It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and
every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people
together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among
drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity—it is
enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect
immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore,
know yourself as nothing in comparison— you do not know God at all. As long as
you are proud you cannot know 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.
That raises a terrible question. 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? I am afraid it means 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 had never known them.
And 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.
- C.S. Lewis
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it
than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or
good-looking but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or
better-looking than others.”
- C.S. Lewis
“For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of
love, or contentment, or even common sense.”
- C.S. Lewis
“The real black diabolical Pride comes when you look down on others so
much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right,
and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the
right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks. But
the Proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says ‘Why should I care
for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything?’”
- C.S. Lewis
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