Christlike Humility

St. Silouan’s central teaching on humility: the distinction between the ascetic humility we struggle to attain and the indescribable humility of Christ which can only be given, humility as the very taste of the Holy Spirit, pride as the root of hell’s whole logic, and the humility of the Theotokos that he loved above all. For Silouan, to know humility is to know God; to lack it is to know nothing, however much one knows.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite; canonized 1987)

Two Humilities

St. Silouan’s most original contribution to ascetic theology is a distinction he drew from experience rather than from books: there are two humilities, and they are not the same in kind.

The first is ascetic humility — the humility a person acquires through struggle: self-knowledge, self-reproach, the descent into hell of which the companion teaching speaks (see The Word Unfolded). This humility can be described. It has degrees; it can be counseled, practiced, lost, regained. It is the humility of the publican who would not raise his eyes, and it is real and necessary.

The second is the humility of Christ, and of this Silouan says it cannot be uttered. Having known it in his vision of the Lord, he insisted that the Lord’s humility cannot be described, and cannot even be apprehended without the Holy Spirit — for when one tries to put the humility of God into human words it appears to language as a contradiction (Archimandrite Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, trans. Rosemary Edmonds, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991, “The Writings of Staretz Silouan,” sections on humility). This humility is absolute: it stands in relation to nothing, measures itself against nothing, competes with nothing. It is not a low estimate of self over against others — it has no “others” within its horizon at all — but the very mode of God’s love, the self-emptying by which the Lord descends to the lowest place to seek the lost. Christlike humility, Silouan said, makes a man glad to see others in greater glory than himself; “the humility of Christ dwells in the lowly ones: they are glad to be the least of men” (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite; cf. the selections collected in Orthodox Times, “St. Silouan through his acquaintance with Elder Sophrony”). One cannot reach this humility by climbing; it descends as a gift, and the soul recognizes it only because grace has already placed a taste of it within.

The distinction matters because it rescues humility from a confusion that has dogged it in the modern mind. Ascetic humility, isolated, can look like — and can decay into — a wounded self-contempt, a perpetual measuring of oneself downward against others. But Christlike humility is not measured against anyone at all. It is not the bottom rung of comparison but the absence of comparison; not self-hatred but a love so secure in God that it has no need to assert itself and feels no diminishment in another’s exaltation. The whole point of the ascetic descent of the word is to clear the soul of the pride that blocks this second humility, so that grace may pour the real thing in. The struggle does not manufacture the gift; it digs the channel by which the gift can come.

Humility as the Taste of the Spirit

This is why, for Silouan, humility is not finally a moral quality at all but an experiential register — a way the Holy Spirit is known. The soul that has received grace knows humility not as a duty performed but as a sweetness tasted; and when grace withdraws, the soul knows its loss precisely as the loss of that humility, and grows hard and proud. Silouan describes the whole of the spiritual life as a learning, through gaining and losing grace, of how to keep the humility in which the Spirit rests: “The Lord teaches the soul humility” (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite). The famous counsel of the descent into hell is, seen from this angle, simply the soul’s labor to return to the low place where the Spirit will again come and dwell.

Because humility is the Spirit’s own atmosphere, it is also the precondition of all true knowledge of God. A proud mind may possess much information about God and know nothing of Him; the humble heart, knowing little, knows Him. This is Silouan’s quiet rebuke to a theology of the intellect alone — and it carries real weight coming from an unlettered peasant who never studied theology in any school yet was sought out for counsel by the learned. The knowledge he commended is not the accumulation of doctrine, true and necessary though doctrine is, but the experiential knowing that the humble soul has of the God who dwells in it. He held that the Lord is known in the measure that He is loved, and loved in the measure that the soul is humbled; pride and the knowledge of God cannot occupy the same heart.

This experiential register also explains the peculiar restfulness of Silouan’s humility. It is not anxious, not straining, not perpetually taking its own spiritual temperature — the very preoccupation with self that defeats humility. The humble soul, for Silouan, is at peace precisely because it has stopped defending itself: it no longer needs to be right, to be vindicated, to be more than the least, and so it is free. The proud soul, by contrast, is always in torment, because it must everywhere maintain a self that everywhere meets contradiction. Here the teaching joins the word of Section 05 at the deepest level: to keep the mind in hell is to lay down, again and again, the self that pride keeps trying to lift up, and to find — at the bottom — the peace that only the humble know.

