1. If it has now somehow become clear how that which Scripture says, 'Pride is the beginning of all sin' (Sirach 10:13), is to be understood; let us also see this which the holy Apostle says: 'The root of all evils is covetousness' (1 Timothy 6:10): since the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the prophet, himself spoke also through the Apostle, and cannot be at variance with himself. We ought carefully to consider why the one wished pride to be named the beginning of all sin, the other covetousness the root of all evils. Or did Paul the apostle perhaps expound the prophetic saying, as he is wont to do? For whether you say 'the beginning of all sin' or 'the root of all evils,' you signify one and the same thing.
Moreover covetousness and pride are so far one evil, that neither can the proud man be found without covetousness, nor the covetous without pride. For indeed even the devil, in whom pride holds sovereignty, was covetous of his own power and of man's destruction; and man himself, through his appetite for the forbidden tree and his craving after the divine likeness, displayed the bent of a diseased covetousness. For from pride are born heresies, schisms, slanders, envy, wordiness, boasting, contentions, animosities, ambition, arrogance, presumption, vanity, restlessness, lying, perjury, and the rest of this kind.
But who can doubt that these also proceed from covetousness, since all who have been corrupted by all those diseases which I have named are reckoned also covetous? 2. Likewise, since covetousness makes men gluttonous, intemperate, drunken, greedy, rapacious, fornicators, adulterers, ravishers, incestuous, profligate; when can they become such without pride, without which God's precepts — by which all those evils I have set out above are forbidden — can by no means be despised? And therefore, if we wish to finish the course of our contest, let us first of all beware of covetousness and pride; not two evils, but one, from which all evil acts draw their beginning. For without pride, what sins can even be begun, since it is said:
'Pride is the beginning of all sin'? Or without covetousness, which is the root of all evils, what evils can be done, since without a root all things are reckoned either nothing or dead? Furthermore, if I cannot perpetrate any sin unless I consent to an evil delight — which is proper to covetousness — and despise God's precepts — which is the evil of pride: how does not every sin proceed from covetousness, which is the root of all evils, and from pride, which is called the beginning of all sin?