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Chapter 8 -
"The Great Sin"
from "Mere
Christianity" by C.S. Lewis
I now 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 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 centre. 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
patronise 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 it 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 someone 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.
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 that 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. 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 make 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 am a proud man, then as long as there in 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 am 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 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 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 smuggle itself into the
very centre 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 chilbains
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 child-like 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 thorough-going 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.
(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 warm-hearted admiration for'. Such an admiration is, of
course, very far from being a sin. But it might, perhaps, mean that
the person is 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.
(4) 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 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.
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