The Pure Evil of Pride.

The sin of the church, along with every human.

I find the relationship English speakers have with the word pride fascinating. Far from being the wretched sin it was in the medieval period, these days pride is often seen as a virtue. I was told throughout my school career that I needed to have some pride in myself and my studies. We are told to take pride in our work at our jobs.  A parent who is expressing their warmhearted love and appreciation for their child will tell them they’re proud of them. Today pride is regarded as something natural, normal, and perhaps even healthy.  Doesn’t pride drive people to be their best selves and achieve things they couldn’t have achieved without it?  

I’d argue yes, with a giant world-destroying asterisk.  Pride only enables a person to be the best version of themselves that THEY can imagine. God’s imagination is infinitely greater and not subject to any of our mortal blind spots. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas about your life are, they’re nowhere near as good as his.  In the middle ages, they understood that the space between the two was the difference between heaven and hell.

In Christian mythology, the sin of pride is most identified with the character of Lucifer Morningstar, AKA the devil or Satan.  I say mythology and not scripture because the Bible doesn’t spend much time talking about Satan. The modern conception of the devil comes from a variety of sources, most notably John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  In this milieu of mythology, Satan was once the worship leader in heaven.  It was his job to lead the angels in the worship of God, fulfilling their divine purpose. He was by all accounts the most glorious thing God ever created; an angel of such surpassing power and beauty and majesty that when he grew arrogant and decided that he should be king over heaven instead of God, he convinced a third of heaven to stand with him in his rebellion.  

In this telling, pride is literally pure evil. I mean that in a technical sense. The other six deadly sins medieval theologians liked to harp on work by taking something good and corrupting it. Sloth turns rest into an addiction that rots one's life; lust takes the God-created joys of sex and turns them into something shame-inducing; wrath takes potentially useful anger and turns it toward breaking perfectly good things; gluttony takes food and causes it to destroy a person’s body; envy and greed cause us to steal and destroy other’s treasures, but only pride invents new and exciting horrors like war and politics.  To a person in the deepest grips of pride, any evil behavior can be justified in the right circumstances.  Either the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in their mind or they see no better way to handle a problem than “doing what must be done.”  They may even congratulate themselves for being bothered by their evil deed.   How compassionate of them.

Just as Lucifer loves appearing like an angel of light, proud people often maintain an appearance of virtue.  This is for two reasons.  The first is that pride will brook no competitor from the other vices.  A person can and often will kill every other vice with pride, justifying that they are beneath them.  They will even be right about these vices being beneath them, but it is a hollow correctness devoid of wisdom.  Pride drives us to push all our virtues out to our surface where everyone can applaud us for them and hides all our evil deep inside our being where only those who know us intimately experience it.  You will seem like heaven’s favored child to people who barely know you at the same time as your closest relationships will grow to resent you.

Now I’m sure many of you think all this talk of the devil is excessive.  If someone can use pride to better their station in life, why shouldn’t they?  We won’t all suddenly become cult leaders or dictators if we decide that, say, alcoholism is unworthy of a person as awesome as us.  What harm is done by being the best person we want to be rather than surrendering our lives to God?

I think our failure to see pride’s evil comes far more from confusion about humility than anything to do with pride itself.  “Humble” conjures up images of dirt-floored log cabins or filthy beggars who repeatedly proclaim that they are nothing. It seems synonymous with meager, lesser, and unspecial.  It seems impossible to be both excellent and humble.  How can it be good to be lesser?

I’d argue it isn’t.  People, especially religious people, often go too far in the other direction in the quest for humility and wind up viewing themselves as some disgusting thing that only the infinite grace of God could ever atone for.  Considering God thought you were valuable enough to die for even when you were a sinner, this attitude also seems deeply wrong.  Both attitudes are barriers to a relationship with God. One has us staring at our own navels in wonder and the other has us staring at the ground in shame, but in both our eyes are not on the true wonder of God’s presence. It’s also impossible to view yourself as something worthless and not view others the same way on some subconscious level. I’ve met a few people who despite absolutely hating themselves, think they’re better than everyone else. This, too is pride.  As C.S. Lewis said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”

Jesus is an interesting case study here, as he is in most questions about spiritual matters. He demonstrates the direct opposite of the self-hating contempt for others described above.  When the teachers of religious law asked him if he was greater than Moses, his answer was an unreserved yes. He was the messiah; the divine word made flesh.  He was the one the Jews had been waiting on for generations. He was the rightful king of not only Israel, but the entire world, and where others only pretended to have all the answers, he actually did.  To say that he wasn’t greater than Moses would be to lie, and since Jesus was without sin, he couldn’t lie.  There’s no pride in claiming to be God if you are, in fact, God.  

