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The Religion & Culture Web Forum

June 2004

Commentary Footnotes

Footnotes for
A 'Monkish Virtue' outside the Monastery:
On the Social and Civic Value of Humility
by Mary M. Keys
(University of Notre Dame)

References

¹Immediately after the questions on humility and pride, Aquinas discusses the sin of Adam and Eve, concluding that our first parents’ sin was one of pride against humility, of “inordinately” seeking likeness to and even equality with God, “wishing to rely on [themselves] in contempt of the order of the Divine rule” (ST II-II 163, 2, c.).

²As Aquinas quotes them, these are: first, “to be humble not only in heart, but also to show it in one’s person, one’s eyes fixed on the ground”; second, “to speak few and sensible words, and not to be loud of voice”; third, “not to be easily moved, and disposed to laughter”; fourth, “to maintain silence until one is asked”; fifth, “to do nothing but to what one is exhorted by the common rule”; sixth, “to believe and acknowledge oneself viler than all”; seventh, “to think oneself worthless and unprofitable for all purposes”; eighth, “to confess one’s sin”; ninth, “to embrace patience by obeying under difficult and contrary circumstances”; tenth, “to subject oneself to a superior”; eleventh, “not to delight in fulfilling one’s desires”; and twelfth, “to fear God and to be always mindful of everything that God has commanded” (ST II-II 161, 6, obj. 1).

³ Where the Dominican Fathers translate “man” and “he,” etc., in these passages, Aquinas almost invariably has used the inclusive homo, hominis rather than the male vir, viri.

⁴ Except for some minor alterations and additions, the text of this section is taken from my article “Aquinas and the Challenge of Aristotelian Magnanimity,” History of Political Thought XXIV (1), Spring 2003, 37-65; please see that piece for a much fuller account of the argument I am sketching here. I am grateful to the publishers of HPT for permission to use text from the article here.

⁵ But cf. ST II-II 130, 1, ad 3, treating presumption as a vice opposed to magnanimity: “As the Philosopher says (NE III.3), ‘what we can do by the help of others we can do by ourselves in a sense.’ Hence since we can think and do good by the help of God, this is not altogether above our ability. Hence it is not presumptuous for a man to attempt the accomplishment of a virtuous deed; but it would be presumptuous if one were to make the attempt without confidence in God’s assistance.”

⁶ Havel wrote this as a speech to be delivered on the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Toulouse in May 1984, but at the time he was prohibited from traveling abroad (Havel 1991, 249).

⁷ Havel loosely defines this concept as “politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them…politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans” (1991, 269).

⁸ The phrase is from another former Soviet-bloc dissident, Karol Wojtila or Pope John Paul II, in his Address to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, October 5, 1995, § 16-17: “In order to recover our hope and our trust at the end of this century of sorrows, we must regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires… We can and we must do so! And in so doing, we shall see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit” (italics in original).