"It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so"
About this Quote
Bernanos lands a paradox that’s less a clever twist than a moral trapdoor: you can’t renounce pride without first possessing a self strong enough to renounce anything. The line needles the pious pose of humility, the performance of smallness that often hides a subtler vanity. If you “rise above pride” by declaring you have none, you’ve dodged the difficult work and kept the reward: a flattering self-image, now baptized as virtue.
The intent is corrective. Bernanos, a French Catholic novelist writing in the aftermath of world wars and amid political hysteria, distrusted both bourgeois self-satisfaction and the modern taste for psychological excuses. His fiction is full of souls who confuse abasement with holiness. Here he insists that humility isn’t self-erasure; it’s self-possession. You need a measure of pride - dignity, standards, a sense that your actions matter - to make humility an act rather than a collapse.
The subtext is sharper: “humility” can be just pride with better PR. People often seek moral exemption by claiming they’re too broken, too insignificant, too “not like that” to be implicated. Bernanos calls that bluff. Rising above pride isn’t the absence of ego; it’s ego disciplined, redirected, made answerable.
It works because it refuses easy virtue. It forces a modern reader, trained to treat self-confidence as suspect, to admit that moral growth requires backbone. Even repentance, Bernanos suggests, takes nerve.
The intent is corrective. Bernanos, a French Catholic novelist writing in the aftermath of world wars and amid political hysteria, distrusted both bourgeois self-satisfaction and the modern taste for psychological excuses. His fiction is full of souls who confuse abasement with holiness. Here he insists that humility isn’t self-erasure; it’s self-possession. You need a measure of pride - dignity, standards, a sense that your actions matter - to make humility an act rather than a collapse.
The subtext is sharper: “humility” can be just pride with better PR. People often seek moral exemption by claiming they’re too broken, too insignificant, too “not like that” to be implicated. Bernanos calls that bluff. Rising above pride isn’t the absence of ego; it’s ego disciplined, redirected, made answerable.
It works because it refuses easy virtue. It forces a modern reader, trained to treat self-confidence as suspect, to admit that moral growth requires backbone. Even repentance, Bernanos suggests, takes nerve.
Quote Details
| Topic | Pride |
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