Is Pride a Sin? Yes: Why Christians Call It the First Sin and the Root of the Rest

Yes, pride is a sin. Scripture says plainly that “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble” (James 4:6). Most Protestant Bibles never call it the first sin; Sirach, in Catholic Bibles, says “pride is the beginning of sin.” Augustine built on that verse, and Christian teachers since have traced both the devil’s fall and Adam’s to pride.

Jesus drew the clearest picture of it in two men praying in the temple. One thanked God that he was not like other men. The other stood far off, beat his breast and asked for mercy, and he was the one who went home justified. Everything Christians have said about pride since comes back to those two men.

Because it puts us where only God belongs. The pride Scripture condemns is a person’s wish to stand higher than God has placed him, owing nothing to anyone. Augustine asked, “And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation?” Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian, put it as “the appetite for excellence in excess of right reason.” He saw its weight in what it does to a person’s relation to God. Other sins turn a person away from God through ignorance, weakness or desire for something good in itself, “whereas pride denotes aversion from God simply through being unwilling to be subject to God and His rule.”

Paul aimed a single question at that attitude: “what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Pride takes credit for what was given. That is why the proud look stands first in Proverbs’ list of what God hates: “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood” (Proverbs 6:16–17). Proverbs also names where it leads: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). James and Peter both write that God “resisteth the proud,” and Peter tells every believer to “be clothed with humility” (1 Peter 5:5).

Jesus told his parable of the two men “unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others” (Luke 18:9). A Pharisee stood in the temple and prayed, “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are,” while a tax collector “would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.” Jesus said the second man went home justified, “for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted” (Luke 18:11–14).

What does the sin of pride look like?

The early monks watched for pride in themselves, and they described it plainly. Evagrius, a monk of the Egyptian desert who died in 399, wrote that the demon of pride urges the soul “not to acknowledge God’s help,” “to think it is responsible for its own success,” and to look down on fellow monks “as unintelligent because they do not all share the same opinion concerning this,” that is, about its own success. Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604, gave four marks, which Aquinas accepted on Gregory’s authority. The proud may:

• think their good comes from themselves;
• grant that it comes from God, but think they earned it;
• boast of having what they do not have;
• despise others and “wish to appear the exclusive possessors of what they have.”

No verse in Protestant Bibles says so directly, though one comes close. In listing what a bishop must be, Paul writes: “Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6). The verse ties the devil’s condemnation to the same fault. The book of Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, is plainer: “The beginning of pride is when one departeth from God, and his heart is turned away from his Maker. For pride is the beginning of sin” (Sirach 10:12–13, numbered 10:14–15 in the Douay-Rheims). Sirach belongs to the Old Testament of Catholic Bibles such as the Douay-Rheims. The King James translators printed it among the Apocrypha, and the Westminster Confession, the confession of Presbyterian churches, holds that those books “are no part of the canon of the Scripture.”

Augustine built on Sirach in The City of God. Asking how Adam and Eve came to disobey, he answered: “what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For pride is the beginning of sin.” He judged that “Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted.”

The devil fell before Adam did. Christians have long read Isaiah’s taunt of the king of Babylon, “I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:14), and Ezekiel’s lament over the king of Tyre, “Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty” (Ezekiel 28:17), as pictures of a fall through pride. John Cassian, a monk who brought the desert teaching to the West, wrote that Lucifer “was cast out of heaven for no other sin but this”; his rank and the history of that reading are told in whether Lucifer was an archangel.

Did Adam and Eve sin through pride?

The serpent’s promise was a promise of rank: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Eve saw that the tree was “a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Genesis 3:5–6). Paul names the act itself disobedience: “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). The churches agree that the first sin was disobedience. They put different things at its root.

• Catholic. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says man “let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of” (397). It adds: “In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him” (398). Aquinas called the first sin pride outright: man coveted “some spiritual good above his measure: and this pertains to pride.”
• Orthodox. The Orthodox Church in America teaches that man “disobeyed God’s command through pride, jealousy and the lack of humble gratitude to God by yielding to the temptation of Satan.”
• Reformed. John Calvin granted that Augustine “is not far from the mark” in calling pride the beginning of all evil, but he placed unbelief first: “infidelity was at the root of the revolt. From infidelity, again, sprang ambition and pride, together with ingratitude.” By infidelity he meant refusing to believe God’s word. The Westminster Confession states only the act: “Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptation of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit” (6.1).

Is pride the same as original sin?

No. In Catholic teaching the phrase “original sin” names the condition that every person inherits from Adam, not the act Adam committed. The Catechism calls original sin “a state and not an act,” a sin that is contracted, not committed (404). The Westminster Confession teaches that the guilt of the first sin was imputed to Adam’s descendants, with “the same death in sin, and corrupted nature” (6.3). On Augustine’s reading, pride was the root of that first act; original sin is what everyone born since has received from it.

