Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [78]
Rather, he flings himself into the arms of the Almighty; he deliberately assents to his status of dependence, and prays with the holy Church: “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit” (Compline). Humility, then, contains not merely the knowledge of our dependence on God but the active conformance of our will to it; our blissful surrender to God. The humble one feels sheltered in God, indeed, as a possession of God: “We are his people and the sheep of his pasture” (Ps. 99:3).
Humility recognizes the ontological dignity of man
For humility demands that we not only take account of the personality of God but at the same time remain fully conscious of our own. Our awareness of “being naught” must not by any means entail on our part a tendency to depersonalization, a kind of a drab submersion in impersonal nature. That blissful assent to our creatureliness and our nothingness, our entire dependence on God, must be given freely and expressly: it must be, precisely, a personal act par excellence. Humility does not command a rejection of one’s own self, pure and simple.
Though we be nothing by ourselves, though everything we have is received—still, we have received a great deal from God. In the first place, humility certainly is our response to the infinite distance that separates absolute from creaturely being. Secondly, it is a response to the fact that whatever we have, we have received from God rather than brought about by ourselves. We grow aware, in humility, of our impotence and our total dependence on God. Finally, we fathom the depths of our wretchedness, our sinfulness, and our pitifulness; we are struck by the divine plenitude of light and our own obscurity.
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