Pride and Humility

Gustave Doré's illustration for Milton's Paradise Lost

What makes pride so evil and humility so noble? Drawing on Dante, Aquinas and Anselm, Anthony Esolen addresses the question in an excellent piece, appearing in Crisis Magazine. Here's an excerpt, but it's well-worth reading in its entirety.

Pride makes a great show of strutting upon the face of the earth, glorying in its palaces and its power, but beneath all the blare and the garish pomp there lies, as it were, a shrunken thing, a cringing little emperor, afraid of the dark – afraid of the vast waters of love. By contrast, humility is the most realistic of virtues. I am a creature; well then, I acknowledge that I am a creature. I cannot attain blessedness on my own; cannot, on my own, even make this world into a decent wayside station, let alone heaven. Well then, I acknowledge what history and my own eyes will teach me. I am a sinner; I survey the moonscape of my life and see it pitted with self-regard, stupidity, and spite. Well then, I bend the neck and confess the sins. In humility, literally, we bow down to the humus or the soil beneath us, and cry out, with the repentant psalmist, “My soul cleaves to the dust” (Ps. 118:25). It is not that we make ourselves out to be less than what we are, but that we try for a change to stop making ourselves out to be more than what we are. We try to look into the darkness of sin, and the more terrifying darkness of love.