“Tapein-“ is the most common Greek root for “humility” and its cognates. The ancient secular use of “tapein-“ hardly gives any positive meaning. It usually refers to “low, lowly, poor, cowardly, or humiliation,” which are not the Greek ideals. Based on this understanding, the goal of this paper is to demonstrate how a philological research of the Greek root “tapein-“ through the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, which is a digitized database of Greek literature, can give historians a new angle to look at the radical changes of the fourth century Christianity.
The research shows that the root occurs about nine thousand times in the known Greek literature from the sixth century BCE up to the beginning of the fifth century CE. Every century takes its own share of the uses of the root. The fourth century CE, however, demands a particular attention because this century alone uses the root about six thousand times. They are heavily concentrated in Christian writings and mostly are used with positive connotations if not to mean a Christian virtue. Even considering some statistical margins of error and the problems of dating of the documents, the result is overwhelmingly stark to be ignored and would leave many questions to historians.
The key question for this paper is this: Why did Christians begin to use the Greek root “tapein-“ so heavily in this century in which the Church victoriously became one of the leading powers of the Greco-Roman world? To partly answer the question, this paper suggests from which angle historians may look at the philological data by providing some historical-textual knowledge of how the root “tapein-“ is used in secular Greek literature, how it could shed any positive meanings to the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how it was used spiritually and politically for the Church and the ascetic movement of the fourth century. This may tell historians about what these six thousand humilities of the fourth century CE cried out to the radical changes of their time.
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