On Pride
June 17, 2009
This is an unusually long blog post for me. It is the result of cogitations during the last couple of weeks.
Why am I at times like this?
I think much more about myself when I should be more mindful of others? I cause pain to those I love. I’m a chicken when it comes to standing up to those who hurt others. I act stupidly. I make a mess in my life by having unhealthy appetites. Why is speaking badly of others so at home on the tip of my tongue? Why is my soul so broken?
Dare I ask it? Why is yours? Neither you nor I are the first to struggle with answers to our experience of pride.
When asked what is wrong with world, G.K. Chesterton responded with this shortest essay ever written: “I am.” The reason he was so sure of his response is because of a realistic view of his own sin, which is first and foremost a power inhabiting our physical bodies. Long ago, one of the early Christians told us that sin “tends to make that which is cease to be.”
Jeff Cook sees sin as a parasite in need of a host, which we willingly supply. As a power sin cannot exist on its own. Just like the demons in Jesus’ parable, sin takes up residence in the house of a willing host.
Early in the life of the church all kinds of saints tried to understand the reality of sin and its manifestations. So they created lists of the most essential elements of sin. One author called these elements “wrong thoughts.” Others prefer to see them as challenges to our faith. Another named them deadly sins. History finally settled on naming seven of them: Pride, envy, sloth, greed, lust, wrath, and gluttony. In these all other sins known to humanity originate. Violence and murder come from anger or wrath. Cheating and hording come from greed. You get the idea.
Why do some call these seven sins the deadly sins? Well, cogitate with me for a moment. For example, a person who is totally possessed by pride, or his heart is strongly grasped by it, will be affected at the deepest levels of his being by his arrogance. Its tentacles extend to all aspects of his life. The way his perceives everything is affected by his high view of himself and low view of others.
Do you own shares in this sin? Are you a club member in the sin of pride? Is pride running and ruining your life? We all naturally love ourselves and self-love is mandated by our Lord “love your neighbor as yourself.” But when I exaggerate this love of myself or pervert it into contempt for others, I am full of pride. Pride or arrogance is a debilitating, death-thirsty disease, gone on a rampage in us. If pride is leprosy, I pronounce myself unclean. Well, thank God that he owns all the shares in the business of raising dead people like me from the grave of pride. He raises me up in order to be free of pride as he was free of it.
The proud think they contribute more than they do. They believe they are more important than they really are. Because their own self blinds them, they are unable to recognize the contributions of others. They believe that if they think highly of others somehow they are thinking less of themselves.
One who knows wrote: “Pride is the cause of the most damaging fall for the soul. It induces the Christian to deny that God is his helper and to consider that he himself is the cause of his own virtues” (Evagrius of Ponticus). Another, who struggled with pride for a long time wrote: “pride made the soul desert God, to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself instead as the source of its own life” (Augustine of Hippo).
Jeff Cooke adds: “the more I make my life, my well-being, my enlightenment, and my success primary, the farther I step from reality. Thus the hell-bound do not travel downward; they travel inward, cocooning themselves behind a mass of vanity, personal rights, religiosity, and defensiveness” (The Deadly Sins and the Beatitudes, p. 34).
The elder son in the prodigal son story is the epitomy of this kind of pride. It destroyed his ability to connect with his father and his brother. Pride is the one sin that makes everyone ill and especially the one who has it.
When you find pride in yourself, or in others, you will also find much private thinking, much time spent alone because of disdain of others, and much lone ranger activity.
Christianity in North America suffers today because millions of individual Christians have decided to go it alone without the church. Believing they are right, they do their own thing without any accountability, any submission to authority, deeming themselves captains of their own souls, masters of their own ships, with the determination to seek their own destinies apart form others. Pride moved into their neighborhood, and became a virtue. Jesus and me and a few others and the h… with the rest of you…
If an implosion of Christianity were to take place in the West, we will find pride as the fuse that lit the movement.
The antidote of pride is humility, the subject of a future article. Meanwhile, think through with Jesus about the damage to your soul that pride is wreaking (read Luke 15:11-32; Luke 16. There are great lessons about pride here). Walk a little with the master. Look full into his wonderful face. The things of pride will grow strangely dim.
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Georges, glad you are “back.”
I remember many years ago being convicted by C.S. Lewis in “Mere Christianity” as he spoke of pride as the “Great Sin” and one that leads to all other sins. I think that is correct. It is so sinister, and yet for me it is so often goes unseen with my own eyes.