4 Ways C.S. Lewis Examines Pride

today I come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals there is one Vice of which no man in the world is free which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else and of which hardly any people except Christians ever imagine that they are guilty themselves I have heard people admit that they are bad tempered or that they not keep their heads about geis or drink or even that they are cowards I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian

accuse himself of this Vice and at the same time I have very seldom met anyone who was not a Christian who showed the slightest Mercy to it in others there is no fault which makes a man more unpopular and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves and the more we have it ourselves the more we dislike it in others the vice I'm talking of is pride or self-conceit and The Virtue opposite to it in Christian morals is called humility you may remember when I was talking about sexual morality I warned you that

the center of Christian morals did not lie there well now we have come to the center according to Christian teachers the essential Vice the utmost evil is pride unchastity anger greed drunkenness and all that are mere flea bites 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 does this seem to you exaggerated if so think it over I pointed out a moment ago that the more Pride one had the more one disliked pride in others in fact 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 ore in or patronize me or show off the point it that each person pride is in competition with everyone else'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 two of a trade never agree now what you want to get clear is that pride

is essentially competitive is competitive by its very nature while the other vices are competitive only so to speak 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-look there would be nothing to be proud about it is the comparison that makes you proud the pleasure of being

Above the Rest once the element of competition is gone pride is gone that is why I say that pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not the sexual impulse may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl but that is only by accident they might just as likely have wanted two different girls but a proud man will take your girl from you not because he wants her but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than you greed may drive men into competition if there

is not enough to go around but the proud man even when he has got more than he can possibly want will try to get still more just to assert his power nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to Greed or self selfishness are really far more the result of Pride take it with money greed will certainly make a man want money for the sake of a better house better holidays better things to eat and drink but only up to a point what is it dial makes a man with $10,000 a year

anxious to get $20,000 a year it is not the Greed for more pleasure $10,000 will give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy Joy it is pride the wish to be richer than some other rich man and still more the wish for power for of course power is what Pride really enjoys there is nothing makes a man feel so Superior to others as being able to move them about Like Toy Soldiers what makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers certainly not her sexual instinct that kind of girl is

quite often sexually frigid it is pride what is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation go on and on demanding more and more Pride again pride is competitive by its very nature that is why it goes on and on if I a proud man then as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful or richer or cleverer than I he is my rival and my enemy the Christians are right it is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world

began other vices May sometimes bring people together you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people but Pride always means enmity it is enmity and not only enmity between man and man but enmity to God in God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably Superior to yourself 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 that raises a terrible 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'm afraid it means they are worshiping 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 penny worth

of imaginary humility to him and get out of it a pounds worth of Pride towards their fellow men I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when he said that some would preach about him and cast out Devil's in his name only to be told at the end of the world that he had never known them and any of us may at any moment be in this death trap luckily we have a test 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 it is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggy itself into the very center of our religious life but you can see why the other and less bad deves come from the devil working on us through our animal

nature but this does not come through our animal nature at all it comes direct from hell it is purely spiritual consequently it is far more subtle and deadly for the same reason Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler advices teachers in fact often appeal to a boy's Pride or as they call it his self-respect to make him behave decently many a man has overcome cowardice or lust or ill Temper by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity that is by Pride the devil laughs he is perfectly content to see you

becoming chaste and brave and self-control provided all the time he is setting up in you the dictatorship of pride just as he would be quite content to see your chillblains cured if he was allowed in return to give you cancer for pride is spiritual cancer it eats up the very possibility of Love or contentment or even Common Sense before leaving this subject I must guard against some possible misunderstandings one pleasure in being praised is not Pride the child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well the woman whose beauty is praised by

her lover the saved soul to whom Christ says well done are pleased and ought to be for here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted and rightly wanted to please the trouble begins when you pass from thinking I have pleased him all is well to thinking what a fine person I must be to have done it the more you Delight in yourself and the less you Delight in the praise the worse you are becoming when you Delight holy in yourself and do not care

about the praise at all you have reached the bottom that is why vanity though it is the sort of Pride which shows most on the surface is really the least bad and most pardonable sort the vain person wants praise Applause admiration too much and is always angling for it it is a fault but a childlike and even in an odd way a humble fault it shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration you value other people enough to want them to look at you you are in fact Still Human the real

black diabolical pride comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you of course it is very right and often our duty not to care what people think of us if we do so for the right reason namely because we care so incomparably more what God thinks but the proud man has a different reason for not caring he says why should I care for the Applause of that Rabel as if their opinion were worth anything and even if their opinions were of value am I the sort

of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl at her first dance no I am an integrated adult personality all I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals or my artistic conscience or the traditions of my family or in a word because I'm That Kind of chap if the mob like it let them they're nothing to me in this way real thoroughgoing pride May act as a check on vanity for as I said a moment ago the devil loves curing a small Fault by giving you a

great one we must try not to be vain but we must never call in our pride to cure our vanity better the frying pan than the fire two we say in English that a man is proud of his son or his father or his school or regiment and it may be asked whether pride in this sense is a sin I think it depends on what exactly we mean by proud of very often in such sentences the phrase is proud of means has a warmhearted admiration for such an admiration is of course very far from being

a sin but it might perhaps mean that the person in question gives himself Aires on the ground of his distinguished father or because he belongs to a famous regiment this would clearly be a fault but even then it would be better than being proud simply of himself to love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God three we must not think pride is something God forbids because he is

offended at it or that humility is something he demands as due to his own dignity as if God himself was proud he is not in the least worried about his dignity the point is he wants you to know him wants to give you himself and 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 fth 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 our selves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself if I had I could probably tell you more about the relief the comfort of taking the fancy dress off getting rid of the false self with all its look at me and aren't I a good boy and

all its posing and posturing to get even near it even for a moment is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert four do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call Humble nowadays he will not be a sort of greasy smarmy person who is always telling you that of course he is nobody probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him if you do dislike him

it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily he will not be thinking about humility he will not be thinking about himself at all if anyone would like to acquire humility I can I think tell him the first step the first step is to realize that one is proud and a biggish step too at least nothing whatever can be done before it if you think you're not conceited it means you're very conceited indeed