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Thursday, June 22, 2023

Pride & The Season of Hubris

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.

 (1)   The “bow” in “rainbow” is not the bow you tie around your neck or in the strings of your shoes but the “bow” that an archer uses.   The Latin word for bow is arcus, from which the words archer, arch, and arc are derived.  Arch is an architectural device that shares the shape of the weapon which is also the shape of the sign that appears in the sky after it rains.   An arc is a curve in geometry.  The kind of artificial rainbow that is sometimes produced by passing light through a prism is often called an arc.  Welding arcs and electrical arcs are also so-named for their curved, bow-like, shape.   When Genesis records the LORD’s covenant with Noah and His placing His “bow” in the sky as His promise never to destroy the world in a Flood again, the word for “bow” is קֶשֶׁת which denotes the weapon and which like its English equivalents is derived from a verb meaning “bend”.   The significance of this sign is that LORD was hanging up His bow, i.e., putting it away never to use it again.   Also implied, however, in the use of the image of a weapon as the sign, is a warning not to behave in the way that brought the judgement of the Deluge in the first place. — Gerry T. Neal
: Aristotle, Dante Alighieri, Dr. Johnson, Justin Trudeau, Neoplatonism, Pride, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Basil, St. Evagrius Ponticus, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas