Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices

put ting on v irtue

Putting On Virtue The Legacy of the Splendid Vices jennifer a. herdt

t he u ni v er si t y of chic ago pr ess

chic ago a nd l ondon

Jennifer A. Herdt is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (1997). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2008 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame toward the publication of this book. 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-32724-2 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-32724-8 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herdt, Jennifer A., 1967– Putting on virtue : the legacy of the splendid vices / Jennifer A. Herdt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-32724-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-32724-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Virtue. 2. Imitation. 3. Christian ethics. 4. Ethics. I. Title. bv4633.h47 2008 179'.9–dc22 2008009645 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

For Jan

contents

Preface | ix Introduction | 1

part i: splendid vices and imperfect virtues 1 Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation | 23 2 Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride | 45 3 Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue | 72

part ii: mimetic virtue 4 Erasmus: Putting On Christ | 101 5 The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition: Acting Virtuous | 128

part iii: the exodus from virtue 6 Luther: Saved Hypocrites | 173 7 Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: The Virtue of Self-Examination | 197

part iv: the anatomy of virtue 8 Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal | 221 9 Emancipating Worldly Virtue: Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, and Mandeville | 248

part v: pagan virtue and modern mor al philosophy 10 Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity | 283 11 Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride | 306 12 Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity | 322 Conclusion | 341 Notes | 355 Index | 433

pr eface

This book began with a certain curiosity, formed somewhat inchoately during my graduate school days at Princeton, about the fact that certain forms of Christian faith champion a theatrical conception of moral development while others judge it false and hypocritical. When, years later, I returned to puzzle this over more fully, I began to understand the issue in terms of differing understandings of the relationship between acquired and infused virtue, and to see it as a key to unlocking the dynamics of early modern moral reflection. Anxiety over the authenticity of acquired virtue was a transformed and exacerbated rendition of Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue that continued to shape theological and philosophical ethics well into the eighteenth century. This project took shape, then, as a particular way of narrating the story of virtue and of thereby beginning to recover and recast a Christian ethic of mimetic virtue freed from these distorting preoccupations. I have accumulated many debts in the course of writing this book and count myself thereby enriched. I am grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge at least some of them here. Jeffrey Stout, Gilbert Meilaender, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Cyril O’Regan offered vital support and wise counsel on the project in its early stages; without them I would not have had the confidence to proceed. Students in my graduate seminar “Virtue and Hypocrisy” let me try out some of my initial ideas for the project on them; I am particularly grateful to Mary Hirschfeld, Douglas Finn, and John Infranca for their enthusiasm and insights. I presented an early sketch of the project to the “Law and . . .” Interdisciplinary Colloquium Series at the University of Notre Dame Law School, and in that context I benefited from questions from Cathleen

Preface

x

Kaveny, Vince Rougeau, Vittorio Hösle, and others. The Erasmus Institute granted me a Carey Senior Fellowship in 2004–2005, allowing me to dedicate myself to full-time writing and research on the project. Portions of chapters 2 and 5 were presented to the Erasmus Seminar, and I am grateful to Anna Battigelli, John Carlson, Eric Gregory, Sarah Hammerschlag, Tobias Hoffmann, Johannes Heil, Florian Michel, Kevin Ostoyich, Dianne Phillips, Bob Sullivan, and Michael Tomko, fellow participants in the seminar, for their probing questions on this material and their support for the project. A draft of chapter 9 was presented to the Department of Religious Studies Ethics Colloquium at Indiana University Bloomington, and I am grateful to all of the participants and particularly to Rich Miller, David Smith, and Aaron Stalnaker for their insightful comments. A draft of chapter 9 was also presented to the Intellectual History Colloquium at the University of Notre Dame; I thank Jim Turner for the invitation and participants in the colloquium for their useful feedback. Sections of chapters 4 and 6 were presented to the Interdisciplinary Christianities Colloquium at the University of Chicago. I benefited from that discussion and am particularly grateful to Aimee Burant, Marsaura Shukla, and Kathryn Tanner for their helpful comments. This material was also presented at the Society of Christian Ethics Annual Meeting in 2005, and I would like to thank those present for the questions and discussion that ensued. Significant portions of chapters 4 and 6 have appeared previously as “Virtue’s Semblance: Erasmus and Luther on Pagan Virtue and the Christian Life,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 25.2 (2005): 137–62, © 2005 Georgetown University Press. I thank Georgetown University Press and the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics for permission to adapt this material and thank the reviewers of the manuscript for their thoughtful comments. I am grateful to John Cavadini, chair of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame, for his unfailing encouragement, and to Larry Cunningham, who as interim chair supported my leave application. Jerry McKenny, Eric Gregory, and Jeffrey Stout each read several chapters and offered invaluable suggestions for improvement. My substantial debts to other colleagues and mentors, notably Jean Porter, Randall Zachman, Mike Michalson, and Jerry Schneewind, are evident in the pages that follow. Deonna Neal and Erin Kidd gave me able assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. Scott Davis and John Bowlin generously read the entire manuscript and gave me detailed feedback

