Author: CCW

The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme II: Pride – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025

“Be it unto me according to thy word,” Mary says. It is the perfect and, really, the only counter to pride; it is humility in all of its strength and beauty. It complements the Beatitudes especially the first: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.“ Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes as taken from Proverbs 16.18. It reads in full: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Only too true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But in a way, it is worse than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them.

Thus Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self, clinging to ourselves rather than to God the author of our very being.

Thomas Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin.

Pride is in our envy, making us think that we deserve better than what we have or are and, consequently, to pull down and destroy anything that seems to stand above us and which others have. With pride there is no above, only below. There is only what stands below us and yet it consumes us in our revolt against the good or joy of others. It is the deadliest poison for our life together in the various forms of our communal and social life, our life in community, whether it is family, school, or church.

Pride is in our anger, making us adopt a position of superiority from which nothing can make us swerve. Even more, anger blinds us like smoke to the legitimate motives that move people. Anger is the smoke-screen that hides reality. Anger raises our fist to God because things are not as we think they should be for us. The all-consuming character of wrath or anger means that others sometimes see it better for what it is than we do. This is different from the category of righteous anger but even that runs the risk of overkill and overreach. Once again, our anger is about ourselves and often as not the penalty of anger is ourselves bringing harm upon ourselves in one way or another.

Pride is in our sloth, making us think that we may get by with a minimum of effort while obtaining the maximum result. Again, it signals a profound form of self-conceit and self-importance. It contributes to a kind of complacency and sense of entitlement based upon nothing more than our sense of ourselves and what is ‘owed’ to us without having to lift a finger.

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The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme I: ‘To decline from sin, and incline to virtue’

Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025

The paradox of sin and love, those “two vast, spacious things” which, as George Herbert observes, most need to be ‘measured’ over and above what can be known through the human philosophical sciences, is captured concisely in the phrase “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” found in the Penitential Service (Cdn. BCP 1962, pp. 611-615). The paradox is that the awareness of sin and evil presupposes the knowledge of the radical goodness of God as prior and thus as that which moves us to seek that good in spite of our failings and follies. Love is the moving force or activity in the virtues of the soul.

Sin and love go together and belong to the necessity of what is made known most clearly through Revelation in the witness of the Scripture which is why Herbert points us to the two moments of Christ’s agony: the agony of Christ in Gethsemane and at Calvary. Those passages illustrate the “two vast, spacious things,” namely, “sinne and love.”

The virtues are activities of the soul which pertain to excellence of character in relation to the highest end of our humanity. Charity, as Paul puts it, is “the greatest of the three,” referring to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes that charity orders all of the virtues to man’s highest end which is God. That ordering is not a negating of the classical traditions of the virtues but a reordering of them to the highest good which is our participation in the life of God. Love or charity, as Thomas argues, is “the form, the mover, and the root of the virtues” (de caritate, 3).

But what exactly is the sin that opposes love or virtue? It is the vices. The Penitential Service provides for the reading of the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. They, too, illustrate this profound and necessary interrelation between sin and love. The confession of sin, as Augustine states, is equally and necessarily the confession of praise to God. Peccatum poena peccati. “Sin is the punishment of sin,” he says, a point which reveals the self-contradictory nature of sin and which really points us to God. Sin is its own penalty; the reward or result of virtue is God in his essential goodness. To know sin presupposes the goodness of God as that which sin attempts to negate and deny.

There are seven deadly sins in the Christian moral tradition that are drawn from Scripture and ancient ethical philosophy. Proverbs 6. 16-19, for instance, explicitly speaks of seven sins. “There are six things which the Lord hates, seven which are an abomination to him.” Hate means things which stand in opposition to the goodness of God. The images in Proverbs speak of the things of the spirit by way of the things of the body: proud eyes, false tongues, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wickedness, feet that are swift to do evil, a false witness that breathes out lies, a sower of discord. They provide an interesting and important insight into vice by way of these concrete images.

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