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vtech2009
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Does God require from us 100% humility? Can we not have some pride. It is hard to balance between complete humility, a virtue, and low self-worth. Are we to believe that we mean truly nothing?
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Gertabelle
Guest
I think a better way to think about humility is that** all our worth** is in God’s love for us.
God bless you!
Gertie
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Mary_Estelle
Guest
I have written about pride and vanity. God imbued these “sins” into ourselves for a reason. If we do not have a “directed” pride and vanity we will not try or do our best to please and worship God and we would just skate along through life. I could say more, but you understand that God made us as we are to encourage us to “do better.” There is a difference between false pride and false humility.
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PelagiathePenit
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I like your name. Mary Estelle. Cute.
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Gertabelle
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Nope. Pride and vanity are not God-given. You assume that we need pride to seek God? Nonsense. I don’t love my son because of pride. I love him because I love him.
It should be the same with God. We love Him for the sake of love. If we do our best to please Him for pride, we do not love Him but ourselves.
That’s my two cents’…
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vtech2009
Guest
Yes but does humility require you to think very low of yourself to the point where you have no self-worth… where is the balance? Perhaps its pride based on God, then its ok?
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Mary_Estelle
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Love is an emotion; it just does not exist in the either. Pride is an emotion as is vanity and humility. God did not make us as blank pages, but wants mankind fill the pages in a God directed way. If you do not uses these as footpath up the mountain, than consider yourself akin to a stone. Stones are cold and feel nothing. We are not stones that endure the weather an then erode away. Please think about it before you judge because these are attributes that we all MUST have as creations of God. How anyone uses vanity, humility, pride, is up to the individual. I think of them as tools that God has given us to sharpen our spirituality, build with and reach higher levels of and for His purpose, not our own. I am not a blank page.
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nuntym
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+JMJ+
Define what is humility and what is pride, and then you might get the answer.
Define what is humility and what is pride, and then you might get the answer.
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Gertabelle
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Nope. Love is a choice. Love is action. Love is commitment. I have no emotion for my ex-husband, but I can choose to love him – through my prayers, through fasting, through taking actions that support him in his work, etc.
Pride is thought. Pride is action. Pride is a way of viewing others, a way of establishing expectations, and meting out punishment when our expectations are not met. Pride is choosing to place our opinions and thoughts above God’s.
Humility is not an emotion either. Humility is a choice, choosing to see one’s worth through God’s eyes. Humility is submitting to God’s infinite love for us.
Your thinking is not in line with Catholic teaching:
God does not give us sin so as that we can rise above it! That line of thinking is an offense to His goodness, to Christ’s suffering and death which we recall so profoundly this Holy Week! Saying that God gives us our sinful nature is to imply that He wills for us to sin, or that He is trying to trip us up.1871 Sin is an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law (St. Augustine, Faust 22L 42, 418). It is an offense against God. It rises up against God in a disobedience contrary to the obedience of Christ.
No. He is ALL GOOD. Through His grace we can overcome our sinful nature. We are not to use pride – or any other sin – as a tool for bringing about our spiritual growth. That is absurd. That is like saying, I’m going to use fornication to grow in chastity.
We are to fight – or rather, allow our Lord to fight for us – our tendencies toward sin, especially capital sins like pride.God bless you all.
Gertie
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Mary_Estelle
Guest
God gave us free will We can chose to sin or reject it and that is what I am speaking of. When we encounter sin or commit a sin we grow or fail from the encounter or sin. If we did not have pride we wouldn’t care if we even got up in the morning. If we didn’t have a little vanity we might never take a bath or change our cloths. If we didn’t have some humility we would never proceed from just being a tree or a clump of grass. Like it or not these virtues or even lack of virtues are who we are and who we become. Yes, God loves us and does not want us to sin, but we all have choses and need to grow from them…or fall. I would love to hear from a forum elder or a theologian or administrator. Yes, I did look this these virtues up… It is when we knowingly use the virtues to defy God to the detriment of man and God design for us that we sin. And to the person who referred to fornication this against the Ten Commandments I don’t know why it was broached.
