Day: August 28, 2022

“He that humbleth himself shall be exalted”

Dante, the poet, in the opening canto of the Purgatorio reminds us of the necessary condition of the soul’s journey to the blessedness of God. Cato, the embodiment of the classical virtues and of Roman liberty, and the guardian of the Mountain, directs Virgil to cleanse Dante’s face with the morning dew and to gird him about his waist with a reed. The reed is the humble plant from the humus, the ground. Humility is the necessary condition of the ascent to freedom and blessedness, to our good in the Goodness of God. Purgation is a necessary feature of sanctification.

Humility is the liberating quality without which we remain enslaved in ourselves like the Pharisee who “stood and prayed thus with himself” and thus not with God! He sees himself as better than others whom he despises, “thank[ing God] that [he] is not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican.” It is all about himself in the posture of self-righteousness which is always divisive and judgemental. We are too much with ourselves, to be sure, particularly in the contemporary culture of ressentiment. For we look at one another not in love but in envy and resentment, seeing each other as threatening, as enemy. This is neither freedom nor our good. Such self-obsession and self-righteousness always points fingers at others and never at oneself. Such is the deadly nature of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride. It is the vain and false endeavour to be God, making the self, rather than God, the centre around which everything else revolves. This is the great lie and our current obsession.

The first of the Beatitudes is humility, the counter to pride. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor in spirit are precisely those who have been freed from their self-obsessions; they are not full of themselves and thus are able to see others with respect and love. In a wonderful image, Dante depicts the proud in Purgatory as bowed down under the weight of a great stone so that they contemplate engraved on the ground before them the great examples of humility in the figures of Mary, David, and even the Roman emperor, Trajan, and, on the other hand, behold the great examples of pride which Dante describes in a series of verses that form the acrostic UMO in Italian, meaning Man. Being bowed down is the opposite of being haughty with noses in the air in disdain and indifference towards others.

They pray the Lord’s Prayer as part of their penitence, offering the last petition about being led not into temptation and about being delivered from evil not for themselves but for others. Their purgation is completed with the singing of the first Beatitude, Beati pauperes spiritu, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Thus they have overcome themselves and are freed, freed to God and to the Communion of Saints. Bowed down they are raised up.

(more…)

Print this entry