Pride is the root of every SIN. Here's why- explained by C.S. Lewis in Screwtape letter 14.

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]It's pretty shocking that how many people have never heard of CS Lewis's The Screw Tape Letters, especially how many Christians, but we shouldn't be shocked because there's just too much truth in here uh to let it get out to the masses, right?

[00:00:19]I think that was CS Lewis's plan. And I have to tell you guys that reading this, we're on um letter 14 today. Reading this has actually changed the way I think in my life as I go through the day.

[00:00:34]It's changed the way I think about how I think if you know what I mean. Has it done that for you guys? Is this your first time reading the Screw Tape letters?

[00:00:44]Just wondering if it's having the same effect on you guys. Anyway, I can't wait to see what the 14th letter has to tell us about the way we're all under attack.

[00:00:58]Welcome back to Literary Archaeology.

[00:01:04][music] [music] >> [music] >> glasses and treats for Lola. I especially like having Lola join us um on this channel. I like it over on Far From Eden as well, but I just feel like this channel is so much about relaxing, slowing down, and really just feeding our souls and finding that peace inside of us. And sometimes the far from Eden stuff can it's actually the things that you know what it's the things that disrupt our peace in a way. I call those things out. What's disrupting men and women? And then over here, you're like, "Yes, but peace." Huh. I didn't think to do that.

[00:02:15]I didn't know I was doing that.

[00:02:19]Okay. Sometimes you're battling demons and you don't even know it. As long as you're open to it and you say that's what you want to do. Fight for truth.

[00:02:30]Satan's a liar. Anyway, let's talk to not talk to, let's listen to what some of his little friends would say.

[00:02:38]According to CS Lewis, "My dear Wormwood, the most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather. Not even the expectation of endowment of grace for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation. This is very bad. I see only one thing to do at the moment.

[00:03:07]Your patient has become humble. Have you drawn his attention to the fact all virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them?

[00:03:18]But this is especially true of humility.

[00:03:21]Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection. Bye, Jove. I'm being humble.

[00:03:31]And almost immediately, pride. Pride at his own humility will appear. If he awakes the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt.

[00:03:44]and so on through as many stages as you please. But don't try this too long for fear you awake his sense of humor and proportion.

[00:03:56]It's funny. On Sunday, we read The Ugly Duckling, and we learned that the moral of the story actually was that the ugly duckling had been through so many trials and tribulations because he was ugly. That now that he was this beautiful swan and everybody's admiring him, he was pretty much immune to pride. Because you don't want to have a prideful heart.

[00:04:27]That was a big part of the story. You know why you don't want to have a prideful heart?

[00:04:35]This screw tape is going to kind of illuminate that. Get it? Illuminate Lucifer.

[00:04:45][sighs and gasps] In which case, he will merely laugh at you and go to bed. But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue of humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our enemy wants to turn the man's attention away from self to him, right? And he's talking about God. Yeah. Stop focusing on yourself and focus on God and to the man's neighbors and taking care of your neighbors. All the objection and self-hatred are designed in the long run solely for this end. Unless they attain this end, they do us little harm. And they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself. And above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.

[00:05:40]Wow.

[00:05:42]Gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.

[00:05:46]I think I've been too gloomy and too cynical sometimes over on the other channel.

[00:06:00]You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of humility. Let him think of it not as self forgiveness, but as a certain kind of opinion, namely a low opinion of his own talents and character. Some talents I gather he really has fixed in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be.

[00:06:27]So that's what the demons want you to think that that humility means, oh no, I'm not I'm well I'm not the best.

[00:06:38]And apparently that's not what humility actually is.

[00:06:44]Okay, no doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth.

[00:07:01]Thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method, thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since that they are trying to believe, sorry. And since what they were trying to believe may in some cases be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it. And we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.

[00:07:40]To anticipate the enemy's strategy, we must consider this his aims. The enemy, God wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world and know it to be the best and rejoice in the fact without being any more or less or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.

[00:08:08]Wow.

[00:08:10]So humility isn't like building a beautiful cathedral and then going, "Oh, it's it's not that great." It's being able to look at it and admire it as if somebody else had done it because you're not internalizing that, I guess, and making yourself important.

[00:08:33]Especially if you are inspired by God to do it and you give credit for your talents to him rather than think your talents are just because you're awesome, but I might be getting ahead of myself.

