Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [73]
This yearning for self-supremacy is not satisfied by terrestrial power, by actual physical power as such; he also hungers for the possession of that metaphysical grandeur which is implicit in all possession of value.
Yet, to be sure, it is not for the sake of the value qua value that he covets it; what preoccupies him is that mysterious power without which he may not attain the plenitude of power, and which therefore irritates him as an irksome limitation imposed on his pleasure in “counting for much.”
Thus original pride engenders a hatred of values, a combative opposition to whatever irradiates light, to all self-contained glory; ultimately, to God. Clearly, this attitude is tantamount to ethical evil in an eminent sense; it constitutes the utmost antithesis to the harmony of values and the extreme negation by a creature of his creaturely status. It represents the most express refusal to honor value by an adequate response to its appeal.
Satanic pride isolates and divides
By taking this position, man cuts himself off from the world of values in its entirety. He will be incapable of all response to value, not so much owing to his value-blindness as because he lacks the readiness for submission that underlies all response to value. His value-blindness will be the consequence, not the cause, of his pride. It is, therefore, a blindness that involves a high degree of guilt. Also, pride determines a specifically grave form of obduracy. Its effects diametrically oppose those of love (which opens and melts the soul) and contrast dramatically to the specific qualities of responsive kindness and luminous harmony which love connotes. The proud personality is lacerated by a deep disharmony; a corrosive venom pervades his entire life; and all the gratification he derives from whatever flatters his pride is unable to provide him with any genuine inner happiness, any blissful peace.
Satanic pride turns freedom into license
Another formal characteristic of satanic pride consists in the abuse of liberty. The gift of free decision, conferred upon man as a mark of his likeness to God, is granted him by the divine Will so as to empower him to respond to values and to surrender to God in a way that carries the full sanction of his personality. Under the sway of pride, that gift is perverted into a stimulus for his orgy of self-glorification and nourishment for his consciousness of counting for much.
The basic fact of freedom—the dimension of our being where we most possess ourselves and actualize ourselves—disjoined from its ordination to God and from its correlation with the world of values, becomes the source of an illusion of absolute power and of a primary claim to dominion. Freedom is degraded into arbitrary license.
In certain conditions, the man governed by pride will commit this or that action, not because it satisfies his cupidity—or even his pride, so far as its material import goes—but as a mere confirmation and exercise of his independence, a test of the position of power he derives from his gift of liberum arbitrium. This is the horrible sin of Kirilov, the lonesome atheist in Dostoyevsky’s Possessed, who according to a deliberate plan shoots himself at a moment convenient for the purposes of a gang of nihilist scoundrels, not in order to promote their revolutionary designs, but just to prove his absolute liberty unrelated to any concrete aim or value, the meaninglessness of death, and the nonexistence of God. Here is a key to many an evil deed which apparently lacks motivation, since by virtue of its contents it cannot possibly offer its perpetrator any subjective satisfaction, even a wholly illicit one.
Satanic pride refuses all submission as such
Apart from his antagonism toward the world of values and its serene harmony, the maniac of pride