COMPULSIONS OF THE FALSE SELF: PRIDE
Text: Proverbs 16:16-20; Luke 18:9-14

I begin today a series on the Seven Deadly Sins. You may remember the Brad Pitt movie, “Seven” about the serial killer who used this ancient classification of sins to identify his victims and design their deaths. Can you name the seven? Pride, Sloth, Envy, Anger, Greed, Gluttony and Lust.

They were arranged in their final classification of seven by Pope Gregory the Great fifteen hundred years ago. Ever since they have been used to reflect on the moral life. Dorothy Sayers, the British mystery writer and philosopher grouped the seven into two: Hot and Cold. The cold-hearted sins were pride, envy and greed. The warm-hearted sins were sloth, gluttony and lust. Anger could be either: The hot burst of temper or cold brooding bitterness.

We could call them, as I do today, “compulsions of the false self.” If we were created with a true self in the image of God, as persons with true desires, we also have a “false self” shaped by the world, which produces false desire or distortions of desire. The desert mothers and fathers of the 4th century called them “passions,” energies which were destructive of love and healthy personhood.

I

Today we look at the first deadly sin, the compulsion of the false self called Pride. Sometimes the seven deadly sins have been pictured as the major branches of a tree with pride as the trunk of the tree. That may be overstating the case, but Pride makes all the other sins deadlier.

Pride makes Envy greener and Anger meaner. It makes Greed greedier and Gluttony “eatier.” It deepens Sloth’s despair and gives Lust a strut.

Pride infects all vices and all virtues. It’s reach is long and its roots are deep. And as one has said, “It comes early and stays late.”

What is this sin of Pride? Dictionaries define it as “inordinate self-esteem.” The Old Testament has six Hebrew words which translate as pride. They have the sense “to lift up” or “to be on high.”
Each of the sins has its own face, and associations are made between animals and sins. Pride is described as “camel-nosed.” Ever seen an humble looking camel, its nose high and lifted up? Pride is being “stuck-up” or “puffed-up.” One expression goes: “He’s eat-up with himself.”
Pride has been described as being “inordinantly pleased with oneself.” The chest is swollen; a walk becomes a strut. Another animal is invoked: “Proud as a... peacock.”

But if pride is “inordinate self-esteem,” isn’t there an ordinate self-esteem? A proper sense of self-worth? Aristotle called pride a virtue if it achieved the golden-mean between extreme vanity and extreme humiliation. Erich Fromm said we must love ourselves before we can love another. Even the self-giving Jesus implied the need of self-love in the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.

I think most would agree: We need a kind of pride that avoids thinking too highly of oneself or too lowly of oneself. One extreme is the sin of Pride and the other the sin of Sloth, which I will describe next week.

II

So what is the deadly sin of pride. The Bible traces it back all the way to the garden of Eden where the serpent tempted Eve and Adam with the lure: Eat of this tree and you shall be as God.

We were created in God’s image and called to “represent and resemble” God in the world. What a high calling. But the temptation is to want to be more - - to be God, to assume God-like power, wisdom and goodness. In our overweening pride we forget, as one has put it, our “common weeniness.”

The Tower of Babel warns us of nations, cities, peoples, who try to build a tower to the heavens, and make a name for themselves.

Ezekiel tells a parable of a nation as a great cedar grown tall and strong at the bank of a river. But the tree forgets that its nourishment comes from God and so is destroyed (Ezekiel 31:1-14).
Solomon, who did not always practice the wisdom he preached, said in Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

The apostle Paul saw pride as the sin of idolatry: We exchange the glory of the immortal God for the image of ourselves. We trade God in for a mirror, worshiping not the Creator but our own creatureliness. So the quip is correct: The problem with the self-made man is that he worships his creator.

In Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, Troy is a brash young farmer whose pride ends up destroying everything he touches. As Berry described him, his “reference point was himself.”
He enlarged his pride by in investing it (as well as a lot of money, usually borrowed money) in equipment. And so then the equipment, the power to do things mechanically became his point of reference. His question was what his equipment could do, not what the farm could stand. The farm, in a way, became his mirror. The farm never at any time was his reference point, and this was his bewilderment and his (and its) ruin. This was why he was reduced by everything he did to enlarge himself; it was why his life was all spending and no gain.1

Pride then is the idolatry of the self, and the world becomes only a mirror of ourselves. We are endlessly self-referential. It’s all about me.

Reinhold Niebuhr says that the root of pride is anxiety. We are fearful, anxious about life, about our finitude, about life. So we try to be as God, we build towers, we buy equipment, we try to enlarge ourselves. He may be right.

III

Historically the church has identified the sin of pride as three main idols: The pride of power, the pride of knowledge, the pride of goodness. Dorothy Sayers says: “The devilish strategy of Pride is that it attacks us not on our weak points, but on our strong.”

