A Year Of Humility (XXXVIII): Old And New Humility

 "Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man.  He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs.  His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys.  By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise.  Hence it became evident that if a many would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.  Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are creations of humility.  For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we.  All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at the bottom entirely humble.  It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything - even pride.

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has move from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert: himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature.  But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can ever learn.  Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.  The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility that the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.  The old humility was a spur that prevented him from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on.  For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make his work harder.  But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

- G.K. Chesterson, Orthodoxy