The Great Sin

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. PROVERBS 16:18

When Lewis came, in his third series of broadcast talks, to the subject of Christian behaviour, he gave one chapter a title that surprised his listeners. He did not reserve it for murder, or cruelty, or the sins of the flesh that respectable people most like to condemn. He gave it to pride. Pride, he told them, is easy to spot in other people and almost impossible to spot in oneself. In the Christian tradition he was drawing on, it was the sin of the first rebel angel, before ever there was a human sinner. Every other vice, by comparison, is small.

Why pride is the worst

Lewis gave several reasons for this ranking, and each of them is worth weighing.

The first is that pride is by its very nature competitive. Most sins arise from appetites that can at least in principle be satisfied. A greedy man may have eaten enough; a lazy man may have rested enough. Pride, by contrast, does not care about having a thing; it cares about having it in greater measure than others. Two proud people cannot both be the cleverest, the richest or the best-looking in the room, and so pride sets every person against every other. It is the root of enmity between neighbours, and between nations.

The second is that pride sets a man against God. Pride wants to be at the top, and a creature determined to be at the top cannot bow to the One who is truly above it. That is why pride, more than any other condition of the heart, shuts a person off from knowing God at all. God is, by definition, immeasurably greater than we are; and a heart that is determined to be on top will never bow to Him.

God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble. JAMES 4:6

The third reason is the most unsettling. Pride can grow out of goodness itself. The other vices are, so to speak, the devil working on our animal nature. Pride works on our spiritual nature, and it can feed on our very virtues. A man may conquer his temper, his greed or his lust, and become proud of conquering them. A church may grow, and its members become proud of it. Lewis warned that a person can be cured of a dozen lesser faults and be no safer for it, if pride is quietly feeding on the cure; the enemy has then traded small sins for a great one.

And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others. LUKE 18:9

Religious pride

Lewis was especially concerned about pride among religious people. He noticed that it is possible to be very devout and yet to be using religion as a platform from which to look down on others. Such people may talk a great deal about their unworthiness, and imagine themselves humble, while all the time they are quietly congratulating themselves on being better than the unbelievers around them. Lewis suggested a simple test. If our religion is leaving us more pleased with ourselves and more contemptuous of others, that is a sure sign that something other than God is at work in it.

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. LUKE 18:10

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. LUKE 18:13

What pride is not

Lewis was careful to clear away some misunderstandings. Pleasure in being praised is not the same as pride. A child who is glad when a parent says well done, or a worker who is pleased by honest thanks, is not proud; the pleasure comes from having pleased someone whom it was right to want to please. The trouble begins when we start to admire ourselves for what has been praised, and to want praise for its own sake.

Nor is pride the same as warm admiration for one’s country or family or school, though that too can go wrong. And it is certainly not the same as self-respect in the sense of refusing to do what is shameful. Lewis’s target was narrower and deeper: the settled habit of the heart that puts self at the centre, measures everything against self, and resents anything greater.

The humble man

What, then, is humility? Here Lewis said something that has helped many readers. Humility, he argued, does not consist in having a low opinion of one’s own gifts, or in pretending to be worse at things than one is. That kind of humility is often a performance, and a tiring one. The truly humble person, Lewis suggested, is someone you would hardly notice as humble at all. He is not thinking about his own merits, high or low. He is too absorbed in other things — in the person in front of him, in the work, in the world, in God — to be keeping score of himself at all. The surest mark of humility is not self-criticism but freedom from self-concern.

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. PHILIPPIANS 2:3

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. PHILIPPIANS 2:5

The way to humility, he added, begins with the recognition that one is proud. That is a large first step, and many never take it. The person most confident that he is free of pride, Lewis thought, is usually the one most firmly in its grip.

Why God wants us humble

Lewis was clear that God does not demand humility because He wants to make us feel small, or because He enjoys our grovelling. He demands it because humility is the truth about us, and because pride makes it impossible for us to know Him. To come into God’s presence is to be overwhelmed with delight, and the delight is greatest when we have forgotten ourselves entirely. God wants us humble because He wants us happy, and the proud cannot be happy in His company.

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up. JAMES 4:10

He found the same theme in his own experience. He had been, by his own account, a proud young man, proud of his intellect and contemptuous of those who did not share it. The surrender of 1929 was above all a defeat of that pride. He knew from the inside how hard it is for a clever person to kneel.

Weighing it

There is almost nothing in Lewis’s teaching on pride to set aside. It is a faithful exposition of a theme that runs through the whole Bible, from the serpent’s promise that our first parents would be as gods, through the proud king of Babylon, to the Lord who humbled Himself to the death of the cross. Augustine had said the same in his City of God, and the Puritans after him.

If one point needs adding, it is the remedy. Lewis described humility beautifully, but the deepest cure for pride is not a technique of self-forgetfulness. It is the cross. Nothing humbles a sinner like the sight of what his sin cost the Son of God, and nothing frees him from the need to be better than others like the knowledge that he has been accepted, freely, for Christ’s sake alone.

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. GALATIANS 6:14

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of the person whose success or praise most annoys you. Ask honestly what that annoyance reveals about your own heart.

2. Notice this week when you compare yourself with others, whether favourably or unfavourably. Bring each comparison to God.

3. Read Luke 18:9–14. Which of the two men do you more naturally resemble in prayer?

4. In your next conversation, practise forgetting yourself: listen fully, ask questions, and resist the urge to turn the subject back to you.

5. Spend time at the foot of the cross in prayer, and let it do its humbling work.

A PRAYER

Lord, You resist the proud and give grace to the humble. I confess that I am proud, more proud than I know.

Forgive me for looking down on others, for measuring myself against them, and for being proud even of my religion.

Show me myself as I am, and show me Yourself as You are, until I forget myself in wonder.

Let this mind be in me which was also in Christ Jesus, who humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Amen.