P r i d e

 Edmund  Hill  O.P.

“IN PRAISE of the seven deadly sins” was the general title of a series of talks of which this essay was originally part, running from Greed, through Gluttony and Envy, down to Anger, Lust and Sloth. All good, nasty, sinful sins of which we can all be properly ashamed when guilty of them. But pride? Can you be ashamed of the opposite of being ashamed? In all the recent spate of historical apologies that has been sweeping the West and has even had the Vatican girding its loins to apologize for the Inquisition, at a conference of scholars organized there on the subject, a Jewish historian said, in effect: “To hell with apologies; what one looks for is an expression of shame.”

We all know how to be ashamed both of ourselves and of those connected with us, of our children for behaving badly, of our parents for being eccentric in public. And the opposite of that is precisely being proud of well-behaved parents, and of clever children, proud of nicely kept gardens and well maintained cars. Pride isn’t a sin at all, it’s a good thing. One expects people with any self-respect to take a “proper pride” in their work. Hovis, I believe, produce a loaf (or used to do so) called Mother’s Pride. As I remarked when having to preach on the equally difficult virtue of humility, one cannot imagine them selling it more effectively by calling it “Mother’s Humility”; and even less – and more to our point here – can one envisage it selling like hot cakes under the soubriquet of “Mother’s Greed” or “Mother’s Gluttony”. “Mother’s Envy” – perhaps. Just possibly even as “Mother’s Sloth”.

So, as I always do in moments of stress, I turn to the Oxford English Dictionary and look up ‘Proud’, from which, according to those giants of scholarship, James Murray, Henry Bradley, W. A. Craig and C. T. Onions (all, presumably, gone to their reward) is derived the noun, “Pride”. [The last named, incidentally, was librarian of Magdalen College, Oxford, when I was a new keen Catholic undergraduate there, and he used to twit me on the lack of really scholarly, learned Catholic authors on patristics, scripture, etc.] So then, I look up ‘Proud’, and read: “Late OE prut, prud = ON pruð-r – brave, gallant, magnificent, stately (whence Icelandic pruður...) All probably from OF prud, prod – doughty, gallant, in mod. Fr preux, = late Lat prodis, profitable, advantageous, useful, apparently taken from the first element in Latin prodesse, to be of value, to be good (for something)”.

Clearly pride is a good thing, and proud is a good thing to be, not a capital or deadly sin at all. Nor is it, incidentally in St Gregory’s list of the seven capital sins, while Vainglory is, and Pride, the ugly duckling among genuine, true-bred sins, has pushed the real, pretty little duckling of Vainglory out of the list.

Turning to other dictionaries we may fare better in “sinnifying” pride (perhaps hamartinizing would be the right word). First, the Latin dictionary; the noun superbia, deriving as in English from the adjective superbus – but just pause a moment and see what we have done to that adjective in English: ‘superb’, a word of the highest possible praise:

“A friend of the community cooked us a superb dinner on New Year’s Day, he did us proud.”

But as for its Latin etymology, it is evidently formed from super, above. So the superbus is a man who thinks he is, and the superba a woman who thinks she is, a cut above others, or they aspire to be so because they are sure they really are so. Like the English ‘proud’, it can in the second place, not the first place, come to mean – superb.

Before we push on to other dictionaries, let us pause again to reflect that the two meanings of ‘proud/pride’, positive and negative, whichever is primary in a given language, must be genuinely connected. To take a proper pride in your work, family, car, etc. because of their outstanding excellence, or to aim at such excellence, is to be in danger of becoming proud in the bad sense, superior to others, contemptuous of them, haughty, arrogant, bossy.

So then, briefly to the Greek and Hebrew dictionaries, which are of key importance in bringing us to the heart of our topic: what is made of ‘pride’ in the holy scriptures? The Greek New Testament has two main words that get rendered as ‘pride’: alazoneia (), which basically means ‘boastfulness’, and hyperephania (), which basically means ‘arrogance’, being overweening.1 In addition there are phrases which include the word hypselos (), ‘high’, such as “a high heart”, “high-minded”, and so on. The Hebrew which these words render in the Old Testament amounts to just one pair of words, ga’ewah (), ge’ah (), meaning ‘proud’ and ‘pride’, but also ‘majestic’ and ‘majesty’, and derived from a root ga’ah (), meaning ‘to rise up’. Again, both good and bad senses, though I am not sure the good senses occur where human beings are concerned. The two Greek words, on the other hand, seem to have an exclusively bad sense, in varying degrees.

