He who possesses humility derives from his confrontation with God not only an awareness of his nothingness and obscurity but a keen experience of his dependence as well. He realizes the truth that he is wholly at the mercy of the all-powerful Lord of life and death, that whatever thought he might have of escaping or eluding God could not but be a pure illusion. “Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy face?” (Ps. 138:7). However, for the Christian this sense of dependence takes on the aspect of being sheltered in God. The thought of his total impotence in relation to God does not arouse anguish or depression in him; he does not attempt to keep up an illusion of sovereignty and to arrange his life as though he were his own master.

Rather, he flings himself into the arms of the Almighty; he deliberately assents to his status of dependence, and prays with the holy Church: “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit” (Compline). Humility, then, contains not merely the knowledge of our dependence on God but the active conformance of our will to it; our blissful surrender to God. The humble one feels sheltered in God, indeed, as a possession of God: “We are his people and the sheep of his pasture” (Ps. 99:3).

Humility recognizes the ontological dignity of man

For humility demands that we not only take account of the personality of God but at the same time remain fully conscious of our own. Our awareness of “being naught” must not by any means entail on our part a tendency to depersonalization, a kind of a drab submersion in impersonal nature. That blissful assent to our creatureliness and our nothingness, our entire dependence on God, must be given freely and expressly: it must be, precisely, a personal act par excellence. Humility does not command a rejection of one’s own self, pure and simple.

Though we be nothing by ourselves, though everything we have is received—still, we have received a great deal from God. In the first place, humility certainly is our response to the infinite distance that separates absolute from creaturely being. Secondly, it is a response to the fact that whatever we have, we have received from God rather than brought about by ourselves. We grow aware, in humility, of our impotence and our total dependence on God. Finally, we fathom the depths of our wretchedness, our sinfulness, and our pitifulness; we are struck by the divine plenitude of light and our own obscurity.