What do the saints say about the fight against pride?

“The beginning of pride is to forsake the Lord”

The biblical reference sentence comes from the book of Ben Sira the Sage (Sirach). It does not define pride by its visible effects, but grasps it at its root: a movement of the soul that turns away from God in order to take itself as its own center.

“The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. For the beginning of pride is sin, and the one who clings to it pours out abominations.” — Ben Sira (Sirach) 10:12-13^[2]

The Fathers retained two decisive points from this text. First, pride is a turning away (apostatare a Deo, says the Vulgate): before it is an attitude toward men, it is a rupture with God. Second, it is “the beginning” — not a late sin, but the source from which all the others spring. Scripture says the same again in Proverbs, with a sentence that became proverbial:

“Pride goes before disaster, and arrogance before a fall.” — Book of Proverbs 16:18^[3]

Saint Augustine: pride at the principle of every fall

Saint Augustine (354-430) gave this biblical intuition its philosophical form. For him, pride is the disordered desire for a grandeur of one’s own (perversae celsitudinis appetitus), and this is the first movement of every evil will. Before the fall, nothing in man was evil: the first fault could therefore arise only from a bad use of freedom, that is, from pride.

“What else but pride could have been the beginning of an evil will? For pride is the beginning of all sin.” — Saint Augustine, The City of God, XIV, 13^[4]

On this point Augustine builds his whole vision of history: two cities, built by two opposed loves, of which pride and humility are the secret principles.

“Two loves have made two cities: love of self to the contempt of God made the earthly city; love of God to the contempt of self made the heavenly city.” — Saint Augustine, The City of God, XIV, 28^[5]

Pride is therefore not a simple inflation of the ego: it is the hidden spring of a whole life folded back upon itself, “to the contempt of God.” And its contrary is not surface modesty, but the love that goes out of self toward God.

Saint Thomas Aquinas: why pride is “the beginning of all sin”

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) gathered this whole tradition in question 162 of the Secunda Secundae, entirely devoted to pride (De superbia). He takes up Ben Sira’s formula and explains it: pride is “the beginning of all sin” not because it is present in every evil act, but because it is the first root from which aversion to God proceeds.

“Pride is the beginning of all sin. For the beginning of every sin is taken from the side of the end toward which disordered appetite tends; now pride has as its object the highest end: it refuses man’s submission to God and to His rule.” — after Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 162, a. 7^[6]

Thomas further specifies that pride is, in one sense, the gravest of sins by its root, because it includes a direct contempt of God: by other sins man turns away from God through ignorance or through weakness; by pride, he turns away by directly refusing to be subject to God and to His rule^[7]. This particular gravity explains the seriousness with which the saints conducted this combat.

To understand why the saints so greatly fear pride, one must go back with them to its two great original manifestations: the fall of the angel and the fall of man. Both accounts say the same thing — pride is the pretension of making oneself equal to God.

“Pride made a demon of the archangel Lucifer”

The classical master of the fight against pride is Saint John Cassian (c. 360-435), who devotes the twelfth book of his Institutes to this vice alone. For him, the destructive power of pride is first seen in its first triumph: the fall of the highest of the angels.

“The angel to whom the excess of his splendor and beauty had caused the name Lucifer to be given was not cast down from heaven for any other vice than this: it was the dart of pride that wounded that blessed and sublime spirit, and from the rank of the angels plunged him into the depths of hell.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 4^[8]

Cassian finely analyzes the mechanics of this fall. Lucifer, loaded with gifts, believed he possessed them by his own nature and not by the liberality of the Creator; he judged himself capable of being sufficient to himself without God’s help. “That single thought caused his first fall. Abandoned by God, whom he thought he could do without, at once, uncertain, he tottered”^[9]. Pride is therefore, at its root, the illusion of self-sufficiency: believing that one holds from oneself what one has received.

“You will be like gods”: pride enters man

From the fallen angel, the same venom passed into man. Cassian underlines that the serpent proposes to Adam and Eve nothing other than what ruined himself: equality with God.

