Pride at the Head of the List

Pride, superbia, holds the first place in the western list of capital vices and, in the dominant strand of the tradition, a place above the list altogether. Gregory the Great, whose reorganisation in the Moralia in Job around the year 590 produced the sevenfold scheme that later became standard, treats pride not as one of the seven but as their root and queen, from which the others proceed; the seven he enumerates are vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy or sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust, with pride presiding. Thomas Aquinas follows the same logic in the Summa Theologiae, distinguishing pride as the inordinate desire for one's own excellence from vainglory as the desire for its recognition, and treating it as the beginning of every sin because every sin prefers one's own will to God's. The fall of the angels and the fall in Eden are both read in this tradition as acts of pride.