Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness
was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the
poor and needy. And they were haughty,
and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.
(Ezekiel 16:49-50)
A couple of decades ago the degradation of our culture and
civilization had only proceeded so far as to devote a parade once a year to
honouring the worst of all sins, the sin that brought the judgement of fire and
brimstone down upon the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the
nineteenth chapter of Genesis. The
parade became a day, the day became a week, and now the entire sixth month of
the year is dedicated to the celebration of this sin. This year Captain Airhead, the dolt who for
eight years has disgraced the office of Prime Minister of His Majesty’s
government in Ottawa, somehow clinging to power despite scandal after scandal
each of which should have been career destroying, and who never opens his mouth
without sticking his foot in it, informally extended the period to a “season”.
As can be
seen in the Scriptural passage that I have used as the epigraph for this essay
there are several sins for which God’s judgement fell on Sodom. Until a few generations ago, however,
reference to the sin of Sodom in the singular would not likely have caused
confusion because the name of the city was associated with a single sin of a
sexual nature, the sin highlighted by St. Jude in his reference to the
judgement on the cities in his epistle and which appears in the list in the
Ezekiel passage as the last item referenced.
While this sin is, obviously, a huge part of what is being celebrated
this month, it is not this sin that I am talking about but the first sin in
Ezekiel’s list, the sin after which the celebration has been named.
I have
often made the observation that when the name of this celebration was reduced
to Pride, they abandoned the lesser of two sins – sins of a sexual nature fall
under the heading of the least of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust – and kept the
worst of all, Pride.
Pride is
the worst sin of all. The concept of
the Seven Deadly Sins goes back to the fourth century of Christianity. St. Evagrius Ponticus was a disciple of the
Cappadocian Fathers, first of St. Basil the Great then of St. Gregory Nazianzus
whom he followed to Constantinople on the eve of the Second Ecumenical Council
before withdrawing first to Jerusalem then later to Egypt, to live a monastic
life. In Egypt, he encountered the
teachings of the Alexandrian Neoplatonist monks who, dividing the human being
into body, soul, and mind, identified for each a trio of λογισμοί –
literally, this is the plural of “calculation”, but is probably better rendered
“thoughts” in this context – that influenced the components in bad ways. This made for nine in total, which were
arranged in a hierarchy proceeding from those which afflicted the body to those
which afflicted the mind, with the ones affecting the body being the lowest and
least, the ones affecting the mind being the worst. St. Evagrius reduced this to a list of eight
sins or rather vices if we distinguish between sins as acts and vices as
behavioural patterns or habits. St.
John Cassian, who brought the monastic movement out of the deserts of Egypt by
founding a monastery in Gaul or France as it is today, popularized St.
Evagrius’ list in his writings. It was
further revised around 590 AD by St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, in his
commentary on Job entitled The Book of
Morals. Technically, St. Gregory
retained a list of eight sins because he separated Pride from what he called
the “seven principal sins”, declaring Pride to be the source from which these
seven flow. The seven were Vainglory,
Envy, Wrath, Melancholy, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. This
was later revised so that Vainglory was folded up into Pride and Melancholy was
replaced with Sloth, producing the list that found its way into St. Thomas
Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and
Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the
seven levels of Purgatory correspond to the seven. This is the list that we know as the Seven
Deadly Sins to this day. The order
represents their ranking. In The Book of Morals they are listed in
descending order from worst to least, in the later revised version they would
be listed in ascending order. Although
his criteria for determining the hierarchy of sin differed from that of the
Neoplatonists the result was largely the same.
Subsequent lists of the Seven Deadly Sins have varied the order. Sometimes they are listed in ascending
order, sometimes in descending, other times whether in ascending or descending
order there are slight changes in the ranking reflecting differences of opinion
as to what is worse than what.
Consistently, however, from the Neoplatonists and St. Evagrius to St.
Gregory the Great to Dante to us today, Pride has been considered the worst of
all.
