Pride Month and Superbia

For Aquinas superbia – which is translated perhaps confusingly as pride in English – is a deadly sin: that is, a sin that causes the loss of sanctifying grace and leads the soul to eternal separation from God if not repented; in other words, a sin that cuts a soul off from God’s love (“sanctifying grace” means “God’s love” as far as I can tell). This possibility is the possibility of Hell. Hell is worse than Auschwitz because Auschwitz was temporary while Hell never ends. Hell is bound to final despair in a way that even Auschwitz wasn’t (read Primo Levi and Viktor Frankel if you don’t believe me). I am just trying to understand St. Thomas.

    The sin of pride is a perversion of our nature as creatures. The prideful person seeks to elevate themselves beyond their rightful place in the hierarchy of being, beyond what they are. Specifically, pride is what we call autonomy (at least in some of its uses). It is a refusal to be bound by nature (i.e. reality) or morality (i.e. reality). The sin of pride makes the self into a little absolute, a little God that defines for itself what is good, true, beautiful; it rejects all conceptions of the good, true, and beautiful that come from outside its own will. It rejects nature (i.e. reality) and moral/natural law (i.e. reality) because it sees itself as limited by this. The prideful self is unlimited in its own self-conception. Only God is unlimited. Therefore, the prideful self sees itself as at least equal to God. Thomas, I believe, interpreted the eating of the forbidden fruit in Eden in light of pride: eating of the forbidden fruit was man’s rebellion against human limits, against being a part of nature rather than standing outside of nature and controlling it according to one’s own will.

     We see this power and the sin of pride in Milton’s depiction of Satan after the fall:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n. What matter where, if I be still the same

The mind is not limited by reality (i.e. God’s Creation) or goodness (God’s grace). The job of the mind is not to conform itself with the real. The job of the will is not to conform itself with the good. In other words, the work of the soul is not to harmonize with God through attuning itself to the Creation, to God’s love; the task of the soul is to be as a god, to be itself creating. To accept anything less is unworthy of the dignity of being a soul – or an angel in the case of Lucifer. Having to conform to a reality we did not create, that was there before us, violates our autonomy. We are – thus the Satanic line of thinking, Satanic from Thomas’ point of view – creators, to refuse this power and bow down to God and nature is unworthy of our freedom:

Here at least We shall be free: th'Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in hell; Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n.

There you have the sin of pride expressed in pure form. This inordinate self-exaltation leads to a radical alienation from other living souls, for nature, for one’s own body and mind, and ultimately for God – that is, it leads to Hell.

. . .

If we move from the world of thought to the social world, we have to note that the Church always interprets nature's meaning authoritatively. If God wrote the Book of Nature, He gave the Church the exclusive authority to interpret it – according to the Church. Of course, while the Holy Spirit guides the Church, or would guide it if allowed to, we know that the Church is made of men; of finite, fallible, mortal men (and in subordinate positions, women). In fact, even in Thomas’ time the Church suffered from terrible corruption. Dante’s Hell is heavily populated with popes, cardinals, bishops, monks, and priests. And of course people in the Church change their interpretations of the Book of Nature, and disagree among themselves as to its meaning at any given time. We see disagreements today in how the Church understands homosexuality, for instance. I don’t want to delve into the question – and Thomas is well-aware of it – of how a Church populated by the All-too-human can authoritatively and on some questions even infallibly interpret nature. But I think even the most devout Catholic – as I know from conversations with a priest I once knew – admits that it requires some mental gymnastics to reconcile the horns of this dilemma.

    The Enlightenment - the source of autonomy thinking - was born in opposition to the authority - again, exercised in a way that often demeaned humanity. Get an unjust authority and people will rebel against authority itself. 

   Of course, autonomy fit perfectly industrial capitalism as it emerged during that time. The capitalist is the ideal of autonomy. 

. . .

So this is “Pride month.” "Pride Month" is a time dedicated to celebrating and advocating for the LGBTQ+ community, commemorating historical struggles, and promoting ongoing efforts for equality and acceptance. "Pride" in this context is about self-respect, affirmation of identity, visibility, representation, and resilience. It is a powerful counter to the shame and stigma that LGBTQ+ individuals have faced, promoting a message of dignity, empowerment, and solidarity. In what follows, I want to focus on the L and the G – on lesbians and gay men, on homosexuality.

