The first step of pride: curiosity.49
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The first step of pride: curiosity The first step of pride is curiosity. How does it show itself? Now you begin to notice that wherever you are, standing, walking or sitting, your eyes are wondering, your glance darts right and left, your ears are cocked. Some change has taken place in you, every movement shows it.
"The perverse person winks the eye, nudges the foot, points the finger." These symptoms show your soul has caught some disease. You used to watch over your own conduct, now all your watchfulness is for others. "They do not know themselves so they must go forth to pasture their goats."
Goats are a symbol of sin, and I am applying the word to their eyes and ears. They are the windows through which death creeps into the soul, as death came into the world by sin. These are the flocks the curious tend while they let their soul starve.
My friend, if you gave yourself the attention you ought, I do not think you would have much time to look after others. Listen, busybody, to Solomon. Listen to the words of the Wise Man for a fool: "Guard your heart with all care."
Your senses have quite enough to do to guard the source of life. You wander away from yourself? Whom have you left in charge? Your eyes sweep the heavens. How do you dare, you who have sinned against heaven? Look over the earth, that you might know yourself. It speaks to you of yourself, because "dust you are and unto dust you shall return."
Are the eyes never to be raised at all?
Yes, but only for two reasons: to look for help or to help others. David raised his eyes to the mountains to see if help would come to him. Our Lord looked out over the crowd to see if they needed his help. One raised his eyes in misery, the other in mercy — two excellent reasons. If when time, place and circumstances call for it, you raise your eyes for your own need or your sister's or brother's, I certainly will
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If it is for some motive other than these two that you raise your eyes I am afraid you imitate neither the prophet
[David] nor our Lord but Dinah, Eve or Satan himself.
Dinah was leading her goats to pasture when she was snatched away from her father and despoiled of her virginity.
Ah! Dinah! You were anxious to see the foreign women?
What need was there for that? What good did it do you?
Was it just idle curiosity? Yes, you were idle, but someone who saw you did not stay idle. You were looking about curiously, but someone eyed you still more curiously. Who would have then believed that your curious idleness or idle curiosity would be fruitful. But it did bear terrible fruit for you and for your family and for your enemies, too.
What about you, Eve? You were in paradise, charged along with your husband to tend it and care for it. If you had kept the command given you, you would have gone in due time to a better place where there is no labor and no care. You were permitted to eat the fruit of every tree except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The other trees were good, and their fruit tasted well. Why did you want the fruit that tasted evil as well? "Be not wiser than it behaves one to be wise." To be wise in evil is not wisdom but foolishness.
Keep what is entrusted to you, wait for what is promised to you. Avoid what is forbidden or you will lose what you already have. Why are you so ready to look on death? What do those glances mean? You are forbidden to eat that fruit, why do you look at it?
"Oh!" you answer. "I am only looking. I have not so much as put a hand to it. My eyes are under no restriction. I was forbidden only to eat. What did God give me eyes for if I cannot look at whatever I want?"
Elave you never read: "All things are lawful for me but not all expedient?" The look may not have been a sin itself
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but there was a sin somewhere in the background. You cannot have been watching very carefully over yourself or you would not have had time for this curiosity. It may not itself be a sin but it is leading you on to sin. You are already guilty of some fault in the matter and more will follow.
While your attention was taken up with this the serpent quietly slipped into your heart, and his soft words are being spoken, gentle persuasive words, lies to lull fears to sleep.
"No, you will not die," he says. He strengthens your attention, he rouses your appetite, he whets your curiosity, he stirs up your greed. While he presents you with a forbidden fruit he steals the gift you have been given. He gave you an apple and stole paradise. You drink the poison.
You will die and be the mother of the dying. Before the first child was born salvation was gone. We are born and we die.
We are born dying men and women, for the doom of death is laid upon us before ever we are born. This is the heavy burden you have laid upon all your sons and daughters even to this day.
And you, Satan! Made in the likeness of God, placed not in Eden but in the delights of the Paradise of God, what more did you want? Full of wisdom and perfect beauty, seek not what is too high for you, peer not into what is too mighty. Stay in your own place lest you fall if you walk in great and wonderful things above you. Why are you casting those glances toward the North? I see you musing very earnestly on something. I do not know what it is but it is something beyond your reach. You say: "I will place my throne in the North.'7 All others in heaven's courts are standing, you alone presume to sit. You disturb the concord of your fellows, the peace of the heavenly country, and if it were possible even the peace of the Blessed Trinity. Wretch!
To this your curiosity has led you. With reckless insolence you shock your fellow-citizens and insult your King. "Thou sands of thousands minister to him, ten times a hundred