But what we have now in mind is our joy related to the fact that the absolute Being is infinitely perfect and that this infinitely glorious Being is a Person. What an immense augmentation of the reality of good is implied in this—that the summum bonum (“the highest good”) should not be a mute impersonal something, an idea or a principle, but a Person speaking to us: Ego sum qui sum (“I am who am”); the absolute Person in whom all values converge at their highest, who has created us and keeps us in being, who embraces us and owns us as only a person can.

Humility calls upon us to allow our hearts to be wounded by the glory of God, to fall on our knees in loving adoration, and to deliver ourselves over to God entirely. We must display that pure response in which our center of gravity is thus transferred from ourselves to God, that His glory taken in itself, without any reference to His benevolence towards us, becomes for us a source of precious joy: Dews meus et omnia (“My God and my all”), said St. Francis of Assisi.

Humility acknowledges our debt to God

Yet, no less essential to true humility is a second step: the confrontation of our own person with the infinite Person who is God. In the face of God we become aware of our sinfulness and our weakness. We say with St. Francis, “Who art Thou, and who am I.” We discern our nothingness and our obscurity and join in the words of the Psalmist, “But I am a worm, and no man” (Ps. 21:7). We come to understand that we are utterly in the debt of God and completely dependent upon Him. “Know ye that the Lord is God: he made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps. 99:3).

In humility, our knowledge of God’s glory takes precedence over our recognition of our creatureliness

As has been shown above, it is only in our confrontation with God that we gain sight of the measure of our debility and our nothingness. However, the knowledge of our relative imperfection and finiteness would by itself suffice to cast us down and to fill us with despair, unless preceded by a contemplation of the glory of God. The revelation of divine glory is the objective condition for the realization of that essential postulate of humility: that the knowledge of our nothingness, far from casting us down or even persuading us into a resigned acceptance of our misery, shall evoke in us a blissful assent to our creaturely status.