The Necessity of Humility and the Danger of Pride

Three quotations that sum up Catholic spirituality

The primacy of humility is, in Tradition, a unanimous constant. Asked about the three principal virtues a Christian must acquire, a Desert Father is said to have answered — in a formula handed down by modern spiritual literature, with no established apophthegmatic source —:

“The first is humility; the second, humility; and the third, humility.”^[4]

The saying is no joke. Saint Augustine already took up the same hierarchy: asked about the path of salvation, he is said to have answered “humility, humility, humility”^[5]. Saint John Chrysostom echoes him:

“Humility is the mother, the root, the nurse and the bond of all other goods.”^[6]

And he extends the architectural metaphor:

“When the foundation of humility is laid, the builder can fearlessly raise the rest of the edifice; but should it be lacking, even if the building rose to heaven, it must necessarily topple and fall in ruins.”^[7]

The image says it all: one may pile every virtue in the world onto a spiritual life — prayer, fasting, almsgiving, chastity, apostolic zeal — if the base is missing, everything collapses.

A unanimous primacy among Fathers, doctors and saints

Saint Francis de Sales, Doctor of the Church and master of modern spirituality, states the same conviction:

“This virtue, necessary to man in this mortal life, is the basis and foundation of all virtues.”^[8]

His friend and co-foundress of the Visitation, Saint Jane de Chantal, draws a striking practical consequence from it:

“If we cannot acquire many virtues, let us at least have humility.”^[9]

A disconcerting phrase: were one to choose a single virtue, it would be humility — as if it alone were worth all the others. Saint Gregory the Great, from the Roman pontificate at the end of the 6th century, already taught the faithful that, without humility, the virtues themselves scatter like dust in the wind^[10].

Saint Vincent de Paul, founder of the Lazarists and the Daughters of Charity, takes up the same conviction in the 17th century:

“Humility is the virtue of Jesus Christ, the virtue of His holy Mother, the virtue of the greatest saints.”^[11]

Thomas a Kempis, in The Imitation of Christ — one of the most widely read spiritual books in Christendom after the Bible — utters this decisive word:

“The more humble and subject to God one is, the more wisdom and peace one will have in all things.”^[12]

In the 20th century, the Austrian mystic Maria Simma (1915-2004), known for the exchanges with the souls in purgatory she said she received — a private revelation with no ecclesial recognition, cited here as simple testimony — reports this word she attributes to the Lord:

“Humility earns us the greatest of graces. Jesus grants the greatest things to the humble of heart.”^[13]

From Evagrius Ponticus to the Desert Fathers, from Saint Benedict — whose Rule devotes a whole chapter to the “twelve degrees of humility” — to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who makes it the heart of her “little way”, the list of saints who place humility first is without exception. This unanimity is no detail: it constitutes a massive argument from authority, what Catholic tradition calls a consensus patrum.

A virtue that makes all the others possible

Why this primacy? Because humility, unlike the other virtues, is not one virtue among others: it is the condition for receiving all the others. Without humility, prayer becomes pharisaical, fasting becomes ascetic pride, almsgiving becomes ostentation, theological knowledge becomes vanity, apostolate becomes self-promotion. The Eternal Father says so explicitly to Saint Catherine of Siena:

“What gives life to the tree and the branches is the root; this root must be planted in the soil of humility, which bears and nourishes charity.”^[14]

The image is precise: charity — which is the highest of the virtues, the end of the spiritual life — cannot grow anywhere but in the soil of humility. A charity planted in the soil of pride is not Christian charity; it is a caricature.

“Humility is truth”

To grasp the centrality of humility properly, two modern misunderstandings must first be corrected. Humility is not a form of self-contempt, a morbid depreciation that would sink into guilt. Nor is it a false modesty — the kind that consists in minimizing one's gifts in words the better to let them be admired.

The classic Catholic definition, condensed by Saint Teresa of Avila in The Interior Castle — “walking in truth” — comes down to two words:

“Humility is truth.”^[15]

The formula is exact: to be humble is to see oneself as one is before God, neither above nor below. The Eternal Father confirms it to Saint Catherine of Siena:

“Humility comes from the knowledge the soul has of itself.”^[16]

Jesus, in the writings attributed to Luisa Piccarreta, goes so far as to propose a terminological substitution:

“What is called humility in man should be called self-knowledge.”^[17]

That says it all. The humble man invents nothing, plays nothing, does not artificially diminish himself: he takes note. He takes note that, without God, he can do absolutely nothing — not even breathe or make his heart beat. He takes note that all his talents, his virtues, his intelligence, his good works are gifts received, not his own productions. He takes note, finally, that left to himself he would be capable of every sin in the world, as Saint Philip Neri observed:

“Lord, watch over me. If You do not preserve me by Your grace, I shall betray You today and commit by myself alone all the sins of the whole world.”^[18]

