"Believe in Yourself!"

From despair.com

Or so the saying goes.  It is a popular maxim that has been around for some time, and has maintained an almost universal popularity.  But G.K. Chesterton, some years ago, gave a powerful critique of it.   In his book, Orthodoxy, he writes this.  It is worth mentioning that these words were published in 1908, well before the decades and decades of "believe in yourself" mantra in the U.S.

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.  Once I remember walking with a  prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world.  Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.  The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."  And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell."  I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?  For I can tell you.  I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar.  I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success.  I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men.  The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."
He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.  "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them.  That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself.  That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.  If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly, individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.  Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay.  It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself.  Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.  Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has 'Hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."¹

And here we are, one hundred and four years later, and that maxim lives on with hardly a critical thought given to whether or not it's actually worth believing.  If you wish to see people today who believe in themselves, look no further than the awful acts of American Idol that so quickly gain infamy in the popular culture and millions of hits on YouTube.

The fruits of this deplorable maxim are in plain view on every side in our culture.  The crusade for "self-actualization," self-esteem, and "believe in yourself" found in the grade schools of our nation has had all too predictable and all too tragic results, the repercussions of which have not yet been fully realized.

I can express nothing but shock and dismay that Christians, especially Christians around my age, often give their assent to this maxim.  Indeed, it has a strong foothold in the church, and the results are - once again - predictable.  It is strange that a belief in such direct conflict with the teachings of Jesus could be so popular in the church.

Believing in oneself is the first and greatest of all sins.  It is that great falsity that threw an idyllic world into terror and suffering; it is the great lie that polluted the Garden of Eden.²  The call to "believe in yourself" is not some New Age fad or self-help advice; it is the cardinal sin among the cardinal sins.  There is a name for those who believe in themselves above all else: the Damned.  And you can bet the Great Deceiver believes in himself.

The most obvious question is the one asked by the publisher in response to Chesterton: "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?"  Chesterton wrote the book Orthodoxy in response to that question.  I hope to be a bit more brief.

It is interesting that in the opening chapter of Norman Vincent Pearle's famous and infamous book The Power of Positive Thinking, he quotes the Bible five times to defend the thesis of that chapter, namely, "believe in yourself."  Ironically, none of the verses so much as vaguely suggest that one should believe in oneself.  In fact, more than one of the verses alone and all of the verses in context make it explicitly clear that one should trust in Christ.

Simply put, there is no biblical basis for the dictum "believe in yourself."  But shouldn't we believe in ourselves insofar as we were created in the image of God?  In a sense, perhaps.  But only as there is buried beneath mountains of abominable sins a glimmer of the face of God.  And so it is not in us in which we believe per se, but in that now tarnished and darkened image.  Above all, we must believe in God; if we are to believe in ourselves, it is only onsofar as we believe in Him.

In one of his less read books, The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis drives the point home:

All those expressions of unworthiness which Christian practice puts into the believer's mouth seem to the outer world like the degraded and insincere grovelings of a sycophant before a tyrant, or at best a façon de parler like the self-depreciation of a Chinese gentleman when he calls himself "This course and illiterate person."  In reality, however, they express the continually renewed, because continually necessary, attempt to negate that misconception of ourselves and of our relation to God which nature, even while we pray, is always recommending to us.  No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable.  The Pagans obeyed this impulse unabashed, a good man was "dear to the gods" because he was good.  We, being better taught, resort to subterfuge.  Far be it from us to think that we have virtues for which God could love us.  But then, how magnificently we have repented!  As Bunyan says, describing his first and illusory conversion, "I thought there was no man in England that pleased God better than I."  Beaten out of this, we next offer our own humility to God's admiration.  Surely He'll like that?  Or if not that, our clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still lack humility.  Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness.  It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.  Surely we must have a little - however little - native luminosity?  Surely we can't be quite creatures?

For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-love, which never fully acknowledges its own neediness, Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence.  We become "jolly beggars."  The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his Need.  He is not entirely sorry for the fresh Need they have produced.  And he is not sorry at all for the innocent Need that is inherent in his creaturely condition.   For all the time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretense that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy.  We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet - or one foot - or one toe - on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf.  The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power, and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not "ours."  Anodos³ has got rid of his shadow.⁴

Ultimately, the message of the gospel - the message of the Bible as a whole - has nothing to do with our own loveliness.  In fact, it stresses quite the opposite given our wayward state.  What it does affirm is God's love for us.  It does not say, "For God so loved the world because it was awesome."  It says, "For God so loved the world."  Full stop.  The key point is God's love, not any inherent good we might claim to have, as Lewis pointed out.  There are a myriad verses which Lewis and Chesterton's ideas echo.  I will leave you with one.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart

And lean not on your own understanding;

In all your ways submit to Him,

And He will make your paths straight.

Do not be wise in your own eyes;

Fear the Lord and shun evil.

~Proverbs 3:5-6

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Notes:

1.  Chesterton, G.K., Orthodoxy, p.18-19

2.  I make this claim for a couple of reasons.  The first is that the serpent deceives Eve by claiming that they would become "like gods."  The second is that, when it comes to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a popular position among theologians is that eating of that tree was not so much a desire to come out of ignorance into knowledge, but was a claim of independence from God.

3.  Anodos is the main character in George MacDonald's Phantastes (you can find a free ebook version here), where his shadow is an evil power that torments him.  Incidentally, George MacDonald's writing had a powerful influence on both Chesterton and Lewis, including Phantastes.

4.  Lewis, C.S., The Four Loves, p.130-131