#pride

I am an expert witness...
because I say I am!

Don Henley, “The Garden of Allah”

[Dear Reader: This is the tenth in a series on the vices as the Desert Fathers understood them. If you haven’t already read them, please begin the series with parts one and two first.]

John Cassian, who has been our mentor on these trips to the Desert, concludes his list of the eight principal vices with the oldest and most dangerous, last in order but “nonetheless first in terms of origin and time” (Institutes XII.1). Like vainglory, what makes pride so, so dangerous for the maturing Christian is that its seeds are sown in the victories we enjoy over the lower vices that manifest themselves in physical behaviors.

It is a challenge to find the line of demarcation between vainglory and pride, and maybe it is not worth too much effort to try; I’m not sure you will find one without the other closely lurking. But I think making some distinction can offer useful insights. The best way I know how to articulate the difference is that the essential quality of vainglory is a desire for praise and even reward on account of our virtues—from people and from God, if not both—while the essential quality of pride is assuming credit for our virtues.

Cassian divides pride into two varieties, a lower and a higher. The lower form, which he calls carnal, proved frequently to be a stumbling block for new monks. Few monks would ever experience the higher form; like the boss at the end of a long series of video game levels, only the most advanced and accomplished monks would ever encounter it in their spiritual journey. We’ll consider both, but we will focus primarily on the first since it is relevant to the broadest array of people.

The Foolishness of Foolish Pride

In the movie Doctor Strange, when the arrogant but desperate title character is briefly cast from Kamar-Taj to beg for re-entry on the doorstep, I have to laugh a just a little bit because it is so very familiar to me. In Cassian’s day, this is precisely how those who sought entry into a monastery were often treated. Someone who walked in off the street hoping to join would be left outside the doors for days, even weeks, to prove just how much they wanted in. In the meantime they were lucky if the monks treated them with mere indifference; they were much more likely to be mocked and to have their motives questioned by every monk who passed them begging at the gate. There was a practical purpose to this: there were plenty of people who mistook monasticism as an easy life by which they could guarantee their basic needs would be met, and better to weed them out up front. But despite its dispassionate utility, this shocking display of apparent cruelty was primarily a spiritual entrance exam. The monks wanted—needed!—to gauge just how proud this guy on the doorstep was.

Once finally admitted into the community, the novice could look forward to months and even years of menial, humbling labor. A monk never outgrew the need for performing dirty jobs as inoculation against self-aggrandizement, but the novices drew the dirtiest. This was simply the next test: Could they remain content—and teachable—amidst these circumstances? Or, like unbroken horses, would they buck and snort and resist? This was also the purpose of the classical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, because the former life and any pride found therein had to be left behind in order to fully embrace the new one. A novice who refused could “never accept the simple and true humility of Christ into his heart—not as long as he boasts to himself of his noble birth, or is puffed up by worldly honors that he has abandoned in body but not in mind” (XII.17.1).

Unsurprisingly, some were able to learn these lessons better and more quickly than others. Cassian provides a tragicomic description of those “no longer content to bear the yoke of the monastery or to be instructed by the teaching of any elder.” When vital but convicting instruction was offered the proud, immature monk would fidget and create deliberate, passive-aggressive interruptions: “He will clear his dry throat and incessantly bring up phlegm; he will play with his fingers, fiddling with them and tracing them as if he were writing; and all the members of his body will be so agitated for as long as the spiritual conference continues that he will give the impression of being utterly at the mercy of swarming worms or sharp thorns” (XII.17.2-3). Any teacher can recognize the phenomenon; there is nothing new under the sun.

This is not an indictment of kinesthetic learners, but rather of an unteachable spirit that is drunk on pride. “The whole time that the spiritual life is being examined and discussed he will be busy with his own suspicious thoughts and will not be on the watch for what he should take in for his well-being; instead, he will anxiously look for reasons as to why such-and-such a thing was said, and in silence he will go over in his heart what objections he could raise against it. The result is that he will be completely unable to understand or in any degree to be improved by anything that has been beneficially discussed.” I’m not the one with the problem, you see. Abba Dinglefracas over there is just a cranky scold who doesn’t get me and doesn’t appreciate what I already have to offer and doesn’t understand why I don’t need this silly old stuff.

“For in his belief that he could attain to the glory of the Godhead by his own free will and effort, [Lucifer] lost even that which was his by the grace of God the Creator.”

John Cassian

This is the pride that afflicts most of us, usually without us recognizing it for what it is, and it mires us in spiritual immaturity and confusion. We simply will not grow until we confront it and repent of it, because until we do we cannot grow. Our inflated sense of self is actually a self-imposed upper limit on our potential, and it orients us on a trajectory away from God. Rather than a vibrant faith, this carnal pride breeds in us defensiveness over our unrepentant sin, bitterness that obedience denies us what we would really rather do if we could get away with it, resentment towards those whose faults mirror our own, and jealousy for those whose growing maturity is a living indictment of our stagnation.

We have to overcome this, and we can—but not by ourselves. In fact, “self” is the whole problem.

