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The discussion about conformity of wills in the preceding chapters overlooks several challenges raised by the observation of a simple fact: the wills of the persons who surround us are already formed. This means that, to be friends with other people, who will be different things to me, either they must change their will or I must. If we leave out the first option, friendship with other people would (at least sometimes) require me to adapt my will to theirs. Thus, the condition of conformity of wills seems to require one to abandon one's own judgement in order to secure the good of friendship. It also remains unclear what the condition of conformity of wills requires from individuals prior to the actual constitution of their ties of friendship. This chapter shows that the thoughts above, if conceived as challenges to Aquinas's position, arise from a deficient understanding of his censure of people's unwillingness to join wills with others. It traces the motivational background of attitudes that instantiate this kind of unwillingness. The route chosen will take us to the notion of vainglory and — with special emphasis — to superbia, roughly translated as arrogance or unreasonable pride.

This chapter examines Thomas Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, arguing that, to confront challenges posed by pride, Hobbes must cultivate the contrary virtues of modesty and humility. Yet, in a stable commonwealth, these virtues are hard to cultivate, as an analysis of Hobbes’ “law of honor” demonstrates. To mitigate these difficulties, Hobbes deploys a theology of divine omnipotence drawn from the book of Job. As Hobbes’ investment in Job demonstrates, his claims for the power of human artifice, and the possibilities of human mastery, are more modest than we have been taught to expect.

The chapter opens by presenting the Dominican Melchor Cano as an antagonist who criticized Ignatius Loyola for his vanity. Ignatius's awareness of that fault created a quandary for him late in life when he acceded to requests to narrate God's activity as he had discerned it over the course of his lifetime. He resolved that quandary by seeing the narrative as a mirror of vainglory valuable for all Jesuits. The chapter explores the reasons for the halting progress of the narration and its eventual completion to the satisfaction of Ignatius just before his death in 1556. Some years later, the Jesuit Superior-General Francisco de Borja (1510-72) made the decision to suppress the text of Ignatius's Acts and substitute for it a biography of Ignatius written by Pedro de Ribadeneira (1526-1611). Ribadeneira's biography presented a sanitized Ignatius more palatable to Church authorities intent on countering the Reformation.

The chapter beings by analyzing Ignatius's account of his foolhardy defense of Pamplona as exemplary vainglory on his part. It then briefly summarizes the scriptural, patristic, and medieval ideas on vainglory as a principal fault of human nature. In his Acts, Ignatius emphasized the ways that he practiced vainglory during his recovery from his wounds in battle, his asceticism, his confrontation with the “Moor,” and his vigil at Montserrat. The chapter argues that Ignatius's account of his experience along the Cardoner River has subtle resonances of the myth of Narcissus. The chapter then follows his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, his initial success in ministry and begging, and his stepping out of the Lord's footsteps on the Mount of the Ascension. The chapter concludes with analysis of John Cassian and Ignatius as strange bedfellows and of Freud's observations regarding narcissism as a clinical ailment.

The personification of Fama-Renown was invented in the Middle Ages, and its first known description is found in Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione. Actually, instead of Fama Boccaccio talks of Worldly Glory, a figure that embodies a negative conception of human glory which had already been developed in antiquity by authors like Cicero in the Somnium Scipionis and Boethius. This interpretation was then reformulated by Christian writers like Augustine, in a way that contrasted the vain aspiration to glory (Vainglory, a typical human ambition) with true glory, an exclusive right of God. Petrarch, who dedicated a long series of reflections to the subject of glory, also introduced an elusive personification of Fama into his Triumphus Fame. He describes a ruler who celebrates an ephemeral triumph, bestowing on illustrious men a glory destined to be erased by Time: true eternity is reserved for the divine sphere.

Chapter 1 traces the political views recorded in Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert (1650) and Gondibert (1651). At this time, Davenant loosened his ties with royalism, and imagined a more flexible and artificial form of sovereignty. This view was informed by Tacitism, especially by Lipsius, but the chapter particularly maps out the common ground between Davenant and Hobbes, who both attest to reading each others’ work at this time. The chapter notes Davenant’s views on religion (described by John Aubrey as ‘ingeniose Quakerisme’), on vainglory and the psychological causes of conflict, and on sovereignty, which Davenant founded on force (an argument current in the Engagement controversy), and on the power of poetry to constrain the imagination. Although Gondibert itself peters out inconclusively, the chapter concludes by highlighting its imaginative afterlife among satirists, including John Denham and Andrew Marvell.