“This vice then entered, through the demon, into the first man... By believing that he could conquer the glory of the Divinity by the strength of his freedom and his own industry, Adam lost even the glory he held from the gratuitous goodness of the Creator.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 5^[10]

Thus pride is, in the order of time, the first of all sins, even though it comes last in the ascetical combat. Cassian holds both points together: “the plague of pride, last in the order of battle, is nevertheless first by origin, the principle of all sins and all crimes”^[11].

The duel of the two cries: “I will ascend” / “He humbled Himself”

The summit of Cassian’s book XII is a striking antiphony: to each cry of pride from the demon, he opposes a word of humility from Christ. The remedy of contraries by contraries becomes visible — God willed to raise up by humility what had fallen through pride.

“The demon says: ‘I will ascend to heaven’; the Lord: ‘My soul is humbled in the dust.’ The demon: ‘I will be like the Most High’; on the contrary the Lord, ‘though He was in the form of God, did not grasp at equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant.’” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 8 (citing Is 14:13-14; Ps 43:25; Phil 2:6-7)^[12]

The table below places face to face, as Cassian does, the program of pride and that of Christ’s humility — the very grid of the whole combat.

Reading: for Cassian, the whole fight against pride consists in passing, sentence after sentence, from the left column to the right — that is, in letting Christ’s humility dislodge the demon’s pretension in us.

Saint Thomas Aquinas’ definition

Beneath the abundance of images, the doctors sought a precise definition. For Saint Thomas, pride is the disordered appetite for one’s own excellence (appetitus inordinatus propriae excellentiae)^[13]. The word “disordered” is essential: to desire to rise toward the good is not evil in itself — it is even the spring of courage. Pride begins when this desire leaves the order, that is, when it no longer wants to owe anything to God or to others.

Thomas, following Saint Gregory, distinguishes four forms this pretension takes, according to what it refuses to recognize:

Reading: the four degrees go from less grave to more grave. All have the same root — refusing that every good is a received gift (cf. 1 Cor 4:7: “What do you have that you did not receive?”).^[14]

Pride and vainglory: the root and its shoot

The Fathers carefully distinguish pride (superbia) from vainglory (cenodoxia, vana gloria), which is its most immediate shoot. Pride is the underlying pretension; vainglory is the search for the esteem of others, the appetite to be seen, praised and admired. Cassian devotes book XI of his Institutes to it and describes it as a multiform and elusive vice, the hardest to detect because it hides even in the virtues:

“The other vices reveal themselves as uniform and simple; vainglory is diverse, multiform, varied; it attacks from every side. Exterior bearing, gait, voice, work, vigils, fasting, prayer, solitude, reading, knowledge, silence, obedience — all these become weapons with which it wounds the soldier of Christ.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XI, 3^[15]

The image he gives of it has remained famous: vainglory is like an onion; “remove one covering, and you find a second; however many you remove, you find as many again”^[16]. One believes oneself humble for having conquered pride: that is pride again. The monk flees praise, and becomes proud of fleeing it. This elusive and reborn character makes the fight against pride the work of a whole lifetime.

Spiritual pride, the most dangerous kind

The most important distinction of the Fathers is that of the two prides. Cassian states it clearly:

“There are two kinds of pride. The first attacks spiritual men and those very high in perfection; the second seizes even beginners who are still carnal... The first relates especially to God, the second to men.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 2^[17]

Carnal pride is the coarser kind — vanity of body, birth and possessions. But spiritual pride is the subtlest and deadliest: it attacks those who have already overcome other vices and think they have arrived. It is the pride of the Pharisee who fasts and gives alms (Lk 18:11-12). That is why Cassian places it eighth and last in his list of vices: not because it is least important, but because it lies in wait at the summit, when everything else seems conquered.

Pride and its seven lieutenants

In the sixth century, Saint Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) fixed for the whole Middle Ages the organization of the vices around pride. In his Moralia on Job, he makes it the queen whose soldiers are all the other vices:

“Pride, queen of the vices, when it has fully conquered the heart, immediately delivers it to its seven principal lieutenants, as to generals, so that they may devastate it.” — Saint Gregory the Great, Moralia on Job, XXXI, 45^[18]

Gregory names these seven lieutenants, which would become the classic list of the capital sins: vainglory, envy, anger, sadness (acedia), avarice, gluttony and lust^[19]. All have pride as their root — which is why the tradition counts it apart, as the source rather than as one sin among the seven. The table below summarizes this genealogy.

