Seeing the Self through Humility and Pride

The figure to the left is a brief visual summary of some of the themes that have been discussed in this blog since its beginning.  The idea here is to represent some associations between the kinds of attitudes that we should cultivate toward our selves and those we should avoid at all costs, especially in this Advent season.  The categorizations that the Punnett Square allows might help to provide clarity for the difficult navigation we must make between the rocky shores of too much and too little.  Despite the risk of sounding Postmodernist, I will have to point out that humility, generally thought of as good, can very often be evil, just as pride, generally thought evil, has much power to influence good actions when it is properly exhibited.

Good Humility

Reality is good.  Humility acknowledges the reality of who and what we are, based on our identity as creatures and our actions as sinners.  The Catholic Encyclopedia defines humility as "a quality by which a person considering his own defects has a lowly opinion of himself and willingly submits himself to God and to others for God's sake."  The essential characteristic of the person of humility is the acknowledgement of the hierarchy of being stemming from God and flowing through the self.  The idea of submission to God requires that we put ourselves under God as the origin and the destination of our human lives.  True humility also encourages us to put others first in our relationships with them.  This attitude comes from an intimate awareness of our own failings and our responsibility for them and the way they influence others.  Good Humility shifts our expectations of others to expectations of our selves.

Evil Pride

Evil Pride is the obvious opposite of Good Humility.  I learned early in life (through such brilliant documentary films as this) the tendency for human beings to put themselves and their immediate interests before all other values.  This is the midpoint of Evil Pride where we behave without the reality check of the above mentioned hierarchy of being.  We are able to imagine that there is nothing above us, although, like the ceiling of the Great Hall at Hogwarts, this is just an illusion.  The starting point of Evil Pride is much more subtle.  An inflated view of the self can be manifested in many ways that we might not identify as such.  For myself, I know that when I begin to feel frustrated at something negative that has happened to me I have a tendency to dwell on thoughts of what I "deserve."  True or false, this kind of thinking makes the self the focus rather than others or God.  Taken to its extreme, Evil Pride makes us become our own beginning and end, essentially taking the place of God and severing our relationships with other people.

Good Pride

Pride is not always evil, however.  There are certain obvious examples of Good Pride that your football coach told you about, but Good Pride on a personal level has to meet certain requirements.  The first is that the source of Good Pride must be, at its most essential level, something outside the self.  The primary such source is, of course, God.  The things we like about our selves (and I would argue that we all have a moral obligation to like things about ourselves) must always be traceable in some way to the opportunities and resources given to us by others.  This factor is compatible with the idea that we must have an appropriate interest in the self.  Mr. Scrooge's business should have been the "common welfare," but his reaction to his conversion experience was not merely to start caring.  Still less did he spend his time bemoaning his past vices.  He went out and used his personal resources to practically aid those he knew to be hurting.  The joy of doing such things is what I call Good Pride, and it always motivates action.

Evil Humility

Good Pride is the cure for the evils associated with the poor practice of humility.  If there is a point that I would like this blog to make more emphatically than any other, it would have to be that Christians must resist  the impulse to take themselves out of the spiritual combat of the contemporary world through an attitude of self-deprecation that debilitates us.  If Good Humility acknowledges reality, Evil Humility forces us to apply unreasonable standards to ourselves.  In fact, when humility goes bad we really end up having an inordinate and even morbid interest in ourselves, and especially our flaws.  If Good Pride leads us to attend to others, Evil Humility leads us back into ourselves, ultimately debilitating us for any positive purpose we might otherwise accomplish.  If I may borrow a phrase from Uncle Screwtape:  this is a favored tool of the enemy. It is much easier for evil to thrive in the world when those who should be opposing it do not do so because they have made mistakes.  Nothing we have done in this life is as important as what we will do next.

Figure B

There is no "Figure B," but there perhaps should be.  Figure B would be a representation of the four categories that illustrates the fact that Good Humility and Good Pride are essentially the same attitude toward the self.  Evil Pride and Evil Humility are the two extremes that tend to distort what we find in this ideal center.  [Extended Metaphor Alert:  You have been warned] One of the toughest skills for me to master in ceramics class my senior year at Wabash was throwing a symmetrical pot on a wheel.  If you have ever tried this, you will know that the main job of the hands is to keep the clay balanced and centralized instead of bunching up and flying off in all directions.  If one side is allowed to slouch into a warped form, the other side is bound to go along with it.  The same is true of the shaping process in our own lives.  Good Humility and Good Pride are the hands that help to form us, while the Evil versions of the same are the temptations that cause us to fly apart. This Advent is a time for us to be shaped into centered vessels to hold the grace of the presence of Christ.