The concept of domination is baked into pride’s very bones. Its marrow consists of systemic hierarchy. For pride has the root pro- for “put oneself forward, before, in front of.”
The word has existed in English a long while. We find it in some of the earliest surviving sermons in Old English, written in poetic prose by a tenth-century CE Benedictine monk named Ælfric (said “AL-fritch”). The first Oxford English Dictionary (OED) example for pride is from the 12th sermon in Ælfric’s second series of Catholic Homilies, a Sunday sermon in Midlent. It’s in Benjamin Thorpe’s 19th-century collection, with thanks also to Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller, and others, for their Old English dictionary that helps translators.
From the OED:
OE [Old English]: Of ydelum gylpe bið acenned pryte and æbilignys.
Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: 2nd Series (Cambridge MS. Gg.3.28) xii. 125
For those interested in official titles, it reads: “Dominica in Media Quadragesime” and “Secunda Sententia de hoc ipso” (“Sunday in Middle Lent” and “Second Discourse on the Same”).
A larger excerpt reads:
Of ydelum gylpe bið acenned pryte and æbilignys, ungeðwærnys and hywung, and lustfullung leasre herunge. Se eahteoða leahter is modignys. I have translated this as: “Of vanity’s emptiness are born pride and indignation, division and hypocrisy, and a lust for false praise. The eighth [capital] sin is pride.”
Here is the OED’s first definition for pride: “A high, esp. an excessively high, opinion of one’s own worth or importance which gives rise to a feeling or attitude of superiority over others; inordinate self-esteem.”
What does this concept of pride mean for those not in dominant positions in a society? I ask this, mindful of Rilke: “Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen,” or “Live the questions now.”
As articulated in 1960 by theologian Valerie Saiving Goldstein in the Journal of Religion article “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” traditionally, a male-centric Christianity has defined sin around the male experience of “pride, will-to-power, exploitation, self-assertiveness, and the treatment of others as objects.” Given this historically masculine framing of pride, the traditional, masculine antidote to such pride, preached for centuries, has been “selflessness.”
Growing up, each time I heard a sermon admonishing me to be “selfless,” I would think, as a conscientious student and as a kid struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia, childhood trauma, and a deep religious nature, “How can I be selfless if I don’t have a self?” It boggled my mind.
This definition of pride, based as it is on a limited framing of the human experience, has had and has an unhealthy influence, as expressed in Receiving Woman: Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine by Jungian psychoanalyst Ann Ulanov: “For a woman sin is not pride, an exaltation of self, but a refusal to claim the self God has given” (134; see also 44-45, 164, 173).
Ulanov adds, in conversation with Goldstein’s ideas: “Women refuse this self by hiding behind self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy, . . . avoiding the self that they are, by always assuming that some greater authority knows better, be that father, mother, husband, even, in this case, theologians’ interpretation of sin” (134).
Boom. As a woman who grew up in the South in Evangelical churches, this wisdom is good medicine.
When I was translating Brother Lawrence’s early Modern French in his Practice of the Presence, I found that in traditional translations of his wisdom, an unhealthy binary also appears in rendering the amour-propre (“self-love”) as a strictly negative “arrogance, pride.” These traditional renderings of the friar’s “[L’présence] est détruire l’amour-propre” result unhelpfully in this kind of traditional translation: “The practice of the presence can help you destroy self-love [amour-propre].”
The amour-propre translated “self-love” here is, however, a Janus word, or, better put, it’s expansive and polysemic, a concept open to much discussion by the mathematician and inventor Blaise Pascal, the philosopher and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others. As an 18th-century edition of Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française points out, amour-propre is a “legitimate and necessary sentiment” that might be “carried to excess.”
Returning to Ulanov, we consider that amour-propre / self-love translated as “pride” has one meaning for those at the top of society and quite another for those at the bottom of oppressive patriarchal systems. Repeating Ulanov: “For a woman, sin is not pride, the exaltation of the self, but a refusal to claim the self God has given” (134).
