Category: VAINGLORY

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

    This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • When you draw closer to God, your desire to be known diminishes.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • We use our cars and clothing and career credentials to craft images of ourselves we wish to promote and project to others, while keeping much about ourselves carefully hidden from view.

    Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • For whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward Thee, it is riveted upon sorrows, yea though it is riveted on things beautiful. 

    Confessions
    St. Augustine

  • Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.

    —Jeffrey D. Sachs

  • It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class?

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • In the case of physical illness, even if doctors tell us it is beyond hope, we do all we can to save the body. But on the other hand, when it comes to the spirit and its maladies, for which recovery is never beyond reach, we plunge into despair as if there is nothing we can do. Focusing on your spirit more than your body will save both; focusing on just the body will cause you to lose both.

    ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
    ON REPENTANCE & DEFEATING DESPAIR
    Letters to Theodore

  • if He had placed corporeal beauty also under our control we should have been subjected to excessive anxiety, and should have wasted all our time upon things which are of no profit, and should have grievously neglected our soul.

    For if, even as it is, when we have not this power in ourselves, we make intense efforts, and give ourselves up to shadow painting, and because we cannot in reality produce bodily beauty, we cunningly devise imitations by means of paints, and dyes, and dressing of hair, and arrangement of garments, and penciling of eyebrows, and many other contrivances, what leisure should we have set apart for the soul and serious matters, if we had it in our power to transfigure the body into a really symmetrical shape? For probably, if this were our business, we should not have any other, but should spend all our time upon it, adorning the bondmaid with countless decorations, but letting her who is the mistress of this bondmaid lie perpetually in a state of deformity and neglect.

    ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
    ON REPENTANCE & DEFEATING DESPAIR
    Letters to Theodore

  • Whoever writes should put in his mind before writing what consequences, effects and reactions are likely to result from it. A piece of writing is something for which one is responsible before, one’s conscience, before God and before its readers. Blessed is the person who writes with his conscience before his pen. And blessed is he whose writing can call forth nobility and not sharp arrows of animosity. No one ought to write and publish without considering the possible reactions to his work, or just to achieve some personal gain.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Experiences in Life

  • Maybe you think that you are more tempted by arrogance than by self-rejection. But isn’t arrogance, in fact, the other side of self-rejection? Isn’t arrogance putting yourself on a pedestal to avoid being seen as you see yourself? Isn’t arrogance, in the final analysis, just another way of dealing with the feelings of worthlessness? Both self-rejection and arrogance pull us out of the common reality of existence and make a gentle community of people extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attain. I know too well that beneath my arrogance there lies much self-doubt, just as there is a great mount of pride hidden in my self-rejection. Whether I am inflated or deflated, I lose touch with my truth and distort my vision of reality.

    —Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World