Pride: Virtue or Vice

According to Richard Taylor, Pride is non a bet of manners or demeanor. One does not function proud scarce by affecting certain behavior or projecting an flick that has been formed in the mind. It is a private excellence much deeper than this. In fact, it is the summation of most of the other virtues, wrongce it presupposes them. Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that plume is a complex emotion. However, time some philosophers such asAristotle manage overcharge to be a profound virtue, othersconsider it a wrong.The witness of assumption as a sin has permeated Christian theology geological dating back to Christian monasticism. However, it wasnt until the late 6th century that self-exaltation was elevated in its ranks among the seven deadly or cardinal sins. The Bible, peculiarly the Old Testa manpowert, has plenty to say about pride. In the book of Proverbs for exemplar we read, Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a glint. (1618 ). Again in Proverbs 214, Scripture says, Haughty eyes and a proud heartthe lamp of the wickedare sin.Augustine makes the argument that pride is not just a sin provided it is the root of all sin. He often used the following passage to support his claim The stolon of pride is when one departs from idol, and his heart is turned away from his Maker. For pride is the offset of sin, and he that has it shall pour out abomination (Sirach 1012-13). This paper seeks to catch 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 excoriates sin was rooted in pride. In his Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and get along, he rural areas that, Some of the angelsin their pride and impiety rebelled against idol, and were cast have from their heavenly abode, and that the devil was with his associates in crime exalted in pride, and by that exaltation was with th em cast d declare. Pride has a certain fascination, attraction and deflect over everything, and it corrupts everything, even what is in it self good. No one can draw the pressure of its temptations, including Augustine himself.In hisConfessions, Augustine identifies pride in his bear life. For example, during his adolescent years when he was searching for wisdom, Augustine refused to approach Scripture because the Latin pas seul that was available to him seemed in addition 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 unploughed 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 head to rising slope its steps. He goes on to say, Puffed up with pride, I considered myself a right adult. The same pride that kept him from accepting the Bible, led him to Manichaeism. Augustin e refers to the Manichees as earthly-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 chicane and what we love determines not only what we do but who we become speaking to our very identity.The human predicament, as Augustine sees it, is that our loves and our believes are dis commited. In order to explain this further, Augustine often referenced the Genesis story of go game and Eve. Although ex and Eve were created in the image of god, they were not satisfied. They wanted to be resembling God, knowing good and evil. It was pride that motivated their rebellion against God and it was a distracted love that allowed them to put themselves before God despite the consequences. Their disobedience led to destruction not only of themselves but also of everyone else.Acc ordingly, Adam and Eves disordered love disordered the loves of all their materialisation and since the fall, all human beings have been born with disordered affections. To Augustine, it was no stroke 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 narcissism. This love of self that he describes is willing to put the world at the center and credit of everything. According to Augustine this primal form of sin is rightfully named pride, as it is a perverse and speci? kind of self-love that leads us to claim a calculate that rightly belongs to God alone. As we turn away from God, self-love becomes the channelise principle of our lives. He suggests that both 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 opposition of these two loves. He writes that the members of the city of God are tell aparted 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 inattentive 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 prior to his conversion, his life was directed by his own will and his own misguided judgments.When reading his confessions, we are made privy to Augustines struggles with self-love and his description of how it undermines his love of God. He is compelled to confess his to a fault erotic relationships with women, his misdemeanors, and his lust for experiences that does not consider other people. Augustine was a striver to the objects of his own zests. He gives 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 public opinion of misdirected desires and love without restraints.Even as we read the confession of the theft of the pears in news 2, it allows us to see how Augustine explains the idea of pride as the bottom-line of all sin. Augustine is kind of concerned with this incident in which he and some friends steal 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 chronicle of the nature of the sin of pride to a deeper level.It suggests that his actions simply represent a human perversion of his God-given goodness. In fact, what he sought to gain from theft the pears and everything we desire whe n we sin turns out to be a twisted version of one of Gods attributes. In a very skillful way Augustine matches mortally 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 dick can never attain the same level as the actor 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 creator 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 later on(prenominal) this power through a series of desires that are incomplete and accordingly will never satisfy .How then is pride the root of 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 outside of you the virginal and clear intentions which are not to be found except locomote to you. We sin, then, by loving the inferior aspects of ourselves, or by loving ourselves to such excess that we claim Gods place, and in the process we turn what love truly is.True love, as Augustine sees it, does not seek out personal advantages. For Augustine, the solution is for human beings to seek humility for it is humility that transforms our lives. Where pride takes sport in replacing Gods power with our own desire for power, humility allows us to be satisfied with our God-given place in the universe. after(prenominal) 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 goal of the rest of his life. Bibliography Augustine, Confessions, translated by Henry 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. cyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.. http//dictionary. reference. om/browse/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 arse Knox, 1993) 1 . Richard Taylor,Ethics, Faith, and Reason. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ Pren tice-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