In this thoughtful, probing study, Os Guinness leads readers in an in-depth examination of the deadly vices. The reader will better understand the classic notion of virtue and vice and how these ideas connect to the Beatitudes. Presenting the truth of the Bible in the context of modern society, other faiths, and 3,000 years of history, Guinness analyzes the corruption of ethics in academia and popular culture to reestablish the deadly seriousness of vice in an age of moral confusion. This is the second in a series of six Trinity Forum studies which combine classical and current readings with provocative discussion questions. The Trinity Forum has been successfully using this material for over eight years in their private leadership forums.

Chapter One

PRIDE (SUPERBIA)

VERSUS POVERTY OF SPIRIT

Pride is the first, worst, and most prevalent of the seven deadly sins. It is either the source or the chief component of all other sin. Pride is also the first of the sins of the spirit, which are "cold" but highly "respectable." Its source is neither the world nor the flesh, but the Devil. This first vice is unique in that it is the one vice of which its perpetrator is frequently unaware.

    This classical view of pride is shared by Jews, Christians, and Greeks (for example, the Greek notion of hubris, or overweening arrogance), but it flies in the face of modern attitudes. The contemporary world has transformed this vice into a virtue in two important ways. The common way is to change the definition by confusing pride with self-respect--so that to be opposed to pride is to be seen as unhealthy. After all, isn't it right to be proud of ourselves? Isn't it damaging not to appreciate our self-worth? Why is pride counted a sin at all?

PRIDE OR SELF-RESPECT?

"Self-respect is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us."

--Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass

    But the deadly sin of pride is not pride in the sense of self-respect, a justifiable sense of one's own worth. Certainly there are problems with our modern preoccupation with self-esteem, especially when it leads to such practices as inflating school grades or rewriting history to boost the esteem of an individual or a group. There are also dangers in such current maxims as "feeling good about oneself," "boosting one's self-esteem," or "building a positive self-image," for they are often used to cover all sorts of conditions about which one ought not to feel good. But that is not the real problem of pride.

VICE OR VIRTUE?

"Pride has always been one of my favorite virtues. I have never regarded it, except in certain cases, as a major sin.... I despise anything which reduces the pride of Man."

--Dame Edith Sitwell

    The rarer way to transform vice into a virtue is to impugn its motivation. Seen this way, as advocated by Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers, the attack on pride is a mask to cover the resentment of the weak. Calls for "love" and "compassion" are therefore bogus--the grand rationalization by which the slave class can curtail the power of the master class, with its nobility, excellence, and "pride."

THE VIRTUE OF THE SUPERMAN

"`Man is evil'--all the wisest men have told me that to comfort me. Oh, if only this were true today! For evil is man's strength.

"`Man must grow better and more evil'--this is what I teach. The greatest evil is necessary for the superman's greatest achievement.

"Perhaps it was good the poor people's sage took upon himself and suffered the sins of humanity. I, on the other hand, rejoice in great sins as my consolation."

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, IV

    Against both these changes, the Christian, classical view is that the sin of pride is wrong and deadly because it is inordinate and overweening. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, pride is "an unreasonable conceit of superiority," an "overweening opinion of one's own qualities." Consider its synonyms: egotism, arrogance, hubris, selfishness, vanity, haughtiness, presumption, boastfulness, bigheadedness, self-satisfaction, self-centeredness, and the like. None of them is admirable.

SELF-DEFINITION

"--Self, n. The most important person in the universe.

--Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

--Self-Esteem, n. An erroneous appraisement."

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

    Seen this way, nothing divides Jewish, Christian, and classical ethics more sharply from modern secular ethics than their contrasting attitudes toward pride.

    In most other views, pride is rarely a major problem. The Greeks, however, warned ofhubris, the overreaching arrogance that creates the illusion of invulnerability, and in the biblical view, pride is the fundamental violation and disordering of love because it puts the love of the human self before the love of God. It begins by breaking the first great commandment, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind," and inevitably goes on to break the second, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Even the differences between these two great commandments are instructive. We are to love our neighbors as ourselves, and a low sense of self-worth will often lead to a poor love of our neighbors. But the same is not said of God. We are not to love God "as ourselves," but for Himself, and love of God and love of self are often pitted against each other .

FOR THE LOVE OF SELF

"Ach! what things people are capable of doing for love--of themselves!"

--Jewish saying

"Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me."

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."

--Mark Twain

"A walking personal pronoun."

--description of Victor Hugo

"Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility."

--Bertrand Russell

PICTURES AND METAPHORS

Throughout history, each of the seven vices has been portrayed by association with different parts of the body, different animals, and different colors. Pride is characteristically described with images suggesting loftiness, aloofness, and inaccessibility. Angus Wilson calls pride "camel-nosed," while journalist Henry Fairlie calls it "high-blown, puffed-up, stuck-up, stiff-necked." For medieval poets and artists, pride was the king or queen of the vices. It was often portrayed as a lion, an eagle, a strutting peacock, or a vain man or woman.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

Because pride is the fountainhead of all other sins, the list of possible examples of pride is endless. Rooted in the very essence of sin--"the claim to the right to myself"--pride is linked inevitably with hypocrisy and denial "the claim to the right to my view of things whatever the reality." As such, it is also linked to hubris--"the arrogance of the illusion of invulnerability" and thus to history's march of folly, sweeping up nations as well as individuals.

FOR EVER AND EVER ... AMEN

"America's destiny is to be the richest, freest, most powerful nation on earth, and to remain so forever."

--Irving Kristol, 1998

"The U.S. economy likely will not see a recession for many years to come. We don't want one, we don't need one, and as we have the tools to keep the current expansion going, we won't have one. This expansion will run forever."

--Dr. Rudl Dornbusch, M.I.T. professor

"The promise of our future is limitless."

--President Clinton, 1999 State of the Union Address

    But this is only the beginning. Pride is found in individual form, such as in common neuroses and the narcissists' complete preoccupation with themselves. It is also found in collective form, such as the group pride of nationalism, tribalism, jingoism, and racism. It also shows in the great criminal acts of history, which in one form or another pivot on a prideful lack of sympathy and fellow-feeling for other human beings (as a following reading illustrates). But often it creeps into our noblest and most enterprising ventures.

    In short, pride can run through everything we do. And the worst of it, as Dorothy Sayers warned, is that "the devilish strategy of Pride is that it attacks us, not in our weakest points, but in our strongest. It is preeminently the sin of the noble mind."

STRONG POISON

"Pride is the fortress of evil in a man."

--Victor Hugo

"Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices. This is what is felt by the poor men in the public tavern, when they tolerate the tippler or the tipster or even the thief, but feel something fiendishly wrong with the man who bears so close a resemblance to God Almighty. And we all do in fact know that the primary sin of pride has this curiously freezing and hardening effect upon the other sins."

--G. K. Chesterton, "If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach"

    One other theme should not be missed. Pride is linked to restlessness and discontent. The reason lies in the self-absorption and pretended self-sufficiency of pride. Because the individual human being is too small and too frail, genuine self-sufficiency is impossible and so, for pride, discontent is inevitable. There is always more that is needed beyond the self, and more to be desired, so contentment proves a mirage. Just as Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a spring and eventually died of frustration because his self-love could never be consummated, so are proud people enamored with themselves to the point of inevitable frustration.

    The antidote is offered in the famous prayer of Augustine, "You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you." The counterpoint to pride, considered in more depth later, is the beatitude, "Blessed are those who are poor in spirit."

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a scholar and writer, and a celebrated and much-loved Christian apologist. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he was educated at University College, Oxford. After brief service in World War I, he resumed his studies at Oxford where he became a fellow in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College. For the last seven years of his life, he was a professor at Cambridge University but insisted on living at Oxford.

    Lewis was an excellent scholar in his field, but his enormous reputation rests on his popular writings. Three dozen of his titles are still available with well over 50 million in print--making Lewis the best-selling Christian author of all time. His scholarly studyThe Allegory of Love was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1936, but he became known popularly through such books as The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, and later through his children's stories The Chronicles of Narnia and his science fiction trilogy. Lewis, known to friends as Jack, was the leading light of the Inklings, a discussion group that met regularly in his rooms or in the Oxford pub called the Eagle and Child. Other accomplished writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers were part of the Inklings. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley died.

    An almost endless number of people have come to faith or have been aided in faith by Lewis's writings, and all have their favorite passages. The one that follows comes fromMere Christianity, the book through which more thinking people have come to faith than any other in the twentieth century. In contrast to most celebrated writings on the seven deadly sins, Lewis's works come to us not from the ancient world, but from a time close to our own. Yet his essay that follows, though modern and not in historical sequence here, is perhaps the single best summary of the Christian position on pride .

