St. Augustine once said that “no one reaches the kingdom of Heaven except by humility.” And while it is true that there is a kind of humility which is of counsel and of perfection, there is also a humility which is of necessity and of precept and without which, says Christ, we cannot enter into the kingdom of Heaven. God banished Angels from Heaven for their pride; therefore how can we pretend to enter therein, if we do not keep ourselves in a state of humility?
Pride, which caused an Angel to be transformed into a demon, is the first and greatest of all the vices, while humility is the first and foremost of all the virtues, the root from which all the other virtues spring forth. “Although many other virtues are commanded by the Christian religion,” says St. Augustine, “study to give humility the highest place, because all virtues are acquired and maintained by humility, and without humility they vanish away.”
So how do you esteem this humility? Do you hold it to be of precept, or only of counsel which you are at liberty to choose or reject at will? How do you acquire it? How do you practice it? How fervently do you ask God for it? How do you examine your conscience on humility to oneself, to our neighbour, to our superiors, to our equals and to our inferiors? How do we know the extent of our own humility?
The answer to all these questions, and many more, can be found in this classic book by Fr. Cajetan Mary da Bergamo, an 18th century Italian reformer whose writings have been eulogized by Pope Benedict XIV as having “this rare quality in our day, that they satisfy the intellect and the heart. Their solid doctrine in no way dries up their tender devotion, and their devotional sweetness in no way detracts from the perfect solidity of their doctrine.”