So much for dictionaries. But before we look at what the scriptures substantively make of pride – not that it will be defined there, but rather illustrated for the most part by examples – before doing that I want to look at an example or two in Christian history, and also in our literature that culturally owes so much to biblical influence. And before doing that (do forgive me for working backwards like this; it must be my twisted mind), since even if scripture doesn’t bother about definitions we do find them convenient, let us turn to our ready source of accurate definition, St Thomas Aquinas.

He deals with pride in q.162 of his IIa IIae – vol. 44 of the English translation; and in art.2 of that question, after much discussion and so to say description, he gives the very succinct definition: pride is “the inordinate appetite for one’s own superiority”. Two more things he says about it, again just summing up and clarifying the tradition:

  • It is in a most important respect the gravest of all sins. What makes any sin essentially and seriously, or gravely sinful, is not the positive object aimed at in the sin, say pleasure or ease, but the turning away from God, the aversio a Deo (opposite of conversio ad Deum) that is involved in it. Now with other sins this is so to say indirect, by impliction, whereas pride means turning away from God directly, by refusing to subject oneself to God and his rule (art.6).

  • Pride is the first of sins, i.e. the source of all sins. And that is why it is not a mere capital sin, one of the seven deadlies; it is rather, as Gregory says, “the queen of vices”.

But when in the Middle Ages they wanted, for catechetical purposes no doubt, to turn what had been called the seven capital sins, because they give rise to subordinate sins, into precisely the seven deadly sins, clearly pride had to be included as the deadliest of them all, and therefore, cuckoo-like, it shoved poor little Vainglory out of the nest.

Starting now to work backwards to the scriptures through examples of pride in literature and history, let me begin with the most recent of them which I am going to cite, and the one that first made itself known to me. In my youth, there was a well known popular song about an epic fight between that bold Russian, servant of the Czar, Ivan Skvinsky Skvar, and the faithful follower of the prophet, Abdul Abulbul Amir, who encountered one another in the streets of Isfahan or somewhere like that. (I don’t think Teheran had been invented, or at least discovered by the British, in those days). So then that bold Russian had shouldered his gun and was strolling down town, taking no notice of other people and not bothering to look carefully where he was putting his feet, when a firm hand gripped his shoulder, and a voice sang in his ear:

          Proud infidel know
          You have trod on the toe
          Of Abdul Abulbul Amir.

So they fought all night long, to the death of both of them – I think they fought ‘neath the light of a pale yellow moon’; but that may be the light ‘neath which a Muscovite maiden now weeps for the bold’, and clearly arrogant, Ivan Skvinsky Skvar.

We now move back into the middle of the 19th century and the novels of Anthony Trollope. Some splendid (but somewhat crude) specimens of pride are to be found in the Barchester novels, firstly of course with the Honourable Johns and Georges and the Countess de Courcy herself, as well as the older Duke of Omnium; but secondly, and far more subtly in the ecclesiastical setting, the two chief protagionists of which are Mrs Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly. Mrs P. gets her come-uppance from the humble, but undoubtedly spirited Mr Crawley, perpetual curate of Hogglestock. He has been summoned to the palace to be reprimanded by the bishop, and Mrs P. of course is present at the interview and constantly putting her oar in. Mr Crawley ignores her until the interview nears its end, and then, at her last overweening intervention:

“Peace, woman”, Mr Crawley said, addressing her at last. The bishop jumped out of his chair at hearing the wife of his bosom called a woman. But he jumped rather in admiration than in anger ... “Woman!”, said Mrs Proudie, rising to her feet as though she really intended a personal encounter. “Madam”, said Mr Crawley, “You should not interfere in these matters. You simply debase your husband’s high office. The distaff were more fitting for you. My lord, good-morning.”

The Last Chronicles of Barset, Ch.18.

