The Enemy In Us

by: Fr.Basil Cole, OP (few of the context of this blog was taken from the book of "The hidden enemy of priesthood: The contribution of St. Aquinas")


As followers of Christ, we need to be aware of our enemy. We must understand him and must know how to deal our enemy. Most people find easier to recognize other people’s negativity but find it much harder to deal with their own negative thoughts, emotions and judgment. The reason is that we are able to recognize easily when other people are criticizing and judging us. We may not know exactly how to deal with it, but we are aware of it. In fact we tend to overlook that we are already sinning and fall into temptation. Pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, sloth and avarice are the deadly sins that we need to recognize and confront them within ourselves because they may already become our vices but we are still not aware.

St. Thomas describes the sin of pride as a vice with its own special interest, namely an “inordinate appetite for one’s own superiority”. Any sin can be prompted by such a spirit and quite often be repulsed by the divine law which keeps a man from sinning because some proud persons want no limits to their behavior (freedom of choice without boundaries). He states that a desire for one’s own superiority pushes one to contribute to an “exaggerated self-esteem” with the harmful consequences of dwelling on other people failures. Pride leads to a boasting about “qualities one does not possess” or imagining one has a gift from oneself, or if thinking profoundly about some aspect of reality is a gift from God, “believing one deserves it” that may cause the bad habit of looking down on others and wishing to appear singularly good.

The root of pride is somehow not being subject to God and his rule. This is another ways of saying that one person exceeds unreasonably his desire for excellence even though he does not have the requisite talents for a particular goal or aim for the work in question. Pride ultimately becomes a kind of contempt of God either by not relying on his help or eventually hating God in some way. One of the few examples is rash judgment – proud person who thinks too highly of himself and less highly of others in proximity is that he is almost forced into making judgment about other people in order to raise himself above others. Instead, these harsh judgments dispose one toward hatred, envy, lack of mercy or simple neglect of friendliness. We can ultimately judge at most that certain actions are apparent mortal sins since we cannot know a person’s soul although we can determine objectively that some actions are gravely unjust. It is important to note that there is no sin called “judgemental”; this is a modern notion that negative judgments of others is somehow condemned by Christ.

 Another example is the sin of ambition; How pride can affect the judgment of other by becoming ambitious?  The desire for recognition therefore can be unbalanced in three ways: First, a person can seek recognition of an excellence which he does not possess, which means seeking more than one’s true share of recognition. Second, he can desire honor for himself without acknowledgment to God. Third, his desire can rest content with recognition itself, without applying it to the service of others. In other words, the unreasonable desire for recognition is the unreasonable desire of excellence. 

Envy, a kind of sin which helps other sins comes in its wake. As what Gregory the Great says; from envy comes hatred, gossip, detraction, gloating over our neighbors’ hard luck, and being sore at his success. Detraction which is sometimes called “backbiting” or “calumny” attempts to injure another’s character by belittling someone in secret causing others to have a bad opinion of the person about whom he is spreading his secret tales so as to take away another’s reputation. One may lie about a person’s character, exaggerating his weaknesses, telling his secrets, accusing him of bad intentions in his good deed, denying his good qualities when he is being verbally attacked or being silent in a malicious way about his good qualities.  This act of detraction is considered to be a grave sin in its species because it willfully injures a person’s reputation and thus prevents him from doing many good deeds. It is not sin however, when the truth needs to be told in a confidential manner to a higher authority for the sake of the individual himself or the common good of the Church. However, even this makes the envious person feel good. 

Gossip, which translates whispering, goes beyond harming a person’s reputation to the desire to split up friendships. This is an even worse sin objectively since a friend is better than honor and to be loved is better than to be honored according to Aristotle. Hatred must be examined first as an emotion before we can turn what it means to hate one’s neighbor as an outcome of envy. As to what St. Thomas says that “hatred is contrary to love”. Good is the object of love and hatred is the object of evil. When there is pleasure, there is the emotion of love behind it because everything is naturally in harmony with what is agreeable to it, and this constitutes “natural love”; similarly it is natural out of harmony with that which is alien and this constitutes “natural hatred”.  The emotion of hatred is not a sin unless it becomes hatred of God or neighbor. The person filled with wrongful hate wishes evil for its own sake upon another which in turn will lead to unjust acts; immoral hatred is an evil disposition which does not care, howsoever undeservedly evil befalls the person he hates.

Gloating over another’s misfortune, this is one of the great tragedies of our present time; the hidden sins of envy by the gloaters over the downfall of our neighbors. They may have been envied in their rise and now these same people delight in their misfortunes, putting their own souls in jeopardy for their lack of mercy.

Pride and vainglory can so wound a person’s virtue by the power of these desires, as to St. Paul called covetousness (greediness) the root of all evils (1 Tm 6:10) – “For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains” and yet St. Thomas teaches that pride is the beginning of all sin because the nature of moral evil begins in turning away from God. Every sin involves a turning toward a changeable good in a disordered way. This in turn disposes a person for a slow or total turning from God through venial and mortal sin, “because of riches a person acquires the power to commit any kind of sin, of satisfying his desires for every sort of sin; for money helps a man to obtain all manner of temporal goods”. Therefore, avarice (greediness) is a kind of root for sin as a turning unreasonably to material goods.