![]() I asked him what he thought the woman was responding to. And the woman looked at me and said, ‘Watch out for the humility topos.’ And then sort of disappeared in a puff of smoke.” We serve him in humility’ - when they were the least humble people you can find in history. The humility topos was used for these abbots - you can think of a good one in Eco’s ‘Name of the Rose’ - who were actually monsters of arrogance, but were always banging on about how humble they were - ‘Just like our lord Jesus Christ. She explained that, in the medieval era, humility was seen as a great virtue. ![]() A woman came up to me afterwards, a medievalist at the university there, and she said, ‘Have you heard of the humility topos?’ I said no. I’d done an event in New Zealand at a very large auditorium, hundreds of people, and I was kind of pleased with it it had gone well. “I had a short and rather valuable lesson,” Mitchell said after a morning on the beach, “one of these warnings that the universe gives you on a platter sometimes. Along the way, he told me a story about the perils of humility. As the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano was spewing plumes of ash into European airspace in April, shuttering airports and stranding millions, the British novelist David Mitchell, a tall, gracious, high-spirited man of 41, was marching me across a long, flat tidal beach near his home in Ireland’s West Cork. ![]()
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