Ambition
Ambition
+ Man was created in the image and likeness of God, and God is unlimited; therefore, man—although he is limited—carries within himself a longing for the unlimited.
Hence came his longing for immortality and eternal life. Hence also came his longing for perfection, and because of this, feelings of ambition exist among people.
The idle person is not in the image of God. But the person who has the divine image, as the Apostle Cyril says:
“Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward.”
This is a spiritual ambition, in which man strives toward spiritual perfection. And before his complete ideals, he sees everything he has reached, no matter how lofty, as if it were nothing, so he forgets it and reaches forward.
Hence arose the humility of the saints, their labor in spiritual struggle, and hence also arose growth in the life of the spirit.
All this ambition is acceptable, required, and spiritual, and is considered a form of virtue, and no one objects to it.
However, there is ambition in material things.
Such as the ambition of the foolish rich man who said, “I will enlarge my barns and build greater ones than them, and I will say to myself, ‘You have many good things for many years.’”
What, then, are the defects of material ambition?
1- The first defect is the attachment of the heart to material things, an attachment that possesses one’s feelings and time, and kills every other spiritual desire.
2- The second defect is that a person enters into competitions that cause him to lose his love for others, and tempt him to build his own glory upon the ruins of people and upon clashing with them and destroying them. Like one who aspires to be the first or the president, and therefore works to get rid of all his competitors.
3- The third defect is that ambition turns into a kind of covetousness or greed that is never satisfied, no matter how much one takes or gains.
4- The fourth is that the means used to achieve ambition is a wrong or unspiritual means, by which a person destroys some of his ideals and spirituality in order to reach his goal.
5- Ambition may extend to authority, and the person becomes a tyrant who destroys everyone who stands in the way of his influence.
6- The person may forget his eternity amid all these forms of ambition, and his orientations become purely worldly.
[1] An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III in El-Keraza Magazine, ninth year, issue 43, October 27, 1978.For better translation support, please contact the center.
