pride

For Dante, the ego's corrupt form: a superiority drive that wants other selves subordinated to itself.

Named here as the inherited core of human evil that matters more than the one Eden act.

Term or model used in this packet's account of Paul, Christianity, Roman power, or church doctrine.

In Jiang's reading of Augustine, the movement away from God toward selfhood, ambition, pleasure, and one's own will.

He describes the terraces as corrective inversions: pride is humbled, wrath is blinded by smoke, gluttony starves, lust burns, and greed is forced to crawl.

The ascent can also be read as a dissipation of ego, moving from self-love in pride toward being captured by external things in greed, gluttony, and lust.

The student's pride hypothesis says pride is foundational because it prevents a person from honestly addressing faults and so underlies later moral distortions.

Jiang's response here is methodological: rather than simply naming pride the root, he tests the claim by asking whether it can causally generate sloth and the other sins.

The student's account Jiang entertains says pride can generate sloth by making a person believe natural ability removes the need for effort.

Jiang says Dante would not make pride the ultimate ground of the sins; he would make ego the basis, understood as how one perceives oneself and one's agency in the universe.

The student answer Jiang accepts says Virgil functions like an embodied inner voice that keeps Dante from collapsing the journey into prideful self-sufficiency.

Virgil names three neighbor-directed corruptions of love: seeking supremacy through another's abasement, grieving another's excellence because it threatens one's own standing, and seeking revenge for injury.