Humility
“It is only in our confrontation with a personal God that we become fully aware of our condition as creatures, and fling from us the last particle of self-glory.
...Humility involves the full knowledge of our status as creatures, a clear consciousness of having received everything we have from God. ‘Or what hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ (I Cor. 4:7).
...Thus, it has been said justly, ‘Humility is Truth.’ Correspondingly, the soul of pride is falsehood, for pride means a refusal to realize our metaphysical situation.
...But what we have now in mind is our joy related to the fact that the absolute Being is infinitely perfect and that this infinitely glorious Being is a Person. What an immense augmentation of the reality of good is implied in this – that the summum bonum (‘the highest good’) should not be a mute impersonal something, an idea or a principle, but a Person speaking to us: Ego sum qui sum (‘I am who am’); the absolute Person in whom all values converge at their highest, who has created us and keeps us in being, who embraces us and owns us as only a person can.
Humility calls upon us to allow our hearts to be wounded by the glory of God, to fall on our knees in loving adoration, and to deliver ourselves over to God entirely. We must display that pure response in which our center of gravity is thus transferred from ourselves to God, that His glory taken in itself, without any reference to His benevolence towards us, becomes for us a source of precious joy: Deus meus et omnia (‘My God and my all’), said St. Francis of Assisi.
...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.
...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...”
~Dietrich von Hildebrand
...Humility involves the full knowledge of our status as creatures, a clear consciousness of having received everything we have from God. ‘Or what hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ (I Cor. 4:7).
...Thus, it has been said justly, ‘Humility is Truth.’ Correspondingly, the soul of pride is falsehood, for pride means a refusal to realize our metaphysical situation.
...But what we have now in mind is our joy related to the fact that the absolute Being is infinitely perfect and that this infinitely glorious Being is a Person. What an immense augmentation of the reality of good is implied in this – that the summum bonum (‘the highest good’) should not be a mute impersonal something, an idea or a principle, but a Person speaking to us: Ego sum qui sum (‘I am who am’); the absolute Person in whom all values converge at their highest, who has created us and keeps us in being, who embraces us and owns us as only a person can.
Humility calls upon us to allow our hearts to be wounded by the glory of God, to fall on our knees in loving adoration, and to deliver ourselves over to God entirely. We must display that pure response in which our center of gravity is thus transferred from ourselves to God, that His glory taken in itself, without any reference to His benevolence towards us, becomes for us a source of precious joy: Deus meus et omnia (‘My God and my all’), said St. Francis of Assisi.
...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.
...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...”
~Dietrich von Hildebrand
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