So, Should I Be Proud of You or Not?
We, as individuals and as a culture, struggle with pride, but not in the ways you might think. Pride is a tricky thing. We’re told it is a sin, even told by St. Augustine that it is the mother of all other sins (which is a big title to claim). But, in the come-and-go of life, who among us hasn’t looked at a friend, a family member, or, if a parent, our own children, and told them how proud we are of them for being a good person or for seeing an important discipline or accomplishment through till the end? And who among us hasn’t benefited from those encouraging words from people we love or admire? This isn’t even to mention how people take pride in their sports teams for winning or even things they have less control over, such as pride in their country. Who hasn’t heard the iconic phrase, “I’m proud to be an American?” And even looking back over the things we’ve done and endured, do we as individuals not build the necessary capacity for self-confidence, in a perfectly healthy way, by being proud of something we’ve done or endured? And we know what it is like when we or someone we know or love has lost a sense of pride. It is a struggle with self-confidence, a spike in anxiety, can drive us to recklessness, and make us prone to self-isolation, self-indulgence, and self-sabotage.
It makes us wonder, pride can’t be all bad, can it? It is true that an unhealthy sense of pride is roundly criticized and rejected as a spiritual poison in the Bible. But, then we have passages like this in 2 Corinthians 7:4 when Paul is trying to encourage the church in Corinth, he says “I often boast about you; I have great pride in you; I am filled with consolation; I am overjoyed in all our struggles.” So, here we see that instilling a healthy sense of pride is an important part of encouraging the poor in spirit. Here, and in many exhortations Jesus himself gave to the poor, oppressed, and the hated, rekindling a sense of worth and dignity in themselves is a part of knowing and believing in their worth before God when the world said otherwise. Today, we’d call that sense of worth and dignity pride.
So, how do we solve this mess? I’d offer this: our problem is largely a linguistic one. We just don’t use the right words to properly communicate the tradition. We don’t understand that what is condemned isn’t the positive sense of pride seen in Scripture and regular life. It is selfish arrogance or hubris.
Pride vs Hubris – A Life-Changing Distinction
Aristotle, the philosopher on whom so much theology in the West has rested, said pride was the jewel in the crown of the virtues. This seems to be a far cry from Augustin’s opinion. But it is important to see that the two aren’t as opposed as we think. We just keep using the wrong words and it fogs up important distinctions. For Aristotle, pride was a healthy sense of one’s dignity and greatness of spirit in reasoned correlation to the good things one had done in life or the capacities one has. He defined hubris as an excess of this, or an over-inflation of one’s worth and abilities. If we look to Augustine again, we see that he largely agrees and defines hubris as a kind of desire for inordinate exultation. In short, hubris is the toxic version of healthy pride. It violates the dignity of God and undermines the majesty of creation. In short, hubris is completely detached from reality. Unfortunately, in English, we tend to translate all of these words as just “pride.” But let’s start making this distinction a little clearer and see how it helps us.
Loving pride is a healthy sense of self-esteem, awareness of your dignity, and loving encouragement of others that we usually mean when we say we have pride in our work, we are proud of loved ones, or the kind of pride that one sees on display historically in the Civil Rights Movement or presently in Pride celebrations done by the LGBTQ+ community to create solidarity in a world that often denigrates and persecutes them. And hubris is a tendency towards supremacy, self-righteousness, egoism, and arrogance. It is an overt violation of other people and other groups for your own self-inflated ends. Think of an especially arrogant player on a sports team, an otherwise learned but snobbish and vain intellectual, or a healthy patriotism that turns into gross and prejudiced (and often violent) nationalism.
A lot of times the two ideas can be distinguished by the effect they have on others. Pride lifts up the struggling and is carried and communicated in loving-kindness. Hubris puts others down so you can be lifted up, artificially deflating who they are and inflating who you are and what it means for you to be in the right relationship together.
We can see a great example of pride as a virtue and hubris as a vice in that hubris served to underpin the notion of white supremacy for centuries in this country and it is precisely a healthy sense of pride that inspired and sustained the Civil Rights Movement a few decades ago, though this sense of self-esteem and dignity was often called arrogance by racists. To make the point further, those fighting for their dignified place in society were often accused of being “uppity.” It is fascinating to note that healthy pride only seems to be a problem in some eyes when the wrong people have it. But we have to watch out that our healthy sense of pride doesn’t start slipping into something more destructive, and when it does, we need to know how to correct the course.
Finding the Balance
Both Aristotle and Augustine agree on the difficulties that hubris presents. Augustine’s solution to hubris is humility, which is instrumental in reigning in our egos and getting a proper sense of pride or self-esteem. Humility isn’t about hating or under-estimating yourself. It is about knowing who you are, what you can do, what you can’t do, and what you can grow into. God is God and we are not, so don’t walk around acting like we’re absolutely perfect or looking down on others who aren’t.
A healthy sense of pride will be good for your self-esteem and it will make you a better friend, relative, romantic partner, and parent if you have children. It will help make you a better citizen, a more reliable pillar of the community, and it will enable you to live a richer life. Hubris will corrupt your relationships with God, with others, and with yourself because it only exists when others are down and feeds personal delusions.
For all the help Aristotle has given us here, we must demote healthy pride as the crowning jewel of a virtuous life. Pride can be a jewel in the crown of virtues, and hubris can be the mother of all other sins, as Augustine warned. But, for us, the crowning jewel of the virtues is agape or caritas, which is love, loving-kindness, or charity. And this will help you. You’ll know whether you’re using a healthy sense of pride or have fallen into hubris by how much your perception of yourself in relation to God and others is lacking in love’s many manifestations and in seeing how your actions and ideas contribute to either putting them down or lifting them up into their fullness.
God’s peace be with you,
Chaplain Caleb
Raleigh Episcopal Campus Ministries 