Recognizing one's gifts without claiming credit for them

Must one, then, deny one's talents? Must one say “I am worthless” when one is competent, “I have no gift” when one is gifted? Obviously not. That would be lying — and thus betraying the very definition of humility as truth. Saint Francis de Sales explains it with his usual finesse:

“We must not fear that the knowledge of what He has put in us will puff us up, provided we attend to this truth, that what is good in us is not from us. Alas! Are mules not always heavy and foul beasts, though laden with the prince's precious and perfumed furnishings? What good have we that we have not received? says the Apostle; and if we have received it, why glory in it as though we had not received it?”^[19]

Saint Benedict teaches it in his Rule with the same sobriety:

“If one sees any good in oneself, attribute it to God, not to self; but as for evil, know that one is always its author and reckon it one's own.”^[20]

The humble man does not deny the beauty of the virtuoso musician; he simply knows that the musical ear, the intelligence, the perseverance, the family that paid for the lessons, the nimble fingers, and even life itself, are gifts received. Saint Vincent de Paul sums it up:

“The virtue of humility makes us understand that all the good done through us comes from God.”^[21]

Jesus says it to Gabrielle Bossis in her book Lui et moi:

“To make yourself quite little, do not diminish your gifts; think only that they all come from Me.”^[22]

Humility is therefore both an act of truth (recognizing what one is) and an act of thanksgiving (returning to God the credit for what one has). This is what spiritual theologians call humble gratitude — already a form of love, one that knows itself indebted.

The practical fruit: no longer judging others

Humility, because it is truth about oneself, radically changes the gaze one turns on others. He who knows that, without grace, he would be capable of every sin can no longer judge his neighbour. Saint Claude la Colombière, in his Retraite spirituelle, writes it in so many words:

“A humble man sees only his own faults, and it is a mark of little virtue to notice the imperfections of others.”^[23]

Saint Paul, in the letter to the Philippians, had made it a precept:

“In humility, count others better than yourselves.” (Philippians 2:3)^[24]

Saint Teresa of Avila makes it the criterion of spiritual progress: to deem oneself advanced in perfection only when one esteems oneself the most wretched of creatures and desires the last place — she herself, her biographers report, “always tried for the last place”^[25].

Saint Francis of Assisi lived it seriously, not out of pious convention — his first biographer reports that “he alone held himself for the vilest of men”, to the point of charging a brother to rebuke him to his face^[26].

A strange paradox: the saints, who are objectively the men closest to God, are also those who feel most unworthy. Conversely, the great criminal often finds himself less bad than others. The reason is that holiness is not self-assessment: the closer one comes to the pure light, the more one sees the slightest stain. The saint has seen, in the light of God, what the hardened sinner does not see: the blackness of every sin. That is why his self-knowledge lays him low — not in despair, but in real humility.

“Meek and humble of heart”

Christian humility is not a human moral invention, the fruit of some generic spiritual wisdom. It is the revelation of an attribute of God Himself. Jesus, in a saying without equivalent in any religion, declares:

“Learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart.”^[27] (Matthew 11:29)

It is the one time in the Gospel when Christ describes His Heart. And what He says of it is staggering: God is humble. Not out of pedagogical condescension, but by identity — infinite humility, without measure, as Saint Charles de Foucauld will say in his eight-day retreat at Ephraim (March 1898):

“You will always be tempted to pride; sink yourselves into humility; there lies salvation. So I have willed to give you its example a thousand times over: My Incarnation, infinite humility, without measure; My birth, humility; all is humility in Me. I am meek and humble of heart.”^[28]

The hymn to the Philippians: kenosis

The most striking text on the humility of God is the hymn to the Philippians — no doubt one of the oldest Christian canticles, predating even the writing of the letter by Saint Paul (on the commonly accepted dating, around 60-61):

“Christ Jesus, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. But He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”^[29] (Philippians 2:5-8)

The Greek verb used, ekenōsen — “He emptied Himself” — gave theology the technical term kenosis: the free self-abasement of God. It is the exact inverse of pride. Where the proud man wants to hoist himself into God's place, God Himself chooses to descend into man's place, and lower still — into the place of the slave, of the condemned man, of the crucified.

Three stages of abasement: Incarnation, Cross, Eucharist

Mystical tradition customarily stresses that the humility of Christ comprises three great stages, each more astounding than the last.

The Incarnation: God becomes a nursing infant

God, the Almighty Creator of the universe, chooses to be incarnate in the form of a nursing infant unable to speak, walk, or feed himself. He is welcomed not in a palace but in a stable. Saint Pachomius, founder of Egyptian cenobitism (4th century), wrote to a resentful monk:

“How do we go toward God? By making ourselves a humble heart, full of gentleness.”^[30]

In that phrase he was imitating the very trajectory of God in Jesus.

