Apart from these morally negative contrasts to haughtiness, there are yet even further natural varieties of the capacity for self-subordination, which may impress us favorably rather than otherwise, but which must still be distinguished from humility. Thus, the disposition we find in many women to center their lives in full self surrender to serving a man and supplementing his personality, to seek support in him in a way comparable to the ivy clinging to a tree; or again, the modesty prompting a man to keep demurely to an inferior station, instead of affecting the first place in the manner of the haughty. These attitudes, too, are the fruits of a natural need or a certain reasonable sobriety—they are not humility.

Humility originates in the right response to God

For, even in the perspective of our relations with our fellow men, true humility has its origin in our right response to God, which implies not only our awareness of the glory and omnipotence of God, and of our own creaturely finiteness, but a total emancipation from our spasm of self-centeredness in the presence of Christ. He is humble in whose heart the infinite merciful love of God, which bends down to us in the person of Christ—the descent of God, who longs to gather the lost sheep, and who solicits our love—has dissolved all pride, even the hidden and the limited one, and reduced all self-assertion: that is what places him in an entirely new position even in regard to his fellow men.

In its full and specific unfolding, humility calls forth what we shall later describe as the virtue of meekness. The humble one has divested himself of all hardness; he faces his fellow men, not mailed and armored, but in the luminous attire of invincible charity. Even his foes—and this is the test of meekness—he confronts unarmed.

In specific contradistinction to the haughty character, the humble man is not hampered by any inhibitions in subordinating himself to others; he is past all self-assertion and therefore ready to obey all authority that has its place in the divine plan. He sets himself at a distance from his own arbitrary will and does not seek satisfaction in the consciousness of unbridled freedom. Whereas a haughty person (apart from the question of the particular objects for which he strives) resents and feels any curb placed on his arbitrary good pleasure to be intolerable, the person imbued with humility adopts as his maxim—in conformity with the seventh chapter of St. Benedict’s Rule—the words of Our Lord: “I am not come to do my will, but the will of Him who hath sent me.” Likewise St. Benedict says, concerning the third stage of humility: “Out of his love of God, the monk submits himself to his superior in perfect obedience.” Holy obedience, the expression of a complete breach with self-will and self-assertion, is that actualization of humility which is most explicitly opposed to social pride.