Nothing has struck the world about the new pope so much as his extraordinary determination to be ordinary. Humility is the word most regularly used about his common touch. The much-quoted trope is that he long ago rejected the bishop\u2019s palace for a modest apartment and swapped his chauffeur-driven car for a bus pass. Even after he had been elected pontiff he spurned the papal limousine and returned to the conclave hostel on the coach with the rest of the cardinals. He went to his room to pack his own bag and then moved across to reception to ask if there was a bill to pay.<\/p>\n
There was more to this than symbolism, though his brief first appearance on the balcony in St Peter\u2019s showed his gift for sign and signifier. Catholics are big on that. The faith is rooted in sacrament, which theology defines as an outward sign of inward grace. Pope Francis pointedly refused to stand on an elevated platform when fellow cardinals approached to offer congratulation and pledges of fealty. It was as if he was saying: the old autocracy has gone, collegiality has returned; this pope is no feudal monarch but gains his status as a first among equals.<\/p>\n
Humility has had a bad name in recent times.\u00a0 Its archetype has been Charles Dickens\u2019s unctuous villain in David Copperfield<\/em> . \u201cI\u2019m a very \u2019umble man, Master Copperfield…. ever so \u2019umble,\u201d says the obsequious Uriah Heep. \u201cI am well aware that I am the \u2019umblest person going. My mother is likewise a very \u2019umble person. We live in a numble abode.\u201d Humble thus became something of a byword for a false ambitious manipulative greedy cloying insincerity. It was what the poet Southey described, rather more succinctly, as \u201cpride that apes humility.\u201d<\/p>\n There can, of course, be virtue in pretence. Socrates commonly resorted to the rhetorical strategy of feigning ignorance, or pretending to be less astute than he actually was, in order to trick his opponents into contradicting themselves. But what did for humility was a combination of Enlightenment rationalism and then the Romantic movement\u2019s infatuation with individualism. The great empiricist philosopher David Hume went so far as to see humility as a vice: \u00a0part of \u201ca whole train of monkish virtues\u201d which included fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, celibacy, silence and solitude. All these were \u201ceverywhere rejected by men of sense… because they serve no manner of purpose; neither advance a man\u2019s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment\u201d.<\/p>\n Things went downhill from there, via Nietszche, \u00a0to our own time when self-esteem, self-fulfilment and self-assertion are the contemporary desiderata. \u201cIf you\u2019ve got it, flaunt it\u201d has rendered humility an anachronism. Modern psychologists and business gurus have now began to pronounce that humility is a distinguishing trait of top business leaders \u2013 so humble individuals can again be well-adjusted valuable members of society. But this is just a new empiricism.\u00a0 There is something tacky about the utilitarian and instrumentalist notion that humility breeds success.<\/p>\n Religions have always seen humility differently. In Buddhism it is a vehicle to bring the liberation from the sufferings and vexations of consciousness. Hinduism has a similar goal of losing ego through the struggle for self-mastery. The very word Islam means submission which necessitates humility. But in common parlance humility is often confused with modesty, bashfulness, self-effacement or lack of ambition.<\/p>\n It is none of those according to the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who has described humility as \u201cthe orphaned virtue of our age\u201d. Humility is different from meekness or lack of self-confidence. To be humble is not to think disparagingly or unconfidently of ourselves. No, we are supposed to appreciate ourselves and our talents and skills. But we also need the capacity to be open to something greater than ourselves. \u201cTrue humility is the consciousness of standing in the presence of greatness,\u201d the Chief Rabbi concludes, \u201cwhich is why it is the virtue of prophets, those who feel most vividly the nearness of God\u201d.<\/p>\n True humility, then, is not stooping in order to look smaller than you are. That is the false modesty which fishes for compliments. It is the tale of the man who won a medal for humility and proudly wore it everywhere he went. True humility is standing at your real height next to something bigger than you which brings home to you your smallness. For the religious that is God. For others it is what Kant called the \u201cmeta-attitude that constitutes the moral agent\u2019s proper perspective on himself\u201d.\u00a0 As the genius father of modern science, Sir Isaac Newton put it: \u00a0\u201cIf I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants,\u201d<\/p>\n Shyness may be a temperament but, as the canny Jesuit now occupying the Vatican demonstrates, humility is more like an intellectual stance. The meek are self-conscious but the truly humble are other-conscious.\u00a0 When Pope Francis returned to the cardinals\u2019 hostel to pack his bag he did not just go to reception to pay his bill. He went to thank the housekeepers for all their hard work behind the conclave scenes.<\/p>\n Acknowledging the contribution of others is key to humility, which is why the new pope bowed his head before the people of Rome and asked them to pray for him before he blessed them. \u00a0It was an important gesture in a Church which has a long history of devaluing the humble, as its treatment of women has shown. Humility is, historically and culturally at any rate, a particular female charism, as is celebrated in the Magnificat, the words with which Mary reacts when she is told she is to be the mother of Christ. She speaks of a God who scatters the proud in the conceit of their heart and exalts the humble, who fills the hungry with good things while the rich are sent empty away. \u00a0Pope Francis began his first day in office with a visit to the largest church in Rome dedicated to Mary where he prayed before an icon of mother and child.<\/p>\n Catholics are scrutinising all this with the minute attention of the archaeologists who first decoded the Rosetta Stone. Will Francis\u2019s papacy mean a return to a collegial relationship between pope and bishops? Will hardline dogma take a back seat to pastoral care? Will women be given a role in Vatican appointments? (For there is no reason in canon law they should not be). Will the decadence of clerical privilege find the cruel arrogance of its power overturned? It ought, for real humility speaks less and listens more. It seeks, in the famous prayer attributed to the new pope\u2019s namesake from Assisi, not to be understood but to understand.<\/p>\n The paradox of Pope Francis is that in him humility and power come together. Vested interests in the Vatican will no doubt scheme to undermine him. But might humility now triumph over power? Two thousand years ago a humble Christ clashed with a powerful establishment of high priests from his own religion and imperial Roman overlords. Then humility appeared to lose, but founded a faith to which a billion people now adhere. <\/strong><\/p>\n Humility has infinitely deeper roots, said GK Chesterton, than many modern men suppose. On the surface humility appears to empty itself of all power. But at a more profound level it disarms power and ultimately conquers it. True humility is strength, not weakness. \u201cWe come nearest to the great when we are great in humility,\u201d said the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore. Humility has nothing to prove, but everything to offer. For most of us, as Chesterton said of the Christian ideal, humility has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n from The Independent on Sunday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nothing has struck the world about the new pope so much as his extraordinary determination to be ordinary. Humility is the word most regularly used about his common touch. The much-quoted trope is that he long ago rejected the bishop\u2019s palace for a modest apartment and swapped his chauffeur-driven car for a bus pass. Even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,39,41,38],"tags":[645],"class_list":["post-7688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic-church","category-culture","category-religion","category-society","tag-pope-francis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7688"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7693,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688\/revisions\/7693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}