The Cross: God becomes a condemned man

The abasement culminates on Golgotha. The Word through whom all things were made lets Himself be spat upon, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified between two brigands. No religion had ever imagined such a God. The Roman historian Tacitus himself bears witness in his Annals (XV, 44): he reports that Christ, “author of that name”, had “suffered the penalty” under the procurator Pontius Pilate, and sees in nascent Christianity nothing but an exitiabilis superstitio, a “detestable superstition”^[31]. The punishment of the cross — a servile and infamous chastisement — made this preaching scandalous in Roman eyes. The Jews rejected it, for a Messiah hung on wood was, according to Deuteronomy, “accursed of God” (Dt 21:23). Yet it is in this ignominious death that the measure of divine humility is revealed.

The Eucharist: God becomes bread

And it does not stop there. After the Incarnation and the Cross, God pushes abasement still further: He makes Himself host, bread — that is, a thing, a manipulable object, eaten, at times sacrilegiously profaned. In a free theological meditation — an opinion offered here, not defined doctrine — one may say the Eucharist is its most extreme abasement — greater, in a sense, than the Incarnation itself, for the glorious Christ remains there accessible to every sinner, in the most complete silence and anonymity, defenceless.

Never shall we be able to abase ourselves as much as He did; never shall we be able to be as humble as Jesus was^[32].

That is why the sacrifice that pleases God is not, in the first place, ascetic performance but the broken heart:

“The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.”^[33] (Psalm 50:19)

Charles de Foucauld: Jesus willed to eat with sinners

And throughout His public life, Jesus never ceased to stage humility by His acts. He ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. He let little children come to Him. He washed His disciples' feet. He refused the title of political king. Saint Charles de Foucauld gives Christ these words:

“I willed to be ranked among sinners to teach you humility: see, My children, how all My acts are lessons in humility; it is because you have such need to learn it and to practise it every day of your life.”^[34]

If we therefore wish to be conformed to Christ — and that is the very definition of the Christian life —, we must above all be conformed to His humility.

The narrative according to Luke

No Gospel text teaches the primacy of humility with as much force as the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, peculiar to Luke's Gospel:

“To some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others, Jesus told this parable:

Two men went up into the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself: ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men — extortioners, unjust, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying: ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”^[35] (Luke 18:9-14)

Why the tax collector is justified

The parable is astonishing. From the standpoint of outward morality, the Pharisee has everything in his favour: he fasts, he gives alms, he observes the Mosaic Law in its smallest details. The tax collector is a collector of taxes in the service of the Roman occupier — a hated figure, suspected of dishonesty, excluded from the company of the just. Yet Christ's verdict inverts the social hierarchy: it is the tax collector who goes home justified, not the Pharisee.

Why? Because the Pharisee, despite his real works, is eaten away by pride — “I am not like the rest”. His prayer is no longer even a prayer: it is self-incense. He asks for nothing because he believes he needs nothing. He thanks God, but in reality he congratulates himself.

The tax collector, on the contrary, does not even lift his eyes. He pleads no good works — he knows he has none to plead. He simply speaks the truth: “be merciful to me a sinner”. And this truth — which is precisely humility, truth about oneself — opens the doors of salvation.

Saint Augustine, in a famous homily on this passage, draws this conclusion:

“God looks more willingly upon bad deeds accompanied by humility than upon good works infected with pride.”^[36]

“Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom before you”

A few chapters later, Jesus radicalizes further. Addressing the chief priests and elders of the people — objectively virtuous men, religious observers, respected judges — He utters a phrase that has scandalized for twenty centuries:

“Amen, I say to you: tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”^[37] (Matthew 21:31)

How is this word to be understood? Obviously not as an apology for prostitution or collaboration with the occupier. The meaning is doctrinal: tax collectors and prostitutes, at least, have no illusion about their own righteousness. They know they are sinners. They have, in spite of themselves, the broken heart. And that broken heart is precisely what God seeks.

What God looks at in the heart

This parable reveals the divine grid of reading. Where man looks at works, God looks at the humility of the heart. God does not weigh, properly speaking, each one's moral accounting balance sheet: He weighs intention and inner disposition. A seemingly virtuous life saturated with pride may, before God, weigh nothing. A seemingly ruined life traversed by real humility may, before Him, weigh infinitely more.

This is what Jesus confirms to Luisa Piccarreta:

“My daughter, what will become of souls that have done so many actions, even good ones, without purity of intention, out of habit or selfishness? What shame they will feel on the day of judgment on seeing these actions, good in themselves, but tainted by their imperfect intentions. In fact, it is not the greatness of actions that matters to Me but the intention with which they are done.”^[38]

And more bluntly still:

“Acts good in themselves, and even great, which are not done for Me alone, are like rusted, tarnished golds that do not shine. I do not grant them even a glance!”^[39]

This is no 20th-century mystical innovation: it is exactly Christ's doctrine in Matthew 6, already denouncing those who “sound the trumpet before them” when they give alms, and who “have already received their reward” (Mt 6:2-5).

At this point in the demonstration, a radical patristic tradition emerges — one that must be quoted precisely so as not to distort it, and understood in its exact intention.

