To sum up: we must not, in statu viae, indulge in a contemplation of our own values; much less can we enjoy them even in the sense of a response to value. Our position in relation to ourselves is intrinsically different from what it is in relation to others. Accordingly, too, love of self is not love in the full and proper sense of the term, as is the one typified by our love for another person. Self-love is confined to our concern for our own happiness and salvation, together with our assent to the divine idea of a fully deployed value-response and of a genuine frui which we are ordained to realize; it lacks those aspects of delight in the beauty and in the splendor of values which are proper to our love of other persons.

This fundamental difference between our position towards ourselves and towards other persons is also revealed in humility. We are to lift our eyes to the majestic splendor of God and to God’s reflection in our fellow men. As regards our relation with ourselves, however, we are to look at our defects and the vastness which separates us from the glory of God; the talents and the gifts of grace which God has given to us we are to consider only insofar as is necessary in order to examine what use we have made of them. Walking in the paths of God, a life pleasing to God will suffuse our consciousness, as said above, with the inward happiness and peace evoked by the soul’s concord with the world of values; whereas it would but undo its own meaning and disprove its own truth, were it to seduce us into an appreciative contemplation of “our” values. Others may do that, never we, ourselves.

Haughtiness prizes independence and self-assertion