Vanity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
In conventional parlance, vanity is the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others. In some religious preachings, vanity is considered a form of self-idolatry, in which one rejects God for the sake of one's own image, and thereby becomes divorced from the graces of God. The stories of Lucifer and Narcissus (who gave us the term narcissism), and others, attend to a pernicious aspect of vanity.
Philosophically-speaking, vanity may refer to a broader sense of egoism and pride. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that "vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality." One of Mason Cooley's aphorisms is "Vanity well fed is benevolent. Vanity hungry is spiteful."
In early Christian teachings vanity is considered an example of pride, one of the seven deadly sins.
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