Preface

xi

and insightful advice; I am enormously indebted to them. Alan Thomas and Ruth Goring, my editors at the University of Chicago Press, were a pleasure to work with throughout the process, as were Joyce Dunne, my copyeditor, and Jan Williams, who prepared the index. Warm thanks to all of them. The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame provided generous support toward publication, for which I am also grateful. My greatest debt is to my husband, Jan, to whom this book is dedicated. He generously lent me his expertise on Jesuit drama and his keen critical eye and breadth of knowledge throughout. More importantly, without his love and friendship and the joy we share in our children, Cora and Adam, I would at best be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

in t roduc t ion

Hypocrisy is not a virtue. But is “putting on virtue,” acting the part of virtue, always a vice? Can we become virtuous without first acting the part? Sincerity, authenticity, “being true to oneself”—these are reigning virtues in modernity. However, many a modern moral agent, suspecting that “playing a part” implies faithlessness to self and acceptance of a heteronomous role, has become mired in self-reflection in a way that short-circuits character development. The insistence on authenticity can lead to dismissal of the virtues as external, alien impositions on the self. If habituation and social formation were suspect to many moderns from the eighteenth century onward because they seem to threaten autonomy, they were suspect to many early modern thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for very different reasons. For these thinkers, the project of acquiring virtue is fundamentally dishonest not because it is a betrayal of the authentic self but rather because it is a false and fruitless assertion of human moral agency. Avoiding the false pretense of virtue requires that we abandon our own efforts and rely wholly on God’s grace to transform us from within. Honest confession of our own failure to attain virtue becomes in effect our sole “virtue.” This book attempts to trace an intelligible path from the one incarnation of suspicion to the other, from honest confession of dependence to authentic assertion of independence. It explores the influence on both of the evolving legacy of Augustine’s critique of the pagan virtues, and it asserts the continuing impact of this legacy even on contemporary debates over virtue ethics, both theological and philosophical. And, by way of positive retrieval as well as negative critique, this book begins to assemble a rough sketch

Introduction

2

of a concept of true virtue and its acquisition that, while in significant respects Augustinian, is free of this untoward inheritance. Early modern suspicion of humanly acquired virtue is associated particularly with the Augustinian tradition. It is thus rooted in Augustine’s famous ambivalence about pagan virtue, well captured by the tag so often attributed to Augustine: the pagan virtues are vices, if glittering ones. As the pagan world receded into the past, anxiety about the pagan vices was directed inward and used to distinguish between true and would-be Christians. It will be important, though, as I trace the legacy of Augustine’s critique, to distinguish between those features of early modern anxiety concerning virtue that are substantially indebted to Augustine and those that are early modern innovations. Briefly stated, the worry that ordinary habituation in virtue simply entrenches the vices of pride and self-love can indeed be traced back to Augustine. Augustine’s accusation is that pagans not only fail to pursue God as their true final end but in fact order all things to self. They fail even to act virtuously for virtue’s own sake. In the early modern period, this critique, now leveled primarily at contemporary would-be Christians, is sustained but exacerbated by two additional convictions: first, that truthfulness requires not just acknowledgment of the dependency of one’s agency on God but also abandonment of one’s agency in a foundational stance of pure passivity and second, that even the pursuit of God as one’s final end is itself a problematic expression of self-love. These anxieties about agency and eudaimonism, the notion that the virtuous life is the truly happy life, were addressed through an account of grace that disrupted ordinary human moral psychology and interrupted natural processes of habituation into virtue. Augustine worried that efforts to “put on virtue”—to imitate the actions of the virtuous in order to acquire virtue—could only go awry in the absence of proper vision of our true final end. But Augustine nevertheless assumed that Christians do put on virtue in a gradual process of habituation best understood as “putting on Christ,” as an imitation of Christ’s example through which we are brought into participation in Christ’s virtue.1 For Luther, in contrast, such an effort to put on virtue will only be a “put-on,” and putting on Christ is instead properly understood as assuming a mask. The attempt to act virtuously in order to become virtuous is seen as essentially hypocritical. Augustine’s own worries about pagan virtue might have been alleviated by the recognition that while pagans do fail to acknowledge the utter dependency of their agency on God, they can at least acknowledge their

