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We can best understand the special character of humility by following Thomas Aquinas’s account of humility and magnanimity as paired virtues. Together, magnanimity and humility equip us in responding well to the lofty vocation to which we are summoned as made to the image of God: that of participating in the reditus of creation to God, realized in ever-widening friendship with God. Magnanimity’s role is to strengthen us in the hopeful pursuit of this great good; humility’s, to dispose us to grasp our capacity for this achievement as gift. Freed from insecure self-preoccupation, the humble-and-magnanimous are freed for ever-reverberating joy.

Jennifer A. Herdt is Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School, and is the author of Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices.