“The Sin of Pride”

pp. 4 - 8

“Intellectual pride wants to master an area and call it ‘our subject,’ or ‘my area.’ But if we are concerned with truth, with any truth, we must be subject to it, not it to us. Pride is the belief that we can do anything without God and it leads to the ultimate madness–a blindness whose main side horror is that it masquerades as sight (John 9:41). Pride is not great and titanic. Is pride not more essentially a rather prim and nervous little clutching at the bonds of our private little world, to stop it falling apart?’ As Chesterton said . . . ‘There is about one who defends humility something inexpressibly rakish. Pride is actually a form of pusillanimity, in that it chooses what is really a very small good, the good of self-respect, and foregoes the much vaster goods which call for self-abandonment, goods like love and joy and indeed greatness.”