Cathedral News
Announcements for the week of August 29, 2010
From the Dean
Both the Old Testament lesson and the Gospel reading today are concerned with pride, that sin which “goeth before a fall.” The Book of Ecclesiasticus, in the collection of books we know as the Apocrypha, is very much concerned with the pride of mankind, demonstrating again and again how it is but vanity in the face of God’s eternal purposes. You can’t really get much more direct than the passage this morning: “How can he who is dust and ashes be proud? For even in life his bowels decay.” O.K. then! Much less direct, in a way, is the parable that Jesus tells when he goes to dinner at the ruler of the Pharisees. We understand the point of Jesus’ story: humility is the attitude that is most graciously rewarded by the householder who invites one to a wedding feast. We immediately conclude that God is the host of the Wedding Banquet, and we are the guests. The Epistle reading, also, is obliquely about pride, for it teaches about the right demonstration of philos, brotherly love. In order to live according to the ethic put forth in this reading, pride can have no sway.
Edwyn Clement Hoskyns, a priest in the Church of England, was Dean of Chapel at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge from 1919 to his death in 1937. In his sermons preached in that Chapel, he meditated again and again on a life of Christ-likeness and the theological understandings which supported such an existence. The following selection, on pride, is taken from Cambridge Sermons, 1938, pages 27-29.
We tend, under the influence of an evil tradition, to regard the Seven Deadly Sins as actions dependent upon an act of the will, and therefore to confine Sin to sins which are committed in direct and conscious defiance of a known and accepted moral law. This is, however, to misunderstand completely the very essence of the Christian religion. That we should so misunderstand it is not surprising, since Western moral ideas spring largely either from that moral theology which has been developed under the influence of the confessional or from that moralism which emerges from the reflections of philosophers, and in both cases a wrong action tends to be defined as culpable only when it is a willful act. For example, a modern Roman theologian opens his series of volumes on moral theology with the following definition: ‘The terms sin, transgression, iniquity, offence, and disobedience are synonymously employed by Holy Scripture to designate a willful transgression of the Law of God, or voluntary disregard of his will.’ If we omit the words ‘synonymously’, ‘voluntary’ and ‘willful, the definition might stand, but if these be included in the definition, the whole Christian conception of sin is [emptied of meaning] at the outset, and a casual glance at the Seven Deadly Sins shows this at once. Avarice, which proceeds from the desire of the possession of material things, and the attachment of the heart to such things, is not a passion which springs from the conscious will: it is part of our very being as [beings] of flesh and blood, it surges up within us. So is Anger, so is Lust, so are Pride and Envy. We do not create these things by our wills. They rise and submerge us. The conscious willful voluntary action is the least serious element, since it does but make manifest the underlying forces which course within us.
We must rid our minds of this paralyzing idea that sins are a series of forbidden actions which we can, if we will, avoid. Sin is this world, with its desires and passions, running its course till ultimately we lie dead…the material world having won its victory and itself then passing to corruption. Death is therefore the complete and adequate symbol of sin…
But we must not think of sin merely in terms of the material world. The catalogue itself forbids this. Pride, Superbia, majestically heads the list, followed by Envy. Here we are on another plane, far more subtle, and far more devastating. Pride is the capital sin, the sin which controls our minds and heads, not our bodies merely. Pride belongs to us when we become the center of the Universe, when everything revolves about us and everything is judged as it affects us, when our achievements dominate our ideas. And Envy is Pride’s younger sister, that sadness which occupies us when others intrude into that central position which we imagine to be ours. And Pride is atheism, just as Lust is barbarism; for Pride is not merely jealousy of other men, it is inevitably jealousy of God.
(Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness. Compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams. 2001. Oxford University Press).