Pride in something doesn’t seem like such a bad attribute. Why is it a sin?
I looked here but didn’t quite grasp the context of the distinction they were making.
The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas Whether pride is a sin?
I think this may best be answered in Cafe Society by a plot discussion of Devil’s Advocate (feat. A.Paccino, K. Reeves).
Ask Bellerophon.
I think in this context pride means arrogance.
Erek
Well per the article “arrogance” in the context of pride seems to be mainly characterized by not knowing one’s place relative to God and rendering appropriate obeisance to him.
Well, yes, that is so. It’s not knowing your place. This is not the first time that the idea that the Seven Capital Vices (a better translation that “Deadly Sins”) don’t sound so bad when we use the colloquial modern sense of the words has been brought up in the SDMB. In this case, what we translate into English as “pride” would be more accurately rendered to us as “hubris”. As the article quotes, there is good pride and bad pride – the “bad” pride is in thinking you are better than you really are.
If you wish to oppress a person or group of people, you need to ensure that any scrap of pride or self worth the person has is completely diminished so you can continue to keep them under your thumb. Case in point, making pride a sin helps the church maintain control over its followers without having to worry about them standing up for themselves, or questioning the validity of its teaching.
To be ruled by your pride is the problem, what leads to sin, just as to be ruled by your lust, or your anger, or your vanity, etc.
So how do you square this with a prohibition on lust - certainly these power obsessed leaders did not wish their sheep to stop procreating?
An excellent exposition of the Devil’s position on the matter. 
Whereas C S Lewis (in The Great Divorce IIRC) paints a picture of the opposite of pride as being a correct understanding of your own importance and worth, with neither arrogance nor false modesty, and admiring the work of your own hands and mind exactly as you would admire the work of someone else’s.
English is not serving us well here: as JRDelierious said, what is being condemned is not pride in the sense of healthy self-respect, but pride in the sense of an inflated self-regard. It would not have been prideful for Lucifer to note that he was among the most beautiful of all creation; in fact it would have been prideful to pretend he didn’t know that – false modesty is a form of pride. It was only prideful when he aspired to be God.
Similarly, it is not sinful to be aware of and pleased with who you are and something good you have done. It is sinful when that awareness and pleasure becomes disproportionate.
It’s worth noting that sometimes the sin of pride results in what appears to be low self-esteem: when a person says “I’m the dumbest person in the world,” or “I’m so ugly noone will ever love me” it **can **be a sign of pride.
Pride is a very special sin - because it is also a virtue. Bad pride is knowing where you are supposed to be, or alternatively, failing to give yourself proper credit. Being meek is good; being a human carpet is just as bad as being a tyrant. In both cases, regardless of the differences in the way you deal wiht others, you are failing to appreciate your place in the world.
This is not to say you can’t be a leader. Everyone has talents, and some will organize beter than others, at least in certain tasks. But leading is not inherently prideful. Indeed, the very best leaders are often suprisingly humble.
Of course, note that appearances are often deceiving. Some people appear humble, but are really servile in the hopes of getting rewards (like innumerable corporate yes-men). Some appear arrogant, but are just being decisive. It’s a very complicated thing, pride, and like most sins is never obvious from the outside.
Superbia is a tough word to get a handle on. Most attestations imply vanity, haughtiness, conceit, and arrogance. There is some mainstream post-Augustan writing in which superbia is connoted more positively. Perhaps the most famous usage is in Anchises’ advice to Aeneas in the Aeneid: parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. Spare the conquered and beat down the proud.
This is the kind of vainglory that causes man to turn his back on God, this imitating Satan. This act is a willful transgression of man’s place in the divinely ordered universe. What gifts man has he receives through God; pride is the turning away from God on account of what gifts God has bestowed. This betrayal is disobedient, unnatural, and potentially harmful to one’s fellow man.
It’s my opinion that pride causes a good deal of problems that we have in social interraction, the workplace, politics, and myriad other areas.
Pride causes people to refuse to admit they made a mistake, or that they could be wrong. People make foolish decisions based on it, and then stand by those decisions with passionate fervor.
It can ruin a relationship. It causes huge problems in the workplace. It can make you think you’re entitled to special treatment. It can lead to xenophobia, which comes with its own entourage of problems.
I think there’s a very good reason it was deemed a sin, but like gluttony, it’s one of those sins which is politely ignored.
That’s a good observation, but it only points out that the church is therfore guilty of pride.
