Abstract

Perhaps one lesson of humility is that modern social-scientific investigation is at its best when it attends to premodern psychological wisdom. While philosophical and literary sources were considered in Chapters 1 and 2, this present chapter considers wisdom traditions that have been preserved and honed within the world’s religions. There are at least two reasons why it is especially important to attend to the collected wisdom of the world’s religions. First, humility has been a central topic of religious reflection for millennia. Second, the concept of humility appears to be particularly at home within religious frameworks. For instance, humility was not regarded as a virtue by the ancient Greeks and was, in fact, hailed as vicious by the likes of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, whereas within religious discourse humility has been perennially extolled. This might suggest that humility is somewhat difficult to understand without some appreciation of the religious context from which it has emerged.