With jnana, “HUMILITY” is awareness of the nothingness of the ego considered from the standpoint of its relativity; with bhakti, HUMILITY is self-abasement before the beauty of the Beloved everywhere present, self-annihilation before the Divine glory; with karma, the same virtue becomes the disinterested service of one’s neighbor, the humiliation of self for the sake of God. (GTUFS: LSelf, A View of Yoga)
A humble person is not interested in having his virtue recognized, he is interested in surpassing himself; hence in pleasing God more than men. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Survey of Integral Anthropology)
Humility is spiritual death, the ‘losing of life’ for God, the extinction of the ego. (GTUFS: GnosisDW, The Christian Tradition, Some Thoughts on its Nature)
Humility is the vacare Deo in all its aspects, and for this reason it is perfect simplicity and primordial purity of the soul in the face of the Divine influx. (GTUFS: SPHF, The Spiritual Virtues)
St. Bernard defined HUMILITY as ‘a virtue through which a man who has a true knowledge of himself becomes contemptible in his own eyes . . .’ Meister Eckhart said that HUMILITY consists in ‘being below’, for otherwise it is impossible for God to give; thus lack of HUMILITY, egotism for example, does violence to the nature of God, which consists in giving. Christ said to St. Catherine of Siena in a vision: ‘I am He who is, thou art she who is not.’ This is the metaphysical foundation of all HUMILITY expressed in direct terms. For Thomists HUMILITY is the measure of our nothingness in the face of God. ‘Humility’, says St. Teresa of Avila, ‘is to walk according to the Truth.’ For St. Ignatius Loyola also, HUMILITY is first of all the simplicity of soul which makes man submit himself quite naturally to the Divine Law, then indifference with regard to worldly things, and finally the ascetic will to live in privations, material and moral, for the sake of God. Al-Qushairi: ‘It is to submit oneself to the direction of God.’ The same writer gives also this definition: ‘It is fusion and contracting of the heart when subjugated by the Truth.’ According to At-Tirmidhi, ‘man is humble when the blazing of the fire of desires has ceased’ (fana, ‘extinction’). (GTUFS: SPHF, The Spiritual Virtues)
Humility (of God): There is no virtue that does not derive from God, and there is none that He does not possess; this allows raising the question of knowing whether He possesses the virtue of HUMILITY, which by definition pertains to the creature; a question that is paradoxical and ill-sounding, to say the least, but logically inevitable. The answer is that the personal God, quite clearly, is in no way opposed to the suprapersonal Divinity of which He existentiates certain potentialities; Being could not contradict Beyond-Being. The God-Person is so to speak “subject” to his own Essence, the “pure Absolute”; the divine Unity – or the homogeneity of the Divine Order – is not impaired by the degrees of reality. To say that God is “one” does not mean that principial Reality does not comprise degrees, but that Being is unique and indivisible; it nonetheless possesses qualities and faculties, lacking which creatures would not possess them. But let us return to the question of HUMILITY: just as the personal God is “subject,” hence in a certain sense “humble,” in relation to the suprapersonal Divinity, so too man ought to show himself humble in relation to his own heart-intellect, the immanent divine spark; the proud man sins against his own immortal essence as well as against God and men. (GTUFS: PlayMasks, Man in the Cosmogonic Projection)
God is not “humble” like man, because He could not abase Himself before someone external and superior to Himself, for such a one does not exist. The “HUMILITY” of God, as we have said, is the simplicity of His essence, for He is without parts. There is, however, another aspect of the “divine HUMILITY,” one that is both intrinsic and anthropomorphic: “When the servant takes one step towards his Lord the Lord gets up from his throne and takes one hundred steps to meet his servant”(Hadith of the Prophet). As for man, he is not a pure essence, but a mixture of spirit and earth; therefore he cannot in himself be “good.” (GTUFS: LSelf, A View of Yoga)
Humility (true): True HUMILITY is to know that we can add nothing to God and that, even if we possessed all possible perfections and had accomplished the most extraordinary works, our disappearance would take nothing away from the Eternal. (GTUFS: LightAW, In the Wake of the Fall)
Humility / Charity (perfect): To know that ‘I am nothing’ is perfect HUMILITY; to know that the ‘neighbor is myself’ is perfect charity. That is perfect which is rooted in existence, not that which depends on action. (GTUFS: SPHF, The Spiritual Virtues)
Humility / Charity (quintessence): The quintessence of HUMILITY, we insist, is the awareness of our nothingness in the face of the Absolute; in the same order of ideas, the quintessence of charity is our love of the Sovereign Good, which gives to our social compassion its most profound meaning. (GTUFS: RootsHC, Virtue and Way)
Humility / Modesty: Humility, for its part, is in no wise contrary to authority, and could not be so since authority is a positive quality; HUMILITY is not modesty, by which we mean that authority excludes modesty while nonetheless including HUMILITY. Setting aside all humilitarianism – automatic and extravagant as it may be, though inevitable and efficacious in the psychological order corresponding to it – HUMILITY is the awareness of our real, and not imaginary, littleness in its various aspects, together with the absence of all desire for individual affirmation. Modesty, on the contrary, is the awareness, not of our ontological limitation or of our human insufficiency, but simply of our incompetence or our incapacity, as the case may be. Thus on the one hand modesty resembles HUMILITY, yet on the other hand differs from it, and this may be illustrated by saying that a modest man must of necessity be humble, but a humble man need not be modest. (GTUFS: SurveyME, Passion and Pride)
Humility / Pride: Humility is a state of emptiness in which our thoughts and actions appear to be extraneous to ourselves, so that we judge them as we judge the thoughts and actions of others. Pride is a blind plenitude which monopolizes everything. (GTUFS: SPHF, The Spiritual Virtues)