Gregory the Great said so in his commentary on Job, the Moralia: “pride is the root of all evil.” Cassian thought no other fault “so destructive of all virtues,” because other faults attack one virtue at a time and pride lays waste to all of them. The Orthodox tradition, in the words of the Orthodox Church in America, has named pride “the cause of all sin.”

Aquinas added a limit. Pride is “the beginning of all sin,” he wrote, “not as though every sin originated from pride, but because any kind of sin is naturally liable to arise from pride.” A person can sin from weakness or ignorance without any pride at all. What pride does is supply the refusal of God that lies behind the worst sins, and Aquinas quoted an old gloss on the Psalms that calls it the sin “which is the last in those who return to God, and the first in those who withdraw from God.”

Yes. It heads the list the Catechism gives of the capital sins, the usual name for the seven deadly sins in Catholic teaching: “They are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia” (Catechism 1866). They are called capital “because they engender other sins, other vices.” The list is older than Gregory the Great, and pride has not always held the same place in it.

Who	Where pride stands	Sins listed
Evagrius (died 399)	Eighth and last; it leads to “the very worst fall”	Eight
John Cassian (died about 435)	Last on the list, first in origin	Eight
Gregory the Great (pope 590–604)	The “queen of sins” and root of the seven	Seven, with pride above them
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1866	First	Seven

Evagrius named eight kinds of tempting thoughts, beginning with gluttony and ending “seventh, that of vainglory; eighth, that of pride.” Cassian kept the eight and wrote that pride, “although it is the latest in our conflict with our faults and stands last on the list, yet in beginning and in the order of time is the first.” Gregory took pride out of the count and set it over the others: “when pride, the queen of sins, has fully possessed a conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins.” Those seven were “vain glory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust.” The Catechism’s list counts pride among the seven and leaves out vainglory, and it names “sloth or acedia” where Gregory had melancholy; Cassian had counted dejection and accidie, “heaviness or weariness of heart,” as two faults. Vainglory is a different sin from pride: Aquinas wrote that “pride covets excellence inordinately: while vainglory covets the outward show of excellence.” How the two differ is set out in is vanity a sin.

Is pride a mortal sin?

In Catholic teaching it can be. Aquinas held that “pride is, of its genus, a mortal sin,” because refusing to be subject to God turns a person away from him. He added that “certain motions of pride are venial sins, when reason does not consent to them”: a flash of self-regard that a person catches and refuses is not the same as a settled contempt of God. Reformed churches do not sort sins into mortal and venial. The Westminster Confession teaches that “there is no sin so small, but it deserves damnation; so there is no sin so great, that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent” (15.4).

Aquinas thought so, in one sense: “pride is the most grievous of sins by its genus,” because its very nature is to turn away from God. It is hard to avoid, he added, because it hides, “since it takes occasion even from good deeds.” Evagrius warned that pride “conducts the soul to the very worst fall,” and Cassian that it chiefly tries “those who are perfect.” A person can be proud of fasting, praying or giving without noticing. Aquinas also gave the way out. Once pride is recognized, he wrote, it “is easily avoided, both by considering one’s own infirmity” and “by considering God’s greatness.”

No. The word has more than one meaning, and Scripture speaks well of a certain gladness in what is good. Paul tells each believer to “prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another” (Galatians 6:4): gladness in work well done is no sin when it does not depend on doing better than someone else. He told the Corinthians, “great is my glorying of you” (2 Corinthians 7:4), which is close to what people now mean by being proud of someone.

Pride becomes sin when a person thinks “more highly than he ought to think” (Romans 12:3), forgets that what he has was given, or looks down on others. Humility does not ask anyone to despise himself. The Orthodox Church in America teaches that humility “does not mean considering oneself as the most vile and loathsome of creatures,” and that “Genuine humility means to see reality as it actually is in God.”

By humility, which in the Orthodox tradition has often been called the “mother of all virtues.” Paul tells the Philippians: “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” He points them to Christ, “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant… he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:3, 6–8).

Augustine saw a paradox in this: “humility, by making us subject to God, exalts us,” while pride, refusing that subjection, falls. James promises help with the struggle: “But he giveth more grace” (James 4:6). Many Christians ask for that grace in prayers for humility. The shortest of them is still the tax collector’s, and the man who first prayed it went home justified: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

---

• 20 Bible verses about pride
• Are the seven deadly sins in the Bible?
• Was the forbidden fruit an apple?
• What was Lucifer’s job in heaven before he fell?
• What is sin? The Bible’s definition