Pride

Pride is the habit, the vice, which disposes a man tomake himself more than he is.

Pride is a special vice, for it has the special object of inordinate esteem for one’s own excellence. Yet pride has also the character of a general vice, for it is involved, directly or indirectly, in other sins, and notably in all sins of malice.

Pride aspires; it tends; it desires something-not simply, but as involving some element of difficulty. The proud man is under pressure; he makes effort to be more than he actually is. Now, a habit that involves drive and effort (and, by that token, involves difficulty with which effort grapples) belongs to the appetitive part of man; it has its subject in the will. Pride resides in the will.

St. Gregory (Moral. xxiii 4) lists four species of pride: (a) thinking that one’s good is from oneself;(b) thinking that one’s good is from God but is owing toone’s own deserts; (c) claiming excellence not possessed; (d)despising others and wishing to seem the exclusive possessor ofwhat one has.

Pride is an assumed self-sufficiency which omits or discounts God in considering what one is. This is manifestly a very great inor-dinateness, and is, in its genus or kind, a serious or mortal evil. Yet, to be mortally sinful, an individual act of pride would have to be a conscious and fully willedmisprising of God. Most acts of pride are venial sins by reason of deficiency of awareness, or lack of full consent of the will.

Since pride is a direct turning away from God and is a practical act of contempt for God, because it is an unwillingness to be subject to him, it ranks with that actual hatred for God which we have called the very worst of sins.

Aversion from God is in all sins, but it is the very essence of pride. Other sins involve this aversion by their nature as sins; pride is this aversion. Aversion from God is consequent upon other sins; in pride this aversion is the sin itself. Hence the first and worst of all sins is the sin of pride;it shares this evil distinction with hatred for God.

Pride, as a special sin, is the source of many other sins, and is therefore listed as a capital sin. But pride, as a general sin, is not merely the source of other sins; it is actually in them. St. Gregory (Moral. xxxi 17) calls pride the queen of vices which conquers the heart of a man and deliver sit to the capital sins. And therefore St. Gregory does not mention pride itself as one of the capital sins, for he considers it them other of them all.