Humility and Transcendence: From Medieval Art and Culture to Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer

This work explores the evolution of the concept of humility from medieval art to the modern philosophies of Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer. In the Middle Ages, humility was expressed as a theological and aesthetic virtue at the service of the divine and the community. Schleiermacher re-signified it as an existential openness to the Absolute, while Schopenhauer secularized it as compassion and the renunciation of the ego in the face of suffering. Through a hermeneutic-comparative approach, it is evident that humility constitutes a fundamental symbolic and anthropological axis for understanding transcendence and rethinking the current fragile human condition.