The Gospel in Dorothy Sayers - Part 4: Pride

 It has been a couple of weeks since I've found time to post ... suffice it to say that life has been on the busy side.  I return today to my dearly-loved and deeply-appreciated Dorothy Sayers, as presented in Carole Vanderhoof's winsome The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers.  Today, I want to share (without comment) Sayers' words on pride, the root of all sin.

V. Pride: The Root of 'The Other Six Deadly Sins'

"But the head and origin of all sin is the basic sin of Superbia or Pride.  In one way there is so much to say about Pride that one might speak of it for a week and not have done.  Yet in another way, all there is to be said about it can be said in a single sentence.  It is the sin of trying to be as God.  It is the sin which proclaims that Man can produce out of his own wits, and his own impulses and his own imagination the standards by which he lives: that Man is fitted to be his own judge.  It is Pride which turns man's virtues into deadly sins, by causing each self-sufficient virtue to issue in its own opposite, and as a grotesque and horrible travesty of itself.  The name under which Pride walks the world at this moment is the Perfectibility of Man, or the Doctrine of Progress; and its specialty is the making of blueprints for Utopia and establishing the Kingdom of Man on earth.

"For the devilish strategy of Pride is that it attacks us, not on our weak points, but on our strong.  It is preeminently the sin of the noble mind - that corruptio optimi which works more evil in the world than all the deliberate vices.  Because we do not recognize pride when we see it, we stand aghast to see the havoc wrought by the triumphs of human idealism.  We meant so well, we thought we were succeeding - and look what has come of our efforts!  There is a proverb that says that the way to Hell is paved with good intentions. [Incidentally, that was one of my father's favorite sayings!] We usually take it as referring to intentions that have been weakly abandoned; but it has a deeper and much subtler meaning.  For that road is paved with good intentions strongly and obstinately pursued, until they become self-sufficing ends in themselves and deified." ("The Other Six Deadly Sins," in The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers, pp. 67-68).

I strongly encourage you to get and read the book:

Carole Vanderhoof, ed., The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers: Selections from Her Novels, Plays, Letters, and Essays. Walden, NY: Plough, 2018.