with love washing it.”50 Humility is taking our place, no matter how small (or big), and fulfilling that place with a heart overflowing with love.