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Mary_Estelle
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I think everyone has missed the point that I tried to make and that is of. free will and choices.
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Gertabelle
Guest
Perhaps the problem is that you are using a dictionary definition of pride, and not the Church’s definition. In modern English, we speak of being proud of our work, or proud of our children. Last week after my son performed in a beautiful choral concert, I told him I was so proud of his hard work and the end result. This is not the same as the sin of pride.
The Catholic Church defines the sin of pride as a capital sin – that is, one of the seven deadly sins. Pride, in the context of the seven deadly sins, is in absolute opposition to the virtue of humility. In other words, according to Church definition, the sin of pride can never be considered a virtue. It is one of the seven deadly sins.
Consider the following dictionary definitions of the word “pride:”
1) a feeling or deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements
2) the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one’s importance
3) a high or inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.
Here, a person derives satisfaction from one’s own achievements. There is no acknowledgement of God’s hand in our achievements, of His grace, of His blessings that brought us to the point of achievement.
3) the consciousness of one’s own dignity
This definition of pride would seem to lend itself to being considered a virtue IF – and only if – one’s dignity is recognized as being created in the image and likeness of God. If we separate this definition from our worth as a child of God, we have the wrong idea of our own dignity, and this can certainly lead us into sin.
My guess from your posts is that you are defining pride as self-esteem, the “consciousness of one’s own dignity.” I have been defining pride as placing my own opinion of myself above God’s opinion of me, as claiming my achievements as my own instead of God’s, of placing my will ahead of God’s will.
By the way, I don’t get up in the morning for pride. I get up in the morning for the love of God. By His grace, I arise with a prayer on my lips for the coming day – usually to St. Jose Maria to help me get out of bed without hitting the snooze button
But then again, my days are so filled with opportunities for humiliation that getting up means a day-long onslaught against my pride 
God bless you, dear one.
Gertie
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fhansen
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Evil is nothing more than a twisting or distorting or distracting from something good. Self-love is good. Inordinant self-love, aka “pride”, is not good, not God-created, according to Aquinas.
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Vico
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Pride is the excessive love of one’s own excellence. One can have some love of one’s own excellence. Humility signifies lowliness or submissiveness.
Matthew 11
28 Come to me, all you that labour and are burdened; I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon yourselves, and learn from me; I am gentle and humble of heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
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Mary_Estelle
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Interesting responses. Yes, I have looked at a regular dictionary about pride. I have also looked it up in my religious books and online. I never said the pride was not a sin, but think of it as a tool to help us get from “there to here.” We, with all our many flaws, often need a push and a boot to make spiritual progress. Don’t ever think that the best of us do not have a sense of pride, for better or worse. In conversing with many people I feel the concepts of pride, vanity and humility are vaguely understood, if at all. I think this goes back to our catechism days when a lot was taught by root. We were not taught the subtleties of the virtues or how they could relate to sin or lead us away from sin. We take pride in everything, for good or evil. Remember I said “God Driven” precepts. Yes, pride can push us to do better for our Lord, not for ourselves. We are emboldened to move from pride of the self, but to a higher spiritual relationship with God.
If you have read THE SEVEN STORY MOUNTAIN you will meet the author who was a prideful, vain, sinful young man, and how he progressed in his journey from pride of self to a certain level of humility.
We will never fully conquer the sin of pride. We were born of original sin. And we will never be fully humble. Hopefully, we will grow from these personal infractions of the ID and delve deeper into the virtues and become aware that almost anything can become a sin in the right venue.
Show me someone without pride and I will give him or her a looking glass. Point out to someone without vanity and I will see a person who does not care. If you find someone with true humility I will honor that person the best that I can. Show me a man or women without sin and I will wonder about what you see.
Someone said I was teaching anti-Catholic views. No, I am just trying to make people think. Yes, I know. Responders will jump all over me, but I have yet to hear from a priest on theses postings.
