Thomistic faith, Markan faith, and humility in the domain of personal relationships
Markan faith as a trait would also relate well to the virtue of humility in the domain of personal relationships, whether human-human or divine-human.
As for human-human relationships, not infrequently, we find ourselves needing to rely on others to come through for us on matters of importance to us, especially in areas of our lives where we recognize our own deficiencies.
By way of illustration, consider a marriage in which each partner brings different strengths and limitations to the relationship. Suppose one partner is incompetent at managing finances, while the second is competent. If the first partner is virtuously humble, they will be disposed to recognize and own this limitation of theirs, and if they have faith in their partner, they will be disposed to rely on them, as a financial manager, and to appropriately overcome challenges to relying on them in this capacity, e.g., continuing to rely on them despite a minor mistake in the budget or a penalty from an unpaid bill. Further, suppose the second partner is significantly less able than the first to provide the empathy, perspective, and emotional support that their teenage child needs. If the second partner is virtuously humble, they will be disposed to recognize and own this limitation of theirs, and if they have faith in their partner, they will be disposed to rely on them, as the more emotionally switched-on parent, and appropriately overcome challenges to relying on them in this capacity, e.g., when they occasionally fail to meet their teenager’s emotional needs. Of course, there are many other ways in which limitations-owning can dovetail with resilient reliance to enhance a marriage and family life. To the extent that each partner virtuously owns their limitations and virtuously relies on the other, and the other comes through with respect to that which they rely on them for, a successful marriage and family life seems more likely than it otherwise would be.
Also, in human-human relationships, appropriately relying on someone can be an aid to becoming more virtuously humble. By way of illustration, when you put your faith in a partner, friend, or therapist, as a confidant, and in doing so you rely on them for honesty about defects in your deep self, you rely on them to be discrete and to hold you accountable. By providing you with a safe, supportive relationship for you to work through your deficiencies, you may well be more likely to recognize and own your laziness, narcissism, selfishness, and other vices, so as to enhance the process of personal growth needed to help you flourish as an individual and in your other relationships.
We suspect that these two observations generalize. Generally speaking, humility and faith, virtuously exercised, make human-human relationships more likely to flourish.What holds for marriage and family life, and for therapeutic relationships, also holds for a wide variety of other relationships between parents, children, lovers, colleagues, neighbors, business partners, commanders and soldiers, leaders and citizens, employers and employees, and many other worthwhile social relationships.
How might Thomistic faith as a character trait fare in the domain of human-human relations, and how might it relate to humility? There are many ways in which a tendency to believe something with certainty on inadequate evidence will not serve relationships well. For example, if our first marriage partner described above forms and persists in the belief that they are a competent financial manager, despite their evidence, and if the second one forms and persists in the belief that they are an emotionally switched-on parent, despite their evidence, and if both of them are stably disposed to believe with certainty on inadequate evidence in other ways pertinent to their marriage and family life, then they are more likely to misrepresent their relationship with each other and with their child in ways that would worsen those relationships. Furthermore, just like in the domain of inquiry, a stable disposition to believe with certainty on inadequate evidence and a stable disposition to own limitations relevant to a personal relationship pull in different, incompatible directions.
When we think about someone in a personal relationship and hold the first disposition fixed in our thinking about them, they would at best only sporadically own their limitations since they would be stably disposed to misrepresent themselves to themselves.Let's now turn to humility and faith in a divine-human relationship. Any attempt to explain how they would relate to each other will be tradition-bound. We choose Abrahamic religion. On that tradition, humans tend to fail in multiple ways: we don't live up to our own moral ideals, we seek our own power and interest over the general good, we squander our natural and Godgiven talents, we neglect to steward creation well, and by acts of commission and omission we undermine the establishment of a peaceful, just, and harmonious global community.These and other failures are at odds with God's purposes. Consequently, we are alienated from God, and we are alienated from each other. At our best, we are aware of our failings and we own them, with regret and an intention to improve. But improvement is difficult, fraught with setbacks, uncooperativeness, greed, malaise, disrespect, and a thousand other impediments. Left to our own devices, failure is not only our past, it is our future as well. Fortunately, God has not left us to our own devices. God has provided a way to be reconciled with God and, as a consequence, a way to be reconciled with each other. Different Abrahamic traditions tell different stories about what that way is. But the stories share in common the idea that human beings individually and collectively can align themselves with God's way by maintaining faith in God, relying with resilience on God and God's way, to help us undo the alienation that characterizes our relationship with God and our relationships with each other. On Abrahamic religion, therefore, humility enables us to see and own our failures and alienation, while faith enables us to align ourselves with God's way of reconciliation. Humility dovetails with Markan faith.
It is difficult to see how Thomistic faith would fit well into this general picture. Just one illustration. Suppose we were generally stably disposed to believe with certainty on inadequate evidence. In that case, we would be more likely to incorrectly view our failings, either by believing that we are worse off than the evidence warrants or by believing that we are better off than the evidence warrants. Moreover, having formed these false beliefs, we would hold them with certainty, and so we would be more likely to retain them. As a consequence, we would be less likely to see ourselves aright, and so more likely not to own them appropriately, whether by being too disheartened by an overly negative view of ourselves or by being too unperturbed by an overly positive view of ourselves. Either way, a precondition of God's way of reconciliation— namely, our seeing ourselves aright—would be less likely to be satisfied. So it is that Thomistic faith would be at odds with humility, and how humility serves God's purposes in reconciliation.
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