Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

Against Pride

Against Pride Chesterton once tried to steal some of the thunder belonging to us clerics. In Robert Knille’s collection, As I Was Saying, I found an essay entitled “If I Had Only One Sermon To Preach,” an essay originally collected in The Common Man. It is not without revealing a very deep understanding of the modern mind that Chesterton proposed to give his sermon this title.“If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against pride,” he affirmed.At the end of his essay, he playfully doubted whether he would ever be invited to give another sermon, though I suspect he would have been invited back again and again. Such are the very sermons we long most to hear.We are ourselves, however , probably too full of this first vice of pride ever to subject ourselves to another such analysis. But Chesterton did not think that pride was the primary vice of most men, though it could be of some. This proposed sermon against pride arose from Chesterton’s reflections about what he had learned because he had become a Catholic.The main thing he learned, he thought, was a kind of “active humility.” His concern about the devastating consequences of pride was “but one of the thousand things in which I have found the Catholic Church to be right when the whole world is perpetually tending to be wrong.”1 In its own way, this essay is a strikingly accurate analysis of the modern mind, of modernity, and why it is, at its theoretical depths, so disordered. Chesterton began his essay by chiding the scientific method of social analysis. He suspected that the scientific inquirer with analytic notebook, asking presumably learned questions, never really noticed what is going on in the average pub or tube (that 77 is, underground, that is, subway). “As he is a scientific enquirer with a notebook, it is very likely that he never saw any ordinary human beings before.” But if we notice what goes on in an average pub, there is invariably one person who is distinctly disliked by everyone. He is not the habitual tippler, the lost soul, or even the thief, each of whom can be tolerated and excused in some way. Of the man whom everyone dislikes, some cockney remarks , “‘E comes in ’ere and ’e thinks ’e’s Gawd Almighty.”2 Chesterton points out that in this instance, in theological terms, the ordinary man in the pub has given an accurate and even learned definition of Satan.“Will men be like Gods?”The trouble with pride, Chesterton thought, is that “it is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices.” He meant that, while the other vices are bad enough in themselves, this is all they are. They bear only their own corruption. Pride corrupts the vices when it uses them for its own ends. “The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority.”3 Chesterton explained in this outline of his “only one sermon” why the characteristic of modernity in particular was in fact related to pride, to an attempt at unwarranted superiority. But exactly in what this “attempt” consists needs again and again to be clarified, however much the ordinary man may recognize and dislike it in practice. The classic religion, as we know, had as one of its primary tenets that pride was the worst vice. No one explained this vice more clearly than St. Augustine. Chesterton thought that most ordinary men in your average pub still understood this truth, though sometimes I wonder about his optimism. Just today a young friend of mine in law school told me that one of her burly classmates had somehow heard of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II’s analysis of truth. He wanted to know “just who this Pope 78 Against Pride thought he was, trying to tell him what to do?”This self-righteous protest has the same roots as those of the man in the British pub whom everyone disliked because he thought he was “Gawd Almighty.”The young law student whom no one could tell what to do, obviously deficient in both self-awareness...