How Empty Glory Can Be Useful

In one matter, however, empty glory is found to be useful to beginners, I mean to those who are still troubled by sins of the flesh. Suppose, for instance, that when they are troubled by the spirit of sexual immorality, they form an idea of the dignity of the priesthood, or of a reputation among all men by which they may be thought saints and spotless. With these considerations they drive off the unclean suggestions of lust, counting them base and at least unworthy of their rank and reputation. So by means of a lesser evil they overcome a greater one. For it is better for a man to be troubled by the sin of empty glory than for him to fall into the desire for sexual immorality, from which, once he has fallen, he either cannot recover at all or recovers only with great difficulty. This thought is admirably expressed by one of the prophets, speaking in the person of God and saying: “For my name’s sake I will remove my wrath far off, and with my praise I will bridle you, so that you do not perish.” That is, while you are held in check by the praises of empty glory, you cannot possibly rush on into the depths of hell, or plunge beyond recall into committing deadly sins. [a]

Nor need we wonder that this passion has the power to keep anyone from rushing into the sin of sexual immorality. It has been proved again and again by many examples that once a man has been touched by its poison and plague, it makes him utterly tireless, so that he hardly feels a fast of even two or three days. We have often known some who live in this desert to confess that when their home was in the monasteries of Syria, they could go five days without food with no difficulty, while now they are so overcome by hunger even by the third hour that they can scarcely keep up their daily fast to the ninth hour. On this subject there is a very neat answer of Abbot Macarius to someone who asked him why he was troubled by hunger as early as the third hour in the desert, when in the monastery he had often scorned food for a whole week without feeling hungry. He said: “Because here there is nobody to see your fast and to feed and support you with his praise of you. But there you grew fat on the notice of others and the food of empty glory.”

Of the way in which, as we said, the sin of sexual immorality is held off by an attack of empty glory, there is an excellent and telling figure in the book of Kings. When the children of Israel had been taken captive by Necho, king of Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Assyria, came up and brought them back from the borders of Egypt to their own country. He did not mean to restore them to their former liberty and their native land, but to carry them off to his own land and move them to a country still more distant than the land of Egypt where they had been prisoners. This illustration fits our case exactly. For though there is less harm in giving in to the sin of empty glory than to sexual immorality, it is harder to escape from the dominion of empty glory. Somehow the prisoner who is carried off farther away will have more difficulty in returning to his native land and the freedom of his fathers, and the prophet’s rebuke will rightly be aimed at him: “Why have you grown old in a foreign country?” For a man is rightly said to have grown old in a foreign country if he has not broken up the ground of his faults. Of pride there are two kinds: first, carnal pride, and second, spiritual pride, which is the worse. For it attacks especially those who are seen to have made progress in some good qualities.