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Lenten Meditation: Pride

Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Pride

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes, and of course, it is true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But it a way, it is worst than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them!

Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self.

Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin.

Pride is in our envy, making us think that we deserve better than what we have or are and, consequently, to pull down and destroy anything that seems to stand above us. With pride there is no above, only below. There is only what stands below us!

Pride is in our anger, making us adopt a position of superiority from which nothing can makes us swerve. Even more, anger blinds like smoke to the legitimate principles that move people. Anger is the smoke-screen that hides reality. Anger raises our fist (and finger) to God because things are not as we think they should be. The all-consuming character of wrath or anger means that others sometimes see it better for what it is than we do.

Pride is in our sloth, making us think that we may get by with a minimum of effort while obtaining the maximum reward. Pride is in our avarice or greed, making us display ourselves in all our finery and with attention to all our possessions. The culture of conspicuous consumption is proud and not a little vain. Chaucer’s Parson points out the compulsion for an “extravagant array of clothing” and the mania of “keeping up great households.” Pride is in our gluttony, making us consume to excess in the culture of “supersize me.” Pride is in our lust, making us disregard the flesh and the feelings of others and leading to the degradation and dehumanizing of ourselves and others.

In short, pride is in all of the seven deadly sins. It is what is deadly in them all.

As Aquinas says “the root of pride is found to consist in man not being, in some way, subject to God and his rule.” It is in that sense the root and principle of all sin. Yet it is not always the most visible of sins. Perhaps it is for this reason that the moral teachers treat it so seriously. G.K. Chesterton remarks that “if I had only sermon to preach, it would be on pride.” T.S. Eliot observes that “most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.” Pride is about our sense of self-importance. It’s all about me!

The Latin term is superbia. We think ourselves as superior and as super! Of course! Isn’t this the biggest problem with pride in contemporary culture? We are encouraged to have an inflated view of ourselves, to have pride in ourselves. The contemporary problem is that pride seems to us not to be a sin at all!

Ours is the culture of self-esteem. Pride appears as an admirable trait. And, to be sure, there is a positive side to pride in the sense of taking pride in our work and so on, though that surely has to do with things that are objectively worthy of respect and comment, deserving of being recognized as good. But there is a danger in a culture that cultivates self-esteem. The danger lies in turning a vice into a virtue.

Perhaps the key term is to be found in Aquinas’ definition of pride as “inordinate self-love.” Inordinate, indeed, pride is about how we get bent out of shape and lose all sense of balance and perspective. Think for a moment of some of the negative terms that accompany so easily and so quickly even the positive aspects of pride. What might seem to be worthy of attention about ourselves can also make us seem to be arrogant, haughty, conceited, egocentric, narcissistic, insolent, presumptuous and vain. Getting the balance right is not easy.

And let’s face it, some of the most destructive and deadly figures of 20th and early 21st century culture hardly suffer from any lack of self-esteem: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe – the list goes on. Cultivating self-esteem runs the risk of nurturing what already lurks in us all, pride!

Pride is about self-interest at the expense of others. In our self-interest, we think that we are superior to others. Our self-esteem is easily and greatly exaggerated. It is perhaps the very thing that we don’t need to encourage in children or in ourselves. The ‘sweet solipsism‘ of children, however cute it may seem at first, quickly turns sour and deadly and becomes the defining feature of the culture of arrested adolescence, a culture of the self-absorbed and the self-obsessed.

There is only one counter to pride. It is humility which has this singular quality to it. It is precisely about not paying too much attention to yourself. “One is the loneliest number” as the Three-Dog Night song puts it. And that is what pride really amounts to: self-willed loneliness.  Pride is the exile of the soul from God and from everything else. More bluntly, pride is the Fall in us because we act as if we were God.

Christ’s Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes. The first beatitude is the precise and necessary counter to the sin of pride in this sense of overweening preoccupation with ourselves to the exclusion of all else. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Pride excludes us from all that belongs to the kingdom of heaven because in being self-absorbed we deny and ignore everything and everyone else, especially God. The purpose of the penitential season of Lent is to move us “to decline from sin and incline to virtue.” The Beatitudes are among the designated readings in the Prayer Book Penitential Service (BCP, p. 614 [1]). The refrain of the Lenten season is captured in the great penitential psalm, Psalm 51. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.” Why? Because the broken and contrite heart is looking up to God. The humble are the poor in spirit who are not puffed up with themselves.

There is an essential element of honesty in humility that contrasts with the deceit of pride. Pride is all pretence. It is about pretending to be more and something else than what we are. The kind of language and the images used to describe pride capture this wonderfully. Pride is “puffed up.” Pride is being “stuck up.” Pride is “stiff-necked.” And pride is “camel-nosed” (Angus Wilson). The proud are those who are inordinately pleased with themselves. And is this feature of pride that results in isolation and loneliness.

The biblical images of pride are numerous. The deep biblical insight is that pride is the pretence to be other than what we are, ultimately the folly of putting ourselves in the place of God. Isaiah imagines the king of Babylon, having oppressed and taken Israel captive, as saying “I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14.13-19), seeing in the events of history the folly of overreach and presumption, kings pretending to be God Almighty.

In the New Testament, one of the most powerful stories about pride is found in St. Luke’s Gospel in Jesus’ parable about the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18.9-14). They both go up to the temple to pray. But the prayer of the Pharisee is really all about his deeds, about the good things that he has done. But good deeds hide a deadly trap. It is the trap of self-esteem. Highly pleased with himself he looks down on others, like the poor publican. The point is made ever so clear. The Pharisee’s prayer is no prayer. “He prayed thus with himself.” He is not really looking up to God at all! It is the publican who is on his knees and who prays for mercy. He is looking up to God.

The pride of the Pharisee contrasts with the honest humility of the publican. Humility has to be worked at and while it is not easy, it is necessary precisely because pride is such an insidious and powerful force in us. Milton has Satan say that it is “better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” And that is exactly the kind of perversity that belongs to pride. It promotes a sense of superiority that is ultimately self-isolating. Pride makes a hell of ourselves. It undermines all relationships. This is its deadly evil.

The moral, perhaps, can be captured in a story, a story that has been variously told but makes the same basic point. A man is shown a vision of Heaven and Hell. Two doors are before him. The door to Hell is opened. He beholds a room with a large table in the centre laden with wonderful food. Around the table is a crowd of people all of whom are emaciated and miserable. All of them are equipped with a very long spoon and while they can reach the food, they can’t get the long spoon turned around to bring food to their own mouths!

The door to Heaven is then opened. The man beholds again a room with a large table in the center laden with wonderful food. Again, there is a crown of people. Again, they are all equipped with a very long spoon. But there is one difference in the scene. Here in the vision of Heaven everyone is happy and contented; there is joy and laughter, conversation and song. Why? Everyone has learned a very simple lesson. They have learned to feed each other!

Pride alienates us from God and from one another. Humility binds us together and helps us to appreciate the gifts of one another and to discern not ourselves but Christ in each other. Paying attention to others is the antidote to self-obsession. Pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins because it is the Fall in us. Exalted in our self-conceit, we are but a ruin of ourselves.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Lenten Series ’09
March 17th, 2009