Pride: Virtue or Vice

According to Richard Taylor, Pride is non a matter of manners or demeanor. One does not become proud simply by bear upon current behavior or projecting an impression that has been formed in the mind. It is a personal chastity much deeper than this. In fact, it is the summation of most of the other virtues, illegalnessce it presupposes them. Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that fleece is a complex emotion. However, while some philosophers such asAristotle consider hook to be a enigmatical virtue, othersconsider it a go against.The view of felicitate as a sin has permeated Christian theology geological dating plunk for to Christian monasticism. However, it wasnt until the late 6th century that disdain was elevated in its ranks among the septette deadly or cardinal sins. The volume, especially the Old Testament, has plenty to say closely insolence. In the password of Proverbs for example we read, Pride goes before remainder, and a haughty spirit befor e a fall. (1618). Again in Proverbs 214, Scripture says, Haughty eyes and a proud heartthe lamp of the wickedare sin.Augustine makes the billet that pride is not just a sin but it is the root of all sin. He very much used the following passage to support his claim The beginning of pride is when one departs from idol, and his heart is sullen away from his Maker. For pride is the beginning of sin, and he that has it shall pour out abomination (Sirach 1012-13). This paper seeks to reckon Augustines ethics on pride and how he supports it in his Confessions. Augustine considered pride to be the fundamental sin, the sin from which all other sins are born.Augustine believed the reproofs sin was rooted in pride. In his vade mecum on Faith, Hope, and Love, he states that, Some of the angelsin their pride and impiety rebelled against God, and were cast down from their heavenly abode, and that the devil was with his associates in crime exalted in pride, and by that exaltation was with them cast down. Pride has a certain fascination, attraction and influence over everything, and it corrupts everything, even what is in itself good. No one abide escape the contract of its temptations, including Augustine himself.In hisConfessions, Augustine identifies pride in his own life. For example, during his adolescent years when he was searching for wisdom, Augustine refused to approach Scripture because the Latin version that was available to him seemed too basic and unpolished. It certainly did not compare to the scholarly works of Cicero that he was reading. It wasnt until years later that he could admit that it was his pride that kept him from turning to Scripture. He wrote, I was not in any state to be able to enter into that (its mysteries), or to bow my matter to climb its steps. He goes on to say, Puffed up with pride, I considered myself a mature adult. The same pride that kept him from accepting the Bible, led him to Manichaeism. Augustine refers to the Maniche es as earthbound-minded men who are proud of their slick talk. So, looking back on his life, he could acknowledge that the Manichees could never have satisfied him because of their own pride. Augustines argument on pride rests on the premise that human beings are defined by what we passionateness and what we fare determines not nevertheless what we do but who we become speaking to our very identity.The human predicament, as Augustine sees it, is that our sack outs and our desires are dis targeted. In order to explain this further, Augustine often referenced the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Although Adam and Eve were created in the range of a function of God, they were not satisfied. They wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil. It was pride that motivated their rebellion against God and it was a befuddled jazz that allowed them to put themselves before God despite the consequences. Their disobedience led to destruction not only of themselves but as well of everyone else.Accordingly, Adam and Eves disordered love disordered the loves of all their offspring and since the fall, all human beings have been born with disordered affections. To Augustine, it was no accident that the Bible records the pride of Adam and Eve as the cause of their fall from Gods grace. Augustine calls this disordered love amor sui, which is Latin for conceit. This love of self that he describes is willing to put the world at the center and fount of everything. According to Augustine this primal form of sin is rightfully named pride, as it is a perverse and speci? kind of dresser that leads us to claim a place that rightly belongs to God alone. As we turn away from God, self-love becomes the guiding principle of our lives. He suggests that two cities are formed by two loves the earthly by the love of self and the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. In his book, The City of God, Augustine explores the enemy of these two loves. He writes that the members of the city of God are marked by the love of God, amor dei while the members of the earthly city are marked by self-love, amor sui.It is no surprise, then, that those absorbed in amor sui act according to what they love and the disorder of their loves is reflected in the disorder of their lives. We do what we love and disordered