Carey Senior Fellow 2004-05
Jennifer Herdt
University of Notre Dame
Hypocrisy among the Virtues
Hypocrisy is not a virtue. But is acting the part of virtue always
a vice? And can we become virtuous without first acting the part?
The project I will undertake while at the Erasmus Institute considers
prominent theological, philosophical, and dramatic works from the
Catholic and Protestant intellectual traditions of the 16th to the
18th centuries that reflect on the place of semblance and role-play
within the moral life. It has long been recognized that 16th- and
17th-century thinkers were particularly preoccupied with dissimulation
and pretense; part of the burden of my project is to show how many
of the issues at stake between pagan ethics and Christianity play
out at this time in debates over the hypocrisy of virtue. My project
seeks both to arrive at a deeper understanding of the roots of the
modern commitment to honesty and to make possible a fresh approach
to the contested issue of whether Christian faith is friend or foe
of an ethics of virtue. Beyond my primary audience of Christian
ethicists and moral philosophers, I have in mind a broad scholarly
audience, including literary theorists and cultural critics, interested
in questions such as: How transparent can character be? Can a person
consider her mature character to be her own achievement? Is assuming
a role a form of self-betrayal?
For the purposes of this project, I isolate three strands or “ideal
types” of early modern moral reflection on hypocrisy and virtue:
Passivist, Anatomist, and Activist. For the first (Luther, Jansenism),
the whole human project of acquiring virtue is inherently hypocritical,
a false assertion of autonomous human moral capacity that can engender
only the outer appearance of virtue. For the second (Montaigne,
Bayle, Mandeville), virtue is indeed hypocritical, in that it is
sustained by pride and the pursuit of honor, but it is nevertheless
socially beneficial. For the third (Erasmus, Jesuit theatrical tradition),
moral and spiritual transformation are accepted as proceeding from
“outside-in.” Acting and pretense are valued for their
capacity to engage and transform the affections, engendering true
virtue rather than hypocritical semblance. Passivists thought they
could finally avoid acting a part by becoming passive vessels of
divine grace. For those in the Activist tradition, in contrast,
grace is active in our acting, in the beauty of virtue displayed
that engages and transforms our affections, allowing us to play
a part that becomes our own as we play it. Accepting the essential
theatricality of virtue involves embracing a paradoxical convergence
of outer and inner, ideal and real, grace and nature, other and
self.
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