If you have read THE SEVEN STORY MOUNTAIN you will meet the author who was a prideful, vain, sinful young man, and how he progressed in his journey from pride of self to a certain level of humility.
We will never fully conquer the sin of pride. We were born of original sin. And we will never be fully humble. Hopefully, we will grow from these personal infractions of the ID and delve deeper into the virtues and become aware that almost anything can become a sin in the right venue.
Show me someone without pride and I will give him or her a looking glass. Point out to someone without vanity and I will see a person who does not care. If you find someone with true humility I will honor that person the best that I can. Show me a man or women without sin and I will wonder about what you see.
Someone said I was teaching anti-Catholic views. No, I am just trying to make people think. Yes, I know. Responders will jump all over me, but I have yet to hear from a priest on theses postings.
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Mary_Estelle
Guest
I have gone back and re-read everyone’s post. Also, I never said that pride was not self love-aka-self love-but we all have pride to some degree. I was and still am, trying to indicate that we should evolve from self-love to love of God. And to the person who said God did not create pride…well, God created everything or so I have been taught. Did someone lie to me about that…nooooo!
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littlestsouls2
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St. Teresa of Avila: “True humility, though it makes the soul feel her own sinfulness, does not disturb her peace, but, on the contrary, infuses consolation. It fills, indeed, the heart with grief and affliction for having offended God, but, at the same time, inspires strong hopes of mercy. By such humility the soul is enlightened to see her own misery, and to praise God for having so long borne with her. But false humility instilled by the devil, brings with it no light to make the soul do good, but represents God as a tyrant who will destroy all by fire and sword. Of all the deceitful inventions of the devil, which I have known, this is the most subtle.”
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fhansen
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No, God did not create evil. Evil is a diminishment of the good that God did create. Pride, in the strict sense that the Church defines it, is the grandaddy of vices; it’s the essence of man’s rebellion against God. If iit serves a purpose as a tool, it does so in a negative sense, by having us learn, by personal experience, of its relative worthlessness, of the harm it causes in our world, Original Sin gaurantees that we have it, and we always have too much of it while we never have enough humility. This is why Scripture tells us that God opposes the proud and exalts the humble, and why the Sermon on the Mount is what it is. The struggle for true humility is the struggle to come to know God. And yes, it’s a good struggle.I have gone back and re-read everyone’s post. Also, I never said that pride was not self love-aka-self love-but we all have pride to some degree. I was and still am, trying to indicate that we should evolve from self-love to love of God. And to the person who said God did not create pride…well, God created everything or so I have been taught. Did someone lie to me about that…nooooo!
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Monica4316
Guest
Yes we do need to strive for 100% humility though most might not get there in this life… but we should try! asking “can we not have some pride” is like asking “can we not have some sin”. Nothing of sin can be united with God… in the end, when we die, we are either His or the devil’s. Not to say that we’re necessarily perfect at death (though we should try) but we shouldn’t hold on to any pride. Pride is of the devil… how can it ever be united to God or enter heaven?
As for how to achieve it… it’s not just our doing, we need to cooperate with grace. The more generous we are, the more graces we can receive, and the more trusting we are, the better disposition we have in the Sacraments, etc… mental prayer also really helps and having an interior life. Then virtue becomes more infused eventually rather than just our efforts (which don’t work, without God, it needs to be grace and our cooperation).
As for the last question… God loves us enough that He died for us. That is enough to know… so it’s not like we “mean nothing” to Him. However humility is understanding that without God, we are nothing - and we weren’t meant to be without God anyways, He created us to dwell in us and unite Himself with us, and be part of our actions. If you consider how God made us, human beings have a lot of dignity - we can even receive God into ourselves physically in Communion!! However, humility I think is realizing that without Him we only have misery and sin (though our nature is not totally depraved like Calvinists believe) - and so we need Him. The only reason we’re apart from Him at all is because of the original sin and our personal sins.
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