The “vain glory” of nations is that they assume God-like power, wisdom and righteousness. America has its own vain glory, arising especially in post 9/11 anxiety.

The White House’s National Security Strategy, 2002, is marked by the sin of Pride. Here are some excerpts:

Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade political adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling, the power of the United States.
Gone is the Cold War doctrine of the balance of power. We can survive only by the superiority of our power.
So we adopt the doctrine of preemptive war:
The greater the threat, the greater the risk of inaction - - and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
No nation can be as powerful, wise or good as we now pretend to be.

The pride of Power lives by the creed: Might makes Right. In Genesis God calls us to have “dominion” over the earth. Prides turn this sacred calling into a plundering of the earth and a desecration of God’s world.

There is the pride of knowledge. We make an idol of learning. We like Faust would trade our souls for ultimate knowledge. By our brains we shall be saved. In our day knowledge multiplies - - at least our access to it. But where is wisdom?

There is also the pride of Goodness, the besetting sin of religious people. Like the pharisee in Jesus’ parable who prayed: (I paraphrase here)

I thank you Lord that I am not like other folk, greedy, unjust, adulterers, or even like that pitiful tax-collector over there pretending to pray. Bless his heart. I pray every day, go to church twice a week, tithe my income, keep the commandments, vote my moral values. I thank you Lord that I’m not like other people (see Luke 18:9-14).

Saint Bernard wrote of the proud monk: “He is inclined to fast more, pray longer, sleep less, look sicker than his fellows, proving that he is a singular holy man.” The pride of goodness.

If those are the main branches of Pride, there are many swollen branches sprouting out from these.

There’s spirit of vanity. The vain person enters the room or walks down the street and assumes all eyes are on him or her. As Carly Simon sang about her vain ex-boyfriend, “You’re so vain you probably think this song is about you.”

Then there’s the sin of ostentation. I like to look good. Don’t you? But when does looking good turn into vanity and ostentation.

Then there’s the pride of rebelliousness against authority. Do you chafe under authority figures, under rules? The Parson in The Canterbury Tales calls this the sin of “contumacy.”

Jayber Crow, the main character in Wendell Berry’s novel tells about his early career as a student:
I did the assignments and made tolerable grades, but I knew I could have done better. I was working against what I was now beginning to understand as a limitation of character.... I had what seemed an inborn dislike for doing anything that someone told me to do.2

There’s the pride of conceit and scorn. There’s the form of pride exhibited by the rolling of eyes. There’s the pride where we must win all arguments and force apologies from those who’ve wronged us. There’s the pride of false humility. “O, it was nothing!” often drips with pride. As Pascal once noted: “Few speak of humility humbly.” Especially preachers.

IV

There are many branches of pride. To examine yourself is to find more than you suspect. As Augustine said, Pride is both cold and blind. Pride is deadly because it blinds us to its presence. If you don’t think you have much, watch out!

Pride is also cold. Color it blue. It moves in the words of William May into “the shadow of solitude.” It’s lonely at the top. We pride ourselves in our uniqueness, our exceptionalism. No one is quite like us. The normal rules do not apply. This may even apply to our suffering and hardship. No one has suffered quite as I have. This is the form of pride called singularity. Quite unique, we are quite alone. Historians identify a strain of thinking in America called “American Exceptionalism.” The normal rules of history that have applied to other nations do not apply to us. We are unique.

V
 

What can we say in face of the insidious power of Pride?

The gospel comes this day in the twin graces of pardon and power. The grace of forgiveness and the grace to overcome the invasive power of pride in our lives.

We must hear this liberating word: Sin is strong, but grace is stronger!

In face of the power and presence of pride we may live in denial or in despair, denial of pride’s place in us or despair over escaping its power.

But Jesus came to the prideful too and comes to us. He was tempted by it in the wilderness. The heart of the devil’s temptations was that he be not just son of God but God! Turn these stones to bread. Rule the nations. Sky dive off the Temple tower. But he, armed with the word of God and spirit of God, said no.

Years later the Apostle Paul would sing this hymn to Christ

Have this mind among yourselves
that was in Christ Jesus
who though he was in the morphe, form, image of God
did not count equality with God
a thing to be grasped (or grabbed)
but emptied himself
taking the form of a servant,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form
he humbled himself
and became obedient unto death
even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-9

For all his power, wisdom, goodness, he bowed beneath Another. Can his mind be in us struggling with Pride?

The spiritual life is like a spiral staircase. We keep coming back around to the same challenges - - like Pride. But we are not at the same place; we are one round higher. We more clearly see what Pride is up to. And by the grace of God - - its pardon and its power, we shall overcome.



1. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint 2000), p.338.
2. Op.cit., p.47.