Haughtiness can attain various degrees. It may go so far as to interfere with man’s subordination to God, whenever this demand assumes a concrete form which appears too painful to bear. There is a type of haughty person who would not bend his knees even before God. As a rule, however, the vice of haughtiness only affects man’s relations with his fellow men. What the haughty person is chiefly bent upon is to avoid receiving anything as a gift from others, accepting any mercy or sympathy, being in the debt of anyone else, or owing gratitude to anyone. Every act that would imply on his part a recognition of any kind of dependence on others is connected, in his feeling, with an unbearable loss of dignity. For instance, though he may not find it difficult to acknowledge other people’s merits of his own accord, he would at once feel it incompatible with his dignity to do so, were he to suspect that his homage was counted upon as an obligatory tribute.

Again, while he may be willing to respect official prerogatives or codified laws, he will meticulously refuse every gesture of submission to any authority not strictly official or legal in character. The haughty person, in a word, is hard, cramped, and morally close-fisted. His behavior constitutes an express antithesis to charity, loving kindness, and readiness to serve; it forms the utmost contrast to a soul penetrated and opened up by the light of Jesus.

This form of pride, too, is evil and entirely incompatible with our transformation in Christ. The pride of the stoic or the cynic is of this kind. And it is this pride which is erected into an ideal at war with charity and humility, in the famous lines of Horace: Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae (“If the world should collapse in ruins about him, struck by its fragments he would remain fearless”). It is the same pride which is at the basis of many a form of fearlessness and natural virility. There is nothing the haughty soul dreads so much as fear. Yet, it is precisely he who so often becomes a slave to the basest kind of fear—the fear of other people’s judgment, which is also called human respect. (This mad pursuer of independence is very dependent on the admiration others give to his independence.)

This type of man, then, loath to ask for anything; convinced that he is above the need of redemption; abhorring any situation in which the goodwill of others (or its absence) would affect him; infatuated with the idol of his “upright” self-sufficiency; ashamed of any movement of love or compassion, indeed of any kind of sentiment; in a word, an epitome of cramped tension, is, again, a type of which humility embodies an integral negation.

Humility does not fear legitimate subordination to others