by CCW | 28 August 2022 10:00
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.
In the Epistle, Paul calls attention to the things of his preaching and teaching ministry but only to say that it is not about himself who is “the least of the Apostles” and “not meet to be called an Apostle.” No. It is really all about grace. “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Humility is not about putting oneself down or wallowing in self-pity for that is simply another form of egotism – singing the poor me’s is still all about me. Instead, humility is about a kind of honest self-reflection like the Publican in the parable who does not presume to a place of prominence or to call attention to himself but “standing afar off,” we are told, “would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.”
“That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me new,” John Donne says in his most extravagant sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” It is not enough, he suggests, using biblical images, for God to knock at the door of our hearts, or to gently breathe his spirit upon us, or to shine down upon us with his love. No, the deeper sense of our pride seeks the stronger force of God in the strong and paradoxically violent verbs of “batter,” “break, blow, burn,” required in order to be made new. God has to break us to make us, it seems.
This runs completely counter to the feel-good culture of self-esteem and affirmation which only imprisons us in ourselves in a kind of endless narcissism. ‘Look at me looking at you looking at me’ is again all about ourselves. But this negates the truth of ourselves which Paul and Luke show us is found in Christ. The upward journey of the Purgatorio is the true journey of our souls. It is about the humility which alone opens us to the perfecting power of God’s grace actively moving in us so “that we, running the race of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure,” as the Collect puts it. We can’t be raised up out of ourselves without humility which is our openness to God.
The great examples of pride on the Cornice of the Proud in Dante’s Purgatorio are those who having exalted themselves are then abased or thrown down. Yet humility is not about abasement – putting ourselves down, as it were. It is about our openness to the mercy of God without which we cannot stand and be raised up and without which we completely isolate ourselves from one another. The Church is not ‘the sect of the elect’ but the place of sinners seeking God’s redeeming grace for the whole of our humanity. Humility recalls us to the truth of our creatureliness. We are the dust into which God breathes his spirit and we become living spirits, alive to God.
Perhaps what we forget more than anything else is that humility is equally the condition of our cheerfulness, come what may in our world and day. As Jesus powerfully reminds us, “In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” Such is the overcoming of pride through the humility of Christ, who “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross,” and all for us and our salvation. Such is the example of his great humility. May it live in us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 11, 2022
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/08/28/sermon-for-the-eleventh-sunday-after-trinity-6/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.