Over at Chronicles, Dr. Thomas Fleming has a concise piece of writing that covers lots of ground on how pagans, old and new, consider the virtue of humility. He contends that the best of the Greeks and Romans had an elevated notion of the virtue, though one not supernaturally elevated as it is in Christianity.
The neo-pagans — moral slobs and effeminates unworthy of their ancient (supposed) forebears — ridicule the virtue. The irony in this is that the modern, say, Nietzschian, while laying claim to the virtues of the ancient world, fails to see that those virtues passed into the Mystical Body of Christ, where they were elevated to the divine. In Catholic Theology, we call this a praeparatio evangelica, a preparation for the Gospel. That such a preparation was important to Catholic thinkers explains, for example, how the Sybil is placed so closely to David in the Dies Irae.
