Humility’s Destiny

Abstract

If Christian humility sets as a regulative ideal complete unconcern for one’s own distinctive importance, the challenge is to say why anyone would consider Christian humility a disposition of human flourishing. The experience of one’s distinctive importance is often felt to be an important, if not essential, aspect of the good life. This chapter shows how Christian humility requires for its intelligibility a different account of what an excellent self is like, and a different account of what human flourishing is like. The Christian themes of crucifixion, Trinity, and beatitude are shown seriously to revise customary assumptions about human selfhood and human flourishing. The chapter shows how a distinctively Christian eschatology and anthropology grounds a distinctively Christian view of humility.