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Comment by raincom | Hacker News Reader

This article touches on humility. Today, we see humility as a virtue, thanks to Christianity, and secularization of Christianity. That's why we see so many people say "in my humble opinion". To the pagans of Antiquity, humility was a vice, and pride was a virtue. And there is a difference between modesty and humility. Modesty doesn't involve dissimulation. When it comes to humility, there is some kind of hiding--that's dissimulation.

Read this interesting article 'How Christian humility upended the world': https://www.abc.net.au/religion/how-christian-humility-upend...

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Humility was a major factor in most pre-Christian religions and similar efforts, featuring prominently in Patanjali’s yoga sutra, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Buddhism, and so on.

The position reiterated in your article is based on a comparison of the New Testament to a naive reading of the Greek philosophers. Christianity did not uniquely bring humility into culture.

What's that sanskrit word for humility in Yoga Sutra? Don't cite 'vinaya', as it means modesty.

Well, humility is inverse of pride; pride is one of virtues in Aristotle's principia nicomachea.

'Christianity (to some extent Judaism), presented an idea, unknown to the world in which it grew, namely the Pagan world of Rome. The idea was that human beings are creatures of God and that they belonged to His domain. He was the dominus or the Lord of the domain. As a result, human beings should not be arrogant, but must be humble instead. (As the ‘Book of Job’ in the Old Testament makes it clear, there is a very heavy price to be paid for arrogance.) Here, it belonged to the opposite spectrum in Ancient thought, which saw arrogance as a moral virtue and humility as a despicable vice. Protestant Christianity, especially Luther and Calvin, very forcefully propagated this idea: Man was a sinner, worse than the lowest worm, because of which God’s Grace becomes unfathomable and ungraspable.' [1]

https://www.hipkapi.com/2017/01/13/humility-is-a-vice/

Pranidhana — in 2.45 for example.

There is no such thing as a monolithic “Ancient thought” — this is a boogeyman created by Christian apologists.

edit: Is that your site? You’ve put a lot of work in.

Well, it is pra-ni-dhAna. Of course, people can say it is humility. ni-dhAna is just deliberation, holding, slowing down. Even the root word dhA/धा is about holding, keeping, etc.

It doesn't matter how you call it, whether "Ancient thought" or "blah blah", what matters is that what is being referred to. It is about how people thought about human actions before Christianity took over.

I’m not clear how you’ve countered my point. It describes humility before god without any stretch of the imagination, and is variously translated because like much of sanskrit it does not map directly.

My second point is that attempting to reason about, or exclude topics from, something as practically diverse and unknown as “Ancient thought” in order to support the primacy of a specific religion is essentially folly.

not really, stoicism was a thing and also humility was in the spirit of delphic maxims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_maxims

I m no expert but i think what christianity brought was forgiveness, and the inclusion of women, the poor and the meek

Why stop there-- they popularized the babylonian slave morality, took mental illness's apparitions as genuine theophanies, brought the classic christian cognitive dissonance to the masses, enshrined platonic and priestly neet nonsense as law, and basically destroyed the west as a civilization (which augustine blamed the pagans on in 410, very humble)-- lots of stuff really

    John Casey, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others famously claim that “pagan” classical Greek ethical thought recognises no virtue of humility.

    The claim is true in the lexical sense that the pagan Greeks’ lists of virtues did not include a single virtue whose name is correctly translatable by the English word “humility”.

    However, their ethical world was richly charged with what we today have no difficulty recognising as humility-thoughts and humility-motivations, even if these were not collected together under a single virtue, but distributed instead among at least three other virtues—sophrosyne, dikaiosyne, and hosiotes.

Humility among the ancient Greeks in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813511...

    Our two most important sources for pagan Greek ethics are of course Plato and Aristotle.

    But we can and should look beyond them, to Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles for example, to get the full picture of the importance to the pagan Greeks of ethical thoughts about the smallness of humans like us in a big and alien world, and the consequent need for restraint and pity, and for the avoidance of hybris (outrage against the natural order of the world).

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