In the chapter on sexual morality, Lewis came to the end and warned that as much as Christians may talk about sexual morality and as important as it may seem to them, that is really not the center of Christian morality. Well, in this chapter we come to the center.
There is one vice which only Christians recognize as a vice. Hardly anyone outside of Christianity recognizes this vice in themselves, yet hardly anyone fails to recognize this vice in other people and hardly anyone outside of Christianity is willing to tolerate it in other people. This would be the vice of pride or self-conceit.
This was the hardest chapter of the entire book for me the first time I read it, because at that time I did not think myself particularly proud, and yet at the end I was forced to admit that I was probably very proud indeed. Not an admission that I wanted to make at all. This is probably still true of me to a certain extent; those of you who know me well can feel free to draw your own conclusions about that.
Why are we so unwilling to tolerate pride in other people? It is because each person’s pride is in competition with every other person’s pride. If I am upset because someone else is the life of the party, that is because I wanted to be the life of the party myself. As a matter of fact, pride is essentially competition and isolation. It is competition with every other person out there: trying to be smarter, dress prettier, make more money, have more social status, be the most respected expert in the field, or whatever else you care to think of, than anyone else in your sphere of influence. It is isolation because anyone who is less than you in whatever area you care to consider is obviously not worthy of attention from you, while anyone who is greater than you or has more than you is automatically your enemy. With all the other vices out there–drunkenness, unchastity, dishonesty, etc.–there is at least the possibility of community. Those of you who are college students can probably attest to this–at least in the case of drunkenness. But with pride, there is no possibility of community because pride is all about competition and isolation.
Donald Miller kind of touches on this in Searching for God Knows What when he talks about “lifeboat theory”. The idea is that we are all in a lifeboat which has too many people in it, and some must be thrown overboard in order for the rest to have a chance to survive. This puts all of us in the position of desperately trying to make the case before everyone else that we are valuable people and we deserve to be kept aboard the lifeboat. A person who is in this position will go to all sorts of extremes to convince everyone else to value him–he will strive to gain the most of or to be the best at whatever things or skills or activities society deems to be the most valuable, he will represent himself in the best possible light, accentuating the positive while minimizing the negative (if he doesn’t outright lie or misrepresent himself to other people), he will go to great lengths to position himself so that he is associated with those whom society considers worthy of respect and admiration while dissociating himself with those whom society considers unworthy.
Pride is a purely spiritual vice which appeals to our diabolical self, while other vices appeal simply to the animal self. Lewis made the distinction between the two in an earlier chapter:
There are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.
Here Lewis makes the point that all the worst pleasures and vices are purely spiritual. And pride is just such a spiritual vice, which is why it is so insidious. For this reason, pride can be, and often is, used to beat down other vices. Lewis gives the example of a teacher who makes her students behave decently by appealing to their self-respect (pride), and the soldier who overcomes cowardice by learning to think of it as beneath his dignity (pride).
The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting you up in 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.
Now Lewis goes on to address some misconceptions about pride. The first is that pleasure in being praised is not pride. This is because your good feeling is not rooted in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone else whom you rightly wanted to please. Even if you cross the line into thinking yourself a fine person because you pleased the person you wanted to please (what we would consider vanity), this is not as bad as real, honest-to-God pride because you are at least still concerned about other people, even if your only concern for them is what they think of you.
A common usage of the word “proud” is in the phrase “proud of”: as in, “I’m so proud of my son” or “I’m proud of my regiment”. Usually this means to have strong respect or admiration for something, and that is perfectly OK. The problem comes when you start to give yourself airs on the basis of your accomplished son or distinguished regiment. But even this is not so bad, because the focus of your pride is something outside of yourself. As long as the thing which you have made into the end-all, be-all of your life is anything outside of yourself, you have taken one step away from utter spiritual ruin. But you are not completely out of the woods until your focus is on God Himself.
God does not require humility as if it is something which is due His dignity, as if He Himself were proud. Far from it. The truth is that God wants you to know Him, and that is not possible as long as you are constantly focused on yourself and trying to do better, try harder, make more, be more accomplished or more respected than everyone else out there. If you just let go of all of that, you will find that you don’t have to try, you don’t have to do, you don’t have to achieve, you don’t have to position yourself so that you look better than anyone else out there. God accepts you just the way you are, and true humility is the ability to simply rest in that.
If you meet a truly humble person, you may be surprised at what you see.
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.
In order to see an example of this in literature, one need only look at the contrast between Father Ferapont and Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov. Father Ferapont was precisely the greasy, smarmy man that Lewis talks about. He lived apart from the community of the monastery where he stayed, lived a rigidly ascetic life, and prided himself fervently on his ability to do so. Father Zossima, on the other hand, was actively involved in his community and was well respected as one who was cheerfully willing to give himself away for their sake. I have written more extensively about this here.
In closing, the first step toward humility is to admit that you are proud. This is big, because the vast majority of people outside of Christianity are not willing to even acknowledge this much.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
Posted in Mere Christianity
