Humility and Hope

Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” begins, “In hope we are saved.” The final appeal in the encyclical is to Mary, the purest of the “humble and great souls of Israel” waiting for redemption. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, her example guides us in strange times like ours, when the ancient sins have lost their shame.

This month’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought (June 12-17) took on a topic of universal importance: mortality and eternity. Our participants, who were deeply engaged in the week-long conversation, repeatedly wrestled with the primordial relation between pride and death. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for example, King Creon of Thebes cannot bear to have his decisions questioned; pride is the obvious source of the tragic intransigence that leads to the deaths of everyone dear to him. In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych, the title character’s pride prevents him from seeing that the escape from his terrible suffering can come only through the simplicity of love.

The problem of pride comes up throughout the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College. For example, in Dante’s descent into Hell, one of the first souls he encounters among the heretics inside the City of Dis is Farinata, a member of one of the noble Florentine families. The fellow rises halfway from his tomb with a bearing scornful enough to impress Virgil, who wants Dante to behave properly:

My guide—his hands encouraging and quick—
thrust me between the sepulchers toward him,
saying: “Your words must be appropriate.”
When I’d drawn closer to his sepulcher,
he glanced at me, and as if in disdain,
he asked of me: “Who were your ancestors?”

Farinata combines aristocratic family arrogance with the self-regard of those whose accomplishments have earned them public honor.

He is unquestionably proud, but, oddly, he is not damned for it—at least not explicitly. In fact, no one in the Inferno is condemned for pride alone (or envy, for that matter), although these are the first and deadliest of the sins being purged in the Purgatorio. In Hell, the lustful, the gluttonous, the greedy, and the wrathful have their own gated communities, so to speak, as do the varieties of the violent, including those violent against nature. Far, far down on a different level altogether are the fraudulent and, even farther below, those who betray a special trust. But if pride is supposed to be so bad, where is it punished?

Gradually it dawns on the reader that Hell itself reveals the inner architecture of pride, all the way from the gardens of the virtuous pagans in Limbo down to the ice of the most intimate betrayal. Having chosen self over God, everyone in Hell is proud, though perhaps not as arrogantly as Farinata. Pride is the fetid air they breathe.
Yet pride is one of those words that can also describe something praiseworthy, such as delight in the success of a child. Pride in this good sense keeps us true to our work, or prevents us, out of fear of shame, from giving up a difficult task or succumbing to lower passions or yielding to cowardice. Still, no one wants to be described as full of pride. In Shakespeare’s play, the Roman tribunes explain why they do not praise Coriolanus for his stunning victories in war: “He pays himself with being proud.” His self-regard is so boundless, in other words, that it needs no help from them.

In fact, pride always alienates those unwillingly subjected to its show of self-regard. It is strange, then, that our little Wyoming town last week strung a banner to pride across Main Street and held events to celebrate it. The encouragement to be proud without having accomplished something, however slight, is spiritually dangerous and politically unwise. It seems especially imprudent if the praise of pride appears to give a new, uneasily positive meaning to the word and to make refusal to recognize its use a thought crime. The old meaning, however, will not go away. Why should we celebrate a pride that undermines the authority of religious parents and the teachings by which they form their children’s consciences? It’s hard to say.

“Pride goes before destruction /and a haughty spirit before a fall,” says the Proverb. It seems more sensible—not to say, more spiritually fruitful—to celebrate humility. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” On the terrace of the proud in Purgatorio, Dante sees an image of humility—King David putting aside his regal dignity to lift his robes and dance before the Ark of the Covenant (much to the scorn of his wife Michal). Contrast Creon in Antigone, who believes that his success requires inflexibility. He issues a decree that the body of his nephew Polyneices must be denied the rites of burial. When Creon’s niece Antigone tries to bury her brother in obedience to the higher, unwritten law, the king hardens his heart against her—he will not be instructed by a mere woman—and then against his son, who should not question his father’s judgment. As the curse of the gods descends upon Thebes and death follows death, the wisdom of humility shines out.

Our last reading in this year’s WSCT was Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Spe Salvi, which begins, “In hope we are saved.” The final appeal in the encyclical is to Mary, the purest of the “humble and great souls of Israel” waiting for redemption. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, her example guides us in strange times like ours, when the ancient sins have lost their shame.

In humility lies our hope.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

This essay was first published here in June 2022.

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