We find it in persons who are by no means blind to value, and are capable of a positive response to it. With them, the desire to count for much plays no decisive part; nor do they exhibit the specific obduracy of the victims of satanic pride. Their life is not spoiled through and through by disharmony; theirs is not the scorching hatred of light as personified by Alberic in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen. On the contrary, they are capable of an honest moral effort; in their lives, the problem of good and evil may rank paramount; they may well show great receptiveness to all kinds of beauty. But they shun confrontation with a personal God; they evade the full avowal of their creaturely status; they balk at that ultimate act of subordination which goes far beyond what is implied in every response to value.

So long as they are only concerned with the realm of values—which, after all, they may in a sense face as equal partners—they are ready to submit to the call of the object. Nay, they would even surrender to an Impersonal Absolute, to which they would be as parts to the whole. For, so long as there is no question of their relation with an absolute Person, they may still keep a last remnant of ego-sovereignty; moreover, as parts of the whole, they may, after a fashion, rejoice in their identity with the absolute.

It is only in our confrontation with a personal God that we become fully aware of our condition as creatures, and fling from us the last particle of self-glory. The idealists who cherish ethical autonomy, the pantheists, the theosophists: these all are bent on escaping from subordination to an almighty Lord, and consequently, from relinquishing a certain minimum sovereignty which flatters their pride.

Humility acknowledges our creaturely status

By contrasting it with this type of pride, we are better able to grasp the specific nature of humility. Humility involves the full knowledge of our status as creatures, a clear consciousness of having received everything we have from God. “Or what hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Cor. 4:7).

It is in humility that we attain to an exact consideration of the metaphysical situation of man. Humility presents in specifically sharp relief that general aspect of all Christian morality—the unreserved recognition of the metaphysical situation of man, the attitude of throwing all illusions overboard and granting to the whole of reality the response that is due to it. Thus, it has been said justly: “Humility is Truth.” Correspondingly, the soul of pride is falsehood, for pride means a refusal to realize our metaphysical situation.