[00:08:53]The enemy wants him in the end to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankfully frankly and gratefully as in his neighbors talents or in a sunrise, an elephant or waterfall. He wants each man in the long run to be able to recognize all creatures, even himself, as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love, their animal, like their animalistic self-love as soon as possible. But it is long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love, a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own, right? Because it comes from God. That's why, you know, you can celebrate it and be happy about it because you didn't do it, right? You didn't you didn't do it. You feel like you didn't I didn't do it.

[00:09:50]That that was all that's all God, you know. Yeah.

[00:09:55]When they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors.

[00:10:06]For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our enemy. He really loves the hairless bipeds.

[00:10:17]That's us. We are the hairless bipeds.

[00:10:22]He has created and always gives back to them with his right hand what he has taken away with his left. His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man's mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet then forgot about it than that he would spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one. Your efforts to instill Yeah. Cuz either way you're thinking about yourself.

[00:10:55]Your efforts to instill either vain glory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the enemy's side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of fame who's thinking Instagram and all these people who want to be like sort of Instagram famous and [clears throat] [snorts] yeah, it's like what people think of them. They're obsessed.

[00:11:41]Wow.

[00:11:44]You must try to exclude this reminder from the patients consciousness at all costs. The enemy will also try to render real in the patients mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring home to their feelings. The doctrine that they did not create themselves that their talents were given to them and that they might as well be proud of the color of their hair. Right? Cuz we didn't do it. He did it.

[00:12:16]But always and by all methods, the enemy's aim will be to get the patients mind off such questions, and yours will be to fix it on them. Even of his sins, the enemy does not want him to think too much. Once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the enemy is pleased. Your affectionate uncle, Screw Tape.

[00:12:42]And we are in a society where it's all me me.

[00:12:48]It's all about us. We think about ourselves constantly. We take pictures of ourselves.

[00:12:58]We think about ourselves constantly.

[00:13:03]Look, especially, you know, I think this came about with more of the millennials. So y'all would be in your like late 30s, 40s right now.

[00:13:15]And you guys came up with like the age of being aware of your mental illness, right? Being sort of aware of it. Now it's okay to, you know, know what ails you. Not going to get into the whole psychology, mental illness problems, and it's probably demons anyway, but put that aside.

[00:13:42][snorts] When you're constantly thinking about how you feel, you're constantly like monitoring, well, what are my feelings?

[00:13:51]How do I feel? That started to get really encouraged in the schools, for example. What are your feelings? What are your feelings? What are your feelings?

[00:14:02]But when you're always focused on your own feelings, that's pride. Even if you're beating yourself up, even if you hate yourself, it sounds like according to according to CS Lewis, even if you're busy hating yourself and you're saying, "I'm not prideful. I'm humble. I don't think I'm all that."

[00:14:25]It's actually worse because you're thinking about yourself. You don't realize you're prideful and you're not understanding. You're you're insulting God's creation. When you insult yourself, you're insulting God's creation.

[00:14:38]Now, repenting is different, right?

[00:14:43]And then you let it go. If you believe that, you know, repentance is real, you'd have to let it go after that.

[00:14:51]Thinking about yourself, it sounds like, is basically pride. And that's what the de the demons want you to think about yourself, your feelings, all the rest of it. Oh, I'm getting anxious.

[00:15:03]One of the things that has helped me a lot is ignoring how I feel. And as a woman, that's an interesting exercise.

[00:15:14]But it has made my life better because feelings come and go and are flippant and some of them are unpleasant.

[00:15:25]But most of them aren't worth it.

[00:15:30]And like I said, it just focuses you on yourself rather than outward. And you might say, "Well, I don't really have any friends. I don't really know."

[00:15:39]You're having more of an effect on people than you realize.

[00:15:46]You're having more of an effect on people than you realize. I talked to a man in one of my consulting counseling sessions, whatever they're called. Don't have a real name for them. I talked to him and he talked about how he went back to school later in life to get a degree that he thought you'd never actually be able to do, but it was sort of like make or break time. You got to get it's got to do something that's going to actually support yourself, right? Have a real job. So he went back and he told me that the young men there, you know, they would have been college age who were also in the same program kind of and this is a very humble man that I'm talking to like this is not a guy that goes around to his own horn at all at all. Um, and he was talking about how they kind of the response to him and the way they treated him was they kind of followed him around and kind of looked up to him and and I said to and and I said, "Wow."

