Vanity

The Seba library treats Vanity in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Richard Sorabji, Pascal, Blaise, Edinger, Edward F.).

In the library 9 passages

Thoughts of lust and thoughts of vanity can be conjured up to defeat each other. But vanity is particularly difficult to defeat. If you have defeated the other seven thoughts, you are likely to have thoughts of vanity.

Sorabji, following Evagrius, argues that vanity occupies a uniquely resistant position among the eight bad thoughts because it is self-reinforcing and persists even after all other passions are conquered.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis

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Vanity is so firmly anchored in man’s heart that a soldier, a rough, a cook or a porter will boast and exp

Pascal asserts that vanity is a universal and ineradicable condition of fallen human nature, traversing all social ranks without exception.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670thesis

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Vanity of vanities, all is vanity except to love God and serve Him. This is the highest wisdom. It is vanity therefore to seek after riches which must perish and to trust in them.

Edinger cites Thomas à Kempis to frame vanity as the complete category of worldly striving — riches, ambition, pleasure, long life — against which the imitation of Christ (and, by extension, Jung’s psychological individuation) is the only alternative.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis

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The main difference I see between it and vanity is that vanity, as in the example of Evagrius’ fund-raising monk, always involves thoughts about the admiration of other people. Pride is in a way more sinister because it does not.

Sorabji draws a precise conceptual distinction between vanity and pride: vanity is constitutively relational, requiring the gaze of others, whereas pride is a more inward and theologically graver turning away from God.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis

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For I had loved vanity, and sought after leasing. And Thou, O Lord, hadst already magnified Thy Holy One, raising Him from the dead.

Augustine confesses vanity as the defining quality of his pre-conversion soul, embedding the term in a personal narrative of transformation from illusion to divine truth.

Augustine, Confessions, 397supporting

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I could easily have treated this discourse in this kind of order: show the vanity of all kinds of conditions, show the vanity of ordinary lives, and then the vanity of philosophers’ lives, whether sceptical or Stoic.

Pascal reveals his architectonic intention to demonstrate vanity as the organizing principle of all human conditions — popular, philosophical, and religious alike — underscoring its structural rather than merely moral function in his thought.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670supporting

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vanity of vanities! But all is not vanity; my fond gratitude for my friends and above all for you, Madame, is not vanity.

Auerbach records Diderot’s ironic citation of the Qohelet formula, demonstrating how Enlightenment secular culture appropriated and partially deflated the theological weight of vanity while preserving its rhetorical force.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting

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The senex emblem of the skull signifies that every complex can be envisioned from its death aspect, its ultimate psychic core where all flesh of dynamics and appearances is stripped away.

Hillman’s senex perspective implicitly invokes the vanitas tradition — the skull as memento mori stripping away illusion — though vanity is not named directly, positioning the archetype as a psychological counterweight to vain self-presentation.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015aside

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