Saint Optatus of Milevis: the shocking phrase

Saint Optatus, bishop of Milevis in Numidia in the 4th century, deals with the Donatists — a rigorist sect claiming to be the Church of the pure. Against them he sets a phrase that sums up the whole Catholic spiritual tradition on the primacy of humility:

“Better are sins with humility than innocence with pride.”^[40]

The formula sounds almost heretical to modern ears. Yet it faithfully translates the logic of the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee: what God saves is the humility of the heart — even when that heart is stained with sins — not the apparent moral perfection inhabited by pride.

Saint Augustine and the commentary on the tax collector

Saint Augustine reformulates, in the line of Optatus:

“God looks more willingly upon bad deeds accompanied by humility than upon good works infected with pride.”^[41]

The verb “looks more willingly” is precise: God does not approve evil — He has not changed His mind about sin — but He sets a gaze of mercy upon the humble sinner, where He turns His gaze from the proud righteous man.

The same doctrine in compact formula

Spiritual anthologies thus condense the teaching of the two chariots:

“A chariot laden with good works, driven by pride, leads to hell; driven by humility, a chariot laden with sins leads to paradise.”^[42]

Saint Basil of Caesarea — brother of Gregory of Nyssa and, with him, the other great Cappadocian — illustrates the same teaching with a concrete example: that of Saint Peter, of whom we shall speak below.

Saint John Chrysostom: why the humble chariot pulls ahead

Saint John Chrysostom, in his fifth homily On the Incomprehensibility of God (against the Anomoeans), unfolds the metaphor:

“Picture in your mind two chariots: harness to one virtue and pride, to the other sin with humility, and you will see the chariot drawn by sin with humility, and you will see the chariot drawn by sin outstrip the one of virtue, not indeed by its own strength, but by that of the humility joined to it; just as the other will be defeated not because of the weakness of virtue, but because of the heavy mass of pride. For just as humility, thanks to its immense power of elevation, triumphs over the heaviness of sin and mounts to heaven first, so pride, because of the great weight of its mass, manages to prevail even over the lightness of virtue and easily drags it downward.”^[43]

The mechanism is limpid: humility has a “power of elevation” that can lift even the mass of sin. Pride, for its part, has such “mass” that it can drag downward even authentic virtue.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: the humble sinner vs the proud virgin

The image hardens further in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the mellifluous doctor of the 12th century, in his homily Super Missus:

“The sinner who, to walk in the footsteps of the Lamb, has taken the paths of humility, has taken a surer road than the man who, in his virginity, follows the ways of pride; for the humility of the one will purify him of his stains, while the pride of the other can only soil his purity.”^[44]

The phrase is doctrinally explosive: between a humble sinner and a proud virgin, Bernard bets on the sinner. Not because sin would be good — it is not — but because humility, even in the sinner, remains the key that opens grace, while pride, even in the virgin, remains the locked bolt that renders it inoperative.

Understanding this tradition without falsifying it

This tradition must be heard precisely. It does not say:

• that it is better to sin than to practise virtue (that would be a moral absurdity),
• that good works are useless (that would contradict James 2:14-26),
• that humility dispenses from the fight against sin (that would contradict the whole ascetic tradition).

It says this: in the divine balance, humility weighs more than works, for it is the disposition that renders works supernaturally valid. Modern spiritual anthologies sum up this tradition thus: better, it is said, a failure borne humbly than a victory won with pride^[45].

And Saint John of the Cross radicalizes:

“All visions and revelations, all heavenly sentiments, are not worth as much as the smallest act of humility.”^[46]

Saint Alphonsus Liguori goes in the same direction:

“Oh! If only we could grasp the value of humility! One gains more by an act of humility than if one acquired all the treasures of the world.”^[47]

The convergent teaching of these saints, separated by a thousand years of history, gives its full scope to Christ's word: a broken and humbled heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.

Here is a particularly delicate point of Catholic spiritual doctrine, which must be formulated with caution but without timidity.

Why does God allow His faithful to fall?

Humility is so necessary to salvation, and pride so subtle in the human soul, that God sometimes permits the fall in order to heal pride. He does not cause sin — He tempts no one to evil (Jas 1:13) — but He may momentarily withdraw certain supports of His perceptible grace, so that the faithful discovers, through experience, his own fragility. Saint Isaac the Syrian, 7th-century Syriac mystic, describes this pedagogy with rare force:

“Believe me, my brother, you have not yet understood the force of temptation and the subtlety of its artifices. But one day experience will teach you, and you will see yourself before it like a child who knows not which way to turn. All your knowledge will have turned to confusion, like that of a little child. And your mind, which seemed so firmly established in God, your knowledge so precise, your thought so balanced, will be immersed in an ocean of doubts. One thing alone can then help you overcome them: humility. As soon as you seize it, all their power vanishes.”^[48]

The experience is universal: there comes a day, in every serious spiritual life, when theoretical self-sufficiency collapses. One discovers that what one thought one knew, one does not really know; what one thought one possessed, one does not possess. This collapse, painful as it is, is paradoxically a grace: it opens the way to true humility, the kind that no longer belongs to verbal concession but to flesh-and-blood experience.

