Veritatem humiliter investigare. Sul ruolo dell’umiltà in Enrico di Gand

Abstract

Humility was perceived in the Christian Middle Ages as a fundamental moral and intellectual quality, opening the way for access to the divine. How this access occurred, and for what kind of people, was dependent on different theological and philosophical presuppositions. The role of humility was thus moulded according to different anthropological and noetical models. By the end of the 13th century, the «question de l’humilité», as Alain de Libera posed it, had also become a locus for confrontation and definition between different intellectual identities. This study focuses on the role that the secular master Henry of Ghent (ca. 1217-1293) assigned to humility for approaching and transmitting divine truth, both from the perspective of the single individual and of the Christian community. Some topical categories describing essential features of humility – low/high, the ladder, interior/exterior, empty/full – aid in the analysis of some passages from the works of this theologian.