In a seemingly prime example of the dangers of prideful desire, master architect William’s frightening speech in Dorothy Sayer’s Zeal of Thy House unsurprisingly precedes a spectacular downfall. “Man,” exults William, “… like God can call beauty from dust … and create new worlds to praise their Maker.” To the horror of onlookers, he continues,
“Oh, but in making man God over-reached himself and gave away His Godhead. He must now depend on man for what man’s brain, creative and divine, can give him. Man stands equal with him now, partner and rival. … Me hath he made vice-gerent of Himself, [a]nd were I lost, something unique were lost … God’s crown of matchless works is not complete without my [work], [c]reation’s nonpareil.”
This statement of what William has already embraced in his heart is the highest point his hubris will reach before he is shattered by his own folly. Within the day, he falls the height of his great building and is crippled, eventually dying of his injuries. Someone else completes his glorious cathedral.
And yet, our desire to denounce William’s pride probably contains misunderstanding. For all its lofty arrogance that begs to be shattered, his speech contains a remarkable degree of truth. In the theology of Genesis (and really of the whole Bible) man could be seen as a “vice-gerent” of God. God really has designed things such that not only do we bear the divine image, but so that we also have a very real and necessary role in the grand scheme of the divine will. So real, in fact, that it cannot be filled by any other.
What God would accomplish of his own power without man would, in fact, be different that what He would accomplish by the hand of His human creatures. In this William is right.
C.S. Lewis brings us to this realization in the second book of his Space Trilogy. Ransom, Perelandra’s protagonist, is horrified to discover this reality in his mission to defeat the Un-man, a supernaturally-possessed man who is seeking to fatally corrupt the unfallen Lady of Perelandra. There is only one way for him to be stopped, not because God cannot stop him Himself, but because He has chosen to stop him through Ransom and no other. “Here in Perelandra,” Lewis writes,
“the temptation would be stopped by Ransom, or it would not be stopped at all … this chapter, this page, this very sentence in the cosmic story was utterly and eternally itself; no other passage that had occurred or would occur could be substituted for it.”
As he writhes under the crushing implications of this, hoping for a way out, the point sinks yet deeper:
“If he now failed, this world also would be hereafter redeemed. If he were not the ransom, Another would be. … He had pictured himself, till now, standing before the Lord, like Peter. But it was worse. He sat before him like Pilate. It lay with him to save or to spill.”
Contrary to our instinct, William’s fatal sin is not his desire for glory, or even his acceptance of his role as unique in the divine will: it is his desire to depose God. Ransom, too, accepts the weight of such a glory. The difference is the role God Himself is 
allowed to take in the process. Had Ransom rejected such glory, it would not have been virtue but disobedience.
Together, Ransom and William lay before us two types of glory. They deeply contrast with one another, and yet also oddly overlap: often the deepest evils are perversions of something good and true. William’s is much closer to the kind of hubris we attach to Satan before his fall. It is also very nearly the kind of glory the Un-man portrays to the Lady before Ransom defeats him. God, the Un-man tells her, “longs to see His creature become fully itself, to stand up in its own reason and its own courage even against Him.” He wants her to place herself at the center, the fatal choice that would lead to her downfall and the downfall of Perelandra—the very same decision that leads to William’s own downfall.
But Ransom chooses the better portion. He does not reject glory — this is not the remedy for the Un-man’s temptation or William’s hubris. No: he accepts the crushing weight of divinely-bestowed glory, something he is not even sure he can bear. He defeats the Un-Man as only he can and saves both the Lady and the world she is to govern. In the process he nearly dies and sustains a permanent wound to the heel, one that will never fully close.
He will crush your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
Certainly this is not the safe, virtuous-sounding modesty we have learned to embrace as pride’s remedy. How can we dare to accept such a role, divinely-bestowed though it may be? And indeed, how can we dare refuse it?
Yet we see a paradoxical response to Ransom’s saving actions at the end of Perelandra. As the angels begin to describe the magnitude of the mission in which he has had a defining role, he is overwhelmed and sinks to the ground. They respond, calling him by the name of Elwin:
“Elwin is falling to the ground,” said the other voice.
“Be comforted,” said Malacandra. “It is no doing of yours. You are not great, though you could have prevented a thing so great that Deep Heaven sees it with amazement. Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you.”
Ah: there’s the catch, and we must learn to live in the paradox. Had Ransom refused his calling by saying that such an honor was not his to take, it would have been disobedience, not humility. And yet, for all the crushing weight of glory that came with Ransom’s messianic calling, he does not bear ultimate responsibility for it. Indeed, it would have crushed him: and so this is a heavenly mercy as much as a heavenly reality.
In the end, Ransom learns something that William never really grasped: every man is both the center and not the center of the divine plan. He is both the point around which the entire Heavens turn, and an insignificant point at the margin. To reject either reality is to fall.
Humility is not denying what God has bestowed on us, or downplaying it. It is not safe, nor is it modest. It is accepting the place God has granted us in the universe, with both the inferiority and the superiority that this place entails. Ultimately, it is this that leads to the fulfillment of our deepest desire: to hear it said to us, “well done, my good and faithful servant.” It means that this desire is not prideful, but God-given. It is, in fact, completely like Christ, “who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
What do we think it means that we are called to be Christlike?
This is humility at its deepest: it is the antithesis of self-sufficiency, which is a necessary ingredient in pride and the death-blow to true humility. Indeed, says Lewis in ‘The Weight of Glory,’ “[p]erfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; ‘it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign.’”
This, then, is what we must come away with: not the fatal idea that modesty is the cure for pride, but that pride is to refuse to accept the place God has bestowed upon us in the universe—and that humility is to accept it. There is a pure pleasure in being what we were created to be, and a legitimate satisfaction we may take in ourselves as the very good handiwork of Another. Indeed, such a satisfaction renders credit to Him, rather than ourselves, and must therefore be the epitome of humility. But paradoxically, it is compatible with our accepting glory and recognition from the very One to whom all credit is due. Indeed, we should say that this, of all things, would require the greatest humility of all:
I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child—not a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. … Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest … of pleasures … when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it was her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. (C.S. Lewis, ‘The Weight of Glory’)
Musings of a Catholic Protestant 