Archdeacon Grantly’s pride was of a different sort – half way between the vice and the ‘proper pride’ which is almost the virtue that St Thomas calls magnanimitas, being high-minded. But still, it is held up to mild ridicule by Trollope, as in this scene from The Warden, where it is being contrasted with the gentler virtues of the Archdeacon’s father-in-law, Mr Septimus Harding, warden of Hiram’s Hospital and precentor of Barchester Cathedral. The archdeacon is visiting the warden:

Though doubt and hesitation disturbed the rest of our poor warden, no such weakness perplexed the nobler breast of his son-in-law. As the indomitable cock preparing for the combat sharpens his spurs, shakes his feathers and erects his comb, so did the archdeacon arrange his weapons for the coming war, without misgiving and without fear. That he was fully confident of the justice of his cause, let no one doubt. Many a man can fight his battle with good courage but with a doubting conscience; such was not the case with Dr Grantly. He did not believe in the Gospel with more assurance than he did in the sacred justice of all ecclesiastical revenues. When he put his shoulder to the wheel to defend the income of the present and future precentors of Barchester, he was animated by as strong a sense of a holy cause, as that which gives courage to a missionary in Africa, or enables a sister of mercy to give up the pleasures of the world for the wards of a hospital. He was about to defend the holy of holies from the touch of the profane; to guard the citadel of the church from the most rampant of its enemies;2 to put on his good armour in the best of fights; and secure, if possible, the comforts of his creed for coming generations of ecclesiastical dignitaries.

The Warden, Ch.5.

Turning back the clock to the beginning of the last century, we come to Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice. Pride, incidentally, cannot thrive without the constant support of prejudice. Jane Austen’s portrayal of her characters and treatment of the theme of pride is altogether more subtle than Anthony Trollope’s, who perhaps deliberately, having a more obvious and precise target for satire than she does, slips occasionally into caricature. In her novel Darcy, certainly, is the principal representative of pride; lesser and more ludicrous ones, whose prejudices are more obvious and glaring, are Bingley’s sisters and the redoubtable and absurd Lady Catherine De Bourgh, whose absurdity is shown up by the even more absurd, pompous humility of her satellite, Mr Collins. The point to notice, I think, about Darcy’s pride is that, while in many respects undoubtedly the vice we are dealing with, it does tend to give place to its corresponding virtue, St Thomas’ magnanimity, genuine high-mindedness and readiness to use the qualities and rank and wealth, of which he is too proudly aware, in the cause of what is right, as in setting off to rescue the silly girl Lydia from a fate worse than death at the hands of the villain Wickham. But long before that episode, in a conversation with Elizabeth Bennet, he has an interesting observation to make himself about pride, distinguishing it from vanity, which is perhaps as near as we get in ordinary English to that unhappy little neglected capital vice, Vainglory.

“Mr Darcy is not to be laughed at!” cried Elizabeth. “That is an uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintances. I dearly love a laugh.”

“Miss Bingley”, said he, “has given me credit for more than can be. The wisest and best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.”

“Certainly,” replied Elizabeth, “there are such people. But I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can. – But these, I suppose, are precisely what you are without.”

“Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule.”

“Such as vanity and pride?”

“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will always be under good regulation.”
 

Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.

(Pride and Prejudice, Vol.1, Ch.11)

We now leave these literary pastures, and move back a few centuries to what are perhaps – or perhaps not – monuments to ecclesiastical pride in high places; if not to pride, then to its other corresponding virtue, magnificence. I refer to St Peter’s in Rome, and to a later quasi-rival, St Paul’s in London. I won’t dwell on the point; it’s just a personal and almost certainly prejudiced sentiment of my own. But St Peter’s, the exterior chiefly, with that vast forecourt and gigantesque colonnade, and the Tu es Petrus carved in huge letters on the façade, always strikes me as being more a monument to the pride that characterized pagan, Augustan Rome than to the values of the gospel preached by St Peter.

The exterior of St Paul’s in London, on the other hand, does not evoke any such negative reaction in my patriotic bosom. It fits in, somehow, with all the other City churches designed by Wren, elegant, beautiful and in keeping with their urban context. When, however, I go inside St Paul’s cathedral, my reaction changes; the place has been turned, I cannot help feeling, into a temple of Mars. There is the Iron Duke, more than life-size, riding his charger down the north aisle; in the crypt you find nothing but a series of monuments to Britain’s great military and naval heroes, Nelson among them. I regret to say that on a lesser scale one gets a similar impression on going into some at least of the country’s splendid mediaeval cathedrals, and parish churches too, on occasion. The exteriors, magnificent, splendid, superb – not proud. But go inside, and they are hung with regimental flags, or plastered with innumerable monuments to local or to England’s worthies. Westminster Abbey is of course the worst instance. All this, to be sure, is not to be put down to the pride of Christopher Wren, any more than to that of the mostly anonymous mason-architects of mediaeval churches. It simply illustrates the pride of the English ruling classes of the 18th and 19th centuries. But when I go into St Peter’s in Rome, then I do get a real sense of it as being a place of genuine Christian worship.

