Spike is Best

Pride is a professional at sermonizing about humility. It will put humility in such an unreachable intellectualized framework as to make it into a gnostic ability.

Especially unchallenged by mere mortals - that's key to observe, for the fanatic will claim to have been challenged and tested in God's fire which puts him above the challenge of mortals.

As long as he gets to do the saying and the framing. One is reminded of a person who will go on and on to someone else about his own faults, and if the other person merely nods assent, he'll get mad and say, "Don't agree with me!"

Pride can take on every kind of manifestation of virtue - or vice - as a cloak. One might say that pride is the worst sin because it can go on the longest. The picture of puffed up arrogance, while certainly being a part of it, is not the near resemblance. You cannot really capture Pride.

It can assume powers to itself in the same stroke that it feigns to abrogate them. It can thump its chest in fierce mea culpas and proclaim itself unworthy and below others; it can rip its garments at the drop of a hat. What pride cannot stand is being on the same level as another person, in the very specific sense of sharing in their mere humanity. It will not enter into matter.

This is one of the reasons for the need to have lay and religious women involved in the formation of priests.