    I have heard from more than one Catholic priest – including bishops – that the “pride” in “Pride Month” exemplifies superbia, the sin of pride. Traditional Catholic teaching emphasizes humility and the acknowledgment of one’s dependence on God – meaning respecting natural law. Some Catholics worry that Pride Month, by celebrating pride, might encourage an excessive focus on the self and personal identity in a way that conflicts with the virtue of humility. Humility here means conforming the mind and will to reality as interpreted by the Church: nature is Creation, and God’s love, God’s being flow into the Creation. Nature is like a book that reveals God, from a certain point of view, and the Church is the only authorized reader. The Church is the final literary critic, so to speak.

     Natural law is the set of moral principles and norms that are rooted in the Creation and thus also in human nature. They can be discovered through natural reason. The pagan can follow natural law. In Dante’s Hell, Limbo is where virtuous pagans exist without pain but without hope. Following natural law means grasping reality and the claims that reality makes on the will. It reflects the participation of rational beings in the eternal reality of God, directing them toward their ultimate good and proper ends.

     In the Thomist tradition – or the Catholic tradition, which has been dominated by Thomism – natural law dictates that human actions should align with their inherent purposes, which are discoverable through reason and reflect God's eternal law. This perspective views the natural ends of human sexuality as procreation and the unitive bond between a man and a woman. Homosexual acts, which are inherently non-procreative and lack the complementarity of male and female, are seen as deviating from these natural purposes. Consequently, such acts are considered a misuse of the gift of sexuality and a violation of the natural moral order established by the Creator. Thus, within this framework, homosexuality is viewed as contrary to natural law because it does not fulfill the natural ends of human sexuality. In acting against nature the homosexual also show contempt for the gift of reason, forcing reason to follow will rather than will follow reason. Sex is fertility in action; male and female complement each other – nature communicates that to a mind that has not been blinded by will, by sin.

   Thus for these priests – representing a faction within the Catholic Church – “Pride Month” exemplifies the sin of pride: making oneself the sole judge of nature, identity, morality; putting the self above everything else. Sexual acts are not the main issue here. Sexual acts themselves can be loving, venial, or when addiction takes over, deadly sinful. The pride comes from the elevation of the self over nature, one’s own nature, community, and God. The sex is just the background, one possible motivation among others, for this spiritual movement. The greedy capitalist who puts himself above nature, logs an ancient and irreplaceable forest for the wealth it makes possible for him, is also prideful – that is, elevates his ego, making it and not God the source of its own law. The beauty, the unreal beauty of the forest (nature) makes a claim on humanity: respect it, let it be, treasure it. But the capitalist puts his own desire for money above all other claims, or is blind to them from the outset. Pride is thus said to be part of all sin. Sin as such is just various forms of pride in this sense.

. . .

  Liberals (progressives and more traditional Lockean liberals) – inheritors of the Enlightenment – of course differ from Milton’s Satan in that they recognize one limit on their autonomy: respecting the autonomy of other autonomous creatures. Autonomy itself is the only limit on autonomy. The forest, having no autonomy, no self, is nothing but a resource that can be chopped down or preserved as an aesthetic object for tourists. It makes no claim on us. Its reality is just that of “raw material.” But the worst offense in this framework is for one person to impose their definitions of the real and the good onto others – to violate or take away their autonomy. (I am again trying to understand here, nothing more.)

     From this perspective, it is fine if an individual autonomously chooses to accept the Catholic reading of nature if that individual neither imposes that reading on others nor expresses contempt for others based on their different readings. For a liberal the Church wants to impose one authoritative reading on nature, just as it does (or did) on the Bible – just as Communist Parties also imposed a single correct interpretation on nature loosely based on Marx. It is like reading a difficult poem – Dante’s Inferno! – and then claiming one interpretation as authoritative, discounting all others. Interpreting also implies by its very nature at least some degree of autonomy. At its most radical, autonomy implies that every “reader” is free to come up with whatever reading that pleases them. Nature – and books – are like inkblots; we project our own subjectivity onto them. If nature is like an inkblot – if it is “indeterminate” with respect to our understandings of it – then it can only be an attempt of one mind-and-will to gain power over other minds-and-wills. This is the epitome of immorality from the liberal point of view.