While the Seven Deadly Sins are a later theological
construct and so are not listed as such in the Bible it is difficult to argue
with the contention that the ranking of Pride as the worst of all sins is
Biblical. A search of the Bible for a
use of the word that is positive or even neutral yields little in the way of
fruit. The first occurrence of the word
and the only occurrence in the Pentateuch is found in Leviticus 26:19 in which
the LORD, telling the Israelites what He will do to them if they do not obey
His commandments, says that “I will break the pride of your power”. In the historical books, David’s brother claims
to know David’s Pride (1 Sam. 17:28) in
what is clearly not intended as a compliment and Pride is what King Hezekiah
has to repent and humble himself from (2 Chron. 32:26) . In the Psalms Pride is consistently the
characteristic of the wicked (10:2,4; 36:11; 59:12). In Proverbs Pride is hated by the LORD and
those who fear Him (8:13), brings with it shame (11:2), contention (13:10),
destruction and a fall (16:18), is in the mouth of the foolish (14:3) and will
bring him low (29:23). In the Prophets
Pride is something that brings the judgement of God upon a people whether it be
Israel (Is. 28:1, 3 – Ephraim, from which tribe the ruling dynasty of the
Northern Kingdom came, is used here as it often is to signify the schismatic
Kingdom as a whole), Moab (Is. 16:6), or Judah (Jer. 13:9). In the book of Daniel it is what brings
judgement on Nebuchadnezzar (5:20). There is only one verse in the Old
Testament in which the word Pride could possibly be taken in a sense less
negative than those we have already looked at.
We shall consider it after looking at the New Testament references which
are few. In the New Testament, Pride is
absolutely, unambiguously evil. In Mark
7:22 it is one of the evil things that come from within a man and defile
him. In 1 John 2:16 the “pride of life”
is one of the three things that make up “the world” in the sense of the system
organized against God. In 1 Tim. 3:6
St. Paul warns St. Timothy against the ordination of a novice “lest being
lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil”. Here the Apostle associates Pride with the
devil, a traditional association which is the reason why the one verse in the
Old Testament that could possibly be taken as neutral probably should not be so
taken. The verse is Job 41:15 which
begins with “his scales are his pride”.
His in this passage refers to Leviathan. Leviathan was the name of a creature
conceived of as a sea serpent or sea dragon.
When the Old Testament speaks of him it is invariably speaking about
Satan. The enemy of God makes his first
appearance as a serpent in Genesis. In
Revelation the Dragon is identified as that serpent of old, the devil and
Satan. In Isaiah 27:1 Leviathan the sea
serpent is clearly Satan. There is no
reason to think that the Leviathan of Job is any different, especially when the
chapter goes on to describe him as “king over all the children of pride” (Job
41:34), and the structure of the book as a whole rather demands that a
reference to Satan be made precisely at this point. The reference to his Pride in verse 15,
therefore, cannot be taken as an exception to the rule that Pride is always a
bad thing in the Bible.
The verses
we looked at in the previous paragraph are verses that use words rendered
“Pride” in our Authorized Bible. The
related adjective “proud” is used slightly more often than the noun. The noun can be found in 46 verses, the
adjective in 47, but these support the picture of Pride that one gets from the
verses that use the noun. Several of
them, for example, use the adjective as a substantive, “the proud”, who might
as well be called “the wicked” as they are always referred to as people whom
God “resisteth” or hath otherwise set Himself against. Needless to say verses that use synonyms
that are translated “haughty”, “arrogant”, and the like, provide additional
support.
Now it
might be argued that all of this merely proves that Pride is bad, not that it
is the worst of evils. The traditional
view that it is the worst of sins was derived in a number of ways. To the Neoplatonists it was the worst because
it was the ultimate sin of the mind, the sins of the mind being worse than the
sins of the soul, which in turn are worse than the sins of the body, because
the mind is higher than the soul which is higher than the body. For St. Gregory the Great it was the worst
because it offended the most against Love.
