Mortally Afraid of Pride

For Calvin the passive virtues of submission, humility, patience, self-denial, cross-bearing stand in the foreground. Like St. Augustine, Calvin is mortally afraid of pride, whereby man exalts himself above God. His strong insistence upon the inability of man and the bondage of the will is not for the purpose of plunging man into despair, but in order to raise him from his lethargy and to awaken in him the longing for what he lacks, to make him renounce all self-glorying and self-reliance and put all his confidence in God alone.

Calvin strips man of everything in order to restore unto him all things in God.

--Herman Bavinck, Calvin and Common Grace (trans. Geerhardus Vos; Westminster 1996; originally written in 1909), 23

Interesting--Bavinck, writing on Calvin, mentioning Augustine, in a work translated by Vos!