A while back I was asking my son if he had pride in his accomplishments. His response was to point out that pride is a sin. This comes from the seven deadly sins, which comes from a monks writings Evagrius Ponticus, who listed eight "evil thoughts" Gluttony; fornication; avarice; sorrow; anger; discouragement; vainglory; pride.
Later Pope Gregory the Great would edit this list down to the "Seven Deadly Sins" we all know and love... pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth. (gotta love Wiki's. I originally thought Dante came up with these).
Pride is excessive love of self (especially holding self out of proper position toward God). Dante's definition was "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor."
After my talk I was grappling for some synonym to use other then pride. Dang if the thesaurus didn't come up with stuff I thought sounded much worse: arrogance, haughtiness, hauteur, insolence, loftiness, lordliness, overbearingness, presumption, pridefulness, proudness, superciliousness, superiority.
So back to using pride with the explanation in the usage of the word not falling under the sinful definition. You can be proud of a job well done. Rubbing it in the face of others and discounting what they have done is where the 'bad-Pride' comes in...
If I was in Germany I could make a word like Doingagoodjobbutnotbeinganassaboutit.
Oh BTW Prudence, Justice, Restraint, Courage, Faith, Hope and Love are the seven heavenly virtues. (they dint seem to be as famous)
2 comments:
I was able to totally conquer my pride. I feel really good about it and like to brag about my mastering it. Umm...Dang. Never mind
I get wishy washy about that one with my kids sometimes. They find it a little difficult to be proud of something and not be able to talk about it for fear of "bragging". I tell them there is a big difference between saying something like, "Wow, I tried rock climbing on vacation! It was fun!"
and saying, "I can rock climb, you can't! Nyah nyah!" It is the negative tone and words that make bragging what it is. But it is still hard to tell them to be proud of an accomplishment when they are doing there best to be humble and not self serving.
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