Wretched Humility, I

“Consider carefully, daughters, the matter I’m going to speak to you about, for sometimes it will be through humility and virtue that you hold yourselves to be so wretched, and at other times it will be a gross temptation.  I know of this because I have gone through it.  Humility does not disturb or disquiet or agitate, however great it may be; it comes with peace, delight, and calm.”—Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection, ch.39, par.2.

There is a certain attitude within certain circles—religious and ex-religious—that looks at old-fashioned (I would avoid the word “traditional”) religious language as negative.  The many remarks by Teresa and other saints about their “wretchedness” sound like self-hatred—and so some religious people find themselves hating themselves—until, eventually, they escape this brand of religion, usually into no religion at all.

I know a few of those people personally, and know of many publicly.  You most likely do as well.  Enough that, as a religious person myself, I would be willing to wager that souls are lost through this conflation—not that being wrong means a person has lost their soul, but rather that certain types of intellectual mistake drive people away from precisely those things that they most need.  That’s common enough in the physical world, n’est-ce pas?

It matters, then, what one thinks it means to call oneself a “wretched sinner,” as Teresa often does.  But a good many of the explanations that purport to explain language about human wretchedness—to explain how it does not entail an unhealthy psychological attitude--fail, to my mind.  Teresa’s remarks here are helpful because they point to a distinction between a humility which is real and good and healthy, and one which is not.