Pride as the Root of Hell’s Logic

The negative of all this is exact. If Christlike humility is the very form of God’s love, then pride is the very form of hell. Silouan teaches that pride is the soul’s primal sickness — the original lifting of the self against God that emptied paradise — and that all torment flows from it. “The proud always suffer from demons,” he was told (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite; cf. “On the Word to St. Silouan,” OrthoChristian.com no. 82322). Hell is not, in this vision, primarily a place of external punishment but the inward condition of a soul that has refused humility and so cannot bear the fire of God’s love, which the humble experience as paradise and the proud as torment.

This is why the two halves of Silouan’s witness lock together. To “keep the mind in hell” is to apply the cautery directly to pride at its root; to refuse despair is to keep that cautery from itself becoming a new and subtler pride. And the whole operation aims at the second humility — the Christlike humility that no struggle can manufacture but for which struggle prepares the ground.

The Humility of the Theotokos

Silouan’s devotion to the Mother of God belongs here, because in her he saw the created person in whom this second humility had most fully dwelt without sin. The Theotokos is, in his idiom, the one whose humility drew down the Lord Himself, the “lowliness of his handmaiden” (Luke 1:48) made the gate of the Incarnation. He records, with characteristic plainness, his own sense of her nearness and his longing to love as she loved (Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, on the Mother of God and the saints). For Silouan the Theotokos is not an abstraction but the proof that Christlike humility can rest in a human heart — the first and greatest of “the lowly ones” in whom the humility of Christ dwells.

Her place in his devotion is also a corrective against any misreading of his humility as merely an interior technique. The Theotokos shows that the second humility is not a feat of self-abasement at all but a perfect transparency to God: she is humble because she is wholly given, and her Magnificat — in which the lowly handmaiden rejoices and magnifies the Lord — is the very opposite of a morbid self-contempt. Silouan’s saints follow her in this. The lives of the saints, he taught, are luminous not because the saints thought meanly of themselves but because their humility had made them so transparent to grace that the love of God shone through them onto the whole world. This is the point at which his humility teaching opens directly into his prayer for all mankind (see The Whole Adam): the humble heart, emptied of self, becomes wide enough to hold others — and finally to hold the whole of Adam in its love.

Place in the Tradition

Silouan stands at the end of a long line that runs through the Philokalia and the desert. St. John Climacus had placed humility near the summit of the Ladder, in the great paradox that the soul which truly knows its own nothingness is the soul nearest to God (Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 25, “On Humility”). What Silouan adds is the sharp experiential distinction between the humility we attain and the humility we receive — and the location of both within the modern crisis of pride that Sophrony would later make the center of his own theology.

The teaching has close kin elsewhere in this repository. St. Paisios of Mount Athos, a generation later and on the Greek side of the Holy Mountain, taught humility as the indispensable foundation on which every other virtue stands or falls, and pride as the foothold of the demons — the same architecture in a different idiom (see St. Paisios: Humility). Paisios, too, insisted that grace flows downward like water and collects in the low places, and that “where there is humility, the devil has no place”; the convergence of two Athonite saints who never met, formed in the same neptic tradition, is itself a kind of confirmation of the teaching. And the dogmatic frame for it all — grace and synergy, the purification of the nous that prepares for theosis — is set out in the guide’s treatment of the spiritual life.

What Silouan adds to this common inheritance is his refusal to let humility be the soul’s own achievement. The first humility we labor for; the second we can only receive. And the whole arc of the spiritual life, in his telling, is the slow education by which the soul learns — through the bitter repetition of gaining and losing grace — to keep itself low enough for the gift to come and to stay. That this education was completed, in his case, in the obscurity of a monastery storehouse, by a man of no learning who became one of the most quoted spiritual voices of his century, is itself a parable of the teaching it embodies.

See Also

References

  • Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991 (Russian original Staretz Silouan, Paris, 1948), esp. “The Writings of Staretz Silouan” on humility, on the Mother of God, and on the saints.
  • St. John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Step 25, “On Humility.”
  • Kallistos Ware (Metropolitan). Foreword to Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite. SVS Press.
  • “On the Word to St. Silouan, ‘Keep Thy Mind in Hell and Despair Not.’” OrthoChristian.com, no. 82322.
  • “St. Silouan through his acquaintance with Elder Sophrony.” Orthodox Times (orthodoxtimes.com).