S1E21 – MC B3C8 – “The Great Sin”

Today we come to the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins, pride, as well as its counterpart, David’s favourite virtue, humility.

Episode 21: Mere Christianity: “The Great Sin” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

• David and Matt recounted some of the adventures in their local C.S. Lewis book group. Some of the ladies were of the opinion thatDavid had been too mean to Matt, particularly on the episode where Matt talks about The Notebook.
• Matt tried to massage David’s ego by talking about a talk he gave at a Theology On Tap: What does it mean to be a restless pilgrim?

Quote-of-the-Week

• The Quote-of-the-week was from “The Screwtape Letters”, Lewis’ fictitious correspondence between two demons:

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble”, and almost immediately pride – pride at his own humility – will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt – and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you should awake his sense of humor and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.

C. S. Lewis, Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters

Toast

• The Drink-of-the-week was Macallan 12. They toasted to the health of Brandon Vogt’s new son, the excellently named Gilbert Lewis Vogt.

Discussion

01. “The Queen of All Vices”

• Pride is the sin we hate most in others…

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Both Matt and David thought Lewis was being a bit generous to Christians here.
• The centre of Christian morality isn’t sex, but pride:

According to Christian teachers, the essential vices, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Matt recalled a previous episode where Lewis emphasised that sexual sins are minor in comparison.

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• If we want to know how prideful we are, Lewis presents a simple test:

…if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, “How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Pride is essentially competitive:

It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise … Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that 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 … It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

02. “Mistaken Identification”

• Pride is often not identified and is instead mistaken for some other vice. Lewis gives two examples:

– Greed: This will drive you to get more money, but there comes a point when you’ve got more than you could possibly ever want. It is at this point that pride takes over, driving you to be richer than some other rich man.

Greed will certainly make a man want money, for the sake of a better house, better holidays, better things to eat and drink. But only up to a point. What is it that makes a man with £10,000 a year anxious to get £20,000 a year? It is not the greed for more pleasure … It is Pride – the wish to be richer than some other rich man, and (still more) the wish for power.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

Lust: A woman who goes around collecting admirers may not be driven by lust, but simply by a competitive desire.

What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

03. “Competition and Division”

• Lewis sums up the competitive nature of pride thusly:

Pride is competitive by its very nature: that is why it goes on and on. If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Good things can come out of other vices, such as camaraderie among a group of drunks, but Pride just can’t do that:

Pride always means enmity – it is enmity.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Pride not only separates man and man, but also man and 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.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

04. “Holier Than Thou”

• How is it that prideful people can also describe themselves as “very religious”? While we expect/hope religious people to hold to a higher moral standard, why should we be surprised when we find religious people with vices?
• Lewis says that the God which the prideful religious worship is imaginary:

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.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Do you worry that this describes you? Fortunately, Jack gives us another test to see if we’re being prideful in this way:

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, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• David and Matt discuss St. Maximillian Kolbe, the Catholic priest who died in place of another prisoner at Auschwitz. David also quoted St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.

St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta

• The previous Lewis quote is the source of a misquote, commonly attributed to Lewis, but which actually comes from a book by Rick Warren:

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life

• However, this is not a quotation from Lewis, as detailed on EssentialCSLewis.com. Incidentally, the author of that website, William O’Flaherty, has just released a book called The Misquotable C.S. Lewis. He also wrote this article for Christianity Today on C.S. Lewis misquotes…

05. “One for Another”

• Jack reminds us of something that he pointed out in the previous chapter: the worst sins are spiritual.

The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Pride can be used to beat down lesser vices. This isn’t a good thing…

Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity – that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride – just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Matt shared a personal story about his struggles with sin in college, and how he was using pride in order to overcome it. David also recalled his hatred of high school, and his low opinion of his classmates.

06. “Praise”

• Jack also says that there are many misconceptions concerning pride:

Misconception #1: Pride from being praised. Lewis says that it’s not necessarily pride:

The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says “Well done,” are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• The problem comes when you start to delight more in yourself than in the praise:

The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, “I have pleased him; all is well,” to thinking, “What a fine person I must be to have done it.” The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of Pride which shows most on the surface, is really the least bad and most pardonable sort … It is a fault, but a child-like and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. it shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• David told the story of the time Carly Simon wrote a song about him, and this got them talking about the movie their “Four Loves” group watched Valentine’s Week, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, as well as Lewis’ book, “The Four Loves”.

The real black, diabolical Pride comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you … the Proud man … says “Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything? … the devil loves “curing” a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity; better the frying-pan than the fire.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

07. “Admiration and Love”

Misconception #2: Pride of a father for a son, or a soldier for a regiment. Better than just being proud of yourself. If this simply means a warm-hearted admiration for something, it’s definitely not a sin. The problem comes when we start thinking ourselves better than others because of our connection to something great.

We say in English that a man is ‘proud’ of his son, or his father, or his school, or regiment … Very often, in such sentences, the phrase ‘is proud of’ means ‘has a warm-hearted admiration for’ … it might, perhaps, mean that the person in question gives himself airs on the ground of his distinguished father,, or because he belongs to a famous regiment. This would, clearly, be a fault; but even then, it would be better than being proud simply of himself. To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

08. “Offending and Knowing God”

Misconception #3: God is worried about our pride because of His own dignity. Lewis says that the primary issue with pride is that it prevents us from coming to know Him.

[God] wants you to know Him; wants to give you Himself … if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble – delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

09. “True Humility”

Misconception #4: Humility doesn’t look like we expect:

[The humble man] will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• Matt and David then discussed the book “David Copperfield” by the Nineteenth Century author Charles Dickens (and disassociate the book from the present-day magician of the same name). Dickens’ book contains a character called Uriah Heep who is always talking about how humble he is…

‘Oh, indeed you must excuse me, Master Copperfield! I am greatly obliged, and I should like it of all things, I assure you; but I am far too umble. There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning. Learning ain’t for me. A person like myself had better not aspire. If he is to get on in life, he must get on umbly, Master Copperfield!’ (17.54)

Charles Dickens, Uriah Heep, David Copperfield

10. “The First Step”

• Lewis concludes the chapter talking about how to grow in humility:

The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

Wrap-Up

Concluding Thoughts

• The outline for today’s chapter is available here.

Support Us!

• Please follow us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
• We would be grateful if new listeners would rate and review us on their preferred podcast platform.