Koinonia on false humility and moral confusion

Koinonia on A False Humility: the Moral Madness of Our Age.

I want to continue yesterday’s look at antinomianism and to tease out the vision of the human person that it seems to imply. To do this I will borrow shamelessly from the Catholic apologist, G.K. Chesterton (whose cause for sainthood has been started in the Catholic Church).

Chesterton calls “mad” the human tendency to isolate virtues from each other. Just as “some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. . . . some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful” (Orthodoxy). When this happens, when my search for the truth is pitiless and my pity is untruthful then I become “the enemy of the human race.” And I become as well my own enemy because I have opened the door, as Chesterton says, not to divine mercy but to anarchy to the refusal of any limits on my life, even the limits imposed upon me by my own humanity. As if one could pick and choose the virtues that were important and "get credit" for them. You will find if you walk clear of 10 rain puddles while on a walk and walk right through the 11^th, you are still wet when you get home.

For Chesterton the source of all this madness is a false humility. As intended by God, humility is meant to provide a limit to the desires of the ego, what Chesterton calls “the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man.” Instead humility has “moved from the organ of ambition. . . . and] settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.” He continues (in what is one of my favorite passages in his work):

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. . . . The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

Thinking a bit more about the madness that Chesterton describes it reveals to us an interesting structure.

For Chesterton the disintegration of the moral life, my preference for one virtue at the expense of the others, reflects the raging of my own ambition. The false humility of this age limits my trust in God, in the Christian Tradition and Natural Law (i.e., “Divine Reason”). The false humility of this age isolates me from my neighbor, it locks me in my own imagination a captive to the limits of my own thoughts. Slowly I come to doubt the experience and wisdom of not only those who have gone before me but also my contemporaries. And all this must be so since your experience, your insights represent a threat to me and to the infinte expanse of my own desires.

Lift the curtain on someone who antinomianism and you see an angry, petulant child who rages against the limits that God and neighbor (and for that matter, the physical universe) place on his or her desires. At its best, antinomianism seeks to defend human freedom from coercion. But what it does instead is justify a moral disintegration rooted in the unchecked self-assertion and an unbounded confidence in myself and my own abilities.

In my next post I want to look a bit more deeply at antinomianism and suggest a pastoral response to the challenge it makes to the Church’s mission. Until then, and as always, your comments, questions and criticisms are not only welcome, they are actively sought.