(September 24, 2022 at 6:21 pm)Duty Wrote: According to the (in)famous book by C S Lewis (an English author) "Mere Christianity", pride is the worst. Yet I feel/think/deduce that having pride in one's deeds and behaviour is central and fundamental to living a decent life. No pride = fail, basically.
Lewis, and Dante, and Aquinas, and Aristotle, define "pride" somewhat differently from modern Americans.
For them, the word means over-estimating yourself. It means that you feel you are more deserving or more important in society than you really are.
This is the "worst" sin only in that it tends to allow us to justify the other sins. So for example if I think that I am more important than you, and I deserve your smartphone more than you do, then I feel justified in stealing your smartphone. Stealing is another sin, but in this case I have justified it to myself through pride.
This is why Dante describes pride as the first sin that has to be purged at Purgatory. Until the pride is gone, envy, greed, etc., can't be erased.
Obviously modern people use it differently. We say that it's good to feel proud of your school, or your ethnic group, or whatever. This is just to recognize the good qualities and feel good about them. There's nothing wrong with that. Although my grandmother, well read in the classics, would correct me if I said I was proud of my accomplishments -- she would say "say pleased, not proud."
(If you start to overestimate these good qualities, however, that would be Lewis's version of pride. So an Aryan who felt that his race was so good that it was better than others could use this to justify bad things.)