One can only image what St. Gregory would have thought if he could have
looked ahead in time to the day when multitudes would march under the banner of
Pride chanting the tautological mantra “love is love”. Scripturally, Pride’s being the worst of
sins is derived from it literally being the Original Sin, the source of all
others. There are two ways in which
this is the case. The one, clearly
found in the Bible, is that Pride led to the Fall of Man. The serpent’s temptation of Eve in the
Garden was temptation to Pride. “Ye
shall be as gods”, i.e., like God Himself.
That the serpent – the serpent of old who is the Devil and Satan – would
tempt man with Pride, provides support for the traditional view that Pride is
what was behind his own Fall. In the traditional view, the devil started out
as Lucifer, a high ranking angel in heaven, who became the first liberal, or
Whig to use Dr. Johnson’s parlance, urging his fellow angels to support him in
his rebellious bid to overthrow the Sovereign King of the universe, God, and
establish a cosmic democratic republic with him as its head. His rebellion failed but the Cosmic Cromwell
became the cruel tyrant of all who followed him in rejecting the King of the
universe, setting the pattern for all subsequent human liberal democratic
republicanism. There is no explicit
account of the origin of Satan in the Old Testament as there is of the Fall of
Man but it is inferred from passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel where human rulers
are spoken to in such a way as to suggest that the supernatural evil behind
them is who is truly being addressed.
The explicit account is found in the twelfth chapter of the book of
Revelation. The point is that Pride is
believed to have been what motivated the rebellion. This is based on St. Paul’s words to St.
Timothy and what can be inferred from Isaiah 14.
In the Septuagint,
the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek made by seventy Jewish
scholars for Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt and which became the Christian
Old Testament, the Wisdom of Solomon
says that “through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that
do hold of his side do find it” (Wis. 2:24).
This is not discussing the cause of Satan’s Fall but his motivation in
tempting man. Envy, however, is closely
related to Pride. It refers to hating someone else for having something
you don’t or being something you aren’t so much that you seek to destroy that
person. In the standard list of the Seven Deadly Sins it stands next to
Pride. On the one end of the list are the vices
which are classic Aristotelian vices – ordinary human appetites indulged in to
excess. Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and
Sloth fall into this category. On the
other end of the list are the vices that are Satanic in nature. Pride and Envy fall into this category. Wrath either belongs with Pride and Envy or
is the middle ground between the two categories. Some have produced lists in which Avarice
rather than Envy stands next to Pride.
I suspect this to be the result of crackpot left-wing ideas infiltrating
theological circles. Avarice is the vice
associated with capitalism. Envy is the
vice associated with socialism. One can
be a businessman, or at least one used to be able to be a businessman in the
days before globalism, multi-national corporations, tech giants and media
conglomerates, without succumbing to Avarice.
One cannot be a socialist without embracing Envy for Envy is the essence
of socialism, its sine qua non, the
spirit that moves it and motivates it.