Stepping back a little further, we take a brief glance in the Renaissance at Lorenzo the Magnificent. The epithet is a just one; magnificent he certainly was, doing great things for his Florence. But as with most of the Italian princelings and great families of that 15th century, the Medici, the Sforza, Farnese, De Rovere, there was unquestionably a strong dash of pride, of self-aggrandizement mixed up with their great public works and patronage of the arts and of scholarship.

Now a swift sprint down the Middle Ages, just throwing out a few names. Among popes, Boniface VIII (ob. 1307) and Gregory VII, (Hildebrand, ob. 1071) – even though he has been canonized, self-canonized in my opinion – stand out. What about St Thomas Becket, and his friend, foil and rival Henry II? Both great men and proud men – and magnificent, magnanimous or high-minded too? Becket, certainly, as archbishop. And then those monarchs and prelates who showed that it is possible to be great and powerful and still not proud: St Louis IX of France, Edward the Confessor, St Stephen of Hungary; St Anselm of Canterbury and a century or so before him St Dunstan – and so back to Gregory the Great, a pope who really and truly did desrve the title. In none of them the least sign of haughtiness or arrogance in their exercise of their authority and power.

And so we come to the chief instance and exemplification of pride before we finally get back to the scriptures – yes, you’ve guessed it, St Augustine. I once suggested to Sir Henry Chadwick that Augustine’s besetting sin was undoubtedly pride, not lechery or lust; and he replied very truly that the man had plenty to be proud about. It must have been difficult for him, he added, his being fully aware that whatever company he was in, he was far and away the most intelligent, the most brilliant person present. Augustine himself would have accepted this judgment, except that in his maturity,3 when he wrote his Confessions, he would have corrected Sir Henry’s statement by saying that he really had plenty to be humble about – about his talents, that is, on the principle of “Let him that glories glory in the Lord” (1 Cor 1:31).

An inordinate love of one’s own superiority; that was certainly evident in the character of the young Augustine. The boy who relished his position as the natural gang leader, organizing the raid on the neighbour’s orchard; the student in Carthage turning his back on the Christian Church because of his contempt for its barbarous scriptures, and joining the Manichees because they were adept at picking holes in these primitive works; the young, and brilliant professor of rhetoric there, now also despising the scriptures for their barbarous latinity, probably so full of his self-importance that he provoked the rowdiness of his students, which was one of the reasons he gives for leaving Carthage and going to Rome. But it was also a matter of leaving the provinces for the capital – and also of heartlessly running away from Mama!

I don’t know whether we can say that his intellectual odyssey, from the Manichees to the Academics (the universal skeptics) to the Neoplatonists, was qualified by a kind of pride, as well as by a genuine pursuit of truth. Later on he will certainly charge the leading Neoplatonists of the day with pride, with constructing, you could almost say, a philosophy of pride. He himself, I think we can justly grant him, did succeed after his conversion in transforming his pride into a magnificent magnanimity; giving himself totally, and in a vocation that was definitely not of his choosing, to the service of God, the Church and his people. But traces of the splendid vice still remained; as he acknowledges in the 10th book of the Confessions, he still felt an inordinate love of and desire for praise. And there can be no doubt that he enjoyed, probably rather more than he should have done, crushing his opponents, mainly his Donatist ones, in the debates to which he so frequently challenged them.

As for his own teaching on the subject, his favourite text is Eccl 10:12,13, of which phrases read in his text: The beginning of man’s pride is to apostatize from God; and, the beginning of  all sin is pride. This is what he has to say round these texts in Sermon 159B, 11:

The whole cause, you see, of our mortality, the whole cause of our feebleness, the whole cause of all the torments, all the difficulties, all the miseries which the human race suffers in this age, is nothing but pride. You have the text of scripture saying, The beginning of all sin is pride. And what does it say in the same place? The beginning of man’s pride is to apostatize from God. If pride strikes you as a minor evil, at lest tremble at the thought of apostatizing from God. Next, if you tremble at the thought of apostatizing from God, throw out the cause of apostasy. It was pride, you see, that made man apostatize from God. So because this is the fountainhead of all our ills, that’s why we are sick in this life. It’s like when an experienced doctor sees someone ailing from a variety of disorders, he doesn’t attend to the immediate causes and neglect the origin of all the causes... No, the really experienced doctor is the one who thoroughly ties up all the causes of all the disorders, and on finding the first of them from which all the rest seem to stem like branches, he cuts out the root, and the whole thicket of aches and pains is chopped down. That’s how our Lord Jesus Christ did all these things, and because he could see that pride was the root cause of all our disorders, he cured us with his own humility.

