Pride - the worst sin according to C.S.Lewis

[Belacqua]

I will say another thing.  I applaud C. S. Lewis for his consistency.  As long as he accepts the Christian ethics of self-sacrifice, he must hold pride as the primary sin because pride is essentially self-worth.

I think I mentioned before that Lewis was a medievalist and a Dante scholar. When he says that pride is a sin, he is using the word in the way that Dante and others use it.

This is the definition he used, from Wikipedia's page on the Seven Deadly Sins:

Pride is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, putting one's own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of others. Dante's definition of pride was "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor". 

So it's clear that this is NOT a sense of gratification at one's real accomplishments, which as far as I know is not condemned anywhere. 

As so often happens, part of the problem comes from translation. "Pride" here is a translation of the Latin "superbia," for which there is no exact English equivalent. If I were in charge I would just leave the Latin untranslated, but nobody asked me.

Dante's system is based on Aristotle more than on the Bible. One of Aristotle's recurring themes is the importance of having accurate knowledge of oneself. If I believe I'm the best guy in the world (which I'm clearly not), then I don't have a clear picture. If I furthermore think that being the best guy in the world makes me entitled to special treatment, and that my neighbors are worthless in comparison, then I'm guilty of pride as Lewis defined it. 

Likewise, when I feel good about my own accomplishments, it would be bad for me to forget about the shoulders of all the giants I stand on.

I think it's appropriate that the psych paper John 6IX Breezy linked us to speaks of two kinds of pride: the "authentic" kind, which is being justified in being pleased about real accomplishments, and "hubristic" kind, which is pretty much what Lewis means.