Pride?

Image by Katherine

Dante’s definition of pride was “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour”.

Pride

The negative version of pride (Latin, superbia) is considered, on almost every list, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins: the perversion of the faculties that make humans more like God—dignity and holiness. It is also thought to be the source of the other capital sins. Also known as hubris (from ancient Greek ὕβρις),or futility, it is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one’s own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of people.

In even more destructive cases, it is irrationally believing that one is essentially and necessarily better, superior, or more important than others, failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others, and excessive admiration of the personal image or self (especially forgetting one’s own lack of divinity, and refusing to acknowledge one’s own limits, faults, or wrongs as a human being).

What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 203.

As pride has been labelled the father of all sins, it has been deemed the devil’s most prominent trait. C.S. Lewis writes, in Mere Christianity, that pride is the “anti-God” state, the position in which the ego and the self are directly opposed to God: “Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”^[39] Pride is understood to sever the soul from God, as well as His life-and-grace-giving Presence.^[5]

One can be prideful for different reasons. Author Ichabod Spencer states that “[s]piritual pride is the worst kind of pride, if not worst snare of the devil. The heart is particularly deceitful on this one thing.”^[40] Jonathan Edwards said “[r]emember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul’s peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan’s whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.”^[41]

In Ancient Athens, hubris was considered one of the greatest crimes and was used to refer to insolent contempt that can cause one to use violence to shame the victim (this sense of hubris could also characterize rape [1]). Aristotle defined hubris as shaming the victim, not because of anything that happened to the committer or might happen to the committer, but merely for the committer’s own gratification.^[42][43][44] The word’s connotation changed somewhat over time, with some additional emphasis towards a gross over-estimation of one’s abilities.

The term has been used to analyse and make sense of the actions of contemporary heads of government by Ian Kershaw (1998), Peter Beinart (2010) and in a much more physiological manner by David Owen (2012). In this context the term has been used to describe how certain leaders, when put to positions of immense power, seem to become irrationally self-confident in their own abilities, increasingly reluctant to listen to the advice of others and progressively more impulsive in their actions.^[45]

Dante’s definition of pride was “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour”.