In On the Trinity he dramatizes the theme into the great contest between Christ and the devil, Christ’s humility proving victorious over the devil’s pride, which is what had lured the Neoplatonists into their philosophic and theurgic pride – theurgy, literally “working the gods”, being a kind of high class magic. The following quotation will show what it involves:

Just as the devil in his pride brought proud-thinking man down to death, so Christ in his humility brought obedient man back to life. The devil grew high and mighty, he fell, and pulled down man who consented to him; the Christ came humble and lowly, he rose, and raised up man who believed in him. The devil did not sink to what he had brought man down to, for while he indeed bore the death of the spirit in his godlessness, he did not undergo the death of the flesh, not having clothed himself with any flesh in the first place; and so he seemed a great chief with his battalions of demons to help him exercise his dominion of deceit. Thus he puffs man up with false philosophy or entangles him in sacrilegiously sacred rites, using them also first to deceive and make fools of the prouder souls who are too curious about magical tricks, and then to ruin them. Thus he holds man in subjection by his swollen self-esteem, and his determined preference for power over justice (IV, 13).

This preference for power over justice is indeed one of the hall-marks of pride. Again, from the same Bk IV, about the prouder souls entangled in the magical sacred rites:

There are some people who think they can purify themselves for contemplating God and cleaving to him by their own power and strength of character, which means in fact that they are thoroughly defiled by pride. No vice is more vehemently opposed by divine law, no vice gives a greater right of control to that proudest of all spirits, the devil, who mediates our way to the depths and bars our way to the heights, unless we avoid his hidden ambushes and go another way... Their reason for assuring themselves of do-it-yourself purification is that some of them have been able to direct the keen gaze of their intellects beyond everything created and to attain, in however small a measure, the light of unchanging truth; and they ridicule those many Christians who have been unable to do this, and who live meanwhile out of faith alone (Rom 1:17). But what good does it do a man who is too proud to climb aboard the wood, what good does it do him to gaze from afar on the home country across the sea? And what harm does it do a humble man if he cannot see it from such a distance, but is coming to it nonetheless upon the wood the other disdains to be carried by? (IV, 20).

The wood, of course, is the wood of the cross, and its Old Testament prefigurement, Noah’s ark, called in Wis 10:4 a paltry piece of wood.

One last quotation from Augustine, this time from his Rule. He is talking about the different circumstances “in the world”, from which members of the religious community have come; some from wealthy upper-class families, others from poor families, from the “lower orders”. And he is warning the latter not to start putting on side because they now associate on equal terms with people they would have doffed their caps to in the world; and warning the former not to get more swollen-headed about contributing their wealth to the community than they had been by possessing it in the world. And he remarks:

Every other kind of iniquity is exercised in the performance of bad deeds; pride,however, creeps stealthily even into good deeds, to destroy them.

(Rule, 1)

One can even find oneself getting proud of being humble – not always in the delightful manner of my 19th century Catholic hero, Bishop Ullathorne, who prided himself on having written the best book on humility ever published.

So at last to the bible, New Testament first, then the Old. Nearly all the New Testament has to say on the subject derives from the text of Prov 3:34, which reads in the Greek LXX, which was the bible of the New Testament authors,4 The Lord withstands the proud, but gives grace to the humble. It is so quoted in Jas 4:6 and in 1 Pet 5:5. We find variations on the text in Luke; in the parable Jesus addresses to his fellow guests at a dinner party, where they were jostling for the best places, 14:7-11; and in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, 18:10-14. Both conclude with the saying: Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. And then in the Magnificat we have: He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts (1:51).