Saint Peter: the proud apostle purified by denial

The paradigmatic case in the Gospel is that of Saint Peter. Peter sincerely loved Jesus — what followed proved it, unto Roman martyrdom. But Peter, before the Passion, was proud. He had sworn he would never deny the Master, even if all the others abandoned Him (Mk 14:29). Jesus, who saw his heart, had gently answered him: “Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny Me three times.” (Mk 14:30)

Saint Basil of Caesarea theologically analyzes this episode:

“God therefore delivered him to his human cowardice and he fell into denial, but his fall made him wise and put him on his guard. He learned to spare the weak, having learned his own weakness, and he now knew clearly that it was by the strength of Christ that he had been kept. […] It is humility that often frees him who has frequently and grievously sinned.”^[49]

Peter's pride had to be broken for him to become the shepherd Christ wanted. The fall taught him what a thousand discourses would not have sufficed to teach: by himself, without grace, he was capable of denying his God three times. It is precisely after this fall, and not before, that Jesus establishes him head of the Church (Jn 21:15-17).

Saint Paul and the thorn in the flesh

Saint Paul knew an analogous experience. Raised to the third heaven in a mystical vision (2 Cor 12:2-4), he might have drawn immense pride from it. To prevent this, God leaves him a “thorn in the flesh” — a persistent weakness whose exact nature Paul does not specify, which spiritual tradition often reads as a recurring temptation or trial meant to keep him humble:

“To keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But He said to me: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”^[50] (2 Corinthians 12:7-10)

Three teachings emerge from this passage:

1. Paul prayed to be delivered from it — he did not passively accept it.
2. God refuses to deliver him, to keep Paul in humility.
3. Paul ends by rejoicing in it, because he understands that his very weakness makes grace visible.

This is a precious grid of reading for anyone fighting a persistent weakness without overcoming it: perhaps this trial remains, providentially, to prevent pride. The conclusion is not resignation to evil — Paul prayed — but peace in the combat, knowing that God knows what He is doing.

The modern testimony of Jacques Fesch

In the 20th century, the death-row convict Jacques Fesch — Servant of God whose beatification cause was opened in 1993 by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger^[51] — converted in prison between 1954 and his execution on 1 October 1957, left a spiritual journal of rare lucidity. In it he recounts that after a period of intense fervour, God slightly withdrew His perceptible grace:

“And then came the slow collapse of my good resolutions, the crumbling of my zeal; I ended by wallowing in a swamp of softness, lazy indifference, and disgust for all effort, while remaining perfectly convinced of the truths of the faith. In other words, I knew where the good lay, but did not do it, because I was weary and weak and the trials I had to go through seemed too strong for my resistance.”^[52]

Yet Fesch understands in this trial that he can do nothing by himself. His crossing of the desert teaches him humility more deeply than all his previous spiritual reading. And he describes pride, later, with searing lucidity:

“Pride! One must beware of it as of the most dreadful of calamities. When all the other vices are subdued, it alone remains and infiltrates, elusive, into our best thoughts. It is tenacious, subtle, winding around our soul like bindweed around a plant. It develops in hatred, and also accompanies the pursuit of perfection. While the other vices, however virulent, remain well delimited, and thus easy to attack head-on, it slips in and troubles our soul to the point that it no longer knows what to think. Believe nothing but one's own misery.”^[53]

The diagnosis is implacable: one does not “attack” pride head-on as one attacks anger or lust. An inverse strategy is needed — humility — which consists precisely in believing nothing but one's own misery.

Humility draws down heavenly graces

In the Catholic spiritual economy, humility is not only a virtue: it is the condition of access to grace. Without it, grace finds nowhere to alight in the soul. This is what Jesus explains to the Italian mystic Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), with almost juridical precision:

“No grace leaves My Throne except through humility. No request can be received by Me if it does not bear the signature of humility. No prayer is heard by My Ears nor moves My Heart to compassion if it is not perfumed with humility.”^[54]

And more directly still:

“For Me to pour My graces into your heart, it is necessary that you convince yourself that by yourself you are capable of nothing.”^[55]

Jesus already said to Saint Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1241-1299), Benedictine nun of Helfta:

“I have always sought, to grant My most spiritual gifts, the most humble, the smallest.”^[56]

Jesus says likewise to Luisa:

“Humility draws down heavenly favours. As soon as I find humility in a soul, I pour into it abundantly all kinds of heavenly favours. Rather than troubling yourself, make sure you are filled with humility and do not worry about the rest.”^[57]

“Humility is the key to Paradise”

In the same vein:

“Humility is the key to Paradise, which no one can enter without it. Humility is the smile of God and of all Paradise, and the weeping of all hell.”^[58]

The image is strong. One may be brilliant, generous, ascetic, virtuous: without humility, the door stays shut. Conversely, one may be utterly poor, unlearned, without extraordinary works: with humility, the door is already open. It is the very promise of the first evangelical beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 5:3) — the poor in spirit being, in the constant exegetical tradition, the humble.

