Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The Role of Pride and Sensuality in the Revolt Against the Church

Two passions in particular, pride and sensuality, foment revolt against Christian Morals and Faith.

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(Luther as he died: an example of a man steeped in pride and sensuality, which led him to revolt against the Pope and to breaking his vow of chastity.)

Pride leads man to reject any superiority in another and generates in him an appetite for preeminence and command that easily leads to a paroxysm. This paroxysm is the end towards which all disorders tend.

At its apex, pride takes on various metaphysical hues: No longer content with shaking off this or that specific superiority or hierarchical structure, the proud person desires the abolition of any and every superiority in whatever field it may exist.

Therefore, he imagines that only omnifarious and complete equality are endurable and, for that very reason, the supreme maxim of justice. Pride thus ends up engendering its own morality, at the heart of which is a metaphysical principle: The order of being requires equality, and all inequality is ontologically bad.

For what I would call “integral pride,” absolute equality is the supreme value to which everything must conform.

Sensuality is another disordered passion of decisive importance in the process of revolt against the Church. Of itself, it leads to shamelessness, inviting man to trample every law underfoot and to reject every restraint as unendurable.

Its effects are added to those of pride in order to occasion in the human mind all kinds of sophisms capable of undermining the very heart of the principle of authority.

The tendency that pride and sensuality awaken aims at abolishing all inequality, authority, and hierarchy.

Plinio Correa de Oliveira

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