Beyond Worry? On Learning Humility from the Lilies and the Birds

Abstract

How on earth do I stop worrying? In Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History, Francis O’Gorman (2015: x) suggests that worries ‘are, of nature, like a strangling weed: they can’t be eradicated even if they can be cut back. They keep growing. They smother. They are exceptionally good at spoiling the view.’ In this chapter, I shall argue that part of the answer to the problem of worry is to be found in a certain view of humility: one that can be teased out from several Kierkegaardian discourses, and which has recently been gaining increasing support—from both philosophers and psychologists— against competing views of humility. Humility is understood not in terms of self-abasement, underestimating oneself, or being ignorant of one’s good qualities, but rather in terms of being focused on others and sources of value besides oneself: thinking not less of oneself, but thinking less about oneself. In exploring the centrality of future-oriented worries to Kierkegaard’s lily and bird discourses, a central thought will be that such worries often stem from excessive self-absorption, a particular aspect of Luther’s (and the wider Lutheran tradition’s) general objection to self-centred desire, and how the motive of our heart is ‘curved in on itself’ (incurvatus in se). 1 As O’Gorman (2015: 54) suggests: