Pride: How it is intimately bound up with the rejection of God’s omnipotence

Aug 3, 2024 by Dave Doveton

By A N Wilson, Catholic Herald.

The University of Oxford hosts a sermon every year in St Mary’s Church on the Sin of Pride. Part of the joke, in my day, was that they used to invite dons to preach who were not noted for their humility. The best I heard was given by John Sparrow, then Warden of All Souls. He made what I think was a useful distinction: vanity is a foible, and pride is a sin.

Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion is vain. Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House is proud. The vanity of Sir Walter makes us laugh. The pride of Sir Leicester leads ultimately to the ruin of his wife’s life.

Our generation uses the word “pride” in a number of ways which would have surprised Tertullian, or whoever first drew up the list of the Seven Deadly Sins. Parents who have a child who has enjoyed some success are told: “How proud you must be.” This does not mean pride in any sinful sense, but rather pleasure at their offspring’s achievement.

The “Gay Pride” marches of June do not mean that homosexual women or men are actually proud of something which is part of their nature: merely, that they were cheesed off by centuries of being told they ought to be ashamed of themselves. Pride the sin, superbia, is something quite other. Sin is deplored because it is something which cuts us off from the contemplation of God.

Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in another Oxford University-hosted sermon – he was asked to preach on the Grace of Humility – that the list of Deadly Sins was a fad of the medieval monasteries. They loved sevens, so they had to add avarice, gluttony and lust to make up the numbers. Pride, however, is the ultimate sin, and probably the best depiction of it in English literature is in the character of Satan in Paradise Lost.

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