Pride - the worst sin according to C.S.Lewis

[GrandizerII]

I wonder if there's been a kind of drift in the meaning of the word "pride." Like maybe it used to be more clearly about hubris, and now it's closer to "self-esteem." 

(I mean, in Henry James novels, "make love" means "flirt." But now it means "fuck," so that's a pretty big change in less than 100 years. You have to stop and think when you read in a novel that "the young couple was seen making love on the sofa at the party." So words can change.)

The first translations of Dante into English were made in the mid-1700s. In those translations, and in every one that I'm aware of since then, the first sin that needs purging in Purgatory has been called "pride." Though the translators could conceivably have used "hubris" or just kept the Latin "superbia." 

Japanese translations use 高慢. The first character means "high," and the second covers a lot of ground -- from "chronic" to "conceited" or even "lazy." (Boasting is "自慢" -- "self" + "conceit.") The dictionary entry for 高慢 gives "haughty; arrogant; proud; stuck-up." So it's clearly the bad kind of pride. 

America is famous for being an individualistic sort of place, where Ayn Rand, for example, could find a home. I wonder if this tendency has contributed to the word "pride" getting a more positive meaning over time.

‘Mere Christianity’ was published in 1952 (although some of Lewis’ source material is from about a decade earlier). If he was discussing ‘pride’ in a Dantean sense, he should have explicitly said so, or used a difference term. As I recall - and it’s been a fair bit of time since I read it - Lewis did neither. He was decrying ‘pride’ in the modern sense; pride in one’s accomplishments, pride in one’s children, and so on.

But that’s to be expected - if Christians were told to feel good about themselves, they wouldn’t be very good Christians. The self-loathing required to make this death cult seem like a good thing is part and parcel of Christianity.

Boru

A quote taken from the book itself, explaining what the author meant by "pride", was posted in one of Belacqua's posts in the previous page. Per my understanding, it seems to be of the Dantean sense (or something similar to that).