Christianity's conception of pride

In Christianity pride is considered to be one of the greatest sins or vices. Aquinas says of pride that it is the disposition to prefer one's own will over that of one's superior and, of course, the ultimate superior of all people is God which means that the worst form of pride is when one favors his own goals, desires, will, etc. over those of God. (One thing that I think is important to note here [and it is in Aquinas and other Medieval Christian writers] is that what people want is very different from what God wants. Being good is all about taming one's own desires and acting in accordance with the will of God and against your own. God's will and man's are divergent and thus man's will must be subjugated. This is something that will come up later with regards to modesty/humility.)

Proud people love themselves greatly and as a result put themselves above their proper station. Aquinas says that pride is at the heart of all the sins as each of them are instances of a person indulging his own desires at the expense of God's which is at the very least implicitly accepting that one's own desire is higher than God's. In short, pride is the root of all other sins.

I think the Christian conception of pride lends support to my claim that your take on modesty sounded more like a take on pride. On your account the modest person is one who is motivated by goals derived totally from one's self, one who is not motivated by what one things will impress others. Essentially, a person who is modest does what he does because he thinks that it is worth doing, not because he thinks that others think that it is worth doing. Yet here we have a paradigm case of what Aquinas would call pride. For Christians a person ought do not want they themselves want but what God wants them to do. (This is what they think humility and modesty are all about as I will discuss later). To be motivated from within rather than from God is to be proud, not modest on the Christian conception. It would be the very opposite of modesty and humility.

Of course, this does not show that you are incorrect, because you were not writing from a Christian perspective, but at least to me it casts quite a bit of doubt on your conception. Especially when we consider that modesty and humility as virtues arose during the rise of Christianity it would seem very odd indeed if in truth their meaning had been quite the opposite of what early Christians had thought and in fact turned out to be the very things that Christians considered to be a vice. I think that if one is interested in the virtue you described, i.e. being motivated from within, it would be better categorized as pride.