Can Christians "Be" Humble? Or Noble, Gentle, or Servile?

Once again, a Christian who is careless about word choices remarked that someone else ought to be "humble." Once again, I wonder what the speaker imagines that "humble" means. Clues to the use of words often come from their origins, so let's look at the adjectives that derive from the different classes of people in the old English feudal system: humble, servile, gentle, noble, and royal.
"Humble" derives ultimately from the Latin word humus, fertile soil. Humble people were those who tilled the soil. There were different categories of "humble folk." Serfs differed from slaves in that serfs were bought and sold with the land, while slaves could be traded around the world. Other tenants, peasants, and freeholders had some civil rights; in some times and places they could earn money, trade, travel, and do as they liked in many ways, but their status was still low and they were expected to remember it.

Humble manners involved elaborate (and probably insincere) displays of deference toward others. Humble manners are rarely observed today. About the only surviving part of this whole system of etiquette is the military salute. Standing up when a person of superior status enters a room was the last piece of humble manners to disappear from twentieth-century culture. Those who don't mind watching others "act humble" toward them can make money, nowadays, exploiting the sexual fetishism a few people still attach to humble manners.

The concept of humility did, however, acquire an extra meaning from Christian religious writing about the position of mortals relative to God. Some vestiges of humble manners survive in religious practices like kneeling in prayer. Many people believe that it is blasphemous to use these manners toward fellow mortals.

"Servile" derives from the Latin word servus, a slave. The servile class were employed as personal and domestic servants. Their status in feudal society was about as low as that of humble people. They, too, were expected to display deference toward others.

Christian religious writers could not completely condemn servile behavior, since Jesus displayed it when He washed the apostles' feet, but as a rule the connotations of the word "servile" have been undesirable. Along with the transparently insincere displays of deference, servile people were also stereotyped as venting their emotions on subordinate servants, and blaming subordinates for their own misconduct. When Chaucer wanted to write about a young man who took the servant's role while travelling alone with his father, even Chaucer had to describe him as "lowly and serviceable" rather than "lowly and servile."

"Gentle" derives from the Latin word gens, which meant "an extended family" but was used only of families of fairly high status. The English word has an interesting history, having been used in the sense of "Gentile, non-Jewish" and also in the sense of "fish bait" (because worms were sold in clumps, because they were harmless, or both). Mostly it referred to the class of people who had inherited estates, which they were expected to rent out but not allowed to sell. An English gentleman was any man who had a coat of arms and some land, but not a title. His position was the same, regardless of whether he had money, education, manners, character, or a pleasant temper. (His sister was a gentlewoman, not a lady...see below.)

Since Americans have no official registry of coats of arms, in theory an American gentleman or gentlewoman would be any person who has inherited land. Around the time the English discovered America, however, confusion about the meaning of "gentleness" was introduced by an obscure little tract describing the ideal English gentleman. C.S. Lewis criticized this book, in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, for confusing the ideal of a gentleman with the ideal of a Christian: apparently the book went on at some length about the gentleman's social manners and religious practice, and, Lewis said, had very little to say about practical property management.

Up into the twentieth century, a nurturing touch was described as "tender" rather than "gentle." Since "tender" is now often used to describe injured or hypersensitive flesh itself rather than the way it might be touched, there is some excuse for what is now the most common way we use the word "gentle," but historically it is inaccurate. The notion that American males should try to "be gentlemen" was based on a political philosophy that postulated that, although most Americans belonged to what Europeans now called the bourgeois class, the French bourgeoisie wanted to emulate gentlemen and gentlewomen, and so would Americans. The distinction was a point of etiquette, not personality.

"Noble" derives from the Latin word nobilis, the aristocracy. (Nobilis is late Latin; the oldest noble families in Rome were the patricii, but "noble" rather than "patrician" was the standard word in feudal England.) Noble manners were observed from two distinct points of view. They were the manners of noble knights and fair ladies who had everything money could buy, at the time, and were therefore motivated by "higher loves" than mere love of money. Noble manners were also the manners of arrogant, pretentious rich people, who were prone, in real life, to drink, gamble, philander, waste resources others really needed, and dump their hung-over moods onto the gentle and servile classes.

Perhaps this disparity between the ideal and the real behavior of titled aristocrats explains why we now describe extraordinarily fine behavior as "noble," but don't encourage people to cultivate noble manners. In practice, the main difference in the etiquette recommended to the noble and gentle classes seems to have been that lords and ladies were expected to have a lot of money, while gentlemen and gentlewomen could be and often were poor. Based on this difference, John Ruskin recommended in the nineteenth century that English women try to be frugal "gentlewomen" rather than extravagant "ladies," but few people seem to have accepted his recommendation.

English also has a word, "royal," derived ultimately from Latin rex, a king, to describe the behavior of the family at the very top of the hierarchy. Royal manners were not available for anyone but the king and his immediate family to copy. In feudal times the royal family had more than ceremonial duties; they were expected to rule on legal matters, avoid being murdered by rivals, and try to conceal their envy of those who weren't royal...but when Americans use "royal" loosely, they usually mean something extremely large or expensive.

English does not have a common adjective that refers to the behavior of the class to which most English-speaking people now belong--business and office workers who live in town. When this class of people became numerous and noticeable in England, the adjective applied to them was a French word, "bourgeois." Before that, they were only a sub-category of the servile class.

For those who believe in American democracy, it is probably better to avoid recommending that anyone "be" any of these things. Then again, for those who seriously want to improve their relationships with other people, it's probably best to avoid using the word "be" at all. Whatever the speaker cited at the beginning of this article wants the other person to do, it can't possibly be "belong to the feudal humble class," since (a) both of them are Americans and (b) the feudal system is breaking up even in Britain. It would be more useful for the speaker to specify behaviors the speaker would like to observe in the other person. When we describe specific things we want other people to do, we give them some chance of being able to do those things.

SOURCES

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary.

More about lifestyles and manners of Europeans of all classes: Philippe Aries, A History of Private Life. 

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Prologue). View an online edition here.

C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies. View an online edition here.

More about choosing words to influence people's behavior: Suzette Haden Elgin's Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series, especially Success with the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and The Gentle Art of Communicating with Kids. Web site here.

To request Aries' and Elgin's books as Books You Can Buy From Me (at a price including a 10% royalty payment to the authors), click here.