How Pride Made Lucifer a Devil

To understand the power of its awful tyranny, consider the angel who, for the greatness of his splendor and beauty, was called Lucifer. He was cast out of heaven for no other sin than this. Pierced with the arrow of pride, he was hurled down from his grand and exalted position as an angel into hell. If pride of heart alone was enough to cast down from heaven to earth a power so great, adorned with such might, the very greatness of his fall shows how carefully we, surrounded by the weakness of the flesh, ought to be on our guard. But we can learn how to avoid the most deadly poison of this evil if we trace out the origin and causes of his fall. For weakness can never be cured, nor remedies found for poor health, unless their origin and causes are first examined with wise scrutiny. [a]

Lucifer was endowed with divine splendor and shone among the other higher powers by the bounty of his Maker. Yet he believed that the splendor of his wisdom and the beauty of his powers, with which the Creator’s gift had graced him, were his by the might of his own nature and not by the kindness of God’s generosity. So he was puffed up, as if he needed no divine help to continue in this state of purity. He counted himself like God, as if, like God, he needed no one; and trusting in the power of his own will, he imagined that through it he could amply supply himself with everything needed for the completion of virtue or the continuance of perfect blessedness. This thought alone was the cause of his first fall. Because of it he was forsaken by God, whom he imagined he no longer needed. He suddenly became unstable and tottering, discovered the weakness of his own nature, and lost the blessedness he had enjoyed by God’s gift.

And because he “loved the words of ruin,” with which he had said, “I will ascend into heaven,” and the “deceitful tongue,” with which he had said of himself, “I will be like the Most High,” and to Adam and Eve, “You will be like gods,” therefore “God will destroy him forever, and pluck him out and remove him from his dwelling place, and his root from the land of the living.” Then “the righteous,” when they see his ruin, “will fear, and will laugh at him and say,” in words that may also be aimed most justly at those who trust that they can reach the highest good without the protection and help of God: “See the man who did not make God his helper, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and prevailed in his vanity.”