Being Humble Does Not Mean You Must Lie

For a long time I believed that part of being "humble" was denying what I believed to be true which, by definition, is lying. I thought that when someone complimented a piece I had written, although I believed it also to be well put together, I was to deny the fact and to say, "No, it really isn't that good." Or if someone said to me, "You are so smart" I thought the "humble" response was to say, "No, I'm pretty foolish actually," although most of the time I don't think myself to be a foolish person.

I have an idea that I am not the only person in this predicament. And, like me, I know that if you have found yourself in such a circumstance that your intentions were completely "honest" although you were lying. As Christians we understand that humility is a virtue we are to develop (cf. Philippians 2:3-8) in order to imitate Christ and to have His "mind" in us. But, as Christians, we also understand that we are to "speak every man truth with his neighbor" (Ephesians 4:25). How then are we to do both? It seems that in our lives these virtues, humility and honesty, are almost at odds one with another. Although it is possible, I'm afraid that being both honest and humble persons will prove harder than we had anticipated. But how is it possible to be both? I will defer to someone much wiser than I. The following excerpt is from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

In these letters, Screwtape, the Undersecretary to Satan himself, writes letters to his nephew, Wormwood, who is currently enrolled in Hell's College of Tempters. Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to overthrow the faith of his "patient."

"You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe that they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's [God's] strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free form any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things" (The Screwtape Letters, pp. 70, 71).

Being humble does not mean that you must lie, nor does lying mean that you are being humble; it just means that you are a liar. True humility is forgetting one's self and rejoicing in the truth as it is, no less, and certainly no more. To admit less is dishonest, to think more is arrogance.