Contents



I. The Question Was Never About Him

I was asked once whether I believed a certain billionaire was a prideful and arrogant man. I answered that I did not have an opinion. If I had a trillion dollars in my own account, I could make a fair comparison; lacking it, any verdict I returned would be counterfeit, a coin struck from metal I have never held. The question, I said, is Shakespearean.

In Hamlet, the prince watches a player weep real tears over a woman dead three thousand years, and turns the spectacle against himself: What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage with tears and cleave the general ear with horrid speech, make mad the guilty and appal the free. The actor has been given only the cue. Hamlet has the actual motive and produces nothing. And the prince does not conclude that the actor is a fraud. He concludes that he himself is the hollow one, the man with every reason for passion and none of its evidence.

That is the direction I want to take the question, and it is the reverse of the direction most people want. They ask about the pride of the powerful hoping for a verdict to carry home, something to set against themselves so that they may be, by contrast, humble. I decline to supply it. The honest question is not whether the man with the trillion dollars is proud. It is what a trillion dollars would draw out of me. So I refuse to place myself above him. I do not say he is arrogant and I am not. I ask, instead, what his fortune would reveal if it were mine, and the inquiry turns, in my hand, from judgment into examination. The examination of the famous man becomes, if it is honest, the examination of the one doing the looking.


II. Pride Is Not What We Think

We define pride as arrogance, as thinking too highly of oneself, and so we look for it where self-exaltation is loud: in the boast, the swagger, the man who announces his own greatness. But arrogance is only one of its faces, the one easy to see. Pride is something more precise, and the precise definition is the whole of this essay: pride is not thinking highly of oneself. Pride is making oneself the reference point from which everything else is measured.

Once that is said, an unexpected thing follows. The two sentences I am the greatest and I am the worst are not opposites. They are the same sentence. Both fix the self at the center of the measuring; both make the self the quantity in question; they differ only in the sign placed before the number. A soul can spend a lifetime making itself small and never once step out of the center, because smallness is still a measurement of the self. The man who insists on his own worthlessness is as preoccupied with himself as the man who insists on his own glory. Self-humiliation is not self-surrender but self-possession in a lower key, the self still gripping the center even as it pretends to vacate it. The attention has not moved. Only its direction has.

And this tendency is not learned. No newborn’s first words are I am the greatest baby ever born. The self-reference is stamped in before any boast is possible, a birthmark older than speech. In the Christian reckoning this is original sin, but the root runs back further than Adam, to the rebellion in which a creature first preferred its own measure to its Maker’s. Pride did not begin with the first man. It began with the first non serviam. What the first man inherited was not the act but the inclination, the seed already in the soil. Pride is there in all of us from the start. It needs only a little wind to stand up: success, power, admiration, wealth, beauty, talent, influence. The wind does not plant the seed. It only shows what was already planted.


III. Solomon: The Man Who Took the Test

Most writing on pride speaks in the conditional. What would you do, if. Of one man we are not left to guess, because Scripture records the experiment in full.

Solomon, newly king, is met by God in a dream and offered anything he will name. He does not ask for riches, or long life, or the death of his enemies. He asks for an understanding heart, to discern between good and evil. He passes, precisely, the test the billionaire question poses. Handed unlimited power and asked in effect what will you do with it, he answers rightly, and is given the wisdom and, unbidden, all the rest besides. He is the one case where the cue and the motive arrive together and the man chooses well.

And he falls anyway. Not at the threshold, where he stood, but slowly, down the long reign that followed: the horses and the gold the king was expressly forbidden to amass, the seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, the foreign altars raised on the high places in his old age. The wisest man, the one who chose correctly when the choice was laid before him, is undone by the very scale the right choice had won him. This is the heart of the matter, and it is more frightening than any cautionary tale of an obvious villain: choosing well at the beginning is not enough. The roots of pride survive success, survive wisdom, survive even virtue. They do not need to defeat the will at the outset. They need only wait for the wind. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher at the end, surveying the accumulation, and the word beneath the English is hevel: vapor, breath, the thing that cannot be held. The man who was given everything a trillion dollars could reveal comes back to report what it revealed.

