Themeattics

All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.

Sophocles, Antigone

At this point, you’ve likely noticed a trend in these posts. Yes, they’re all about means of self-improvement and traps we fall into, but they have all been ancillary. There’s a core concept I’ve been tip-toeing around, and I realized I’m doing all of these other articles a disservice by avoiding it. Since there’s no time like the present, here we are.

Let’s talk about pride.

Saint Thomas Aquinas believed pride to be “the beginning of all sin” (Q162, A7). In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis expanded on this claim: “…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.”

And what is pride? Boiled down, it’s nothing more than the belief that we are the most important thing at any moment. On its face, we recognize this as a flawed idea. Still, elevating it to the Prime Fault might seem a bit of a stretch at first glance. With everything going on out there – all the murder, hate, lack of empathy, and schadenfreude – feeling that you’re better than someone else doesn’t seem all that bad, does it? In fact, it feels pretty natural. True, even.

Already, you’re in it.

And to be fair, you’re not wrong. Most of the residual effects of pride come with worse direct outcomes. However, they all originate there. Lust, greed, and envy, the Cerberus of sins, are variations on the idea that what someone else has would be best served in our own interests. Sloth, that our time be used only in service to making ourselves feel good at the moment. Gluttony, that all things are made to serve our desires. Wrath, that another person might dare put their wants, or even needs, above our own. All of them point inward. All of them scream, “me.”

So here we find ourselves, mid-year 2021, awash in pride. As a society, we celebrate it. Far from the ultimate vice, we seek it out. Glorify it. We do what we can to plaster it anywhere anyone can see. We want the recognition. We want to be admired. Revered. To be important. The Original Sin of humanity, that pride that led to the fall of man, is still going strong. It always will be.

I don’t want this article to sound accusatory – believe me, it isn’t. I’m no better than anyone else here, and likely a lot worse than some. I like to pretend I don’t want those things, but that hasn’t stopped me from sharing these articles on Facebook and checking every so often to see if they get any traction. That was never the goal, but it would be nice, wouldn’t it? That little bit of recognition, the thought that something I say might have some influence. That it might help build a legacy, get some people interested in my work, and ultimately help publish my novels. I’m only human, after all.

Far from accusatory, I want to help us all understand. Pride is a prime motivator. It drives most of society as we experience it, and there is only one way to combat it. The most bitter pill. Humility.

Humility also gets a bad rap, but not from people trashing the idea so much as entirely misunderstanding it. These days it is mostly interchangeable with modesty, but the two vastly differ. Modesty can be part of humility, of course, but it can just as easily be a case of pride – feigning humility for the sake of hearing more praise. No, the humility that fights pride is much harder than basic outward signs. It is understanding the fact that pride drives humanity and actively seeking to silence it in our own life. It is forcing oneself to be content with what one has. It is putting our all into service of those around us, no matter the outcome. It is not expecting anything from anyone. Ever.

There is nothing easy about humility. Nothing natural. It seems our every instinct rails against it. Pride is the American way. The Western way. The Earthly way. Right, Left; Capitalist, Communist; Christian, Buddhist, atheist; white, black; everything and everyone; nothing is immune. Ideologies crumble against the unbreakable nature of humanity. If we exercise true humility, we will be taken advantage of, and we will have to accept it. We need only look at the truest example of real humility – Christ himself. He lived this. We killed him for it.

I’ll close with His instruction for us on just this thing. “Or how sayest thou to thy brother: Let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold a beam is in thy own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote of thy brother’s eye.” – Matthew 7:5. Such is humility – the constant turn inward to purge pride. A turn inward that never ends, and thus never allows us to throw stones at others.

I hope this post finds you well, friends. Let’s keep improving ourselves, together. It would do us all some good.