Do you have a working definition of humility? You probably do. I did, at least before I read The Joy of Humility: The Beginning and the End of Virtues. My definition went something like this: “Humility is having a truthful assessment of oneself and one’s relationship to God, others, and creation. A humble person knows who she is, and places herself neither below her God-given location, nor above it. Such knowledge is a necessary foundation upon which all other virtues and spiritual gifts are built. As such, humility is the gateway virtue.” This working definition has served me well in my ministry. But as I read the conversation about humility hosted by Drew Collins, Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan C. Rosa, I realized that my definition of humility is only one of many.

There are a dizzying number of historical definitions of humility brought into the conversation. Aristotle’s concept of virtue as the mean between two extreme vices is ever-present, as is Paul’s classic hymn of Christ’s humility in Philippians 2; we are reminded that Augustine tells us that “almost the whole of Christian teaching is humility.” Benedict’s working definition is “to believe and profess oneself lower than others” and “to believe and acknowledge oneself useless for anything.” Anselm’s is “to acknowledge oneself as contemptible.” Aquinas claims that humility is “praiseworthy self-abasement to the lowest place,” though he also tells us that  “to aim at greater things through confidence in God’s help, is not contrary to humility.” Luther adds that the self “must consider himself to be nothing.” As the conversation about humility arrived at modernity, unsurprisingly Hume mocks humility as “monkish virtue” and Nietzsche as a “slave morality.” These historical definitions are, of course, in addition to the (sometimes multiple) definitions of each commentator.

Guiding readers to the realization that humility has been and still is an amorphous and ambiguous concept is one of the goals of this conversation– and it really is a conversation. The Joy of Humility is set up as a dialogue among theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and social scientists. Scholars like Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Miroslav Volf and Norman Wirzba contribute to this volume. Each essay has a thoughtful response, to which the original author then offers a reply. The result is a rich and provocative back-and-forth about the nature of a virtue that you thought you knew.

Stacey Floyd-Thomas pulls no punches as she starts the conversation with a womanist critique describing how the virtue of humility has been used as an instrument of oppression to demean and subjugate Black women (among many others) in a “white supremacist patriarchal world.”[1] She calls into question if humility is even a virtue at all, since it has been so pervasively used as a weapon against marginalized people. This spicy back and forth between Floyd-Thomas and Robert C. Roberts is an implicit challenge to the other commentators: Should this book about the virtue of humility even exist?

The answer, of course, is yes. But by beginning the work by calling the concept of humility itself into question, the other commentators are forced to grapple with the vicious (vice-ish?) reality of humility as it has been lived in the world. In response, most offer a different definition of humility that reinterprets the virtue with a twist. Miroslav Volf argues for an emancipatory understanding of humility, Jennifer Herdt pushes for a magnanimous understanding, Norma Wirzba for an interlocked and creaturely understanding.

The second half of the book is a conversation about how one might observe, define, employ, and live into humility. Don E. Davis and Sarah Gazaway approach the topic from the field of psychology and how humility relates to human flourishing; Jason Baehr offers a vigorously reasoned philosophical account of the “wide” and “narrow” approaches to understanding humility; Elizabeth J. Krumei-Mancuso wonders what the role of humility is in servant leadership; Kent Dunnington emphasizes the difference between the Christian virtue of humility and secular counterparts, and offers suggestions for Christians in our time and place better understand Benedict’s “ladder of humility” as a way to the practice of the virtue.

But let’s get to the really interesting part. In addition to wrestling with what, exactly, humility is and does, as the title suggests, each essay is also a commentary on how humility and joy are linked together. This seemed like an unlikely pairing until I remembered this lovely quote from Esther de Waal’s Lost in Wonder:

“Delight is a glorious word which carries a lightness about it and seems to be saying this thing is good and I am good, and I am happy with my relationship to this world around me, but above all I am happy with my relationship to myself, my own inwardness, and also to my own outwardness.”[2]

In her own way, de Waal is having the same conversation as Herdt, Wirzba, and Dennington. Delight is only possible when an individual can recognize goodness in the world through her rightly ordered relationships that reach both inward and outward. It is easy to imagine de Waal in her English garden, observing the movement of an insect among a riot of delphinium and holly hocks, and understanding with satisfaction the gift of her existence, simply as it has been given to her.

These rightly-ordered relationships are absolutely essential for a healthy, life-giving, virtuous understanding of humility. Amid the vast array of definitions and understandings of humility, a truth about the function of humility emerged: Humility is only as virtuous as the community it is embedded within. When humility is manifest in an individual with rightly-ordered, other-centered and loving relationships, humility liberates us to live into our beloved creatureliness. From this sort of humility springs forth joy, and joy abundant. We are released from competition and striving, seeking goodness, but goodness for everyone within the community. When humility is employed in a wrongly-ordered, broken community, humility becomes nothing other than humiliation - a means to control. Humility magnifies whatever it touches. When humility is employed in a context of goodness, joy spreads. When humility is employed within brokenness, harmful, even murderous, self-denigration spreads.

The Joy of Humility claims that it does not “arrive at any conclusions or definitive statements about humility.”[3] This is true. But the undercurrent of discussion about humility as both contextual and functional has helped to hone my own working definition. Instead of humility as a “gateway virtue,” I think humility is as virtuous or vicious as the relationships that it is embedded within. Humility isn’t the gateway virtue; love is.

[1]  Collins, Drew, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Evan C. Rosa, ed. The Joy of Humility: The Beginning and the End of the Virtues. Waco, Baylor University Press, 16.

[2] de Waal, Esther. Lost in Wonder. Norwich: Liturgical Press, 2003, 31.

[3] Collins, Drew, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Evan C. Rosa, ed. The Joy of Humility: The Beginning and the End of the Virtues. Waco, Baylor University Press, 6.