The Link Between Charity and Pride

A few years ago, I studied President Ezra Taft Benson's legendary talk, Beware of Pride, and heard a quote that I shared the other day: "Pride is the universal sin, the great vice." By that time, I had been taught that charity was "the greatest of all [virtues]," and I wondered if there was some kind of link between pride and charity. I knew that they weren't opposites; the opposite of pride is humility, and the opposite if charity, selfishness. But I felt that there was some kind of connection. I just didn't know what the connection was.

Now I do.

In President Uchtdorf's recent talk, In Praise of Those Who Save, he said that "The great enemy of charity is pride." So, pride and charity are connected in that they are enemies. And that makes sense, when you think about it. Charity is defined as being "the pure love of Christ" (Moroni 7:47). Arguably, it is Christ's defining attribute. And President Uchtdorf went on to say that "if charity is the pure love of Christ, then pride is the defining characteristic of Satan." He described pride as being "short-tempered, unkind, and envious," all traits that I'd consider quintessential to the characteristics of Satan and entirely antithetical to the characteristics of Jesus. And it follows that just as Jesus and Satan oppose each other on every hand, their defining characteristics and core attributes are also directly opposed to each other.

And this opposition works well with the opposites I had mentioned earlier. President Benson said that "Selfishness is one of the more common faces of pride," and in another talk, Pride and the Priesthood, President Uchtdorf said:

So how do we conquer this sin of pride that is so prevalent and so damaging? How do we become more humble?

It is almost impossible to be lifted up in pride when our hearts are filled with charity. . . . When we see the world around us through the lens of the pure love of Christ, we begin to understand humility.

So we see that charity and humility go together, just as do pride and selfishness do, and pride and selfishness both go against charity and humility, and vice versa.

Charity and pride are opposing forces, each with strong links to each other's opposites. They are the core attributes of the divine and the diabolical, respectively. They can be considered each other's "great enemies," and I would venture to guess that the more you have of one of them, the less you have of the other. President Benson spoke of how pride tempts us to "elevate ourselves above others and diminish them," and President Uchtdorf said "It is almost impossible to be lifted up in pride when our hearts are filled with charity."

So let us try to develop charity and keep our pride in check, bearing in mind that these two traits are opposed to each other in such a way that increasing one of them will almost certainly increase the other.