Reading: for Gregory, one never fights pride “all by itself.” To disarm it at the root is to dry up at once the sap of the seven vices; to let it reign is to reopen the door to them all.

Why pride destroys all virtues at once

Cassian explains why pride is more dangerous than any other vice. Each vice, he says, attacks only one virtue: gluttony ruins temperance, anger ruins patience. One can therefore be defeated on one point and still stand on others. Pride, however, does not ruin one virtue: it ruins all of them together.

“There is no vice that dries up all virtues and strips man of all justice and holiness like the evil of pride. Like a general and pestilential disease, it is not content to weaken one member only, but corrupts and ruins the whole body.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 3^[20]

The image is military: pride is the tyrant who, “after seizing the citadel of the virtues, overturns and destroys the whole city from its foundations”^[21]. And the richer the soul was in virtues, the greater its ruin — because pride feeds precisely on virtues. Hence the saints’ constant paradox: the more one advances, the more one must fear pride.

“Last in the order of battle”

If pride comes first by origin, it comes last in the combat — and that is what makes it so treacherous. The other vices declare themselves early and loudly; pride waits until the soul feels secure. Cassian describes it as the disease that “especially attacks the perfect, and bites more terribly those who are already almost established in the consummation of the virtues”^[22].

This is the constant experience of spiritual masters: one never gets rid of pride definitively. Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), doctor of the Church, warns that humility must grow as the soul rises, otherwise the demon turns its own gifts against it: as long as one is on this earth, “nothing matters to us as much as humility”^[23]. Holiness does not end the combat; it refines it.

Vainglory, the “multiform” vice that disguises itself as virtue

The particular danger of spiritual pride is that it feeds on the good. Cassian describes how vainglory, repulsed on one side, returns on another:

“If it has tempted the soul to carnal elevation and has had to withdraw, multiform in its perversity, it changes mask and character, and now under the appearance of virtue it strives to pierce its conqueror.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XI, 2^[24]

Fasting, almsgiving, prayer and austerity itself can become occasions of pride. “The one it could not overthrow by honor, it overthrows by humility”^[25]: one can be proud of being humble. That is why the fight against pride can never rest on the feeling of having succeeded — that feeling is already the relapse.

“Deserving to have God as adversary”

From all this Cassian draws a dizzying conclusion, which expresses the unique gravity of this vice: pride is the only vice Scripture presents as having God Himself for its declared enemy.

“What evil, then, is pride, that it deserves to have as its adversary not an angel, not the contrary virtues, but God in person! For nowhere is it said of those who are prey to other vices that the Lord resists them... This is said only of the proud.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 7^[26]

The reason, Cassian says, is that “the other vices turn back against the sinner himself, or harm only men like us; but pride properly reaches God”^[27]. By attributing to himself what belongs only to God — glory, sufficiency, the origin of good — the proud man does, in his measure, what Lucifer did. That is why Scripture opposes God Himself to him.

“God resists the proud”

The whole strategy of the saints is contained in a single verse, the most cited passage of Scripture on this subject, and it states both the threat and the remedy:

“God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” — First Letter of Saint Peter 5:5 (citing Pr 3:34; cf. Jas 4:6)^[28]

The logic is clear and formidable: God does not fight pride from the outside; He withdraws His grace from the one who claims to do without it — exactly what happened to Lucifer. Conversely, He fills the one who recognizes himself as poor. The fight against pride is therefore not first an effort of will against oneself: it is the choice to receive everything instead of attributing everything to oneself.

God healed contraries by contraries

For Cassian, the remedy for pride is not a mere moral discipline: it has a name and a face, the Incarnation. God willed to raise up by humility what had fallen through pride.