love disorders what we do. This is the primary theme that runs through and through Augustines confession. In his Confessions, Augustine reveals that his own life was absorbed by this self-love or pride. He shows how front to his conversion, his life was directed by his own will and his own misguided judgments.When reading his confessions, we are do privy to Augustines struggles with self-love and his description of how it undermines his love of God. He is compelled to confess his excessively erotic relationships with women, his misdemeanors, and his impulse for experiences that does not consider other people. Augustine was a slave to the objects o f his own desires. He turn ins great detail about his erotic desires, suggesting that it was his desire to love and be love that dominated him. Once again, we recognize his notion of misdirected desires and love without restraints.Even as we read the confession of the theft of the pears in Book 2, it allows us to see how Augustine explains the idea of pride as the bottom-line of all sin. Augustine is quite concerned with this incident in which he and some friends stole pears from a neighborhood orchard. Augustine deeply regrets his sin, and offers a few brief insights as to how and why he committed them but what bothers him most is that he stole the pears out of sheer desire to do wrong. This story takes Augustines explanation of the nature of the sin of pride to a deeper level.It suggests that his actions simply represent a human sexual perversion of his God-given goodness. In fact, what he sought to gain from stealing the pears and everything we desire when we sin turns out to b e a twisted version of one of Gods attributes. In a very skillful way Augustine matches each sinful desire with a desire to be like God demonstrating how pride seeks power that we do not and cannot possess because it belongs to God alone. The creature can never attain the same level as the antecedent even though pride allows us to think the contrary.Augustine also argues that each sin consists of a love for the lesser good rather than a preference for God. Such delight in the created over the author reflects a turning from God and a turning to love of self. Augustines own disordered desires give us an awareness of not only the individual but also the social nature of pride or sin. For Augustine, pride is a disorder that affects us not only personally but also communally. This is why our existence becomes consumed by the need for power. We seek after this power through a serial publication of desires that are incomplete and therefore will never satisfy.How then is pride the root o f all sin? Augustine would say our lives were made for God and to want more than God is pride. God is enough and pride causes us to forsake God and to seek after disordered desires to fulfill our self-love. According to Augustine, The soul fornicates when it turns away from you and seeks outdoors of you the pure and clear intentions which are not to be found except returning to you. We sin, then, by pleasing the inferior aspects of ourselves, or by loving ourselves to such excess that we claim Gods place, and in the process we pervert what love truly is.True love, as Augustine sees it, does not seek out personal advantages. For Augustine, the ascendant is for human beings to seek humility for it is humility that transforms our lives. Where pride takes pleasure in replacing Gods power with our own desire for power, humility allows us to be satisfied with our God-given place in the universe. by and by Augustine spends his first 30 years searching, he comes to the conclusion that only a person with humility can follow Christ. As he says to God in his Confessions, You sent him (Christ) so that from his example they should learn humility. Where pride was the mark of the Augustines years prior to his conversion experience in Milan, humility became a close of the rest of his life. Bibliography Augustine, Confessions, translated by atomic number 1 Chadwick (New York Oxford University Press, 1992) Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love (Washington, D. C. Regnery Publishing, 1966) Cardinal sin. Dictionary. com. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.. http//dictionary. reference. om/ sponsor/cardinal sin(accessed February 21, 2013). Taylor, Richard. Ethics, Faith, and Reason(Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1985) Wogaman, J. Philip, Introduction to Christian Ethics A Historical Introduction, (Louisville, Westminster prank Knox, 1993) 1 . Richard Taylor,Ethics, Faith, and Reason. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall 1985), 98 2 . Dictionary. com. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.. http//dictionary. reference. om/browse/cardinal sin(accessed February 21, 2013). 3 . Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love (Washington, D. C. Regnery Publishing, 1966), 4 . Augustine, Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (New York Oxford University Press, 1992), 40 5 . Ibid. , 40 6 . Philip J. Wogaman, Introduction to Christian Ethics A Historical Introduction, (Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 1993), 57. 7 . Augustine, Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (New York Oxford University Press, 1992), 32. 8 . Ibid. , 219