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Sirach identifies pride as the cause of sin that leads to ruin. The Christian theologian Augustine echoes this in the City of God, showing how he used Sirach's wisdom tradition as an authoritative source for teaching.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Sirach 10:13
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
Deuterocanon
11 For when a man is dead, he will inherit maggots, vermin, and worms. 12 It is the beginning of pride when a man departs from the Lord. His heart has departed from him who made him. 13 For the beginning of pride is sin. He who keeps it will pour out abomination. For this cause the Lord brought upon them strange calamities and utterly overthrew them. 14 The Lord cast down the thrones of rulers and set the lowly in their place. 15 The Lord plucked up the roots of nations and planted the lowly in their place.
Date: 195–180 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Augustine, City of God 14.13
On the City of God Against the Pagans
Early Christian
Our first parents fell into open disobedience because they were already secretly corrupted; for the evil act would never have been done if an evil will had not preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For “pride is the beginning of sin.” And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cling as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction. And it does so when it falls away from that unchangeable good which ought to satisfy it more than itself.
Date: 426 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Within early Christianity, the Letter of Barnabas echoes Sirach 5:12–14 about the danger of a double tongue, as well as the warning in Sirach 4:31 against an ungenerous attitude (Barnabas 19:7–9). Origen (d. 254 ce) quotes Ben Sira as scriptural when commenting on several Old Testament passages (Genesis 12:5; Joshua 15:6; Jeremiah 16:6). Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 CE) quotes about eighty Sirach verses, while John Chrysostom (d. 407 CE) includes about three hundred citations from the book. Augustine (d. 430 CE) not only cites Sirach about 300x, but also preached sermons on Sirach passages. Rabanus Maurus (d. 856 CE), abbot of Fulda in Germany, composed the earliest surviving Latin commentary on Sirach ..."
Jeremy Corley, “Sirach,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Apocrypha, ed. Gerbern S. Oegema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 284–305.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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