Is humility really, “thinking of yourself less”?

The law is summarized as “loving your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18) and Jesus gives us the Golden Rule, “treat others as you would like to be treated. (Matt 7:12)” We would agree when we see someone who loves their neighbor well and treats others as they would want to be treated that this person is indeed acting humbly.

But C.S. Lewis’ (for all that I love him I don’t fully agree with him on this) statement from Mere Christianity and echoed by the late Tim Keller that “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is think of yourself less.” seems to be off kilter with the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself and Jesus’ teaching at the Sermon on the Mount.

Don’t get me wrong, we could all do with thinking of ourselves less. After all self-love is the gospel of the age, the poison in the well of modernity. But if we are to love as we have been loved then it necessitates that we 1) have a knowledge of the love by which we have been loved, and 2) categorically recognize that love to be good, right, true, helpful, hopeful, and desirable. It is a love that we wish to welcome other people into as Henry Scougal says, not a love that we’ve not considered both as an object and as something has benefited us.

And maybe this is splitting a frog hair four ways. After all we can definitely agree that someone who is arrogant is not humbly… or loving.