The familiar text of Phil 2:5-11, Have this mind among yourselves which you have in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped etc.; if read as Oscar Cullmann would have us read it, takes us straight back into the Old Testament and Genesis by in fact contrasting Christ’s obedience and humility with Adam’s disobedience and pride. It is generally agreed that here Paul is quoting an early Christian hymn; and by the word “form”, morphé () in the Greek, is not meant “the nature” of God, but precisely “the image” of God, those words signifying first and foremost “shape”. And “a thing to be grasped” is altogether too weak for the Greek word harpagmon (), which really means “up for grabs”. In other words, the man Christ Jesus, though being in God’s perfect image, did not count equality with God as being up for grabs, but waited until it was given him as a reward for taking the form of a slave and humbling himself unto death, even death on a cross. Adam, on the other hand, with the assistance of Eve, had counted equality with God as something to be grabbed, up for grabs, by eating the fruit that would open his eyes and make him like God, knowing good and evil (Gen 3:4).

So here we are at last, back at the beginning with the first sin; and that was not the sin of disobedience, of eating the forbidden fruit, but the sin of pride which prompted it, of self-exaltation to the extent of wanting to be like God, to be equal to God; a sin repeated on a group or social or universal scale a few chapters later on with the attempt to build the tower of Babel: Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves (Gen 11:4). A tower with is top in the heavens, so that we can climb up and look God in the eye, and say, “Hullo, God, here we are on a level with you. We can do everything that you can”. Is not that, to be sure, the root sin of our contemporary Euro-American highly skilled, technically brilliant, scientific, science-mad civilization?

But of course we have to go further back still, behind the beginning of material or sidereal time to the sin of the devil himself, the sin of Lucifer. As such, it is nowhere described in the bible; but the tradition, which can be seen starting in the Apocalypse, understands it as indicated in two passages, the taunt of Isaiah 14 against the king of Babylon, especially v.12 and the following: How are you fallen from heaven, O Day-star (Lucifer), son of Dawn! ; and the taunt of Ezekiel 28:12-19 against the king of Tyre. Here the glory and beauty of the king of Tyre (really the city of Tyre, the great commercial New York of the ancient world) is described in vivid detail; and then in vv.16-17: In the abundance of your trade you were filled with violence and you sinned; so I cast you out from the mountain of God, and the guardian cherub drove you out from the midst of the stones of fire. Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendour ... and so on.

But what was the precise act of pride which the tradition sees Lucifer, the devil, the great dragon, as actually committing? Here the key text comes from a rather surprising source – at least it surprised me when I found what it was. Lucifer is thought of as having said to God, Non serviam, I will not serve, will not be a slave, in contrast to Michael who said, and is, “Who-like-God”. Fine; but where do we find this Non serviam ? In Jer 2:20, where it is the rebellious Israel that says to the Lord, “I will not serve, will not be a slave”. And what provoked Lucifer to this great refusal? Here I think the tradition is simply creative, imaginative in the best way; I can think of no scriptural text behind it. It declares that he, and all the heavenly host, were required to do homage to the heavenly son of man, to the incarnate one; not merely to the eternal Word, which would have been no problem for the greatest of all created intellects, but to the earthy human being, the man, the Adam, which the Word was to become. Lucifer’s pride showed itself in a refusal, precisely, to humble himself. And this meant, as all pride means, human as well as angelico-diabolical, a refusal to accept the demands of love, of charity.

Pride, the Queen of the Vices, is really ranged, not against lowly humility, but against Charity, the Queen of the Virtues. An inordinate self-esteem makes it impossible to esteem others, hence to love others, impossible even to esteem God, hence to love God. From which dire condition of soul may the good Lord and his humble Christ deliver us. Amen.
 

Notes

1.   References: alazoneia 1 Jn 2:16, Jas 4:16, 2 Tim 3:2; hyperephania Mk 7:22, Rom 1:30.

2.   That was the editor of The Jupiter, not as yet Mrs P.

3.   Augustine started his De Trinitate shortly before finishing the Confessions. He wrote of the former “I began this work as a ‘youth’ (iuvenis), as an old man (senex) I have finished it.” Iuvenis was a technical legal term denoting the age 20-40; although at that time Augustine was actually just into ‘senior’ – the next category – he is recognising, I think, at least his intellectual immaturity; he could be said to have become emotionally mature somewhat earlier – he was consecrated bishop in 395 (aged 41.) Ed.

4.   With the exception of the Johannine tradition.

Gluttony       Sloth