Is Pride the Root of All Sin?

Pride and Sin in the Augustinian Tradition

            Augustine argues that pride is the root of every sin.  In Book XII, chapter 6 of City of God, pride is identified as the cause for the evil angels’ misery; in Book XIV, chapter 13, writing of the first human sin, Augustine similarly asks, “could anything but pride have been the start of the evil will?”[1]  In both sections, Augustine employs the logic behind Ecclus. 10:13: “the beginning of all sin is pride.”[2]  Fallen angels and the first humans both turn their gaze inwards, towards themselves, and in doing so they demonstrate a longing for “a perverse kind exaltation.”[3]  Instead of fixing their gaze upon the immutable God, these creatures – created ex nihilo[4] – seek a change within themselves.  This prideful desire is the beginning of the evil will and quickly leads to the first evil act of disobedience.  Conversely, then, the sign of obedience is humility, and it is humility which in actuality exalts.  For Augustine, this is because, “devout humility makes the mind subject to what is superior.  Nothing is superior to God; and that is why humility exalts the mind by making it subject to God.”[5]  This dichotomy between humility and pride are defining characteristics of Augustine’s two cities.  Love of God is the first prize in the heavenly city, while those abiding in the temporal city seek only to love themselves.[6]

            Augustine’s understanding of pride establishes what becomes a classic theological formulation of sin.  The notion that pride caused the original rebellion against God can be traced from Augustine, through theologians like Thomas Aquinas,[7] and well into twentieth century theology.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, works from the same Ecclus. 10:13-14 passage in his 1939 book Life Together to argue that “the spirit and flesh of human beings are inflamed by pride, for it is precisely in their wickedness that human beings want to be like God.”[8]  Like Augustine before him, Bonhoeffer claims that confession of our inherently selfish pride only comes through identifying with the humiliation of the cross of Jesus Christ.  This theological tradition certainly has its merits; it seems quite clear that pride plays a crucial role in humankind’s rejection of God.  However, recent feminist theology offers a needed critique of the simple notion of equating “pride” with “sin.”

A Necessary Critique

            Bonhoeffer scholar Lisa Dahill points to the abuse and exploitation of women as a warning against a simplistic insistence that one must always humble oneself to overcome any and all sin.  She recounts the story of Shirley, who attended a lecture at her church that explained how Bonhoeffer’s concept of loving one’s enemy involved complete and utter surrender to the “other,” even to the point of surrendering one’s life.  Afterwards, Shirley remarked to the lecturer, “if I had been hearing this theology thirty years ago, I would be dead right now.”[9]  Bonhoeffer’s specific historical and contextual theological expositions on the necessity of self-denial had been universalized by the lecturer to suggest that someone like Shirley, who one night found herself being strangled by a male aggressor, could only overcome the evil through selfless humiliation.  Fortunately that night, Shirley forcefully exerted herself and was able to flee to safety.  Dahill’s point is that Bonhoeffer’s (and thus Augustine’s) unchallenged notions of the relation between selfhood, pride, and sin need to be reassessed, particularly taking into account the experience and theology of those outside a tradition that is so often dominated by Western males.

            It would not be historically and theologically fair to assert that the entirety of Bonhoeffer’s and Augustine’s understanding of sin can be reduced to pride.  Certainly both theologians argue that pride ushered in the first acts of sin, and they both frame their argument around the claim in Ecclus. 10:13 that the root of all sin is pride.  However, William Mann points out that Augustine “is careful to insist that pride is not a component in all sins.”  Some sins, for example, “are committed in ignorance or desperation.”[10]  Mann cites Augustine’s De natura et gratia in offering this clarification.  In City of God, on the other hand, Augustine does not seem to find it necessary to explore conceptions of sin beyond the inherent connection with pride.  And it is this exposition in City of God that serves, at least in part, to establish a dominant and lasting theological understanding of sin. 

Context is the Root of Application

Bonhoeffer certainly relies on this Augustinian tradition of interpretation, but Dahill is right to insist on the necessity of critical contextualization in the appropriation of Bonhoeffer’s theology, especially around the issue of selfhood.  She argues that such a claim “is consistent with Bonhoeffer's own lifelong insistence that truth is never abstract, absolute, or fixed, but requires prayerful, concrete discernment in every new context within the flow of highly complex social-historical circumstances.”[11]  Contemporary theology would then do well to appropriate the likes of Augustine and Bonhoeffer’s claim that pride is the root of all sin with careful nuance.  Application of this theology must be met with deliberate awareness of the potentially disastrous consequences that an unfettered equation of “pride” with “sin” could wreak on the life of someone like Shirley.

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[1] Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Penguin Classics, 2003), 571.

[2] Augustine, City of God, 477.  The translator renders the verse as “pride is the start of every kind of sin” in the second instance, 571.

[3] Augustine, City of God, 571.

[4] For Augustine, that God creates ex nihilo – out of nothing – is decisive in explaining how sin could have entered the world through God’s good creation: “But only a nature created out of nothing could have been distorted by a fault.  Consequently, although the will derives its existence, as a nature, from its creation by God, its falling away from its true being is due to its creation out of nothing.”  See Augustine, City of God, 572.  William Mann explains that Augustine’s concept of good creation ex nihilo is especially important to Augustine’s work in resolving the problem of evil.  See Mann, “Augustine on Evil and Original Sin,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41-42.

[5] Augustine, City of God, 572.

[6] Augustine, City of God, 573.

[7] The editor references Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, 2a-2ae, q. 162, a. 7 and Augustine to illustrate the trajectory of this doctrine in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, volume 5 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 111.

[8] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 111.

[9] Lisa Dahill, “Reading from the Underside of Selfhood: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Spiritual Formation,” Journal of Lutheran Ethics 3, no. 8 (August 2003), para. 3, http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Journal-of-Lutheran-Ethics/Issues/August-2003/Readings-from-the-Underside-of-Selfhood-Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-and-Spiritual-Formation.aspx (accessed April 17, 2012).

[10] Mann, “Augustine on Evil and Original Sin,” 47.

[11] Dahill, “Reading from the Underside of Selfhood,” para. 6.