Many would
say that there is a good Pride and a bad Pride and that everything said above
pertains to the bad Pride. This is an
Aristotelian concept, at least if we regard Pride as a proper translation of μεγαλοψυχία
from book four of his Nicomachean Ethics. That this is a proper translation is rather
doubtful. Liddell and Scott give as
their first definition of it “greatness of soul, highmindedness, lordliness”
and even “generosity”. “Greatness of
soul” is what you get when you split the word into its components and literally
translate each of them. Unfortunately,
what you get when you transliterate the word is megalopsychia, which sounds
like it describes a mental condition that will get you locked up in an asylum
for the criminally insane. This is not the word translated Pride in the
New Testament. In Mark 7:22 the word is
ὑπερηφανία, in 1 John 2:12 it is ἀλαζονεία, in 1 Timothy 3:6 the phrase in
which it occurs is in Greek the single word τυφωθείς. ὑπερηφανία, a compound formed from the word
for “over” and the word for “shine”, basically means self-promoting
arrogance. This is the word that is used for Pride in the
early Greek versions of what would become the Seven Deadly Sins. Its adjectival form occurs five times in the
New Testament, in three instances being used substantively to mean “the proud”
and in the other two used as “proud” in lists of attributive adjectives, all of
which are negative. The primary meaning
of ἀλαζονεία is “false pretension, imposture” from which the meaning of “boastfulness”
is derived, which is its meaning in the Scriptural text. Τυφωθείς, rendered “being lifted up with
pride” in the Authorized Bible, is a passive aorist participle form of the verb
τυφόω which in the active voice means to “delude”, but when it is used in the
passive voice indicates that the subject of the verb is “crazy, demented”. Liddell and Scott give as more specific versions
of the passive meaning “demented, rendered vain” and “filled with insane
arrogance”. Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία does
not appear in the New Testament and it would be difficult to take the word as
he uses and describes it as a synonym for any of the New Testament words for
Pride, although it would also be difficult to argue that it is consistent with
humility, which both Testaments stress is something God insists upon among the
faithful. Liddell and Scott do give a
second definition, noting that the word can be used in a bad sense, in which
case they render it “arrogance”, which of course, would be a synonym for the New
Testament words for Pride. Those today
who would distinguish between a good Pride and a bad Pride seldom have anything
like what Aristotle meant by μεγαλοψυχία in mind. What they think of good Pride is something
along the lines of “an honest and non-inflated sense of achievement or
accomplishment” or “thinking well, but not too highly, of oneself”.
The Pride that our civilization has decided in its apostasy
and decadence to celebrate every June, however, bears no resemblance to either
these more modest redefinitions of Pride or to Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία. Observe the way in which those who celebrate
Pride now demand that everyone else do so as well. Public figures, even if they do not actively
speak against Pride but merely do not speak in favour of it, do not march in
its parades, do not wave its flag perverted from the sign God gave the world as
a token of His Covenant never to send a world-destroying Flood again in
defiance of Him and ignorance of its full implications (1), and are basically
deemed insufficiently supportive, find themselves in a position eerily similar
to the person in the Soviet Union who was the first to stop clapping after one
of Stalin’s boring harangues. This “you
must support us or be destroyed” attitude is hardly consistent with either a
modest rather than inflated positive feeling about yourself and your
accomplishments or Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία which can be translated “generosity”
or “magnitude”, i.e., the opposite of the attitude in question. It is, however, very consistent with another
Greek word that is often associated with Aristotle, albeit with his writings on
rhetoric and Greek tragedy more than his Ethics. This is the word ὕβρις. Transliterated as hubris this word continues
to be used in English today.
The primary meaning of ὕβρις provided by Liddell and Scott
is “wanton violence, insolence”. They
provide an explanation of this definition in which they clarify that the
violence arises out of the Pride of strength or of passion. Think of someone who thinks that because he
is strong he can walk all over those who are weaker – a bully would be a good
example – and you have a pretty good picture of what is meant by it. Aristotle identified it as foremost example
of a character flaw – interestingly he used a word that has the basic meaning
of “failure, fault” that in the New Testament is the primary word for sin –
that in tragedy, brings about the fall of the hero. ὕβρις is not used often in the New
Testament. It occurs three times and in
our Authorized Bible is translated “hurt”, “harm” and “reproaches”, i.e.,
designating the acts that spring from the attitude rather than the attitude
itself. In the LXX, however, it is
frequently used for Pride. It is used
alongside ὑπερηφανία in Leviticus 26:19 when the LORD says that He will break
the “pride of your power”. Rather
fittingly considering its association with a fall in Aristotle and popular
ancient Greek thought it is also used in the LXX of Proverbs 16:18 and is the
Pride those who fear the Lord are enjoined to hate in Proverbs 8:13.
This word so appropriately describes the attitude that is on
display in the celebrations of Pride that I humbly suggest it be used instead
to clarify more precisely what is being celebrated.
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