The Essential Vice

Pride or Self-Conceit is the chief vice of creation. "According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites 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" (Lewis, 87).

Pride is essentially competitive by nature. The man that is proud of his wealth, his house or his beautiful wife is not actually proud of those things. He is proud that he is wealthier than so-and-so, that his house is the largest on the block and that in his circle of friends his wife is more beautiful than all the others. If everyone were equally rich, with an equally palatial house and equally beautiful wives the proud man would not be proud. The key to ridding oneself of Pride then is remove the competition. Lewis states that the Christian virtue opposed to Pride is Humility. I wonder if it isn't contentment.

Pride never brings two together. Pride always means enmity, enmity between man and man and enmity between man and God. When you get to know God you realize that He is something that is immeasurably superior to yourself in every aspect. If one does not recognize this fact, one does not know God. "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" (Lewis, 90).

"Pride is a spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense" (Lewis, 92). Pride is the primary sin. It requires very little other than the awareness of the self and of God. It then places the self ahead of God. All other sins than flow forth from pride. "It is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you ad I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it" (Lewis, 104).