The Sins of Pride

....No one, so far as I know, puts in a good word for greed or envy. Lust has its practitioners but they do not pretend that it is a virtue. But what of pride? Is it really always a sin?

One of the greatest novels in our language, “Pride and Prejudice”, argues, after all, that we need to be a little more circumspect about how we use the word, and about what we think of those to whom the adjective, proud, is attached. That wise young woman, Elizabeth Bennett, comes to realise that what she originally takes to be a regrettable and dislikeable display of pride by Mr Darcy is in fact something quite else – a sense of loyalty to and identification with ideas, values and institutions that are themselves admirable. Her sister, Mary, early in Jane Austen’s novel, points the way to the conclusion that Elizabeth will later happily reach, “Vanity and pride” Mary notes “are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

........................Vanity brooked no shadows across the sun.
Vanity, then, we can readily see as a failing of the greatest as well, doubtless, as of the most humble. And the more vaunting the vanity, the higher the mountain of regard, the greater and further the fall and the deeper the pit of humiliation. The descent of the vain is invariably accompanied by cruel laughter. It is a subject for mirth and finger-pointing, The more you pretend for yourself, the more you have to lose. So just as virtue is said to be its own reward, vanity is its own penalty, tracked at a short distance by mockery and even derision. You will not please man for long, better surely to concentrate on pleasing God.

How safe is it to claim, as a politician, divine guidance for what you do for other men, to assert that you simply act as an unworthy agent or instrument of His will? Here I suppose vanity is suffused with pride. Mortal man you may be, but what you do allegedly bears the stamp of God’s grace and authority.

The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians
Chapter 1, Verse 10
“For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men?
For if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.”


Almighty God, have mercy on them, and on all that bear me evil and would do me harm, and their faults and mine together, by such easy, tender, merciful means as thine infinite wisdom best can devise; vouchsafe to amend and redress and make us saved souls in heaven together, where we may ever live and love together with thee and thy blessed saints. O glorious Trinity, for the bitter passion of our sweet saviour. Amen.

University Sermons; The Sin of Pride; Rt Hon Chris Patten


World Book Day

To mark World Book Day 2008 on 6 March, the Bodleian Library held a one-day display featuring the Creation as recorded in three spectacular and historic manuscripts of the sacred books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the Torah, the Bible and the Qur’an.

For centuries, religion and the written word have been closely entwined and manuscripts have played a vital role in preserving and transmitting sacred knowledge. The importance and respect accorded to the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is shown in the way they were reverently copied and by the brilliance of their illumination and calligraphy, in the quality of parchment or paper on which they were written, and in their bindings. These texts were designed to be studied and read aloud to an audience of the faithful.

Judaism - The Kennicott Bible, copied in north-west Spain in 1476, is one of the treasures of the Bodleian Library. It was a chance acquisition, named after Benjamin Kennicott, biblical scholar and Radcliffe Librarian, who in 1771, when it was brought into the Library by a young man, recognized its importance and purchased it for 50 guineas.

Christianity - This manuscript is the first volume of a three-volume moralized Latin Bible produced in France in the second quarter of the 13th century. It was given to the Library by Sir Christopher Heydon in 1604; the other two volumes of the set are now in Paris and London.

Islam - This Qur’an is one of a large number of manuscripts purchased in Venice in 1817 by the Bodleian Library from the collection of the Jesuit Matteo Luigi Canonici. It was copied, probably in Cairo, in the year 766 of the Islamic era, which corresponds to 1364-5 AD.

Lesley Forbes, Keeper of Oriental Collections at the Bodleian Library said: ‘Mounting a special display for a public audience to mark World Book Day has become a tradition at the Bodleian Library. In 2008 we invite you to look at the story of the Creation as recorded in three of the Library’s particular treasures’.
Each year the Library celebrates World Book Day by exhibiting one of its great Treasures in the Divinity School, Old Bodleian Library. Past displays included: The Gutenberg Bible (2004), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,the autograph manuscripts(2005), Shakespeare's first Folio (2006), The original Wind in the Willows: The Centenary of a Children's Masterpiece (2007).


The display was held on 6 March 2008 in the Divinity School, Bodleian Library.