De arte praedicatoria

If the preacher intends to rouse his hearers to flee pride, let him use these authorities: Whoever exalts himself will be humbled.¹ Likewise: What is high to men is an abomination before God.² Likewise Paul: Do not be haughty in mind, but fear.³ Likewise Jesus, son of Sirach: The beginning of every sin is pride.⁴ Likewise: He has put down the mighty from their seat, and has exalted the humble.⁵ Likewise Peter: God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.⁶ O man, consider what pride takes away, what humility, the nurse of virtues, bestows. Pride made devils out of angels; humility, however, makes men like the holy angels. Pride is heavenly by origin, and yet it hides in ashes and sackcloth. Let the cloistered man beware lest he say with the Pharisee: I am not like the rest of men.⁷ But let him rather cry out: I am a worm and not a man, the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people.⁸ If he is a learned man, let him not thunder out with the Pharisee: Our lips are our own; who is lord over us?⁹ but let him rather cry out with the publican: God, be merciful to me a sinner.¹⁰ O man, it is up to you to set your place low; it is dangerous to stand on a precipice. To the humble man the Lord says: I am as the dew, and Israel shall spring forth like the lily.¹¹ The lily grows better in the valley than on the mountain, because there it is nourished more abundantly by water, retains its greenness longer, preserves its whiteness longer. Whence it is said: The lily of the valleys.¹² So he who is a true Israel, truly seeing the Lord, planted in the valley of humility, is nourished by a greater watering of heavenly grace, and springs forth more richly in spirit.

He retains more fully the brightness of charity, and the whiteness of innocence. "The more one owes by virtue of a gift, then, the more humble he ought to be, when he sees himself more bound in rendering account." For any works whatsoever are rightly deprived of their reward, unless they are seasoned with the sweetness of humility. For "he who gathers virtues without humility, as it were, carries dust into the wind." This is the humility that cries out: Let him who is greater become as one who serves.¹³ And elsewhere: The greater you are, humble yourself in all things.¹⁴ This is what caused the Son of God to descend from the bosom of the Father into the womb of the Virgin; this is what wrapped him in poor rags, that he might clothe us in the ornaments of the virtues; this is what circumcised him in the flesh, that he might circumcise us in the mind; this is what allowed him to be scourged bodily, that he might free us from the scourge of sin; this is what crowned our king with thorns, that he might crown us, his servants, with the roses of eternal blessedness.

Oh, how unlike humility is pride! which cast Lucifer out of heaven, deprived Adam of paradise, transformed Nebuchadnezzar into a beast. This is pride, which, while it insolently raises itself above itself, ruinously falls below itself. This is what, while it seeks itself outside itself, does not find itself within itself. This is what makes a man peculiar within what is common, singular within the universal, solitary in public, and isolated within the community. This was the first thing that cast man down, and it is the last thing that stands in his way as he returns to the Lord.

When you fight well, when you think everything subdued, whatever evils it then presents, pride still remains to be conquered.

This is what unmans one's bearing, sets one's gesture outside the rule, through which words overflow, threats thunder, what is lacking is claimed, what is present is disregarded. This handed the philosophers over to a reprobate mind,¹⁵ blinded the Jew, destroys the obstinate, casts down the exalted.

This is signified by the north wind, when it is said: Rise, north wind, and come, south wind.¹⁶ The north wind is hostile to flowers, plunders the grasses, binds the waters with frost; so pride is a stepmother to good things, destroys the fruit of one's work, binds the mind with the frost of perversity, about which it is said: All evil is spread abroad from the north;¹⁷ because pride is the mother of all wickedness. Of this it is also said: What do you see, Jeremiah? I see a pot boiling from the north.¹⁸ This is the pot of the servants of pride, in which the children of darkness are cooked down, the pursuers of honors, the hunters of riches, who desire the first seats, who wish to be greeted in the marketplace, and to be called "Rabbi" by men. This pot Nebuchadnezzar kindles, that is, the devil; to it the arrogance of pride supplies the flame; in it the proud man is cooked down; the cooked matter is eaten by Egypt, that is, the unclean spirit draws it into his own body, and afterward carries it off into hell. Pride is a wind that throws up dust from the face of the earth, because it casts the proud man out from the stability of eternal life. This is the swelling that drives away the medicines that have been applied, because pride does not receive the grace offered to it. There are, moreover, four kinds of pride, which, like four winds, blow through the whole world, because they puff up worldly men with swellings. Arrogance, namely, which ascribes to itself what it does not have; insolence, which appropriates to itself what it owes to others; haughtiness, which believes many things of itself beyond the truth; obstinacy, which sets itself up as a superior. These are the four craftsmen who shake the whole world and offer men various illusions.