Quote of the Day: It goes with some of the discussion we’ve been having in the comment section of A Satan Complex, but almost anything from Augustine is good enough to have its own post, and this is no exception.
It was in secret that the first human beings began to be evil; and the result was that they slipped into open disobedience. For they would not have arrived at the evil act if an evil will had not preceded it. Now could anything but pride have been the start of the evil will? For “pride is the start of every kind of sin” (Ecclesiasticus 10: 13). And what is pride except a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation? . . . [However], by aiming at more, a man is diminished, when he elects to be self-sufficient and defects from the one who is really sufficient for him. . . . This then is the original evil: man regards himself as his own light, and turns away from that light which would make himself a light if he would set his heart on it.
— St. Augustine, The City of God, 14. 13.