Solomon does not turn the inquiry into a judgment of someone else. He takes from me my last consolation. I cannot tell myself that I, at least, would have chosen well, because Solomon chose well and it did not save him. The escape I was reaching for, the hope that I might have passed the test, is the very road he walked, and it ran where it ran.


IV. The Two Faces of Pride

If pride is self-reference, then its opposite cannot be self-deprecation, because self-deprecation is self-reference too. The true picture is not a line with pride at one end and humility at the other. It is a triangle. There is the inflated self that claims the higher place. There is the deflated self that claims the lower one. And there is the de-centered self, which is humility, and which claims no place at all but takes the one that is given.

Humility, in action, is a vector before it is a posture, and the vector points up the mountain, away from the self, toward the one who needs her. Humility is not a mood or a feeling but a telos, a direction of the will toward what is not itself. It can be set down in five motions, and each one exposes both of pride’s faces at once:

  • It discloses the real lack without performing it: pride conceals the lack, and self-humiliation performs it, broadcasts the wound, makes a theater of the deficiency, but both keep the self on the stage.
  • It ascends toward the neighbor rather than negotiating a comfortable descent: pride refuses the climb, and self-humiliation negotiates a descent on its own terms, choosing its own lowness, which is still self-direction.
  • It takes the place that is given rather than the place that could be claimed: pride claims the higher seat, self-humiliation claims the lowest, and to claim the lowest seat is still to claim, still to have the self select its own position.
  • It stands in the common line rather than the exempt one: pride takes the exempt line, the platinum lounge reserved for those who do not wait, and self-humiliation takes a different exemption, the exemption of the specially unworthy, I do not deserve even to stand with the others, which is also a line of one’s own and also not the common one.
  • And it keeps what cannot yet be understood rather than forcing it to its own measure: pride forces the mystery down to what it can command, and self-humiliation forces it too, down to the measure of its own ruin, its certainty of its own damnation, which is its own forcing, its own refusal to wait in the dark for a light it has not been given.

To insist one is beyond all help is not humility. It is the will seizing in advance a verdict that was never its to render.

Humility waits.

So the two faces are one geometry seen from opposite sides. The proud man inflates the reference point; the self-abasing man deflates it; neither will surrender it. Humility alone removes the self as the point from which the measuring is done, and the moment it does, there is nothing left to arrange. Posture is what both faces of pride are: arranged stances of a self that will not stop being the subject. Vector is what is left when the self consents to stop being the subject at all, and turns to face the mountain.


V. The Wind and the Stage

This is why pride is so badly tracked in public. We condemn it in the man who has nothing and applaud it in the man who has everything, though the vice is identical and only its amplification differs. The arrogant neighbor is called obnoxious. The arrogant athlete is called a competitor. The arrogant celebrity is called confident, the arrogant billionaire visionary, the arrogant influencer authentic and elite. The same self-reference, attached to beauty or fame or wealth or achievement, is renamed charisma; attached to a man with no amplifiers, it is simply named pride. Success does not remove the vice. It disguises it, and then rewards the disguise.

Solomon and the lilies belong on the same page here. Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. The lily does not measure itself. It takes the place that is given, the light and the soil and the brief season, and it is clothed past the glory of the king who measured everything and was clothed in vapor. The match and the forest fire differ in magnitude, not in kind; they are made of the same thing. So with the neighbor’s pride and the king’s. The fire is only the match given wind and dry country. What we are watching, when we watch the famous, is not a rarer pride than our own. It is our own pride handed a larger stage, and the largeness fooling us into calling it something else.


VI. The Last Sentence of a Life

A life ends in a sentence. Not a written one. The sentence the soul has become, spoken at the last crossing, where the whole orientation it has carried comes to its point and is either turned or fixed. There are, in the end, two sentences a life can be, and they are grammatical opposites before they are moral ones.

The first: Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. Let it be done to me according to your word. The verb is passive. The self is the one acted upon. Mihi, to me, in the dative: the self has become the indirect object of its own life. And the measure is your word, not mine. It is spoken at the moment of the maximum possible claim, a young woman told she will bear God, with every reason to negotiate, to ask terms, to perform either her worthiness or her unworthiness for so vast a thing. She does neither. She discloses the real situation without performing it, how shall this be, and then takes the place that is given. Her consent is not a collapse but a participation, the self opened to be moved rather than erased. All five motions in one passive sentence, and the sentence is passive because humility is the self consenting to be acted upon by what it cannot measure.

