Vainglory

The Forgotten Vice

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467442091
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Julia Roberts on the red carpet at the Oscars. Lady Gaga singing "Applause" to worshipful fans at one of her sold-out concerts. And you and me in our Sunday best in the front row at church. What do we have in common?Chances are, says Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, that we all suffer from vainglory -- a keen desire for attention and approval. Although contemporary culture has largely forgotten about vainglory, it was on the original list of seven capital vices and is perhaps more dangerous than ever today.In Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice DeYoung tells the story of this vice, moving from its ancient origins to its modern expressions. She defines vainglory, gives examples from popular culture, explores motivational sources, and discusses other vices associated with it such as hypocrisy and boasting. After exposing the many ways in which vainglory can rear its ugly head, she explores personal spiritual practices that can help us resist it and community practices that can help us handle glory well.

Chapter 1

Glory, Goodness, and Getting Attention

Glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow.
[Gloria virtutem tanquam umbra sequitur.]

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations

Augustine’s Confessions is a classic story in which he confesses his own sin and professes God’s faithfulness. Although I’d assigned the book in my classes for years, not until I started researching vainglory did I register how strong and recurrent a theme this vice is in Augustine’s life. Augustine struggled with vainglory in every single form I will outline in this chapter. Reflecting on his struggle, I realized how common it is. To tell Augustine’s story of vainglory is to tell our own.

Having a name for a vice is like having a medical diagnosis. It gives us a clearer idea of what we’re facing, helps us disentangle surface symptoms from root causes, and points to remedies or therapies that are likely to be most effective. We’ve already seen vainglory’s embarrassingly familiar face — on Facebook and in the front pews. While the Christian tradition offers us a name for and a definition of this vice, Augustine gives it a personal portrait and a narrative. With the help of this wisdom from the past, in the next two chapters I’ll translate this source of temptation and trouble for our time.

The Confessions opens with these words:

Great are you, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is your power and your infinite wisdom. Human beings, as but a little part of your creation, would praise you; human beings who bear with them their mortality, the witness of their sin, the witness that you resist the proud. Yet they would praise you; they, who are but a part of your creation. You wake us to delight in your praise; for you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you.1

Like Augustine, we’ll focus first on the greatness of God and the goodness of his creation as worthy of glory. In this chapter we’ll ask, What is glory and when is it good? Then, in the next chapter, we’ll look at the ways sin spoils glory by severing right relationships between goodness and glory. That is, we’ll explore what makes glory vain. We’ll work in this order because vices always name good things gone wrong. We can understand sin’s damage more clearly if we look first at how good God created things to be.

Good Glory?

If you are a Christian today, when you hear the term “glory,” you may well assume that glory is something that only God can rightly have.2 That means that any glory human beings could seek or have as their own is, by definition, disordered. And Scripture does speak clearly about glory belonging to God. In Psalm 19 the poet writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1); the great hymns recorded in Revelation proclaim God’s glory (Rev. 19:1, 7); Christ himself directs his disciples to do their good deeds for the glory of God the Father (Matt. 5:16; John 15:8), and claims that in his glory the Father is glorified (John 13:31). In fact, almost all positive references to glory in Scripture are to God’s glory. Human beings, on the other hand, are warned, condemned, and punished for glory-­seeking, from the Old Testament kings and the ostentatiously rich admonished by the prophets to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day and the false apostles trying to outdo Paul in the New Testament.

Contemporary Christians who doubt whether glory can be good for us are in distinguished company. It turns out that there are lots of thinkers in the Christian tradition who argue about which sorts of things are good for us. Their arguments range over all the so-­called goods that are the objects of the seven capital vices, not just glory. For example, in disputes over the nature of greed, some early Christian thinkers thought that money could be used well without gradually corrupting our desires, while others believed that Christians should aspire to be completely detached from worldly possessions. John Cassian, an early spiritual writer (c. 360-435 a.d.) who studied spiritual discipline with the Desert Fathers, instructs monks to give up ownership of every last penny, lest their renunciation of worldly values be incomplete. His worry? Lingering desires for possessions leave a root from which serious spiritual problems can grow, such as dejection over one’s vocation and chronic problems with wrath.3 The stories of the Desert Fathers — the spiritual leaders of ascetic communities in the wildernesses of fourth-­century Egypt — recall one monk who even gave away his Bible, reasoning that if the Bible commanded the rich young ruler to “give all he had to the poor and follow [Christ],” then the book giving him that instruction was itself included in “all he had.”4 Augustine, on the other hand, was more sanguine about the possession of wealth. He warned about excess but did not condemn owning private property altogether.5

