I was trolling through threads long passed and I kept seeing a many many threads about pride. Plus, all the other threads which you can simply talk about pride...
Like
Eomer's here.
Or
Squatter's on the
Seven Deadly Sins. And then mine, which I also wanted to talk about the
Seven Heavenly Virtues, but it turned into being more about Pride.
Pride rears it's ugly head everywhere, and once you think about pride, there is automatically the connection with humility. Humble is what we should be, as humility is a virture, and pride is bad, pride is a deadly sin.
After reading through some of these though, I was struck by the discussion in
Eomer's thread on the different levels of pride, and whether all pride is necessarily a sin. There is arrogant-pride, and selfish-pride (presumably bad things), but you can have confidence-pride and pleased-pride, that is pride in yourself, your accomplishments, and goals. In order to achieve something, don't we have to have a bit of pride, and if we do the right thing shouldn't we be proud of it?
That was more of what I was thinking at the time, I don't want to create another thread about Pride, because there are plenty out there, but it did get me thinking about Humility. Of course, I don't think you can talk about one without at least thinking about the other, so feel free to add anything else to the 'pride' debates. When I did a quick search about Humility, I found
Lalwende's thread:
Humility and Heroes.
So, I do recognize the humility is definitely a noble, virtuous quality to have. However, (and I apologize in advance for my distorted, jumble mind-processing) isn't it annoying to meet someone who is just too humble! Don't we all know someone like that? Someone who is full of so much humility you think it's a fake act and you just want to try and get them to boast about something, so you can rub it in their face.
Then I wondered, are there different types of humility, as there can be different types of pride? Is too much humility a bad thing, don't you need to mix in a bit of that evil pride and have some balance?
I was trying to figure out if any of Tolkien's characters represented an annoying amount of humility, but not sure if that is possible. I thought Frodo, as he seriously does annoy me, but I wonder if that is just the fact that he does annoy me, and not necessarily because he is too humble. I think I will wait for further input however, until I get into Frodo's humility.
