Today’s WOTD is “hubris.” Defined by Merriam Webster as “exaggerated pride or self-confidence,” it derives from the Greek meaning that particular brand of cockiness that’s both a dangerous character flaw and the human trait most likely to provoke the wrath of the gods. The word always makes me think of this quote from Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.
Whatever the limits of his tonsorial splendor, Williams always exhibited a sentiment quite the opposite of hubris. It’s one of the things that made him beloved by gods and humans alike. (I guess if you’re only one of 104, maybe it’s easier to stay humble? Could be, could be…)
Stay humble, friends. Be like Rowan.
See post from 2019, here.
(The best wisdom is recycled wisdom.)
And Happy Lent, y’all!
… following St. John Cassian and St. Gregory the Great. They are called “capital” because they engender other sins, other vices. They are pride, avarice [greed], envy, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth” (No. 1866).
C.S. Lewis speaks for many Christian moralists when he calls pride “the essential vice, the utmost evil.” He asserts that pride “is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
If you are a C.S. Lewis fan (this doesn’t relate to pride):
“If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun… Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never come. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumable they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”
C.S. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime” (1939).
And I don’t even know who the current Archbishop is. And is he the 105th or 106th? But Williams is unforgettable. I miss him and his marvelous sonorous voice, but also his childlike humility. He’s a rarity in Christendom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/science/geometry-math-brain-primates.html
I was still in college, looooong before, BA’s, MAs, seminary, and PhD’s, when I began to realize that Pride was the progenitor, the basis, as it were, of all evil. I had discovered Lewis by this time, but I still did not realize his significance. I was a VERY young Christian. I think this insight that Sunday morning with a Baptist (NOT Southern Baptist!) preacher (and me then a devout Presbyterian) was probably the beginning of my life of Christian scholarship. And the more I study and strive to understand, the more I despair of ever understanding ANYthing. Falling over things in the dark.
I always assumed the worst/basis was ‘avarice/greed’, but it deserves a re-think.