I have always had a problem understanding pride. We are all proud; I certainly am myself. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. How can we be humble when we are always proud, and how can we go to heaven when we are proud?
This is a very important question, and it is relevant not only to pride but to all vices, or habits of sin.
But first, what is pride? It may be defined loosely as exaggerated self esteem, or an exaggerated consideration of one’s own excellence.
When we use the word “exaggerated” we are implying that there is a just consideration of one’s excellence, and indeed there is. St Teresa of Avila says that humility, the corresponding virtue, is “to walk in truth” (Interior Castle, Ch. 10).
The truth is that we all have many talents and good qualities, but these are gifts from God and we should be grateful to him for them.
We cannot glory in them as if they were our own achievement. St Paul writes to the Corinthians, “What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Cor 4:7).
It is not pride to recognise that we have many talents. It is pride when we consider these gifts as our own and boast of them.
The reason why pride is such a deadly sin is that it robs God of his glory, referring the glory to oneself.
Indeed, the original sin of our first parents was a sin of pride.
The serpent tempted Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of the tree, telling them, “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).
But while pride is a deadly sin, not all sins of pride are mortal.
It will depend on the particular thoughts or actions in each case.
Since the original sin of Adam and Eve, the vice of pride remains in all of us as a habit, as a tendency to consider ourselves too highly.
They say that pride will die 24 hours after we do. And St Josemaría Escrivá used to say that the best business would be to buy people for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth!
If we are all proud, how can we also be humble? We begin by recognising that we all have some degree of humility, some recognition of the truth of our good qualities and deeds, and of our many shortcomings and sins.
Only Satan has unalloyed pride with no trace of humility.
We can think of the relationship between pride and humility – or between any other vice and virtue, for that matter – as a spectrum, with pure pride on one end and pure humility on the other.
We are not on either end, in pure pride or pure humility, but somewhere in between.
The more we struggle to grow in humility the more we reduce the level of pride and the further along on the spectrum we are.
Hopefully when we die we will have succeeded in reducing pride to a minimum.
But even when pride remains, always ready to lead us into an exaggerated consideration of our self-worth, by itself it is not sinful.
While bad habits, or vices, can result from repeated sins, the habits themselves are not sinful. It is the acts, the sins, to which they give rise that are sinful.
Therefore, as long as we succeed in not consenting to the temptations to pride – to thoughts of vainglory, to comparisons with other people, to boasting about our accomplishments, to excusing ourselves when criticised, etc. – we are not committing sins of pride, but rather are growing in humility.
This is an important truth. It is acts, not bad habits, that are sinful. Similarly with good habits, or virtues, it is the good acts to which they give rise that are meritorious, not the virtues themselves.
We see this in the fact that all the baptised in the state of grace have the infused virtue of charity, but what is important is to do acts of charity.
Our Lord makes this clear in his description of the Last Judgment: “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink … “ (Mt 25:34-35).
Similarly, St James rebukes those who show no deeds of charity: “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?” (Jas 2:16)
In summary, even though we all have the habit of pride, we also have the virtue of humility in some degree. It is the acts of pride that are sinful, not the vice itself. So as long as we repent of our sins and do not reject God at the end of our life through pride, we can be saved.