“God, creator and physician of the universe, knowing that the principle of all vices lies in pride, took care to heal contraries by contraries, and willed that what had fallen through pride should be raised up through humility.” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 8^[29]

The fight against pride is therefore, at bottom, a configuration to the humiliated Christ: “Learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29). This voluntary abasement of Christ — the kenosis of the hymn to the Philippians — is the model and source of every victory over pride. One does not make oneself humble by force; one allows oneself to be shaped by the One who first lowered Himself.

“Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending”

Saint Augustine summarized this inversion in a classical image, that of construction: before raising a building, one must dig foundations all the deeper because the tower will be high.

“Do you wish to become great? Begin by being little. Are you thinking of raising a high building that touches heaven? Think first of giving it humility as its foundation.” — Saint Augustine, Sermon 69, 2^[30]

Christian greatness is therefore not opposed to humility: it passes through it. This is exactly the opposite of pride, which wants to rise while skipping the foundation — and collapses. “One lowers oneself by digging the foundations,” Augustine says: the house “descends before it rises.”

The twelve degrees of humility of Saint Benedict

Where Cassian describes the evil, Saint Benedict (c. 480-547) traces the path of healing. Chapter 7 of his Rule — the longest and most famous — describes a ladder of twelve degrees of humility, which is exactly pride taken in reverse. Taking up the image of Jacob’s ladder (Gen 28:12), Benedict states a paradoxical principle:

“If we wish to reach the summit of the highest humility..., we must set up that ladder which appeared to Jacob in a dream... Now this ascent and descent undoubtedly mean nothing other than this: one descends by exaltation and rises by humility.” — Saint Benedict, Rule, ch. 7^[31]

The first degree is to keep the fear of God constantly before one’s eyes; the last is that humility of heart should appear even in the attitude of the body. Between the two: renouncing one’s own will, obeying, accepting hard conditions, confessing one’s faults, not believing oneself superior, being content with everything. This ladder has structured fifteen centuries of monastic life: it shows that the fight against pride is not an abstract refusal, but a series of concrete steps, each disarming one root of pride.

The ladder of Saint John Climacus

In the East, Saint John Climacus (c. 579-649), hegumen of Sinai, gave this image its most famous treatise, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (whence his surname, Climacus, “of the ladder”), where pride and vainglory occupy the last and most formidable degrees. His sentence on pride has remained famous for its psychological accuracy:

“Pride that believes itself rich is, at bottom, the sign of a great poverty.” — Saint John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent^[32]

Climacus describes pride as a blindness: the proud man does not need a demon to tempt him; he tempts himself, having become his own adversary^[33]. The only remedy, according to him, is to hold oneself resolutely in the last place and to refer to God every good one does — what Cassian will call, as we shall see, “repeating the words of the Apostle.”

Refer everything to grace: “It was not I, but the grace of God”

The first and most radical weapon is to give back to God every good one thinks one has done. Cassian formulates it as a reflex to maintain whenever one feels that one is progressing:

“Whenever we feel that we have advanced in the virtues, let us repeat the words of the Apostle: ‘It was not I, but the grace of God with me’ (1 Cor 15:10); ‘it is God who works in us both to will and to accomplish’ (Phil 2:13).” — Saint John Cassian, Institutes, XII, 9^[34]

This is the exact antidote to Lucifer’s poison, for he believed he held his gifts from himself. Saint Paul’s question — “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Cor 4:7) — is, for Cassian, the decisive weapon: as long as one knows oneself indebted for everything, pride has no hold.

Self-knowledge: “humility is walking in truth”

The second weapon is self-knowledge in truth. For Saint Teresa of Avila, humility — and therefore the disarming of pride — is not a feeling of littleness, but a lucidity: seeing what one is before God, neither magnifying oneself nor falsely lowering oneself.

“I was wondering one day why Our Lord loved this virtue of humility so much; and suddenly, without having reflected on it, it came to my mind that it is because God is sovereign Truth, and humility is walking in truth.” — Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, Sixth Mansions, ch. 10^[35]

This definition — “la humildad es andar en verdad” — is one of the deepest in the tradition. Pride is always a lie: it makes man believe he is his own source. Humility adds nothing to the truth; it stands in it. To see that one has received everything is already to have conquered pride.