Past translations of Brother Lawrence are most often by those positioned nearer the center of the Appendix A wheel on the Ontario Centre for Innovation website. I have experiences further from the center of that wheel and/or below the line of domination on Kathryn Pauly Morgan’s graph on which the wheel is based; thus, reading in a translation that a prayer might “help me destroy self-love” feels reductive, representative of a dominant perspective that in its binary vision omits my experiences and those of many people I know, and is toxic and harmful.
Through my brown womanly eyes, I see differently. I was a kid who could hardly read owing to dyslexia, undiagnosed. Somehow I persevered during that stress and feeling stupid that characterized my childhood, and through grace and the help of kind teachers, was fortunate to earn scholarships to attend college, even after my father shouted, “You can’t go! I can’t afford it!”
Like so many, as I know from being a teacher for over twenty years and fortunate to be in conversation with countless students, I am someone who has also worked and healed her way to self-compassion and personhood, after societal and familial trauma. After childhood and young adulthood wounding of what Erich Neumann calls the self-ego axis, I had to build a small ego before I could “lose” it, and during that process I knew very painfully intense, self-loathing-informed self-consciousness. To my mind, then, and with the help of many historical dictionaries and books from the friar’s era, amour-propre translates in this specific context as “self-preoccupation.”
Thus, when Brother Lawrence writes that practicing the presence prayer can “détruire l’amour-propre,” I translate this holistically, in view of all the friar teaches that supports self-compassion and a modern understanding of a healthy ego and well-being. This translation comes closer to the mystical original and is more universally helpful. My 2022 translation reads like this: “This practice of the presence dissolves [détruire] gradually, and almost unconsciously, the self-preoccupation [l’amour-propre] that is such a part of human nature” (48).
This phrasing is truer psychologically to what Brother Lawrence means, is representative of what this practice of prayer actually does, as I know from decades of experience, and is more useful to more readers. By choosing “dissolves,” my translation honors the core of détruire, from de- “un-” and struō “I build” or “un-build.” It is a kind of dismantling, where the small ego no longer reigns, but our true nature, or self, call it love, does.
We remember, too, that in conversations with Joseph of Beaufort and elsewhere, Brother Lawrence emphasizes that we “work gently” (47-48), practicing the presence as often as we can, and with love, to deepen our intimacy with God as our primary relationship so that we are then more in touch with our own self, self-compassion, and others in a mature way, instead of being overly preoccupied with others’ opinions of us, which can be part of an unhealthy small ego hoping to “win” another’s superficial approval or some kind of status, as Joseph shares in the Fourth Conversation dated November 25, 1667 [italics by the author]:
Brother Lawrence talked to me with great enthusiasm and openness about his way of approaching God. . . . The refining process that develops our soul does not depend on changing our works, but on doing for God what we would ordinarily do for ourselves. It’s a pity to see how many people get attached to doing certain works very superficially, to gain something or someone’s good opinion, always confusing the means for the end. He found no better way of going to God than by the ordinary tasks that were prescribed to him by obedience, disentangling these as much as he could from all self-interest and concern for others’ opinions, and doing all work for the simple love of God” (133-134).
Again, we remember amour-propre’s positive meanings: “self-esteem, self-respect, self-love,” and how building self-esteem often first involves unbuilding or, as Internal Family Systems describes it, “unburdening” our selves of their unhealthy self-narratives. We also recall that in Letter 2, the wise friar Brother Lawrence chooses l’amour-propre to name the practice of the presence prayer “un heureux amour-propre,” “a happy self-love” (72).
This passage deserves a closer look. In the French we read, “Je sais que quelques-uns traitent d’oisiveté, de tromperie et d’amour-propre cet état; j’avoue que c’est une sainte oisiveté et un heureux amour-propre.”
“I understand some call this state idleness, self-deception, and self-absorption. I know from experience it is a sacred idleness, and a happy self-love” (72).
For modern meditations on healthy self-love, I recommend the work of the Center for Action and Contemplation, for example here in the Daily Meditations, “Your True Self Is Love.”