The second sentence is sung. I did it my way. Active voice. First person. Past tense. Total authorship. I did it, the whole life objectified into a thing I made, my way, the measure mine from end to end. And it is spoken not at the threshold but at the close, which is itself the inversion. Mary speaks before, in consent. This soul speaks after, in verdict. The one opens a life to the word; the other shuts it against the word and signs the bottom of the page in its own hand. It is self-sovereignty set to music, the self upon the throne, and we should not pretend it is ugly. Self-humiliation is ugly and easy to refuse; no one is seduced by the man performing his own worthlessness. But this is sung in a major key, with strings, and it sounds exactly like courage, like integrity, like a man who regrets nothing and answered to no one. The whole room admires it. This is the harder face of pride, the one that does not crawl but stands up straight and sings, the same root as the billionaire called visionary, only given a melody instead of a stage.

And both sentences are spoken at a crossing, the one place the will is lifted off its long inertia and set free to turn. To sing I did it my way at the end is to reach that final freedom and spend it refusing to turn, to declare the loop was always one’s own, authored, mine, that one was never moved but only ever moved oneself. The inertia breaks, and the freedom it releases is used to ratify the very orientation the freedom was given to release. The will fixes itself at the exact spot where grace was still being offered, and mistakes the fixing for liberty.

And it is here, at that fixing, that we are tempted to imagine mercy and justice as two motions pulling in opposite directions, one wishing to draw the soul in and the other to hold it back. But that is not their relation. Justice is simply the truth of what the soul has become, the orientation made final when the last freedom is spent. Mercy is the unbroken call that precedes that truth, the space in which the will may still turn, the offer that does not withdraw. Mercy does not contend with justice; it prepares the only path by which justice could become joy rather than verdict. Mercy keeps the crossing open.

Divine mercy calls, and it calls every soul, all the way down, to the last instant and the last crossing, never withdrawing the offer, pursuing the soul into whatever far country it has chosen. The call does not fail. It is not the kind of thing that can fail.

But mercy can be refused, and the refusal is what cannot enter, not the person. Pride cannot return to heaven for the reason a clenched fist cannot receive a gift: not because the gift is withheld, but because the one posture in which it could be received is the one posture pride will not take. Heaven is entered through fiat, through the place that is given received as given, and the soul that says my way is not turned away at the door. It declines the door. It stands before the only entrance there is, the consent to be acted upon by what one cannot measure, and will not pass through, because to pass through is to stop being the author, and being the author was the whole of what it loved. The door is held shut from the inside.

This is more terrible than a God who damns, because it leaves the soul holding its own sentence. Justice does not overrule mercy. Justice honors the answer the soul insisted on giving. Mercy offers the place that is given; pride will not take it; justice, which is only truth made final, lets the refusal stand. The rich man of the Gospel, with every entrance but one, finds at the end that the needle’s eye was never an obstacle set in his path. It was the single low door he would not stoop to enter, and the stooping was the whole of it. He had the platinum lounge. He did not want the other lounge, the one whose only admission is to put the self down at the threshold and walk in measured by something other than itself.

So the question was never whether the billionaire is proud. The question is what wealth, praise, beauty, power, success, or even suffering would reveal in me, for pride does not begin when a man is handed a stage. The stage only lights what was already standing there. Two sentences, then, and a life is the slow composition of one of them. Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. Or: I did it my way. Let it be done to me, the passive that opens a life to the word. Or: I did it, the active that closes it against the word. There is no third sentence and no neutral one. The examination Hamlet turned on himself, the one I declined to turn on the man with the trillion dollars, was always pointed here, at the one who is reading and the one who is writing alike: which of the two am I, even now, learning to say?

A life is already leaning toward one sentence or the other long before the lips speak it.


References

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947.

Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006.

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperOne, 2001.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005.

Pieper, Josef. The Four Cardinal Virtues. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.

Ratzinger, Joseph (Benedict XVI). Introduction to Christianity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004.

Sinatra, Frank. “My Way.” Written by Paul Anka and Jacques Revaux. Reprise Records, 1969.

Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1964.