Weirdly, even though Jesus thought he was literally God, he didn’t act as though that fact made him more important or worthy of honor than anyone else.  At the last supper, Jesus stripped down to a loincloth and washed his disciples' feet in the posture of the lowliest of servants.  The narrative in the gospel of John ends with this gem.  “When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.” (John 13:12-16)

How different that is from the picture of greatness the world paints us.  Everywhere he went, the king of heaven was honoring and respectful, even to people the religious elite of the day thought were due no respect like tax collectors and women of ill repute. Instead his divine mission was to pass the holy truth he knew on to others. He knew that there was no separation between him and God, even as he faced the indignities of being bound in flesh. He knew all God’s children were unique and precious and he treated them as such.  This is true humility. Jesus was secure in his own value, and looking outward to a world that needed his help.

How different this also is from the attitude of most churches.  Even the best of churches usually suffer from religious arrogance.  We think just because we know the truth about Jesus that nobody else has ever had a useful or correct thought about God.  I find the notion that the creator of the universe never interacted with the world outside of the pages of our holy book absurd.  Jesus actually had all the answers and he didn’t act as though nobody else had anything worthwhile to say.  Why do so many Christians think it’s their right to beat the world over the head with their wrongness about God? Why are we frustrated or surprised that the world doesn’t want to hear about our savior when we don’t act like him?

Pride, probably.

Now as much as I detest pride, there’s a strange tension here that pride is also the most understandable and human of sins. How are we supposed to think of others as more important than we are when we aren’t living other people’s lives?  We’re firmly locked in the first person when it comes to being human, and only divine revelation or stronger drugs than I’ve ever tried can show us something else for even a moment. Even the humblest among us sometimes get caught in our own heads and I am no exception.  I admit I suffer from pride. Some of you who know me well may be laughing furiously at this absurdly obvious admission right now, and rightfully so.  I love the sound of my own voice and I have for a long time. My voice is beautiful and it generally says things that are witty and correct. Why shouldn’t I love talking over everyone else?  

The answer is that there are many answers to that question. The most selfish and honestly important to me is that I lose an opportunity to learn something I don’t know every time I’m talking instead of listening.  It is far better instead to wait until asked for my opinion.  Getting to the point where I can admit that has been hard, but not as hard as my life would have been if I’d been unable to admit that.  With that admission, I become capable of being something approaching what God wants me to be, rather than just everything I think I should be.  With God’s grace, I hope to grow in this understanding every day of my life.

In light of this, a grand irony about Lucifer’s rebellion against God emerges.  Lucifer was never greater than when he served at God’s right hand.  There he was enthroned above everything other than God, surrounded by beauty and majesty greater even than his own. After the fall, he was king only over hell, with even the lowest of loyalist angels above him.

What was that hell God threw lucifer down into? I don’t think it was a place of torment and suffering initially.  I think God just gave Satan what he wanted; a domain to rule as he saw fit, free from God’s will.  After the perfection of heaven, what could his own lesser creation be but hell?  What madness of pride had possessed him that he didn’t immediately throw himself at God’s feet and beg his forgiveness?  I have no doubt God would have forgiven him. The Jesus story seems to indicate God is rather forgiving. Instead, he stayed in hell.  In Paradise Lost, Lucifer says after being thrown down “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”  I would rather serve in heaven.  What value is a throne over naught but ashes?

*****A PRAYER FOR HUMILITY*****

God, take my eyes off of me and place them firmly on you and your children around me.  I repent of my need to exalt myself above others and instead embrace the truth Jesus modeled that the greatest should serve the least.

Finally an ANNOUNCEMENT!

I will be starting a premium substack. I’ve thought long and hard about it. I refuse to charge people money for the things of god, but there are all these other things I have opinions I could write about, and I have no qualms about charging for those. Look forward to my first premium article about…something. I’m not sure yet, but I know I like writing and I’m good at writing. It’s probably time I started trying to monetize this passion and talent.