The salt that seasons all virtues

Luisa extends the metaphor:

“Humility is the salt that seasons all virtues and preserves the soul from the corruption of sin. Humility is the little grass that grows beside the paths. It disappears when trampled. But it grows back afterward more beautiful than before. Humility is that domestic graft which ennobles the wild plant. It is the currency of grace.”^[59]

Three successive images:

• Salt: without it, virtues remain bland, without supernatural savour;
• Trampled grass: the humble man may be crushed, he always grows back;
• The domestic graft: humility ennobles even the sinner's wild nature.

Inner peace and the end of judging others

Humility is not only attractive to grace; it also produces fruits immediately perceptible in the life of the soul. Thomas a Kempis writes:

“The humble man enjoys unalterable peace; anger and envy trouble the heart of the proud.”^[60]

This peace comes from the humble man's having nothing left to defend: neither his reputation (he knows his misery), nor his superiority (he claims none), nor his righteousness (he knows he has none by himself). The proud man, by contrast, is constantly threatened: a word, a glance, a comparison can destabilize him. Adam of Perseigne, 12th-century Cistercian, describes it in few words:

“Where humility is found, there also are peace, fear and reverence for the commandments. Humility, O man, shows you what you are, what you have been, what you must become. Why pride yourself, earth and ashes? Why forget your own condition?”^[61]

Humility, finally, frees from the fear of others' gaze. Saint Teresa of Avila writes it in The Interior Castle:

“Thus does one begin to conquer inner freedom, and no longer care what is said of us, whether for good or ill.”^[62]

Saint Francis of Assisi completes, in his Admonitions:

“For what a man is worth before God, that he is worth in reality, and no more.”^[63]

Oratorian tradition lends Saint Philip Neri the same rule of life: never to excuse himself, even when the accusation brought against him was entirely false^[64].

Humility, condition of the knowledge of God

Humility opens, finally, onto the highest knowledge, that of God Himself — of His “Will”, that is, of His loving design and the divine life He wills to deposit in us. Jesus explains it to Luisa:

“Humility produces knowledge of My Will.”^[65]

“His Will”, here, does not mean only His commandments to be observed: in the language of the Book of Heaven, it is His Will itself, received within us to live and act there — far more than mere obedience.

He specifies — “to annihilate oneself”, here, is to cease counting on oneself; “to recognize one's nothingness” is to admit that without God one can do nothing:

“The more you annihilate yourself and learn to recognize your nothingness, the more My Humanity will communicate its virtues to you and flood you with its Light.”^[66]

The paradox is constant: the lower one descends in humility, the higher one rises in knowledge of God. Why? Because knowledge of God is not an intellectual conquest but a gift. God gives Himself to the little ones. To the proud He remains opaque — not out of spite, but because pride blocks the door of the soul.

The sin of the angels and the fall of Adam

At the origin of all human sins, Catholic tradition discerns a single first vice: pride. Before even Adam's fall, it was through pride that the fallen angels drew away from God. Patristic tradition, leaning on Isaiah 14:12-14 and Ezekiel 28:11-19, has always read in Lucifer's revolt an act of pure pride: the creature wanting to hoist itself to the Creator's rank.

Saint Charles de Foucauld, in his eight-day retreat at Ephraim (14-21 March 1898), gives Christ these words:

“It is through pride that the angels were lost, through pride that Adam fell. […] You will always be tempted to pride; sink yourselves into humility; there lies salvation.”^[67]

Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches in the Summa Theologiae that pride is “the root and queen of all vices”^[68]. The Catechism of the Catholic Church takes up this tradition by ranking pride among the seven capital sins, first of all (CCC §1866). Capital does not mean the gravest in itself (apostasy or murder may be graver) but the one that begets the others — caput, the head, the source.

“Pride gnaws away grace”

If humility attracts grace, pride repels it — worse, it destroys it. Jesus says it to Luisa Piccarreta:

“My daughter, pride gnaws away grace. In the hearts of the proud there is only emptiness filled with smoke, which produces blindness. Pride makes a person his own idol. The proud man does not have his God within himself. Through sin, he destroys Him in his heart. By erecting an altar in his heart, he places himself above God and worships himself.”^[69]

Three spiritual mechanisms are described:

1. Pride gnaws grace — it wears it away, it makes it flee;
2. It produces blindness — the proud man no longer sees himself as he is;
3. It makes the soul an idol of itself — the proud man ends by worshipping himself.

