We have all heard it said that “pride cometh before the fall,” which is actually a paraphrasing of Proverbs 16:18. For Christians, the relationship is not so much chronological or sequential, as essential.
In pride, because of pride, through pride, concomitant with pride. . .cometh the Fall (with a capital “F”). The two are intimately connected, for pride is really the foundational cornerstone upon which every elaborate edifice of self-adoration or self-appeasement is erected. And the Fall is that rebellious characteristic which echoes in our hearts and actions the words of Milton’s vainglorious devil in “Paradise Lost’: “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”
Lust, greed, gluttony, envy, wrath, sloth — each and every shortcoming and frailty that humanity faces or embodies can be distilled into what theologians have called the “fundamental option,” namely the radical choice that faces each of us in countless particular situations and in the overarching narrative of our entire lives, one with only two possible answers – Around what are our lives oriented? God (and derivatively the other) or the Self? What are we putting first and with whom does our loyalty lie?
Humility, pride’s counterpart in virtue, is quite different from self-abasement or passivity in the face of oppression. It is not remaining in untenable or inappropriate situations out of a misplaced conviction that we can “change” another person or institutional bureaucracy or tyranny by grinning and bearing it at the price of our human dignity.
It is not faux meekness expressed in silently supporting systems which are unjust because of “good citizenship” or patriotism or comfort with the status quo.
It is not ignoring our surroundings or the way in which we approach other human beings because of a firm assurance that we will be rewarded in the future (in this life or the next) with a metaphorical pat on the head for our unpretentious acceptance of things as we are told they should be.
Rather, pride is combatted with humility born out of love. Not the cloying, syrupy-sweet sentimentality of Valentine’s Day, but the raw, challenging, sacrificial love which pours itself out for the other and has the pottery of its selfhood shattered in the process. What the Gospels call agape.
Our commitment to our neighbor, as evidenced in the interpenetrating sources of Scripture and tradition (the Good Samaritan parable, care for those in any kind of need, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and so on), can never be divorced from our creedal statements about the very nature of God.
As the theologian Karl Rahner makes clear, love of God and love of neighbor are two sides of the same coin.
To return to the Good Samaritan, in the healing and ministry offered to the beaten wayfarer, the Samaritan restores him some measure of his personhood. And yet, the relationship is dialogical — cliché as it is, in giving he or she somehow receives.
It is clear that the relationship between the one who is ostensibly in need and the one who is ostensibly the caregiver is not as clear cut as one might first think with a cursory glance. In this self-emptying, the “minister” is mysteriously filled too. Here pride is undone and as the demon in “The Screwtape Letters” claims, “pain and pleasure take on transfinite values and all our arithmetic is dismayed.”
Somehow one approaches the other without seeking to obliterate or absorb him or her, but in authentic relationality, and always in contact with God as the source of all being and of all love. Somehow the three are distinctly three, and yet also simultaneously one. They are independent and yet bound together by dynamic love.
Sounds like another Christian doctrine, doesn’t it?
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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