Ambition

“Ambition” doesn’t appear in the Geneva Bible, but by William Casey King’s count ( Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue ) it appears seventy-six times in the notes to that Bible. Almost all of the references are negative. In his NYRB review of King’s book, David Bromwich summarizes: “It was by ambition that Adam fell; and the argument goes both ways: absence of ambition may be a sign of grace. In the Geneva commentary, a proof of the purity of the heart of Jesus is said to be that, in curing the leper (Mark 1:44), ‘He was not mooued with ambition, but with the onely desire desire of his Fathers glory, and loue towardes the poore sinners.’” For others in the Renaissance and Reformation, ambition was not only a sin. It was a sickness.

By the 18th century, ambition had transformed itself into a virtue, but King notes that the shift started earlier:

“Cortes, Pizarro, and other self-made men of the New World were regarded by some contemporaries as guilty of insolence and overreaching. Yet the scale of their conquest and plunder conferred on them an ennobling stature that softened the roughness of their ascent.”

Others recognized the rising reputation of ambition and sent out cautions. Bacon saw that ambition could make men slaves of the very power they aspired to gain. Montaigne recognized that ambition is amplified by the gaze and approval of others, so that it needs constantly to be distracted by outward things. Shakespeare’s Macbeth captures the “vaulting” character of ambition. As Bromwich puts it, for Macbeth, “ambition” is “a name for a force that wants to fill a void that nothing can fill.”

Contemporary Christians who advocate ambition should take some notice of the cautions of earlier generations.