Luisa herself adds:

“Pride is the most terrible ingratitude toward God and the greatest affront one can do Him; it blinds the soul completely, it brings it to fall into great impiety, and it leads it to its ruin.”^[70]

Spiritual blindness

Blindness is the central danger. The proud man does not know he is proud — that is the very definition of pride. According to a maxim attributed to Father John Chapman, 20th-century Benedictine monk: to believe one has become humble would already be proof of the contrary^[71].

Indeed, the humble man always believes himself prouder than he is; the proud man always believes himself humbler than he is. It is the exact inversion of the gaze the soul turns on itself. Saint Catherine of Siena made it a practical criterion: to know whether one is progressing in humility, it suffices to check whether one still feels proud. If one has the impression of advancing, one must be wary.

The elusive character of pride

Pride, as seen with Jacques Fesch, has the peculiarity of being the one vice that insinuates itself everywhere — including into the practice of the other virtues. One can be proud of one's humility, of one's asceticism, of one's charity, of one's theological knowledge, of one's mystical visions. The whole ascetic tradition, from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in his treatise On the Degrees of Humility and Pride (1124), stresses this spiral: the further the soul advances, the more it discovers within itself an unsuspected depth of self-love^[72].

This spiral has no floor: there is no point at which one would be definitively safe. That is why spiritual tradition recommends permanent vigilance — not anxious, but lucid — over the subtle movements of self-love.

More dangerous than all other vices

Thomas a Kempis, in The Imitation, formulates a raw, almost clinical criterion of the spiritual danger of pride:

“The more a man knows himself, the more he humbles himself; and he does not stop at vain praises from men.”^[73]

The proud man is therefore, fundamentally, someone who does not know himself — and who, for that reason, hangs upon the gaze of others rather than upon God's. Saint Faustina Kowalska, in her Diary (1934-1938), sums up the issue in a single sentence:

“By myself I can do but one thing: offend You, O my God. For misery can do nothing else by itself but offend You, O infinite Goodness!”^[74]

And it is precisely this radical awareness — not sickly, not guilt-inducing, but true — that constitutes the heart of Christian humility.

Recognizing that all comes from God

The first practical application of humility consists in referring every gift back to its Giver. Natural talents, intelligence, beauty, health, fortune, virtues, successes, vocation — all is received. Saint Paul had formulated it in an implacable rhetorical question: “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Cor 4:7) If all is received, no personal superiority is tenable. Daily humility therefore consists, at each small success — a job well done, an apt word, a compliment received — in inwardly recognizing: “thank You, Lord, it is from You”.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux had made it the matter of her “little way”: claiming nothing, accepting each thing as a gift, climbing to God not by works but by avowed poverty.

Not excusing oneself when accused

Saint Francis de Sales, in the twenty-second Spiritual Conference, proposes a classification in five degrees of humility, which constitutes one of the most practical passages of Salesian spirituality. Without entering here into detail (the object of a dedicated article), at least its central principle must be retained: perfect humility is not content with knowing its misery; it accepts being recognized as such by others — and even, at the highest degree, rejoices in it.

“To love contempt and rejoice when criticized; for what semblance of deceiving the minds of others? It is not reasonable. Since we admit that we are nothing, we must be well content that it be believed, said, and that we be treated as vile and wretched.”^[75]

An anecdote reported by biographers: one day, numerous criticisms from one of his enemies were relayed to Saint Francis de Sales. He answered, and he truly meant what he said: “Ah, at last someone who really knows me!”^[76]

Saint Jane de Chantal, his friend, completes:

“A truly humble heart, when humbled, sinks lower still.”^[77]

Preferring the last place

The evangelical precept is explicit. Jesus gives it in Luke 14:8-11: to wedding guests choosing the first place, He teaches taking the last first, “so that he who invited you may say to you: ‘Friend, move up higher’” (Lk 14:10). And He concludes with the principle running through the whole Gospel: “Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Lk 14:11; Lk 18:14; Mt 23:12)

Concretely, this can translate into a thousand small attitudes: yielding the floor, accepting a less valued task, not seeking to shine in conversation, taking the last portion, listening before speaking, asking advice instead of always giving it.

Distrusting oneself, placing one's trust in God

The major practical consequence of humility is what spiritual tradition calls self-distrust. Not a pathological lack of confidence — which would be a psychological defect — but a just estimation of one's own strength, knowing that without God nothing is possible. The Bible says it with a bluntness modern culture no longer bears:

“He who trusts in his own mind is a fool.”^[78] (Proverbs 28:26)

And conversely:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight.”^[79] (Proverbs 3:5)

“It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in man.”^[80] (Psalm 117:8)

Christian humility is therefore not a lack of confidence — it is a displacement of confidence, from self to God. Saint Louise de Marillac sums it up:

“To obtain God's grace, let us humble ourselves deeply, through a holy distrust of ourselves and great confidence in His goodness.”^[81]

Why humility alone is not enough

A humility without trust is deadly. If one knows oneself a sinner, wretched, incapable of the least good, but does not believe in God's infinite mercy, one falls into despair — precisely the sin Judas committed after his betrayal. That is why Catholic spiritual tradition holds together, indissolubly, two poles which spirituality has called, since Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Angela of Foligno, the double abyss: the abyss of man's nothingness, and the abyss of God's Love.

