Use
Piety in modern English usage can refer to a way to win the favour or forgiveness of a god. According to some, this type of piety does not necessarily require the spiritual piety, while others refrain from distinguishing the two.
It is also used by others to refer only to external signs that result from the spiritual aspect of piety. That is, according to some, if one is "truly" pious (in the spiritual sense), the natural and inevitable result of it will be religious piety. By this definition, then, piety can be either genuine, in that it springs from spiritual piety, or false, in that it is an attempt to exhibit the signs of piety for their own sake, or for some other reason (such as propitiation or public esteem).
In Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, and Anglicanism, piety is one of the Seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. In her work, Defy Gravity (2009), author Caroline Myss mentions prayers for invoking the "Grace of Piety" so that one can see every human being as divine.
Piety can be demonstrated by position or state of mind, such as prayer. The best known gestures demonstrating piety are kneeling in Christianity. bowing down to pray in Islam, and prostration (Buddhism).
Also used in Giuseppe Verdi's Italian opera Attila the Hun.
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“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
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