Mere Christianity -- Book 3, Chap. 8

The Great Sin

Lewis now arrives at the part of Christianity morality which is really distinct from all other morality:  the one vice that all humanity have in common.  It is the one vice that we all loathe when we see it in someone else.  Almost no one readily admits that are guilty of it.  Some will quickly admit that they have a problem with their temper, or with their obsession of the other sex or with alcohol, or even that they are cowards.  But almost no one admits to this.  Although most are not merciful when they see it in others.  There is no fault that is more unpopular yet which we are so unaware of in ourselves. 

And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.

What is this vice?  Pride or Self-Conceit – Self-Righteousness and the virtue opposite of it is Humility (Matt. 5:3). 

The Center of All Vice

Remember when Lewis warned that the center of Christian morality was not found in sexual vices.  Well, we have now come to the center, the source of all vice.  “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.” 

Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison:  it was through Pride that the devil became the devil:  Pride leads to every other vice:  it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Now, if you really don’t think pride is the foundational vice out of which all other sin flows, think about Lewis’ statement he made earlier:  “the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others.” 

If you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, “How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?”

Or, how much do I look down on others who are self-righteous and therefore, they look down on others?

Why do we do this?

Pride is Competitive

Because we are all in competition with one another, with each other’s pride.  “It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise.” 

Pride is essentially competitive – it is competitive by its very nature – while all the other vices are competitive only by accident.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.  We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not.  They are proud of being richer, or clever, or better-looking than others.  If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about.   

In the church we may see it as being “more committed” to Christ than others, more knowledgeable of the Bible, more prayerful, more giving, even more humble. 

It is the comparison that makes you proud:  the pleasure of being above the rest.  Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. 

With other vices, you might find someone having to compete with other to get their way, but that is only by accident.  But with pride, everything is done for the sake of “proving I am the better man.”

In fact, pride is really the vice behind all vices.  For instance, take greed.  Greed may lead someone to constantly by a bigger and bigger house – but only up to a point.  After awhile the house is really as big as you need it to be.  But what is it that drives you to want an even bigger house than you need?  Pride.  Simply put, you want a bigger house than so-and-so.  That gives you power over others.  And

Power is what Pride really enjoys:  there is nothing that makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers.

And this drive for power is never ending.  There is always more to get.  There is always more to conquer.  “Pride is competitive by its very nature:  that is why it goes on and on.”

If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or clever than I, he is my rival and my enemy.

Is anyone getting tired yet?  How fun is this rat race we are all on?

“Pride has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”  Why?  Because with other vices you usually find wonderful fellowship with others.  If you enjoy being unchaste, then you can find whole groups that will wallow in depravity with you.  If you love “getting high” or “getting wasted” you can find others to party with. 

But pride always means enmity – it is enmity.  And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity with God.

Our Pride and God

There is no greater enemy to your pride than God.  Why?  Because

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself.

Remember that “competition” is at the root of pride?  So what do you do when all you want is more power and control and then suddenly you come up against unlimited power and absolute control?  That’s why:

Unless you know God as that – and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison – you do not know God at all.  As long as you are proud you cannot know God.  A proud man is always looking down on things and people:  and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

As Lewis says above:  Pride leads to every other vice:  it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Now this raises an important question:

How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious?

I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God.  They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people:  that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound’s worth of Pride towards their fellow-men.

All of us can, at any moment, be subject to this death trap.  So how can we know if this is where our heart is?

Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good – above all, that we are better than someone else – I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.  The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.  It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

In other words, the real test of pride is what are you consumed with:  yourself or others, God, neighbor, etc.  Remember that the very essence of conversion is the shift off of pride of oneself to Christ.  Pride is the reversal of humility.  In Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, Screwtape, the senior demon, says to his apprentice, Wormwood:

Your patient (the Christian) has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact?  All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.  Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove!  I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride – pride at his own humility – will appear.  If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt – and so on, through as many stages as you please.  But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humor and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed (SL # 14).

But Pride can begin to work the other way as well, into something as subtle as “false” humility.  In the Horse and His Boy, there is a Narnian stallion named Bree, who is a hero warhorse and begins to look down on the other horses around him.  Soon he is taken from his homeland and forced to serve in the army of the enemy.  He hits rock bottom and becomes one of the most pitiful creatures in all the Chronicles.  Yet, he clings to his pride and begins to feel sorry for himself because he thinks he’s lost everything.  But the Hermit of the Southern March corrects his self-pity:

My good Horse, you lost nothing but your self-conceit . . . If you are really so humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must learn to listen to sense.  You’re not quite the great horse you’ve come to think, from living among the dumb horses . . . But as long as you know you’re nobody special, you’ll be a very decent sort of Horse . . . .” (cf. Rom. 12:3; Phil. 2:3-8).

You, of course, can see how deceitful pride is in our lives, even in our religious life.  With all the other vices, the devil works through our animal nature.  But Pride is, at its very essence, a spiritual vice and therefore far more subtle and deadly. 

There are even times when you attempt to “use” Pride to defeat the other vices.  For instance, when a teacher attempts to build a student’s “self-esteem” to make him behave or when a man tries to overcome being a coward, or his lust, or anger, by making himself believe that such things are beneath him.  While such an approach may have immediate success, all the time he is setting up in himself the “Dictatorship of Pride” – it is like desiring to see a sore on your arm healed if you were allowed to have cancer in return. 

For Pride is spiritual cancer:  it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.   

It is no wonder that we are seeing a generation of highly dysfunctional adults who for the last twenty years have been the subjects of the modern “self-esteem” emphasis.

Now, For Some Qualifications

Lewis wants to be clear as to exactly what he means:

1.  Pleasure of being praised is not Pride.  Notice that when we seek to please others and we hear that they have taken pleasure in something we have done is not wrong.  It is not that you are taking pleasure in yourself, but in the fact that you have brought someone else pleasure. 

Where such happiness begins to become pride is when you shift to thinking “My, what a wonderful person I must be to have done that.” 

The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming.  When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom.

The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you.

It is certainly right to not worry about what others think about us when our motive is because we care more about what God thinks about us.  But the proud man is motivated for another reason, namely, because he thinks the opinions of others are somehow beneath him – their nothing to me.  “The devil loves ‘curing’ a small fault by giving you a great one.”  In order to cure our vanity, we must never call upon Pride as the answer.

2.  What do we mean that we are “proud of” someone, like our child?  Sometimes we simply mean that we have “warm admiration” for them, which is not wrong.  But if the admiration leads to focusing on oneself because of the other then it is moving toward sin.  At the end of the day we must remember that we ought not to love or admire anything more than we love and admire God. 

3.  Why is God opposed to the “proud” but gives grace to the “humble”?  It is not that God is in anyway threatened by you.  Rather, he wants you to know Him.  He wants to give you Himself.  And you cannot receive Him with your arms full of yourself. 

He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble – delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.  He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible:  trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are.

Humility is truly liberating because it frees us from ourselves so that we can enjoy and love God and others.

4.  Finally, what does a really humble person look like? 

He will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.

Rather, you will probably just come away thinking, “Wow, did you notice how well he listened to me and cared about what I had to say?”  You will notice that he will not be thinking of himself at all.

So, what then is the first step to humility?  It is to realize that you are proud in the first place.  This is a big step, but nothing else can be achieved without this first one.  The real danger is if you think that you are not conceited, which means of course that you are very conceited indeed.