PARADOXES OF HUMILITY: THE ETHICS ST DOROTHEUS’ OF GAZA IN THE LIGHT OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
Humility is considered by many Christians as a core virtue. However, their opinions as to its content diverge greatly. To elucidate the concept of humility it seems appropriate to turn back to its descriptions in the early Christian tradition. An authoritative source for a description of this kind are the writings of St. Dorotheus of Gaza from the 6th century, the influence of which reaches far beyond the historical epoch and immediate social environment of their author and stretches both to the members of the Society of Jesus in the West and to numerous readers of Orthodox spiritual self-help books in Russia. Ultimately relying on ancient Greek philosophy and psychology, St Dorotheus develops a theory of virtues and passions as behavioural dispositions whose actualizations are right and wrong actions, respectively. He seeks to justify the core character of humility by presenting a sophisticated interpretation of a scriptural text (Gen 2 and 3) and gives a detailed description of the kinds of humility and of conscious states associated with them. Unfortunately, his account of humility, too, turns out to be rather incoherent as it involves mutually incompatible and psychologically implausible attitudes, such as attributing one’s own right actions to God and simultaneously taking oneself to be doing not enough for salvation. Besides that, in his approach St Dorotheus favours utter self-humiliation which is hard to reconcile both with the received Christian and enlightened moral point of view. Nevertheless, a reasonable attempt at reconstruction of the concept of humility can be made with reference to the ancient Greek principle of the mean that St. Dorotheus himself clearly endorses. According to this principle, humility is primarily to be understood as «balancing-out» of one’s own and other’s preferences on the basis of their supposed objective value and with due respect for human dignity. One more aspect of humility is a committed acceptance of one’ own and other’s finitude and vulnerability as human beings. Explicated along these lines, the concept of humility could be of interest not only for Christian spirituality but also for contemporary ethics, theory of action, and social philosophy.