Humility
Christianity, humility, or meekness, is seen as a virtue, encompassing three skills:
- yielding ones rights and possessions to God,
- earning the right to be heard rather than demanding a hearing, and
- responding properly to anger when others violate one's personal rights.
Amongst the benefits described (or at least claimed) in the bible are wealth in heaven, honour, wisdom, eternal life, unity and others.
Mahatma Gandhi is attributed as suggesting that attempting to sustain truth without humility is doomed to cause it to become instead an "arrogant caricature" of truth.
Selwyn Hughes, a contemporary Christian author, suggested that humility for Christians is not about lowering yourself down to something tiny, and thus insulting God's work, but rising to the fullest height of your ability and then comparing yourself with God.
The View of Ayn Rand's Objectivist Philosophy
Some other schools of thought, such as Objectivism, have seen self-abasement as antithetical to morality.
Humiliation is the act of being made humble. It is considered quite different to humility by most people, and the two should not be trivially interchanged.
See also:
