Gabrielle Hunt - Outside Reading 3

Gabrielle Hunt

18 April 2012

Outside Reading 3

Pride

 “Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

                I’ve been doing research for my final paper and a lot of the things I’m interested in discussing I’ve found C.S. Lewis discussed in this book. Although I’ve been a fan of C.S. Lewis most of my life, I’ve never gotten around to reading this book, though I’ve heard it’s absolutely crucial. As I’ve been reading it, it’s been the section on Pride that has stuck out the most to me.

                C.S. Lewis calls pride “the Great Sin,” the only sin that does not stem from our animal nature but from our spiritual nature, a “spiritual cancer” that destroys our lives. He notes that pride is most irritated by the pride of other people, that “each person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride.” The thing about Pride is that it isn’t about who you are, as yourself. It’s about who you are in comparison to the people around you. Pride is inherently comparative. It wouldn’t make sense for someone to be proud of having average grades, or being averagely good-looking, or being an average kind of friend. Pride is reserved for those things that make one better than other people. However, other people don’t usually care much for your pride, so pride is about telling yourself that you’re better than other people.

                The Horse and His Boy is the ideal example of this Pride in action. Prince Rabadash is proud of his fighting skills and position.  Bree is proud of his ancestry and his job as a war horse. Aravis is proud of her ancestry. Aravis didn’t create her own royalty; it’s not something she can rightfully be proud of. She can be proud of her family, because they are outside her and as C.S. Lewis puts it (I’ve never met a more quoteable author), “to love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin,” as long as that love/admiration doesn’t exceed our love/admiration for God.

                All of these people, sooner or later, are reminded that these kinds of qualities do not make them better people than anyone else. The primary way this happens is through humiliation, being forcibly made humble. Bree is humiliated when he runs away, leaving his friends in danger. Aravis is humiliated numerous times when she is not shown the respect she “deserves” as a princess. Prince Rabadash is literally transformed into a donkey when he fails to show humility before Aslan.

                Towards the end of this section, C.S. Lewis describes a truly humble person: “He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.” It does not even occur to a person who is truly humble that they should probably be more humble. He doesn’t brag about being the most humble person; that would be self-refuting, as Dr. Silverman noted in class on the 17^th.