Thin souls

Augustine, of course, says that pride is the beginning of revolt and sin. A prideful soul is one that refuses to recognize that “the whole quality of the soul’s existence is from God” and therefore that it is “enlivened in mental activity and in self-consciousness by God’s presence.”

God, Augustine assumes, is within, but pride seeks what’s outside, and as the prideful soul moves “toward the external” it becomes “empty within” as it exists “less and less fully”: “To move away to what is outside is to sacrifice what is deeply inside, and to put God far away, by a distance not of space but of mental conditions.” Though I’m far from endorsing this whole picture, Augustine does give us a brillian metaphor: Prideful souls “puff up” but are ultimately distended; they seek expansion but that very pursuit of expansion contracts.

It is curious that Augustine uses “distension” here, the same word he uses to describe the experience of time, in which we are “distended” between memory and expectation.