Pride, a Billionaire and C.S. Lewis

A little while ago, the London Sunday Times published an article on the effect that reading C.S. Lewis had on the life of American billionaire, Thomas Monaghan.

Thomas Monaghan founded ‘Domino’s Pizza’, one of the world's largest pizza chains. Yet material success did not bring Monaghan satisfaction. A friend gave him C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’ to read. In his chapter on ‘The Great Sin’ in that book, Lewis writes that Pride leads to every other vice. Lewis calls Pride “the essential vice, the utmost evil… the complete anti-God state of mind”.

Monaghan realised that night that he was the proudest person he knew, nor did he like this thought. Reading C.S. Lewis that evening, set in train events that were to lead Monaghan to divest himself of many of his material trappings, to his selling off 90% of his business empire and his donation of this vast sum to good causes, culminating in the late 1990s with the selling of what now has become the world’s largest pizza delivery chain for an estimated $1 billion.

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