I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity along with Tim Challies in his Reading the Classics Together reading program. I read along last week, too, when the reading was the first six chapters of Book 3, Christian Behaviour, but I didn’t have time to post on it.
This week’s reading continues with the rest of Book 3, chapters 7-12, chapters on forgiveness, pride, charity, hope and faith. If you want a summary of this section, I suggest you read Tim’s own post from today, because I’m not doing summaries here. I’m just commenting briefly on one or two things that I find interesting or convicting or that I disagree with in each section of reading.
First, let me say that I’m learning more from this book on Christian behaviour than I did the previous two books. I’ve thought a lot about the subjects in Book 1 and Book 2 (and it may be that it was reading this very book when I was 18 or 19 that started me in that direction of thinking), and less about the subject of this section.
The chapter in this section that was most convicting to me was the one on pride (or self-conceit), which Lewis calls “The Great Sin.” Pride, says he, is the central evil or vice.
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, 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.
If you think about this, you’ll see that it’s right. We lie to gain or preserve something for ourselves—to get an edge up or to keep from being taken down. We covet because we want to have more than others do. And it’s anti-God because, for one, it is serving ourselves by looking out for our own self-interest rather than serving God.
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 is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy.
I struggle a lot with pride. I’ve mentioned before that I am, by nature, extremely competitive. I think I started out in life wanting to be the best at everything I did, and while I may be better at being content for other people to be better at some things than I am now than I used to be, that ugly competitive streak still shows itself more often than I’d like.
Here’s another of my dirty secrets: One of the reasons I have a thick skin—I can take it when people tell me I’m wrong or stupid (or whatever) without getting upset—is that I’m usually sure that I’m right. I have a pretty high opinion of myself. I was going to say that deep down I have a high opinion of myself, but honestly, you don’t have to dig very far to find it. If you’ve bought into the self-esteem psychobabble of contemporary thought, you may see this as a virtue. Believe me, it’s not.
It’s pride, and pride is a very ugly thing because, as Lewis says, it leads to all kinds of other sin. But the ugliest thing about it is that it raises me up and brings God down. It brings God down because it is service of self rather than God, and because it does not acknowledge my dependence on God as the source of everything that I am and have.
Lewis says the beginning step in acquiring humility, which the virtue corresponding to the vice of pride and the opposite of it,
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.
Another biggish step, I’d think, is giving a truthful answer to Paul’s question in 1 Corinthians 4:
For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive?
It doesn’t hurt to brush up now and then on the doctrine of total depravity either. Someone I know who stuggles with pride and one-upmanship once called it the great equalizer.