Yet, by the same token we also realize what God has granted to us. First of all, humility must not cause us to forget the fact that God has created us in His likeness, that we are spiritual persons. It is not lack of humility which makes the Psalmist say: “Thou hast made [man] a little less than the angels” (Ps. 8:6). Any form of the negation of our nature as a spiritual person (be it, say, materialism or the worship of vital force)—any idea of levelling down the incomparable ontological superiority of man to all mere vital being, let alone to mere matter—is hopelessly remote from the attitude of true humility. For a denial of that ontological dignity which God has conferred on us forcibly involves a disregard for the glory and all-powerfulness of God; yet humility is above all a recognition of the glory of God, and in a secondary sense only, a recognition of our own unimportance.

Over and above the natural dignity that God has conferred on man, Christian humility will remember that far higher and ineffable gift of divine mercy; its call upon man to participate in divine life; the imparting of supernatural life through Baptism.

Pantheism simultaneously depersonalizes man and exalts him, rendering humility impossible

The humble Christian, therefore, will be the last to emulate the pantheist in minimizing human personality or regarding man as a quantité négligeable. He will not become a victim of that infatuation for size which, in view of the colossal dimensions of material nature or the immensity of the solar systems, suggests a notion of man as a mere drop in the world’s great ocean. In this case man’s actions could never, of course, mean more than a sequence of irrelevant details in the process of nature. Behind this suicidal nihilism—as we have already hinted—a kind of sinister pride is hidden; for howsoever its teachers may emphasize the irrelevance of man, from their conception of being constituent parts of this vast and divinized cosmos they again snatch a vertiginous sense of bigness; at bottom, that vast cosmos is nothing but an ego inflated beyond measure with which one may identify oneself. The individual’s alleged function of being a part of the great whole holds out a compensation for pride; for the significance one may yet have as part of the whole is at any rate inherent in what is ultimately the same thing as oneself, not a gift from above, from an absolute Being radically different in kind.

Inasmuch as it denies a personal Godhead—creating out of nothing a world distinct from itself, through a free act of its will—pantheism, of necessity, blurs the concept of man as a finite being. The bond between Creator and creature is superseded by a relation between the whole and the part.