Subsection 14 Self-love, vainglory, praise, honour, excessive applause, pride, too much joy, and so on, as causes

Self-love, pride and vainglory—“blind love of oneself,” which Chrysostom calls one of the devil’s three great nets, and Bernard an arrow that pierces the soul and kills it, a stealthy enemy that slips past our awareness—are major causes.

Where neither anger, lust, covetousness, fear, sorrow nor any other disturbance can take hold, this will quietly corrupt us without our noticing. “Self-love has conquered the man whom gluttony did not defeat,” says Cyprian: self-love has overcome the man whom overindulgence could not overtake. He has scorned all money, bribes and gifts; otherwise upright and sincere, he has given himself to no foolish fancy and has withstood all the body’s tyrannical desires, yet he has lost all his honour, taken captive by vainglory. Chrysostom, on John. “Glory, you alone burn up the soul and mind.”

A powerful assault and cause of our present illness: although we generally neglect it and take no notice of it, this violently batters our souls and causes melancholy and folly. This pleasing disposition, this soft, whispering breeze of popular favour—“lovable madness,” this delightful frenzy, most irresistible passion, “the mind’s most welcome error”—this agreeable disease steals upon us so sweetly, ravishes our senses, lulls our souls to sleep and puffs up our hearts like so many bladders, all without our feeling it, so that those afflicted never once perceive it or think of a cure.

In this disease we usually love best the man who does us most harm, and are quite willing to be hurt. “We gladly welcome flattery of ourselves,” says Jerome: we love him, we love him for it. “O Bonciarius, how sweet, how sweet it was to receive such praise from a man like you!” It was sweet to hear.

And as Pliny candidly confesses to his dear friend Augurinus, all your writings are most welcome, but especially those that speak of me. Again, a little later, to Maximus: I cannot express how pleasing it is to hear myself praised.

Though we smile to ourselves, at least ironically, when parasites smear us with false encomiums—as many princes cannot help doing, “since they find nothing of the kind within themselves,” knowing that they fall as far short of such virtues as a mouse falls short of an elephant—still it gives us pleasure. Though we often seem angry and blush at our own praises, inwardly our souls rejoice. It puffs us up: “a deceptive sweetness,” “a coaxing demon,” making us swell beyond our proper limits and forget ourselves.

Her two daughters are lightness of mind, excessive joy and pride, not to mention the other attendant vices listed by Jodocus Lorichius: boasting, hypocrisy, perversity and idle curiosity.

Now the usual cause of this mischief comes from ourselves or from others: we both act and are acted upon. It proceeds inwardly from ourselves when we are the active causes, from an inflated opinion of our good qualities and our own worth—which is really no worth—our generosity, attractiveness, grace, courage, strength, wealth, patience, meekness, hospitality, beauty, temperance, gentle birth, knowledge, intelligence, science, art, learning, our excellent gifts and good fortune. For these, like Narcissus, we admire, flatter and applaud ourselves, and think the whole world values us as highly. Just as unattractive women readily believe those who tell them they are beautiful, we too readily believe in our own good qualities and praises, and are too well satisfied with ourselves.

We boast of and advertise our own works, and scorn everyone else’s in comparison. “Puffed up with knowledge,” as Paul says: our wisdom, our learning! All our geese are swans, and we value other men’s works as low and disparage them as much as we overvalue and prize our own. We will not allow them second place, no, not even third. What, “is Ulysses compared with me?” They are “mice, flies and gnats beside him,” nits and flies compared with his implacable and haughty, eminent and arrogant worship, though in truth they are far ahead of him.

They alone are wise, alone rich, alone fortunate, brave and beautiful, puffed up with this dropsy of self-conceit. Like that proud Pharisee, they suppose they are unlike other men, made of a purer and more precious metal. “They alone are effective in conducting affairs”—what the wise Periander said of those “who first consider every undertaking,” and so on.

“I knew a certain man,” says Erasmus: I knew someone so arrogant that he thought himself inferior to no man alive, like Callisthenes the philosopher, whose insolence was such that he thought neither Alexander’s deeds nor any other subject worthy of his pen; or Seleucus, king of Syria, who thought nobody fit to contend with him except the Romans, “judging them alone worthy to contest dominion with him.”

What Cicero wrote to Atticus long ago still holds: there has never yet been a true poet or orator who thought anyone else better than himself. Such, for the most part, are your princes, potentates, great philosophers, historians, founders of sects or heresies, and all our great scholars. As Jerome defines him, a natural philosopher is a vainglorious creature, an utter slave to rumour, fame and popular opinion. Though they write “on contempt for glory,” as he observes, they still put their names on their books.