From C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, the character who embodies Pride has this dialogue with an angel on the threshhold of Heaven:
“I am perfectly ready to consider it. Of course I should require some assurances… I should want a guarantee that you are taking me to a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness–and scope for the talents that God has given me…” “No,” said the other. “I can promise you none of those things. No sphere of usefulness; you are not needed there at all. No scope for your talents; only forgiveness for having perverted them.”
You can be altruistic to others and still be prideful. One way I fall into it is preferring World A (where my suffering is greater, but I know that I have some responsibility for any respite I get) to World B (where I’m doing much better, but I’m not at all the cause of my good fortune). It’s not bad to delight in using the talents you have and sharing them with others, but it is a problem for Christians to be possessive of those gifts or to need others to be dependent on you.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean that the total absence of pride-in-this-sense is exactly the same thing as perfect altruism, only that the latter would be a consequence of the former.
From C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, the character who embodies Pride has this dialogue with an angel on the threshhold of Heaven:
You can be altruistic to others and still be prideful. One way I fall into it is preferring World A (where my suffering is greater, but I know that I have some responsibility for any respite I get) to World B (where I’m doing much better, but I’m not at all the cause of my good fortune). It’s not bad to delight in using the talents you have and sharing them with others, but it is a problem for Christians to be possessive of those gifts or to need others to be dependent on you.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean that the total absence of pride-in-this-sense is exactly the same thing as perfect altruism, only that the latter would be a consequence of the former.