Humility is often called the lost virtue. Foulcher attempts to assure humankind that humility is not a lost virtue. She sets it in several traditions in several monastic places and explains how it is still very much a part of daily life, and especially of religious life in monasteries.
Foulcher places humility in the modern world, then in the Greco-Roman world, then in the Judeo-Christian world. She proceeds to humility in the desert places and moves into the cloisters. She then moved humility into the monasteries, starting with the Monastery of St. Benedict, Monastery of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Christian de Cherge, and ending with the Monks of Tibhirine.
Humility emerges not as a moral virtue achieved by human effort, but as a way opened by grace as a divine climate to which all are invited to inhabit. She challenges the church to reclaim humility as essential to its life and witness today.
Humility was put at central stage with the election of the poor
man called Pope Francis, who took to washing feet, paying his own housing fees, living simply, making the earth his home.
This book provides a deeply thoughtful and well-researched consideration of this difficult, indispensable, sometime dangerously misused, life-generating virtue.
(Thanks to Sr. Irene Hartman, OP for this
review.)
