Christian humility calls us to an act of self-humiliation

But we must go one step further. He whose soul has become a seat of consummate humility is not only able to confess his wrongs with ease, to submit himself, or to bear an offense with resignation; he actually elects to be the last. He yearns for the practice of obedience; he is glad to suffer slights and avid of contempt and rebuke. It is here that we reach the mysterious innermost core of Christian humility.

What the latter implies is not merely a liberation from pride in its various forms (including haughtiness); not merely a recognition of our true metaphysical situation and an emergence from all illusions; not merely the habit of seeing ourselves in blissful freedom of soul as we appear in the eyes of God and of giving our joyous assent to this truth.

Beyond that, Christian humility implies an express act of self-humiliation, a voluntary descent beneath our legitimate natural dignity, an act of reducing ourselves to naught before God. It implies the gesture of a permanent inner dying of the self, so that Christ may live in us—a gesture that has found its unique expression in the figure of St. John the Baptist and his words: “He must increase: but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

If, as has been pointed out earlier, humility is only conceivable as a response to the personal God of the Christian revelation, again this deepest fulfillment of humility is only conceivable as a response to the God-Man, Jesus Christ; to the very gesture of descent performed by Him who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men and in habit found as a man; humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:7-8).

Let us represent to ourselves the ineffable scene, as reported by St. John in his Gospel (13:2-15): “And when supper was done (the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Him), knowing that the Father had given Him all things into His hands and that He came from God and goeth to God, He riseth from supper and, having taken a towel, girded Himself. After that, He putteth water into a basin and began to wash the feet of the disciples and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded . . . Then after He had washed their feet and taken His garments, being set down again, He said to them: Know you what I have done to you? You call me Master and Lord. And you say well: for so I am. If then I, being your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also.”