Managing Emotion in Byzantium by Margaret Mullett;Susan Ashbrook Harvey; & Susan Ashbrook Harvey

Managing Emotion in Byzantium by Margaret Mullett;Susan Ashbrook Harvey; & Susan Ashbrook Harvey

Author:Margaret Mullett;Susan Ashbrook Harvey; & Susan Ashbrook Harvey [Harvey, Susan Ashbrook]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2022-08-08T00:00:00+00:00


8 An Early Christian Understanding of Pride

Robin Darling Young

DOI: 10.4324/9780203710661-8

Historians usually date the modern investigation into the emotions from the publication of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872); but over the past 145 years of their study, it has taken them until the 1990s to begin the study of feelings in the specific time-periods they study. One of the first to examine the difficulties of writing a history of an emotion and its construal in antiquity had to note how little research had investigated the emotions since Lucien Febvre’s unanswered 1941 call to Annales school historians to investigate sensibilité in the pre-modern world. But even that historian, writing in the late 1990s, did not venture far into late antiquity.1 Since the turn of the millennium, however, studies of the emotions in the post-classical world have multiplied. With this multiplication have come debates – still not settled – about how much can be known about the emotions of a very different culture, given the social construction of emotions and the tricky vocabulary for them.2

As an object of study and description, a particularly difficult emotion – if it is an emotion – is pride. As familiar as it is to students of early Christianity or late ancient philosophy, its status as a feeling is as uncertain as its negative valence seems sure. It is undeniable, for instance, that early in Christian thinking in the Latin west, pride had already been identified as the primal sin. Although the word has come to have a positive valence in contemporary English – thus, ‘black pride’, or ‘gay pride’, signifying especially from 1968 forward a positive self-image or self-regard, collectively or personally, in the wake of historical discrimination or mistreatment – the word ‘pride’ has been used much more frequently with negative connotations, as when a person harbours arrogant self-regard and conceit. It is often thought of as a state or a status assertion with which is associated a feeling, or what would be called in modern English an emotion.3

1 See the discussion in the printed version of the Gifford Lectures for 1997: R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford, 1990); see also L. Febvre, ‘La sensibilité et l’histoire: comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?’, Annales d’histoire sociale, 3 (1941), 5–20. 2 An excellent overview of the first part of the ensuing discussion can be found in B.H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, AmHR, 107.3 (2002), 821–45. See also the account of scholarly approaches to the topic in W.V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 18–22; and D. Konstan, ‘The emotions of the ancient Greeks: a cross-cultural perspective’, Psychologia, 48 (2005), 225–40. 3 For a discussion of the emerging ambivalence of the word in English, see J. Taylor, ‘Hume on the dignity of pride’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 10.1 (2012), 29–49. But usually, pride, or its Greek or Latin putative equivalent, is a problematic state for early Christians.



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