Finding Hell in Your Own Head

I’m generally not a fan of using fear as a motivator, because it is a flawed and ultimately poisonous motivation. But pride ought to alarm us—our own pride, for our own sakes, should stop us dead in our tracks in grief. Inside the Church and outside, I don’t think enough people truly respect the kind of soul-warping damage it does to us: “There is no other vice which so reduces to naught every virtue and so despoils and impoverishes a human being of all righteousness and holiness as does the evil of pride” (XII.3.1).

“God opposes the proud” is a sentiment repeated and paraphrased throughout the Bible. Cassian comments that Scripture never teaches us that the Lord draws such a bright line with those caught up in gluttony, lust, greed, or anger, even though all are serious matters from which redemption is necessary. However—and buckle up for this, because you may not like it—he observes that the pain for those offenses is only felt by those who are themselves guilty of sin, even if the price they pay winds up being the results of sins committed by others rather than themselves. (I understand that could be a very irritating idea, especially if you’ve been grievously wounded by the sins of others. Please consider the principle here, not the particulars of your own experiences.) That phenomenon, being hurt by what others do more than what we do, probably ticks us off more, actually…because pride blinds us to the fact that we are not innocent—no matter what games of comparison between us and them we might be tempted to play—and that our sins hurt others as well.

But even more than that, pride “of its very nature touches God, and therefore it is specially worthy of having God opposed to it” (XII.7). God graciously offers to redeem us from any vice, but pride is no ordinary vice. The awfulness of pride is it causes us to say to God, either explicitly or implicitly, that “I’m just fine without you.” Unlike any other sin, pride is a deliberate, personal insult to a perfect, beneficent God.

And that self-reliance is the source of this terrible, powerful vice. Cassian looks to pride’s author to help us understand the severe gravity of failing to account for the distortions it introduces into our thinking and our faith. “[Lucifer] believed that he had acquired the splendor of his wisdom and beauty of his virtue, with which he was adorned by the grace of the Creator, not as the latter’s [abundantly generous] gift but by the power of his own nature. Made proud on this account…he relied on the power of his free will, believing that by it everything that pertained to the perfection of his virtue and to the continuance of his supreme blessedness would be supplied to him in abundance” (XII.4.2).

So Lucifer, an angel blessed magnificently by God, exchanged gratitude towards God for pride in himself. In this state of self-regard he assumed the benefits of his blessedness would continue forever by his own “sufficient” efforts, only to realize too late just how badly he had miscalculated: “Because of it he was abandoned by God, whom he did not believe that he needed. At once he lost his balance; he tottered, became fully aware of the frailty of his own nature, and lost the blessedness that he had enjoyed as a gift of God” (XII.4.2-3, emphasis mine).

Is that Hell?

How is that not Hell?!

Imagine having irretrievably forfeited the extravagant goodness of a loving, generous God, only to realize too late just what you discarded in foolish pride, belatedly recognizing that you had clung to something decaying and incomparably dingy. And you get to live with the memory of that mistake for all eternity, stewing in absurdly misdirected hatred forever because you were too proud to repent while it was still possible to do so.

Rather than a vibrant faith, this carnal pride breeds in us defensiveness over our unrepentant sin, bitterness that obedience denies us what we would really rather do if we could get away with it, resentment towards those whose faults mirror our own, and jealousy for those whose growing maturity is a living indictment of our stagnation.

I do not dismiss the biblical presentation of Hell as a hot place, but if I’ve learned anything from Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego it is that the fire isn’t such a bad place if God is there with me. But to live eternally with a molding bowl of tasteless lentil soup that I thought I wanted more than God’s blessing? The eternal regret is the true torment. The wages of Lucifer’s pride are also available to us, should we make this laughably bad exchange: “For in his belief that he could attain to the glory of the Godhead by his own free will and effort, he lost even that which was his by the grace of God the Creator” (XII.5).

The Harder They Fall

Carnal pride was the scourge of the novices but the abbas, the spiritual leaders of the community, were the prey stalked by Cassian’s deeper form of pride. This is because one simply could not experience this form of pride until they had made great spiritual advances and experienced victory over the lower, carnal vices. Only the most mature and respected monks faced it. “And because the most subtle enemy has not been able to conquer these persons with a carnal fall, he attempts to cast them down and overthrow them by a spiritual collapse, thereby striving to despoil them of all the [results] of their previous gains, acquired at great effort. But those of us who are still caught up in the earthy passions he never deigns to try in this way; instead, he overthrows us with a crasser and, so to say, carnal pride” [XII.16).

With that in mind, our consideration of this kind of pride will serve more as vaccine against anticipated future struggles, though it can serve us usefully wherever we are now. Unfortunately I have already gone longer here than I intend, so we will conclude this next blahg. For now it is enough to say that the presence of pride and the knowledge of its ruthlessness should never dissuade us from seeking maturity in Christ, but it should remind us that we will only do so by God’s grace, purchased with Christ’s blood and made effective in us by the Holy Spirit.

I haven’t been terribly practical in this dispatch from the Desert, because (as usual) it has gotten away with me. So I’m going to be content for now trying to get real about what the problem is and invite you, dear friend, to some introspection. Next week we’ll turn from the prince of the vices to the king of the virtues, as a means of seeking remedy for pride and for all that ails us.

photo credit: pixabay.com