[00:16:48]I said, "You really taught them something. You taught them that it's never too late. That when it's make or break time, what you do is you rise to the occasion and you do you do it. You go it. You work four jobs, which he did at one time if you have to. You work the jobs. You get the degree that's hard that you thought it's maybe one of your parents said you could never do and maybe you shouldn't do and you go and you do it anyway. And these young men saw that and I said to him, "You might have saved some of their lives because we all know that later in life [sighs] is going to beat you up."

[00:17:34]And they had the opportunity to see a man whose life had beaten him up. And what did he do about it?

[00:17:43]He carried on. He fought. He succeeded.

[00:17:47]and he's a very nice guy on top of it.

[00:17:51]And I said, "They're going to get to a place where they're low and I bet you anything they're going to think about you and the thought of you and what you did is going to inspire them to keep going."

[00:18:04]And he had never thought about it that way.

[00:18:09]So, you might think, well, you know, can't really I don't know. Well, he could have just not talked to them. He could have not. He could have just ignored them or whatever, but he didn't.

[00:18:20]He could be like, "I've got too much going on. I got to think about all this.

[00:18:24]I can't be messing with you youngans."

[00:18:27]He didn't do that.

[00:18:30]And it's the ripple effects of it are huge. And we'll never know, you know, we'll probably never know, but it mattered. And if you're oiling your own head and what you're going through and all of that, that you're not paying attention to the things going on around you. The tiniest little interactions you have with people, the tiniest interactions you have with people affect them.

[00:18:54]And we need every little bit. A kind hello, a smile.

[00:19:01]You'll know it when you're there as long as you're not all in your own head thinking about yourself constantly. And this is as much for me as anybody else.

[00:19:11]It's a great reminder. And this is the answer to all that anxiety and depression.

[00:19:17]Stop thinking about yourself.

[00:19:20]Think about other people, what they're going through, etc. How you can bring [snorts] light, more light into the world. And it's a battle. It's not easy.

[00:19:30]This fighting demon stuff is not for the faint of heart. But what else are you going to do?

[00:19:37]you going to join them? No. No. Don't accidentally join them either because that's the way they get you. They don't want you to know that's what it's about.

[00:19:45]They want you to think, I'm just thinking about myself. It's just not a big deal. Let's go to therapy so I can talk about myself for an hour and how my feelings are valid. Valid.

[00:19:57]Valid. Valid. Feelings. Feelings.

[00:19:59]Feelings. How do I feel? How do I feel?

[00:20:02]How do I feel?

[00:20:04]How do I look? How do I feel?

[00:20:07]What do people think of me?

[00:20:11]It destroys us. It's like it's like a cancer and it's really attacking society and it is pride.

[00:20:24]It's no wonder the term pride has been taken to mean something supposedly positive.

[00:20:34]It's a mockery of what of how bad pride is. It's like a celebration that the devil has infused pride into all of us. You don't have to be going in that parade to be guilty of it.

[00:20:59]It's something we have to be extremely mindful about.

[00:21:03]And I'm telling you what, these screw tape letters.

[00:21:08]Serious business. I get why.

[00:21:12]You don't hear about them. You don't read it in high school.

[00:21:16]Imagine if we did. And we all knew how bad pride was and we knew what pride was. Imagine that. Imagine if we'd held on to the definition of it.

[00:21:28]It would look different. It would look real different.

[00:21:35]My mother used to tell me, Aaron, pride goeth before the fall. And she used it when I was concerned about my MS and I was thinking too much about myself. And she would say, "Pride goeth before the fall."

[00:21:54]Sometimes that woman hit a home run. But these little things she said to me, thank God she did.

[00:22:01]It's amazing how on Sunday we talked about pride and the ugly duckling and now Screw Tape Letter 14 is right in sync with it. That's not me. I didn't do that. I have no idea. I just read what's next. All a God thing.

[00:22:19]It's a God thing.

[00:22:22]None none of this is me.

[00:22:25]It's all a God thing. And those of you who've been around for a while or have even spoken to me, you know it's, you know, I mean it. So, okay. Well, we got our assignment for the week. Let's just really work on the pride.

[00:22:44]Protect your peace. Feed your souls. I love you guys and I'll see you on the next one. Bye.

[00:22:56]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Sorry about that. I started to play the wrong outro. Outro.

[00:23:23]Ah, yeah. I don't I don't know that pride is going to be a problem for me.

[00:23:27]Just kidding. Uh-oh. I found that humor that they didn't want us to find. Oh well.

[00:23:35]I will see you guys Thursday.

[00:23:37]Good night.