Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [88]
In its full and specific unfolding, humility calls forth what we shall later describe as the virtue of meekness. The humble one has divested himself of all hardness; he faces his fellow men, not mailed and armored, but in the luminous attire of invincible charity. Even his foes—and this is the test of meekness—he confronts unarmed.
In specific contradistinction to the haughty character, the humble man is not hampered by any inhibitions in subordinating himself to others; he is past all self-assertion and therefore ready to obey all authority that has its place in the divine plan. He sets himself at a distance from his own arbitrary will and does not seek satisfaction in the consciousness of unbridled freedom. Whereas a haughty person (apart from the question of the particular objects for which he strives) resents and feels any curb placed on his arbitrary good pleasure to be intolerable, the person imbued with humility adopts as his maxim—in conformity with the seventh chapter of St. Benedict’s Rule—the words of Our Lord: “I am not come to do my will, but the will of Him who hath sent me.” Likewise St. Benedict says, concerning the third stage of humility: “Out of his love of God, the monk submits himself to his superior in perfect obedience.” Holy obedience, the expression of a complete breach with self-will and self-assertion, is that actualization of humility which is most explicitly opposed to social pride.
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