Between humilities: A retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the virtue of humility

In Modernity, humility became suspicious and, as a rule, philosophers who do their thinking after Modernity have paid it little attention. We assume we are beyond humility. Iris Murdoch resisted Modernity. "We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with [like humility]. We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality."1 Murdoch called philosophers to enrich their impoverished vocabulary, to examine all directions in thought, and to re-consider transcendence.;This dissertation can be understood as a response to Murdoch's call. In the first half, we catalog a wide variety of pre-modern usages of the term humility and develop a deeper sense for the 'directions in thought' supporting these usages. In the second half, we turn to the Moderns and do the same.;The most exemplary pre-modern account of humility is to be found in Aquinas. His exemplarity is evident in both what he says about humility (actus signatu) and also in the way that he engages the question in the first place (actus excercitu).;He says that when a human soul begins to desire a good that is difficult to achieve (bonum arduum), that soul will suffer two opposed motions or passions: hope and dread. Two virtues are needed to check these motions: humility and magnanimity.;In choosing to treat the question in the way that he does, Aquinas shows critical distance from both Aristotle (calling it a virtue) and Augustine (treating it naturally). In that distance, we glimpse an approach to inquiry that is not only more capacious but also more compelling (and eminently more humble) than modern and post-modern approaches. Aquinas manifests (especially in his account of humility) as an inventive and resourceful dialectician, who is willing and able to move between univocal, equivocal, and even analogical modes of thought.;This inquiry will be successful if it reminds its readers that they are humble i.e., between ignorance and transcendence. This reminder should move us from asserting that we are beyond humility to accepting our place between humilities.;1 Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 293.