Clive Staples Lewis…..Readers of this blog know that this 20th century intellectual giant is my all-time favorite Christian Author. A one- time Atheist, he came to experience the magnificence and love of God and could not stop writing about his faith until he died. This piece was originally published on 2/28/2018.
ON PRIDE: 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 in ourselves, the more we dislike it in others…..The center of Christian morals does not lie in sexual morality….According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, etc 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.
Pride is competitive by its very nature-It gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having it more than the next man. People are not just proud of being rich, clever or good-looking. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer or better-looking than others. It is the comparison that makes one proud; the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. Pride always means enmity, not only between man and man, but enmity to 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.
ON CHRISTIAN PRIDE: 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?? 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 has never known them.
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 the vices can smuggle itself into our religious life. Why? The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come from our animal nature at all. It comes direct from hell. IT IS PURELY SPIRITUAL: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly.
It can also be used to beat down simpler vices. Many a man has overcome 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 seeing you becoming chaste 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 one’s cold sores cured if he was allowed , in return, to give one cancer. For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
CULLED FROM ‘MERE CHRISTIANITY’ – A C.S. LEWIS TIMELESS CLASSIC
Takeaway points: Pride is a common vice, a spiritual vice which leads to other vices. Admitting it even to a minute degree is the first step in becoming humble. As C.S. Lewis also wrote, ‘Humility is not thinking less about oneself but thinking about oneself less’.
WE all should beware of seeing ourselves as better than others, especially our fellow Christians and those from other denominations, it is a common trap that the enemy sets for us. We should always remember that all that we are and have comes from Grace and Mercy. Besides, only the God who assesses our motives in all that we do (and not our outward actions/words), knows who is acceptable to Him
Hilltop Thoughts, Valley Strengths 