Venerable Marthe Robin, 20th-century French mystic (1902-1981), formulated the articulation in one sentence:

“Humility calls forth trust. The lower humility descends, the higher trust rises, the more the soul is raised to love.”^[82]

The movement is inverse in appearance — descending in humility while rising in trust — but coherent in reality: the more one knows one's misery, the more one needs mercy; the more one knows mercy, the more strength one has to look at one's misery without collapsing.

Saint Francis de Sales: only the humble can truly trust

Saint Francis de Sales, in a famous letter to his Visitation nuns, formulates the same articulation:

“You ask me, my dearest daughters, whether a soul conscious of its misery can go to God with great confidence. Now I answer that not only can a soul with knowledge of its misery have great confidence in God, but it cannot have true confidence unless it has knowledge of its misery. For this knowledge and confession of our misery introduces us into God's presence.

Thus all the great saints, like Job, David and the others, began all their prayers with the confession of their misery and unworthiness; so that it is a good thing to recognize oneself poor, vile and abject, and unworthy to appear in God's presence.

That famous saying among the ancients — Know thyself — though it is understood of the knowledge of the greatness and excellence of the soul, so as not to debase and profane it in things unworthy of its nobility, is also understood of the knowledge of our unworthiness, imperfection and misery, inasmuch as the more we know ourselves wretched, the more we shall trust in the goodness and mercy of God; for between mercy and misery there is so great a bond that the one cannot be exercised without the other.

Had God not created man, He would have been truly good; but He would not now have been merciful, for mercy is exercised only toward the wretched.”^[83]

The argument is theologically decisive: God can exercise His mercy only toward the wretched. If I refuse to recognize myself wretched, I deprive myself of His mercy — not because God withdraws it from me, but because it has no hold on me.

Saint Faustina and the double gaze

Saint Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), apostle of Divine Mercy, expresses the same articulation in her Diary:

“As I become aware of my misery, I at the same time become aware of the infinite depth of Your Mercy. In my interior life, I keep constantly before my eyes the abyss of misery and abjection that I am, on the one hand, and on the other the abyss of Your Mercy, O my God.”^[84]

Two simultaneous abysses, nourishing each other: this is the breathing of every authentic Catholic spiritual life.

Angela of Foligno: the perfection of the spiritual life

Saint Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), Franciscan tertiary and one of the greatest medieval mystics, expresses the same secret in her own way:

“Here is the whole of perfection: to know oneself! to know God! Supreme necessity dominating every necessity! To be eternally bent over the double abyss — that is my secret!”^[85]

And more broadly:

“To know the all of God and the nothing of man — that is perfection.”^[86]

The word “perfection” is decisive here: Angela is not describing a preliminary of the spiritual life, but its consummation. One never moves past the double abyss — it is the spiritual life itself, from its first steps to its completion in the beatific vision.

This is also what Saint Bernard of Clairvaux taught in his treatise On the Degrees of Humility and Pride, considered one of the summits of Cistercian mysticism: “Mark how these two kinds of knowledge are necessary to you for salvation: if either is lacking to you, you cannot be saved.”^[87]

At the end of this journey, one truth stands out: humility is not one virtue among others, to be practised occasionally or added to an otherwise already solid Christian life. It is the very breathing of the soul before God — the inhalation by which one recognizes being nothing without Him, the exhalation by which one returns to Him all He has given.

Practically, let us retain:

• Humility is truth about oneself (Teresa of Avila): seeing oneself as one is, neither above nor below;
• It is the root of all other virtues (John Chrysostom, Francis de Sales);
• Christ is its supreme model through His free self-emptying (Phil 2:5-8);
• God looks more willingly upon a humble sinner than upon a proud righteous man (Augustine, Bernard, Optatus);
• God sometimes permits the fall to break pride (Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Jacques Fesch);
• Pride is the most elusive of vices: it infiltrates even the pursuit of perfection;
• Humility draws down grace; without it, no prayer is heard;
• It calls forth trust: only knowledge of misery opens to mercy.

Saint Bernard concluded: “You cannot be saved without the two kinds of knowledge.” That is why the unanimous Catholic tradition — from the Desert Fathers to Thérèse of Lisieux — invites us never to cease “sinking into humility”, as Charles de Foucauld put it. Not out of morbid self-depreciation, but because at the bottom of that abyss one always meets, ever more deeply, the Love of Him who Himself descended even unto death on a cross.

• The double abyss: an introduction — the Catholic doctrine of the double knowledge of self and of God, root of all spiritual life.
• Knowledge of man's nothingness, which produces humility — the first dimension of humility: recognizing one's sin and misery before God.
• Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947) — the Italian mystic whose writings illuminate the place of humility in the life of the Divine Will.