Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [84]
While glorying in or boasting of one’s advantages is a fortiori incompatible with humility, their pleasurable contemplation—as has been shown—is also an offspring of pride; for what vanity delights in is not the value as such but its ornamental function in the service of the ego. Accordingly, a vain person is indifferent to values exhibited by others, and only interested in those which he deems to be distinctive of himself. But—so one might object—why should it be wrong of man to delight in his own values, even in the sense of taking delight in objective value? Why should he be encouraged to discover, to recognize, and to rejoice in the values of others, and at the same time bidden to forego any such rejoicing in his own virtues, nay, to suppress in his mind any emphatic awareness of them?
Humility proscribes all contemplation of one’s own virtues
It is here that we reach the core of humility, its innermost secret as it were. In addition to banning all desire to count for much, all proud glorying and all vain delighting in one’s own self, humility, indeed, proscribes all contemplation of one’s own values, nor does it even tolerate any keen consciousness of them. The reason is, first, that humility implies our consciousness of our own frailty and of the constant danger of sin in which we live, and above all, a trembling anxiety lest we should lapse into pride. No one is truly humble unless he is imbued with the sense of the permanent menace which pride represents to fallen man. As the Psalmist says, “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth: and a door round about my lips. Incline not my heart to evil words: to make excuses in sins” (Ps. 140:3-4).
Because the terrible sin of pride, which he repudiates with all his heart, is always present to his eyes, the humble man will never direct his glance to any one of his virtues, lest he should lapse into pride and (in however disguised a fashion) attribute that virtue to a primary goodness of his own self. In holy modesty he will extend a veil over any values discernible in him and never seek to reveal the ultimate value hidden in the depth of his being. To be sure, he has to know about the abilities with which God has equipped him, if only to be aware of the responsibility they entail. Yet, these abilities must appear to him in the light of the tasks they impose on him, rather than as values which he owns; having regard to the responsibility he is charged with, linked to his consciousness of being an unprofitable servant, he will not abandon himself to the enjoyment of “his” values. Nor will he, lastly, yield to the suasion of that false sense of security which suggests that he might, without lapsing into pride, consider his advantages and enjoy them in a pure response to value as though they were the virtues of another. For the false sense of security is itself an offspring of pride.
Contemplation of our own virtues eviscerates them
Moreover, the ethical and religious values of the person himself, as constituted by and founded upon his response to the value (of a good), are essentially outside his field of vision. Because they are built up by the person’s response to value, they do not themselves enter his consciousness in his experience of the values which elicit his response. The self values thus displayed remain, as it were, on the margin of his consciousness; their presence is but indirectly signalized by the interior peace and luminous harmony that brighten his soul in the act of responding to the values whose call he experiences. As soon as our glance alights upon the ethical value of our moral action or value-response itself, we lose contact