But the head and origin of all
sin is the basic sin of Superbia or Pride. In one way there is
so much to say about Pride that one might speak of it for a week and not
have done. Yet in another way, all there is to be said about it can be said
in a single sentence. It is the sin of trying to be as God. It is the sin
which proclaims that Man can produce out of his own wits, and his own
impulses and his own imagination
the standards by which he lives: that Man is fitted to be his own judge. It
is Pride which turns man's virtues into deadly sins, by causing each
self-sufficient virtue to issue in its own opposite, and as a grotesque and
horrible travesty of itself. The name under which Pride walks the world at
this moment is the Perfectibility of Man, or the doctrine of Progress; and
its speciality is the making of blueprints for Utopia and establishing the
Kingdom of Man on earth.
For the devilish strategy of
Pride is that it attacks us, not on our weak points, but on our strong. It
is preeminently the sin of the noble mind—that corruptio optimi which
works more evil in the world than all the deliberate vices. Because we do
not recognise pride when we see it, we stand aghast to see the havoc wrought
by the triumphs of human idealism. We meant well, we thought we were
succeeding—an look what has come of our efforts! There is a proverb which
says that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. We usually take it
as referring to intentions that have been weakly abandoned; but it has a
deeper and much subtler meaning. That road is paved with good intentions
strongly and obstinately pursued, until they become self-sufficing ends in
themselves and deified.
Sin grows with doing good.
. .
Servant of God has chance of greater sin
And sorrow; than the man who serves a king.
For those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them,
Still doing right.
T.S. Eliot: Murder in the
Cathedral
The Greeks feared above all
things the state of mind they called hubris—the inflated spirits that
come with over-much success. Overweening in men called forth, they thought,
the envy of the gods. Their theology may seem to us a little unworthy, but
with the phenomenon itself and its effects they were only too well
acquainted. Christianity, with a more rational theology, traces hubris
back to the root-sin of Pride, which places man instead of God at the
centre of gravity and so throws the whole structure of things into
the ruin called Judgment. Whenever we say, whether in the personal,
political or social sphere,
I
am the master of my fate,
I
am the captain of my soul
we are committing the sin of
Pride; and the higher the goal at which we aim; the more far-reaching will
be the subsequent disaster. That is why we ought to distrust all those high
ambitions and lofty ideals which make the well-being of humanity their
ultimate end. Man cannot make himself happy by serving himself-not even
when he calls self-service the service of the community; for "the community"
in that context is only an extension of his own ego. Human happiness is a
by-product, thrown off in man's service of God. And incidentally, let us be
very careful how we preach that “Christianity is necessary for the building
of a free and prosperous post-war world.” The proposition is strictly true,
but to put it that way may be misleading, for it sounds as though we
proposed to make God an instrument in the service of man. But God is
nobody's instrument. If we say that the denial of God was the cause of our
present disasters, well and good; it is of the essence of Pride to suppose
that we can do without God.
But it will not do to let the
same sin creep back in a subtler and more virtuous-seeming form by
suggesting that the service of God is necessary as a means to the service of
man. That is a blasphemous hypocrisy, which would end by degrading God to
the status of a heathen fetish, bound to the service of a tribe, and liable
to be dumped head-downwards in the water-butt if He failed to produce good
harvest-weather in return for services rendered.
“Cursed be he that trusteth in
man,” says Reinhold Niebuhr [Beyond Tragedy] “even if he be pious man
or, perhaps, particularly if he be pious man.” For the besetting temptation
of the pious man is to become the proud man: “He spake this parable unto
certain which trusted in
themselves that they were
righteous."
