Humility, the Foundation Virtue

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least nothing whatever can be done before it."...

Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense: and this is the most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going back to the subject of Humility. You may remember I said that the first step towards humility was to realise that one is proud. I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues. A week is not enough."

 --C.S. Lewis

The book says that humility is the foundation virtue.  Using the analogy of the tower, it is the opposite of the foundational motive of the builders of Babel, which was arrogance and pride.  Our faith tells us that pride was the cause of the first sins.  Satan and the bad angels did not want to serve.  Eve and Adam wanted to be like God.

Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.. GK Chesterton

Faith requires humility because to believe something as true requires that one understand one does not know.   Children have a natural humility which tells them to trust and imitate and believe what their parents and others tell them.  As we get older we have to learn to practice the right kind of humility.   That doesn't mean thinking that we are worthless or stupid or untalented, because that is a kind of lie to ourselves and it is ungrateful to God.   God made us with great value and intelligence and gave us all our own gifts.   The most important aspect of humility is to realize that God gave us everything we have.

 The tower diagram in the book lists Proverbs 22:4 which says

Humility and the fear of the Lord bring wealth and honor and life.

You can easily draw your own comparisons between those promises and the outcome of the Tower of Babel. 

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