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By Root 2118 0

these, notwithstanding the etymological kinship between Hochmut and haughty.) Haughtiness refers, not to a perverse attitude to value, but to a repugnance against submission to other persons. It may not hinder a man from giving a positive response to impersonal values or from complying with a demand of morality. But the haughty man will find it intolerable to feel dependent on other persons, to serve others, to subordinate himself to an alien will, and above all, to suffer ever so slight a humiliation. He is unable to admit before others of having been in the wrong, even if he knows it in his heart; much less could he prevail on himself to ask anybody’s forgiveness. He is stricken with a crabbed anxiousness about preserving his dignity, which mostly takes the form of preoccupation concerning his rights and his honor. In his relations with others, he lays great stress on occupying the stronger position. He frequently declines the voluntary help of others, lest its acceptance should be construed as an avowal of weakness. He is loath to engage in any partnership where his would not be the senior position. He is eminently hard; and inclined to despise compassion as a sign of feebleness.

Haughty men are for the most part fanatics of the idol of “manliness.” Neither a resentment against value as such nor the abuse of values as an ornament for the ego belongs to their characteristic defects. All their interests subserve their urge for self-assertion. They may not grudge recognition of another’s merits, but are highly reluctant to perform any act of obedience, to endure any kind of slight, to yield or to surrender in any fashion. That is why the haughty man, even though admitting in his conscience that he has done wrong and regretting his conduct, is incapable of genuine repentance. Much less would he admit his wrong to others and make amends. Confession and the very spirit of the Confiteor are therefore essentially distasteful to him.

Haughtiness exists in various degrees

Haughtiness can attain various degrees. It may go so far as to interfere with man’s subordination to God, whenever this demand assumes a concrete form which appears too painful to bear. There is a type of haughty person who would not bend his knees even before God. As a rule, however, the vice of haughtiness only affects man’s relations with his fellow men. What the haughty person is chiefly bent upon is to avoid receiving anything as a gift from others, accepting any mercy or sympathy, being in the debt of anyone else, or owing gratitude to anyone. Every act that would imply on his part a recognition of any kind of dependence on others is connected, in his feeling, with an unbearable loss of dignity. For instance, though he may not find it difficult to acknowledge other people’s merits of his own accord, he would at once feel it incompatible with his dignity to do so, were he to suspect that his homage was counted upon as an obligatory tribute.

Again, while he may be willing to respect official prerogatives or codified laws, he will meticulously refuse every gesture of submission to any authority not strictly official or legal in character. The haughty person, in a word, is hard, cramped, and morally close-fisted. His behavior constitutes an express antithesis to charity, loving kindness, and readiness to serve; it forms the utmost contrast to a soul penetrated and opened up by the light of Jesus.

This form of pride, too, is evil and entirely incompatible with our transformation in Christ. The pride of the stoic or the cynic is of this kind. And it is this pride which is erected into an ideal at war with charity and humility, in the famous lines of Horace: Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae (“If the world should collapse in ruins about him, struck by its fragments he would remain fearless”). It is the same pride which is at the basis of many a form of fearlessness and natural virility. There is nothing the haughty soul dreads so much as fear. Yet, it is precisely he who so often becomes a slave to the basest kind of fear—the fear of other