Reclaiming Humility: Four Studies in the Monastic Tradition Volume 255

Does humility have a place in contemporary life? Were Enlightenment thinkers wrong to reject humility as a “monkish virtue” (Hume) arising from a “slave morality” (Nietzsche)? Australian theologian Jane Foulcher recovers the counter-cultural reading of humility that marked early Christianity and examines its trajectory at key junctures in the development of Western monasticism. Humility emerges not as a moral virtue achieved by human effort but as a way opened by grace—as a divine “climate”...