February 17, 2024: Pride

Good evening. As I mentioned last week, for Lent this year, I am doing a media fast, which means that I am cutting out most forms of media (news, social media, music, video games, etc.) until Easter. I am carving some exceptions for my job and a few other professional and personal obligations, including this blog, but for the next seven posts, this blog’s focus will be shifted.

To reiterate what I said last week, it is not my intention to proselytize, as I am sure that no readers want that. But I do want to reflect more deeply on the nature of sin, both as a personal examination of conscience and to add some principles into thinking on environmental questions that are usually lacking.

To further pile up the disclaimers, let me stress that I am not a trained theologian, and nothing I say should be taken as doctrinal.

I’ve settled on what I hinted at last week: I will be using the seven posts to reflect on each of the seven deadly sins. So here we go.

Sin

Before we launch into the individual deadly sins, some discussion about the nature of sin in general is in order. Most educated people in the West, including those without an explicit Christian background, probably understand the word “sin” to mean a violation of divine law, such as promulgated in the Bible. This definition is not wrong, but it is incomplete in my view. St. Augustine of Hippo viewed sin in relational terms: sin is fundamentally a fissure in one’s relationship with God caused by self-love.

This fissure occurs upstream from the sinful act, and thus when a sinful act is committed, the problems typically began much earlier. Thus the seven deadly sins are not specific sinful acts, but rather they are patterns of thought that lead us into sinful acts.

The seven deadly sins are not discussed in the Bible, but their history goes back to early Christianity, specifically to Tertullian of Carthage in the third century, and after some centuries of refinement, the seven deadly sins had settled by the early Middle Ages into the list we know today. There is some overlap between the seven, and not all sinful behaviors are easily identified as stemming from one of the seven, but it is a useful list that has stood the test of time. The seven deadly sins are pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust.

Original sin, as described in Genesis 3, stems from Adam and Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit. Satan, presenting himself as a serpent, convinces Adam and Eve that the fruit will give them moral knowledge and put them onto God’s level. Thus we might identify the deadly sin at work as pride, and so pride is a good place to start this series.

Pride

At its fundamental level, pride can be understood as an elevation of oneself above God. There are some forms of pride that are easy to recognize, such as showing off one’s fancy car or football players dancing after a touchdown. But most are harder to recognize.

There is a pride of suffering. One can go around with a “woe is me” attitude, calling attention to one’s misfortunes in a bid to gain sympathy. There is a pride of renunciation. The Gospel reading in the Catholic Church for Ash Wednesday (February 14), Matthew 6:1-6,16-18, is very appropriate.

Jesus said to his disciples:
"Take care not to perform righteous deeds
in order that people may see them;
otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.
When you give alms,
do not blow a trumpet before you,
as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets
to win the praise of others.
Amen, I say to you,
they have received their reward.

…

When one recognizes pride in oneself, it can be tricky to respond. With many other life challenges, the natural response is to make plans to tackle the issue. If I recognize that I am overweight, it is logical to plan such responses as moderating my diet, cutting out certain unhealthy foods, drafting an exercise plan, and so on. But these are inherently prideful responses, based on the idea that I can take care of it by myself. One is ultimately limited in the ability to “solve” one’s own pride in the way that a lasting peace cannot be attained by warfare alone.

Most of the terms of the seven deadly sins take negative connotations in modern discourse, but pride is an exception, in that pride can have positive or negative connotations. We have Pride Parades, in reaction to the stigma that surrounded homosexuality until recently. We generally consider patriotism, defined as pride in country, as a virtue, such as with those “Power of Pride” bumper stickers that were emblematic of a certain vacuous, post-9/11 type of patriotism. We generally consider it virtuous to take pride in one’s work. Which of these manifestations of pride should be regarded as sinful, and for which a word other than “pride” might be more appropriate, is an exercise for the reader.

A particular type of pride, hubris, originates from ancient Greek. The word has several meanings, and in a mythological context, refers to the belief that one is at or above the level of the gods in some way. This was considered to be the most severe transgression, and many Greek myths, such as that of Arachne being turned into a spider, revolve around hubris and its creative punishments. In modern usage, “hubris” is often a kind of collective pride, and applied (sometimes ambivalently) to genetic engineering, geoengineering, and many other modern technologies. The term implies folly of humans collectively transgressing perceived natural limits; that doing so is unethical; and there might be negative, unforeseen consequences. Again, for which modern applications the word “hubris” is appropriate is an exercise for the reader. However, it is interesting to observe that the belief in certain, normative limits that are set by a higher power is common to Christianity and to mainstream environmentalism.

Now we come to moral pride, perhaps the most difficult of all. This is the belief that one is morally superior to others. Moral pride is a risk for all of us, but for the devoutly religious, who believe that their moral principles derive from God, moral pride is particularly hazardous.

A few weeks ago, in my post on honesty, I quoted some dialogue from an episode of Yes, Minister and discussed how the chief whip described Jim Hacker’s intention to inform the Prime Minister of arms sales to terrorists as “moral self-indulgence”. This is where things get difficult. It does not seem correct that the antidote to moral pride is nihilism, or a complete abandonment of moral principle. But what is the antidote then? I don’t have a very good answer.

Perhaps as a tangential answer, we might consider the antonym of pride. It is not “shame”. In fact, both pride and shame follow from the belief that oneself is of supreme importance. The antonym of pride, and indeed one of the seven capital virtues, is humility. A sincere practice of humility would not denigrate one’s own wealth, looks, intelligence, or moral character, but rather would recognize these things as gifts, not earned, and gifts that could be taken away as freely as they are given. Humility, unlike pride or shame, leads us to the Golden Rule: to treat others as we wish to be treated.

But nothing makes a greater mockery of our pretensions to pride than what I will call the Fundamental Fact of (earthly) life. This fact is mortality. Readers have, I assume, a wide range of beliefs about the nature of the afterlife, and I have no desire to open that question now. But as regards our earthly lives, what we are experiencing right now, there is no dispute that our lives are finite, fragile, and very short by cosmological standards. I will be returning to the Fundamental Fact several times throughout this series.

(The term “fundamental fact of life” is overloaded and does not always mean what I am using it for here, but I want the term and therefore will take it.)

I will conclude with a look at Ramesses II, who was the pharaoh of Egypt for much of the 13th century BC and may have been the pharaoh described in the Book of Exodus. He was known as a prolific builder, as a generally effective ruler, and for having a vainglorious personality. His reign of 66 years was quite long, especially by the standards of the ancient world, but Ramesses II eventually met the same end that we all do. The name of Ramesses II has been translated as Ozymandius into Greek.

In the early 19th century, a fragment of a statue of Ramesses II was discovered inspired the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly to write Ozymandius, one of the most famous poems in the English language.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”