The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme II: Pride – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025
“Be it unto me according to thy word,” Mary says. It is the perfect and, really, the only counter to pride; it is humility in all of its strength and beauty. It complements the Beatitudes especially the first: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.“ Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes as taken from Proverbs 16.18. It reads in full: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Only too true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But in a way, it is worse 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.
Thus 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, clinging to ourselves rather than to God the author of our very being.
Thomas 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 and which others have. With pride there is no above, only below. There is only what stands below us and yet it consumes us in our revolt against the good or joy of others. It is the deadliest poison for our life together in the various forms of our communal and social life, our life in community, whether it is family, school, or church.
Pride is in our anger, making us adopt a position of superiority from which nothing can make us swerve. Even more, anger blinds us like smoke to the legitimate motives that move people. Anger is the smoke-screen that hides reality. Anger raises our fist to God because things are not as we think they should be for us. The all-consuming character of wrath or anger means that others sometimes see it better for what it is than we do. This is different from the category of righteous anger but even that runs the risk of overkill and overreach. Once again, our anger is about ourselves and often as not the penalty of anger is ourselves bringing harm upon ourselves in one way or another.
Pride is in our sloth, making us think that we may get by with a minimum of effort while obtaining the maximum result. Again, it signals a profound form of self-conceit and self-importance. It contributes to a kind of complacency and sense of entitlement based upon nothing more than our sense of ourselves and what is ‘owed’ to us without having to lift a finger.
Pride is in our avarice or greed, making us display ourselves in all our finery and calling 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.” The more goods one has is not the same as the good itself. ‘He who has the most toys wins’; wins what? The kingdom of heaven is not measured by the quantity of our possessions.
Pride is in our gluttony, making us consume to excess in the culture of “supersize me” or, for that matter, too, in the self-indulgent aestheticism of the foodie culture, past and present. ‘You are what you eat’ is a reductive view of our humanity.
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. It reduces us all to a collection of body parts and at the loss of a sense of personal integrity and respect for others as persons. We are reduced to things to be used by others or for ourselves. Lust, too, extends to the inordinate desire for power over others who are equally reduced to objects, to things, that serve our pleasure.
In short, pride is in all of the seven deadly sins. It is precisely what is deadly in them all.
Thus Aquinas observes that “the root of pride is found to consist in man not being, in some way, subject to God and his rule.” In that sense, pride is the root and principle of all sin. For that reason the moral teachers treat it very, very seriously. G.K. Chesterton remarks that “if I had only one 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 of ourselves as superior and super; ‘super me.’ Isn’t this the biggest problem with pride in contemporary culture? We are constantly encouraged to have an inflated view of ourselves. We are encouraged, even compelled and constrained to have pride in ourselves. The contemporary problem is that pride, it seems, is not seen as a sin at all.
Ours is the culture of self-esteem, about feeling good about yourself. Thus pride appears as an admirable trait and something to be endlessly celebrated. And, to be sure, there is a positive side to pride in the sense of taking pride in your work and so on, though that surely has to do with things that are objectively worthy of respect, activities that ought to be 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, since pride is how we get bent out of shape and lose all sense of balance and perspective about everything. Think for a moment about some of the negative terms that accompany 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.
Needless to say, some of the most destructive and deadly figures of 20th and early 21st century culture hardly suffer from lack of self-esteem: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe – the list goes on. I forebear to name some of the more obvious ones that are so much before us now. Cultivating self-esteem runs the risk of nurturing what already lurks in us all, pride, and to such an insidious extent.
Pride is self-interest at the expense of all other interests, not least an interest in the good 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. It leads to the culture of narcissism in which the distinction between self and other, between ourselves and even the image of ourselves is lost because we are completely lost to ourselves. Christopher Lasch notes this in his reflection on his book, The Culture of Narcissism. Narcissus drowns in the reflection of himself but not knowing that it is a reflection of himself. In other words, there is a complete disconnect from reality and from ourselves. The paradox of pride is the total loss of self.
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. But that is what pride really amounts to: various forms of self-willed loneliness. Pride is the exile of the soul from God and from everything else, including ourselves. More bluntly and theologically, pride is the Fall in us because we pretend to act as if we were God. It can only be folly and pretense.
Christ’s Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes. They are recommended to be read at the Penitential Service for Ash Wednesday if there is no communion (BCP, p. 64). The first Beatitude is the precise and necessary counter to the sin of pride in this sense of the overweening preoccupation with ourselves to the exclusion of all else. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor in spirit are those who are not puffed up with a sense of self-importance and as such are open to the presence of others and the world around them without which they know they are nothing.
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 refrain of the Lenten season in the Offices is taken from 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 looks up to God in the awareness of its own shortcomings. It is a reality check. The humble are the poor in spirit who are not full of themselves.
There is an essential element of honesty in humility that contrasts with the deceit of pride. Pride is all pretense. 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. Pride is “puffed up.” Pride is being “stuck up.” Pride is “stiff-necked.” The proud are those who are inordinately pleased with themselves. And it is this feature of pride that results in isolation and loneliness. Pride negates and denies any and all forms of mutuality; it is literally blind to all that is other than itself.
The biblical images of pride are numerous. The deep biblical insight is that pride is the pretense to be other than what we are; ultimately, this is 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). Isaiah sees in the events of history the folly of overreach and presumption, kings pretending to be God Almighty. An old story that is endlessly repeated.
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 himself and 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 crowd 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 content; there is joy and laughter, conversation and song. Why? Everyone has learned a very simple lesson. They have learned to feed each other! Ah! No self without others!
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 indeed are the poor in spirit. May Mary’s words be our prayer. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
Fr. David Curry
March 27th, 2025