Accept humiliations and contempt

The third weapon is the hardest: to accept being lowered in fact, and not only in thought. The saints are unanimous in saying that humility is learned only through humiliations, as patience is learned only through annoyances. Loving to be little in idea costs nothing; the combat begins when someone else treats us as little. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, in her Last Conversations (Yellow Notebook, summer 1897), gives the lesson in the form of a synthesis retained by her sisters: to be humble is to rejoice not only when one is taken for imperfect, but especially when one is so in reality and feels it^[36].

Saint Francis de Sales also warns against a false humility that is only pride turned inside out: calling oneself a sinner with the lips while hoping to be contradicted, or being distressed by one’s faults out of vexation at not being perfect. “This displeasure... proceeds from self-love, which is troubled and disturbed at seeing itself imperfect”^[37]. True humility peacefully accepts being an unfinished work. For these misunderstandings, see Common errors about the fight against pride.

The little way: rejoicing in being little

The fourth weapon completely reverses the perspective. Where pride wants to become great, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), doctor of the Church, chooses to remain little — not out of cowardice, but because littleness attracts God’s mercy. This is her “little way”: not to seek to climb by one’s own strength, but to let oneself be carried, like a child taken in arms.

“It is confidence, and nothing but confidence, that must lead us to Love.” — Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Letter 197 to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, 17 September 1896^[38]

“To remain little is to recognize one’s nothingness, to expect everything from the good God as a little child expects everything from his father.” — Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Counsels and Memories collected by her sister Céline^[39]

This spirituality of littleness is the culmination of the whole combat: pride wanted to do without God; the little way wants to expect everything from Him. It joins the spirituality of abandonment, where the soul ceases to rely on itself and relies only on grace. The table below summarizes the weapons the saints oppose to pride.

Reading: none of these weapons is an effort to “become humble” by force — which would still be pride. All consist in letting go of a pretension in order to receive, in its place, the grace God gives to the humble.

The perfect model of victory over pride is not an ascetic, but the Virgin Mary. In the Magnificat, she does not say that she has fought pride: she sings of a God who, in her, has overthrown it from below, looking not at her greatness but at her lowliness.

“He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the humble.” — Gospel according to Saint Luke 1:51-52 (Mary’s canticle)^[40]

The whole Gospel of humility is there: God “has looked upon the humility of His handmaid” (Lk 1:48) and, by that gaze, makes the humblest the greatest. Mary perfectly realizes what Cassian described as the program of Christ — the exact opposite of Lucifer’s “I will ascend.” She does not lift herself up; she receives herself entirely from God. That is why the tradition names her “the one who crushed the serpent’s head” (cf. Gen 3:15): the humble handmaid defeats, by her littleness, the pride of the fallen angel.

In the end, the voice of the saints on pride says one constant thing: this combat is never finished here below. Pride is Cassian’s onion, from which one never removes the last skin; it is the vice that “rises again when struck down,” that is reborn from its own defeats, and that feeds even on the virtues opposed to it. To believe it conquered is already to have let it return.

But this lucidity is not discouragement — it is the opposite. For the same tradition affirms that victory is not our work: “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” We are not asked to make ourselves humble by a heroic effort — that would still be a form of pride — but to remain poor before God, to expect everything from Him, and to say again, each time we believe ourselves strong: “It was not I, but the grace of God with me.” The fight against pride is not a war one wins: it is a poverty one keeps — and it is precisely this poverty that attracts grace. “One rises by humility,” Benedict said. The shortest path upward always passes downward.

• What do the saints say about humility — the contrary virtue of pride, seen from its positive face: what the saints said about humility itself.
• How to grow in the fight against pride — the practical path: concrete means, stages and exercises to disarm pride day after day.
• Common errors about the fight against pride — misunderstandings to avoid: false humility, self-contempt, scruple, affected humility.
• The necessity of humility and the danger of pride — the doctrinal background dossier on these two opposed realities.
• What do the saints say about the fight against envy — one of the seven vices born from pride, wounding charity.
• What do the saints say about the fight against anger — another lieutenant of pride, ruining peace and patience.
• What do the saints say about abandonment to God — the spirituality of trust, culmination of the fight against self-sufficiency.