MY FAIR MAN

"Cycling and showing off."

--George Bernard Shaw's list of his hobbies in Who's Who

"With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare, when I measure my mind against his."

--George Bernard Shaw

"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions hove only wasted my time."

--George Bernard Shaw

"Bernard Show discovered himself, and gave ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world."

--Saki

THE GREAT SIN

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 every one 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 cannot keep their heads about girls 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 am 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 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.

    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 oar in, or patronize me, or show off?" The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one 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 cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking 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 has gone, pride has 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 round; 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 selfishness are really far more the result of Pride....

    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 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. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils 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 deathtrap. 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 smuggle itself into the very center of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices 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 vices. 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-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride--just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains [corns on the foot] 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:

    (1) 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 wholly 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 rabble 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.

    (2) 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 airs 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.

    (3) 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 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. 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....

    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 are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

From C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity . Copyright [C] 1942 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Extracts reprinted by permission.

NEVER OUTDONE

"As Majority Leader, [Lyndon B. Johnson] was thrilled to be the first legislator in Washington with a car phone. When Everett Dirksen, Republican Minority Leader and a friendly rival, also acquired one, he telephoned Johnson's limo to stay that he was calling from his new car phone. `Can you hold on a minute, Ev?' Johnson asked. `My other phone is ringing.'"

--Robert Dallek, Johnson's biographer

"I am extraordinarily patient--provided that I get my own way in the end."

--Margaret Thatcher

Questions for Thought and Discussion

1. Lewis's opening paragraph is packed with striking observations on pride. What part of this description strikes you most deeply? Is Lewis right when he says of pride, "And the more we have it in ourselves, the more we dislike it in others"? If so, why do you think this is the case?

2. Lewis describes pride as "the complete anti-God state of mind." What does he mean by this? Why, according to Lewis, are the more visible vices of anger, greed, and drunkenness "mere fleabites" by comparison to pride? Why do you agree or disagree?

3. From the world of business to the world of sport, modern life thrives on competition, yet Lewis says, "Pride is essentially competitive." What examples does he give? What other examples can you think of? Is all competition wrong? If not, why is this characteristic of pride so destructive? How can you encourage a child, spouse, or employee to excel other than by appealing to pride?

4. According to Lewis, what does pride do to a man or woman's relation to other men and women? To God? What test does Lewis suggest for determining our pride regarding our religious life? How does he say we can tell when we're truly in God's presence?

5. How does pride become a component of temptation to "beat down the simpler vices"? Why is this strategy so successful? What is its danger? Can you recall an example in your life of someone appealing to pride to get you to change your behavior? What do you think of Lewis's description of pride as "spiritual cancer"?

6. What is the first misunderstanding of pride Lewis mentions? At what point does the joy of pleasing someone become pride? What do you think of Lewis's distinction between the lesser sin of vanity and "the real black, diabolical Pride" that is so proud it doesn't care what others think?

7. What second misunderstanding of pride does Lewis address? Why is that not pride? "To love and admire anything outside yourself is" what, according to Lewis? If this is true, what then does "spiritual ruin" consist of?

8. What is the final misunderstanding about pride? What does Lewis say is the real reason God forbids pride? What shift takes place in one's attitude when one becomes truly humble before God?

9. What do you think of Lewis's final line, "If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed?" Is this a catch-22 or simply true? In light of your character and work, what are your main temptations to pride?

THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GOES GOD

"I fear that would be impossible. I have written only five."

--Oscar Wilde, when asked to compile a list of the world's 100 best books

"There but for the grace of God goes God."

--Winston Churchill, commenting on a fellow Cabinet member, Stafford Cripps

"Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest, and cockiest, new college graduates. `When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, "Are you the smartest person you know?" And then if they said yes, they'd hire them. If they said no, they'd say, "Who is?" And they'd go hire that guy instead,' Oracle engineer Roger Bamford said. `I don't know if you got the smartest people that way, but you definitely got the most arrogant.'"

--Mike Wilson, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison

"Q. What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?

A. God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison."

--Joke circulating around Oracle about CEO Larry Ellison

(Continues...)

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