    Thus “Pride Month” can be experienced as expressing a will to free the will from interpretations that demean homosexuals – like Thomism. Like Protestant interpretations, which in contrast to Catholicism exclude reason and nature from the discussion altogether, and just make homosexuality a breaking of God’s commandment (based on a selective reading of the Bible taken as authoritative).

. . .

   My view is that there is nothing inherently demeaning about having a homosexual orientation. I confess I didn't always think like that and it took some serious soul-searching to reach that. Plato's depiction of sublimated homo-erotic love certainly helped. But now that I understand it, I am certain of it. I have no idea why we have the sexual natures that we have.  Genes, family, culture, influences, traumas – all of the above. I don’t care. Homosexuality is a part of being human – apparently in every culture. It is thus natural, as part of the Catholic Church (including the Pope) acknowledges. If God created nature, God permitted homosexuality. There are all kinds of lustful, pornographic expressions of homosexuality just as there are of heterosexual sexuality. Neither kind of desiring has a monopoly on virtue. But it is equally possible to find genuine love and a responsible form of living together among homosexuals as it is among heterosexuals. I know that from experience. Sexual orientation is independent of loving commitment, of respectful affectionate partnership. In my reading of nature, that is godly. If God is love, then when we experience love in our natural lives we experience God in a way. If God is love, I cannot imagine God being so unloving, so hateful toward this group of people – a condemnation and shaming by category – as these Christians are.

    I can image a Thomist Catholic who in good faith believes L’s and G’s are in danger of being sinfully prideful, who genuinely cares about their souls, who believe that “only the truth can set you free” and believes that they have been graced with that truth and must speak out. I can imagine a good Catholic during the Counter-reformation who believed that burning heretics was necessary to save the souls of the heretic himself and the simple people who were threatened with damnation should they adopt the heresy. But you know the fruits by the tree. The doing evil to another human being – in a big way or small – is a bad fruit.

   I believe that nature does confront us with realities we in our autonomy are not free to ignore. The forest is an example. Children are another – an adult should never beat them (or drop bombs on them). I believe our sexuality imposes limits on our autonomy – I just wrote about those limits a couple of days ago. I think the Thomist – in this taking over Aristotle and translating him into Christianity – is right within limits.

     One of those limits is that if nature is a book, then like any great book its meaning is not univocal and one-dimensional. Any totalitarianism in interpretation violates nature. Traditionally, Christian churches have given a very weak interpretation of homosexuality. Some churches are beginning to improve on these primitive interpretations; others cling to them. And I think they have given a weak interpretation of scripture, too (I wrote something on this already). These are things well-meaning people need to be prepared to discuss, using all the tools of reason. But seeing the self as the source of all value and nature as a dead, meaningless thing that we can do with what we will (including our own nature) is an idea I cannot live with.

    I have my problems with Pride Month. We live in a narcissistic culture – a narcissism largely produced in a way by the social reality of a totalizing capitalist economy. Of course, that affects the way all people feel and think, and homosexuals are people. And given the options the Christian churches gave them, is it any wonder that homosexuals were almost forced to understand themselves in terms of liberal-enlightenment autonomy – which as I said I cannot live with for various reasons, some of which I have mentioned here. If nature is defined as it has been by the Church, then by definition your self, if you are to affirm it being homosexual, must be outside of nature. I reject the traditional Thomist reading of nature here. The Church itself has alienated homosexual people from itself and its teachings. It alone is to blame for this situation. (Just as it lost the working class during the first phase of industrialization.)

      Celebrations of promiscuity – orientation makes no difference – celebrate something that is deeply alienating. Some Pride month celebrations seem to celebrate a reading of sexuality that I cannot share – again, one that has nothing to do with homosexuality per se. Moreover, I cannot imagine identifying myself with a sexual orientation – with the least individual aspect of my being. But then, I have not been dumped on because of my sexuality as have homosexuals since the beginning of time. I don’t feel the need to stand out and have people notice me – by the way I dress, talk, act. But then I have never had to live in a closet, metaphorically speaking.

    I hope that one day all this just won’t be a thing, any more than interracial marriage is for most of us today.