Thinking little of your abilities is sometimes mis-identified as humility. It's really insecurity, and it's not a good thing. Last summer, this was brought to my attention while reading The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis. The book is a "series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood, so as to advise him on methods of securing the damnation of a British man, known only as "the Patient".
This is his letter to Wormwood on the subject of humility (keep in mind, the "enemy" is God, since this is a letter from Satan):
Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility.
You must 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.
To anticipate the Enemy’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 from 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 regonise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love – a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors.
His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man’s mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forget about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself as a bad one.
What a brilliant letter. I'm learning that humility is not having a low opinion of your own talents and character. It is having a high opinion of your talents and character, finding them of great value, but without bias for whether they are your talents or your neighbor's. Good stuff; a good reminder.
