The Madness of Divine Humility

There is a madness in God’s love. It is not the madness of confusion or passion but of boundless humility. The Infinite bows before the finite, the Creator kneels before His creature, and the Immortal accepts the embrace of death. This folly, which the world cannot comprehend, is the very fragrance of divine life.

Archimandrite Zacharou begins where every true ascetic and every angel begins, with humility. Not the gentleness of manner that the world mistakes for meekness, but that consuming fire that annihilates pride. “Humility,” he writes, “characterises the way of the Lord, of His angels and of His saints.” It is the pulse of heaven, the rhythm by which the divine heart beats.

When God descends, He does not simply lower Himself but empties Himself. The path of Christ is a descent into the abyss of human misery, not as a visitor but as one who bears it in His own flesh. He serves His enemies, feeds His betrayers, and offers His body as food for the very ones who pierce His hands. The Liturgy repeats this scandal of love again and again, as the Lord ministers to those who do not yet love Him.

Humility is not a condition to be achieved. It is participation in the divine mode of being. To be humble is to live as God lives, to descend, to give, to love without measure.

Even the angels, clothed in light, tremble before this mystery. They veil their faces and their feet, knowing that even their brilliance is borrowed. They burn with the fire of worship yet they know that their flame is not their own. Their wings become the language of humility, two to hide, two to serve, two to soar. They fly not in presumption but in adoration.

The saints too live in this holy descent. They stand before God with the same awareness as the angels, that all they are is gift, that existence itself is a loan from Love. They know that self-assertion is exile and that the only way to be truly alive is to be emptied. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” says the Forerunner, summing up the entire logic of heaven in one sentence.

But man, unlike the angels, wars against his own humility. The ego is a restless tyrant, forever building thrones from dust and calling them eternal. It fears the abyss of nothingness, the confession that “I am an unprofitable servant.” Yet it is only when a man dares to enter that abyss that he finds himself upheld by God.

To become “a nothing of humility,” as Zacharou says, is not to vanish but to make room for the Infinite. It is to discover the paradox that when I diminish, I am enlarged, when I bow down, I am raised up, when I lose my life, I begin to live.

Humility is not weakness, it is the strength of God manifest in the flesh. It is the hidden ladder that unites earth and heaven, the song that makes angels tremble and demons flee. The man who has tasted it is invincible, for he has ceased to defend himself and allows God to be his defense.

The path of humility is the path of divine fire. It burns away every pretense until only love remains. And when love alone lives in the heart, man stands beside the angels, both veiled and radiant, both silent and aflame, adoring the One who became nothing that all might be filled with His glory.

Reflection based on the writing of 

Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou 

“The Ineffable Folly of Divine Love” pp. 15-17