Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [85]
Hence, it is strictly impossible in the same act to refer our value-response to the value of our own response in a given case. Even with respect to our own attitudes in the past, it is not possible to look at their value and to take delight in them. It is not impossible to display an ethically valuable behavior and later to reflect upon it with satisfaction; yet even this is destructive of value and inconsistent with humility. For it still severs our contact with the value to which our original moral attitude, the object of our subsequent contemplation, was referred and devoted; it therefore undermines our moral continuity with the subject of our past action, reducing the memory of our accomplishment to an empty shell whose content of value has evaporated.
The humble man remains ever conscious of his own imperfections
More than that, far from relishing or even pondering over his own values, the truly humble person is likely to look upon himself, after the example of many saints, as the greatest sinner. For he is most keenly aware of the gratuitousness of the grace he has received; and the higher he has risen objectively, the more clearly he sees the abyss that separates him from the infinite holiness of God. He measures his station, not by what he represents absolutely but by the distance between what he has received from God and what he has actually accomplished. Nay, it is inherent in ethical perfection to be constantly advancing towards Christ and never to attribute to one’s moral status a completeness which would give one the feeling of being the possessor of a value. Humility does not prevent a person from seeing that, with God’s help, he has been making progress in some direction; but he must never lose sight of the essential relativity of that progress. The determination never to cease advancing—a process that has no term in statu viae—is one of the basic conditions of holiness.
To sum up: we must not, in statu viae, indulge in a contemplation of our own values; much less can we enjoy them even in the sense of a response to value. Our position in relation to ourselves is intrinsically different from what it is in relation to others. Accordingly, too, love of self is not love in the full and proper sense of the term, as is the one typified by our love for another person. Self-love is confined to our concern for our own happiness and salvation, together with our assent to the divine idea of a fully deployed value-response and of a genuine frui which we are ordained to realize; it lacks those aspects of delight in the beauty and in the splendor of values which are proper to our love of other persons.
This fundamental difference between our position towards ourselves and towards other persons is also revealed in humility. We are to lift our eyes to the majestic splendor of God and to God’s reflection in our fellow men. As regards our relation with ourselves, however, we are to look at our defects and the vastness which separates us from the glory of God; the talents and the gifts of grace which God has given to us we are to consider only insofar as is necessary in order to examine what use we have made of them. Walking in the paths of God, a life pleasing to God will suffuse our consciousness, as said above, with the inward happiness and peace evoked by the soul’s concord with the world of values; whereas it would but undo its own meaning and disprove its own truth, were it to seduce us into an appreciative contemplation of “our” values. Others may do that, never we, ourselves.
Haughtiness prizes independence and self-assertion
We have, lastly, to speak of a further and distinct form of pride, which may be described as haughtiness or social pride. (The French term is fierté, in contradistinction to orgueil, meaning pride in the general and theological sense; the German terms Stolz and Hochmut are respectively equivalent to