The best proof that pride is a vice is that the people who espose it as a virtue tend to be either assholes (Ayn Rand) or are going through a stage of life when being an asshole is common (undergraduates who’ve taken Ayn Rand too much to heart).
They are all “also virtues”. Greed and Envy are great motivators, Sloth is the mother of invention, Wrath keeps one from being abused or taken advantage of, and gluttony and lust keep the species alive and growing. And taken to excess all the cardinal virtues are also vices. And I definately side with Mrrealtime, the “Seven Deadly Sins” were specifically designed to support the feudal system, elevate the noble class, and keep the serf’s in their place. Only the dogmatic nature of organized religion keeps them defined as the great sins that they aren’t.
This type of argument is unrigorous in the extreme. It poses two vague abstractions which varied across time and space and posits that one was developed to uphold the other.
The contention that the medieval church was utterly dogmatic, monolithic, and was able to “keep the serfs in their place” through books which only a infinitesmally small educated elite had the training or leisure to read requires a great deal of nuanced argument. I’m waiting.
“Nuanced arguement” ? Both the medieval church and medieval society in general were highly oppressive and dogmatic; this is well known.
Keeping the commoners from reading the Bible was part of that; it made sure that all they knew of it came from the priests, who selectively quoted the parts that supported the system. It’s the same as the slave-owning South, who fanatically kept the slaves from literacy to keep them from reading the Bible ( or anything else that denied slavery was a virtue ).
Frankly, it’s rather obvious organized religion was develped solely to keep the serfs/slaves/commoners in line, and support the ruling class. That’s what i’s for.
They were both more oppressive and dogmatic than modern American society and religion, sure, but actually, medieval society and especially medieval Catholicism was much less oppresive or dogmatic than society and Catholicism just after the Reformation.
It is well asserted that the medieval church and society were highly oppressive. This received view is not well supported in the primary sources and is the product of thoroughly discredited historiography.
The “commoners” were “kept” from reading the bible hardly more than you are prevented from reading, say, thousands of pages of federal, state, and local law. If you wish to acquire enough training to make it meaningful and spend an enormous amount of time learning it thoroughly, you are welcome to. Otherwise, ordinary people trust the police and their local and federal governments to handle the details. You know not to kill people, you know not to steal, and this is enough for most people.
Likewise with the bible. Most priests were incapable of reading it, let alone interpreting it intelligently. The persistent problem for the medieval church was not mass lay illiteracy so much as clerical incompetence.
Ironically, the rapid increase in popular literacy by the end of the 14th century is one of the leading causes of dogmatism and the stifling of intellectual and institutional creativity. An excellent book on the subject is RI Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society.
The era characterized by the greatest ecclesiastical dogmatism, persecution, and oppression is what we usually like to call the Renaissance.
Your final argument is perhaps the most puerile. You argue that organized religion was designed to support the ruling class and keep the rabble in line. This is inconsistent with the first three hundred years of Christianity. The church was revolutionary: no other contemporary religions organization admitted peasants, paupers, and women to the extent of the Catholic church, let alone recognized them as major spiritual figures. Scholars hostile to Catholicism have argued that the rise of the church is one of the primary causes for the downfall of the Roman ruling class and the imperial political order.
Also do read RW Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. You might be surprised.
Piffle. If the whole issue of “pride” was a matter of the church oppressing people, then why did the Greeks, hundreds of years before Jesus wandered around, make hubris the central failing of nearly all their tragic heroes? Why did the author of Beowulf, having written a lengthy poem in which Beowulf is always perceived as the best and most virtuous person in the story, criticize Beowulf harshly for his mod when Beowulf rashly went up against the dragon, alone? (Tolkien also notes the same condemnation of Beorhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon, where Beorhrnoth is criticized for his ofermode.)
As has already been noted, part of the trouble in this discussion is that English has reduced to a single word related but separate concepts. However, it is pretty clear that far more societies than medieval Christianity have viewed (excessive) pride/hubris/superbia/mod as a failing of humanity.
In these discussions, I generally use hubris because that word should be familiar to anyone who had a course on literature in high school. But the notion is that a person who might place himself above his place–whether it be his class or in relation to a god or in relation to the law (human or divine or natural)–will act in ways that harm himself and others. Even Dirty Harry recognized that “A man’s got to know his limitations.” That does not necessarily mean kow-towing to superficial authorities (although some such authorities would choose to interpret it that way), but in knowing when his actions or his beliefs will incur unnecessary harm.
This is not to say that no society has ever attempted to use the concept of hubris to keep people in their place, but the notion that the concept was invented by medieval Christianity has no basis in fact.