When the author of the Letter to the Ephesians addresses slaves and masters, humility is at stake for both.1

Slaves, obey those who are your masters [kurioi] according to flesh... being the slaves [douloi] of Christ. knowing that each one, if he does good, will receive the same from the Lord [para kuriou].

Slaves have something to do under this new dispensation: to obey not merely as they must but wholeheartedly, aware that they are demonstrating their obedience to God. Masters should treat their slaves well in the awareness that God serves as master to all.

Somewhere in this combination of how things are, how they should be, and what they are called, we will find humility in the full and exact sense. For when humility is known as a virtue and prized, one asks where the humility is to be achieved, in one's nature or behavior or self­description. This virtue entails deliberate underestimation of oneself, so it seems to be a virtue one has to be conscious of, thus something beyond low standing alone.

Likewise possibly where humility is sneered at and barred from the company of the virtues, one may have to ask where it goes wrong, or what you want to say is wrong about a humble person. Do we blame that person's actual low or weak condition, or the works of humility suited to that con­dition? Or is it something in the language by which the humble know themselves to be humble?

The home may be ever so humble without thereby possessing the virtue of humility. What accounts for the difference?

What Nietzsche condemns the humble for raises questions like the ones I am asking. His attitude seems straightforward. In fact the less you know about Nietzsche the more straightfor­ward it will appear. Proud self-assertion is healthy, and the herd's morality tames the proud, and humility sins against human greatness.

Does the offense (for instance) in the life of humility described in Ephesians consist in the falseness of the caution that its author recommends to masters? Denying a divine cause for cau­tion makes Nietzsche no more original than any other atheist, who’d likewise respond to this Epistle that there is no master up above in heaven.

Maybe asking about a document from the Christianizing Roman world starts the story too late. Nietzsche drew on pre-Christian Greece, and as far as possible on Greek antiquity before Socrates, when he sought words for his opposition to a morality enfeebled by Christian and Platonic pieties. I will mainly be looking at On the Genealogy of Morals, because that book (henceforth GM) contains Nietzsche’s most sustained and greatest discussion of ethical phe­nomena; and it is informed throughout by Nietzsche’s reading of Greek antiquity. We will have an easier time understanding GMs revulsion toward humility if we imagine as Nietzsche does the reaction that a very early un-Pauline time would have exhibited to the sight of humility.

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