Looking back in the tradition, we find similar disputes about the vice of wrath. Could Christians ever be angry in the right way for the right things (e.g., injustice), or should they leave vengeance only for the Lord? Cassian follows his teacher Evagrius (345-399 a.d.) in completely prohibiting anger at another human being because of its disruptive influence on prayer.6 Theologian Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274 a.d.) takes a more moderate position, arguing that anger is an emotion that can be used well or badly, and in some cases gives us the energy needed to right a wrong. And then there’s the centuries-­long argument among celibate monks and theologians about whether sexual pleasure in marriage is good, or whether marital intercourse is permitted only as a necessary evil, and its pleasure regarded as a “remedy for concupiscence,” tinted by shame.7 As in the case of glory, most of the controversy revolved around how to most faithfully interpret scriptural teachings about what is good for human beings and when and why.

So, can glory ever be good for humans?

Here’s where definitions can help. We need to note that “glory,” as it is used in the tradition’s discussion, often meant something much less theologically loaded than the term Christians today use most frequently in worship or prayer. Glory, as Aquinas defines it, simply means “goodness that is displayed.” The annuals in my front yard bloom in profusion where my family and neighbors can see them; they are meant to be a lovely display. Even turning in a paper to your college professor might count as displaying your goodness to others (if it’s a well-­crafted paper, that is!). And if your professor uses your paper as a model for other students to emulate, she is displaying its goodness for still another audience.

What would it look like to accept Aquinas’s description of glory as goodness that is made “apparent and manifest in its splendor”?8 This description simply means that when people notice something good and recognize its attractiveness or desirability, they typically express approval and praise. The neighbors enjoy looking at my flowerbed of bright purple impatiens and remark to me how much they appreciate their beauty. The student’s paper earns an A and a commendatory note on the back page from his professor.

I’ve begun with these examples to show that on this definition, the goodness in question does not have to be moral goodness. It can be anything that is good or that we perceive as good. The clearer and more manifest the goodness is, and the greater the goodness is, the more recognition and approval it typically elicits — as when your YouTube video goes viral and earns your garage band’s new song vastly more “likes” than “dislikes.” You can show your own goodness deliberately or without intending to do so, or others can call attention to it. Even if an artist is skeptical about the success of her latest creation, a gallery owner can recognize its genius and put it on display. In the right context, almost anything good created by God or made by us can attract notice. Its glory testifies to and affirms the goodness of the world God created, and of our own creative abilities when they imitate his. In short, if anything good is shown and known, we’ve got a case of glory.

Human goodness, too, extends beyond the realm of the moral. If we are thinking only about shows of moral or spiritual goodness, we could narrow the meaning of “glory seeking” to taking credit for our virtuous actions instead of giving credit to God and his grace and power. This is certainly one of the types of vainglory that Christians should be concerned about. But thinkers in the tradition meant something broader than this by “glory.”

So any display of genuine goodness is a case of glory — whether human effort helped produce it or not. A glorious sunset over Lake Michigan is a palette of beautiful colors spread across the sky — evidence of beauty and goodness in the created world that we can see and appreciate. A virtuoso performance of Brahms’ first piano concerto is also something that holds our attention and draws our applause, and rightly so. When novelist Anne Lamott writes wonderingly of her sleeping newborn son, “His hands are like little stars,” his precious body, too, counts as a case of something glorious.9 The conversation about glory in the Christian tradition starts with the display of all and any types of goodness, even the goodness of inanimate objects like sunsets, and then narrows to cases of attention given to human goodness generally, like a beautiful musical performance, and finally focuses on instances of human virtue or moral goodness as even more specific cases.

If glory means something good being put on display for others, then glory and the concept of beauty, especially visible attractiveness, are closely linked.10 Both glory and beauty apply to a wide range of goods, moral and natural, from intentional actions to physical objects. Both “glory” and “beauty” evoke the idea of being something that draws our notice and appreciation. Similarly, in the moral life, we are attracted to certain exemplars — people whose lives display goodness that we admire and find attractive.

Aquinas uses the term “clarity” to explain how glory is goodness made manifest, and he is quick to point out that “glory” and “witness” are closely related. Bearing witness (e.g., to the gospel) is itself a case of making some good clearly kn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Glory, Goodness, and Getting Attention
• 2. Varieties of Vainglory
• 3. Vainglory’s Roots: Pride and Fear
• 4. Honesty Required: Hypocrisy and Habituation
• 5. Making a Mockery of Magnificent Virtue
• 6. Practices of Resistance, Places of Encouragement
• 7. Sharing the Light: Grace, Formation, and Community
• Epilogue
• Brief Suggestions for Further Reading
• Notes
• Index