Introduction

3

agency as fundamentally socially dependent and socially constituted. Pagans do not, then, necessarily order all things to self; they can in fact act for virtue’s own sake. Such a concession would have moved Augustine’s attitude toward pagan virtue closer to that of Aquinas, for whom pagans pursue true if proximate ends and possess true if imperfect virtues. But if, as for early modern hyper-Augustinians, human agency must be abandoned, and if every form of eudaimonism amounts to selfishness, this avenue is closed.2 Pagan virtue, virtue resulting from anything other than interruptive grace, cannot be anything but false and sinful. If there is any room for habituation in the Christian life, it must be sharply distinct from habituation into natural “virtue.” A pure will, a pure heart, must be first given by God in some way outside of, and discontinuous with, ordinary moral psychology. For Christian ethics, then, increasingly problematic accounts of human agency and moral psychology were a consequence of this exacerbated Augustinian worry. What was lost was any sense that grace can work through ordinary processes of habituation, allowing a gradual transcendence of prideful self-love, a growing recognition of our true final end, a developing sense of the dependency of our virtue and moral agency. Even where some place remained for habituation or growth in charity, understood as a form of secondary causality or co-causation with divine agency, this had to be preceded by some moment of exclusively divine action on the passive human self. Despite the fact that moral psychology could not hope to comprehend this moment of exclusively divine action, this is not to say that there was a lack of interest in moral psychology among Augustinian thinkers of the period. Seventeenth-century thinkers of many stripes devoted themselves to delving into the psychology of natural virtue. This was so despite the fact that for the hyper-Augustinians among them, natural virtue could only be merely apparent virtue. If only the elect few possess true Christian virtue, false natural virtue might be more important for the conduct of public affairs. What emerged in the course of these explorations into natural moral psychology were new forms of moral philosophy that were secular in the sense of setting aside any appeal to grace. Even when these secular forms of moral thought understood themselves to be reclaiming forms of pagan ethics, they continued to be shaped in problematic ways by the legacy of the splendid vices. On the one hand, some reclaimed habituation but tended as a reaction against hyper-Augustinianism to valorize the pursuit of glory and the motivating power of pride, and in so doing failed to grasp the possibility of acting for virtue’s own sake. Others,

Introduction

4

remaining suspicious of habituation and continuing to think that it could give rise only to false virtue, sought, like the hyper-Augustinians, a pure starting point, a pure will, but now as an end in itself and as a natural achievement rather than a gift of grace. Authenticity became the keystone virtue. What resulted were deracinated forms of Christian ethics on the one hand and truncated forms of secular ethics on the other. This study is highly selective in that it focuses not on conceptions of true virtue so much as on conceptions of merely apparent virtue. It proceeds on the assumption that we have much to learn about ideals of virtue by looking at what, in a given context or for a given thinker, appears as the closest semblance of virtue. It is these semblances of virtue that, given how easily they can deceive, pose the greatest threat to true virtue. Unmasking these pretenders can thus function as a powerful defense of true virtue. Lee Yearley’s distinction between “counterfeit virtue” and “semblances of virtue” is helpful here. Counterfeit virtue is characterized by simple hypocrisy: apparently virtuous actions are performed with the intention to deceive others. Semblances of virtue fall short of true virtues while resembling them, but without involving any intentional deception. “Conventional people,” Yearley comments, “often mistake semblances of virtue for real virtues by not understanding that a virtuous person chooses virtuous action for itself, not for its consequences.” They perceive natural goods as having independent value, when in fact they have value only for the virtuous, within the context of a good life as a whole. My interest, like that of Yearley, is largely with semblances of virtue, rather than with counterfeit virtue, but with this caveat: where self-deception is at play, the distinction between the two is murky. For example, in Cenodoxus, a Jesuit play I take up in chapter 5, the title character persuades himself that he pursues virtue for its own sake, when in fact he seeks only to be praised as virtuous. Moreover, acting as the virtuous do in order to obtain praise and honor, if it does not involve self-deception, would seem to require intentional deception of others: insofar as I am not acting for the reasons characteristic of the virtuous, I seek to make others believe I am more virtuous than I truly am. Yet Yearley would classify acting for the sake of praise as a semblance of virtue rather than counterfeit virtue. Yearley, then, is too quick to conclude that “the concept of counterfeit virtues is easily understood and reveals little of theoretical interest about virtues.” 3 He is right, though, to suggest that semblances of virtue are typically seen as posing the greater danger for true virtue. Yearley’s interest in semblances of virtue arises primarily out of his

Introduction

5

concern to differentiate between the conventionally virtuous and the truly virtuous, who often attack “normal social or religious practice in the name of a higher vision.” 4 I am interested not just in general in this sort of distinction and what it reveals about the “higher vision” being pursued, but in a particular tradition of reflection in which all acquired virtue came to be seen as a mere semblance of virtue. If, as Aristotle taught, we become virtuous by doing virtuous deeds, then there is a time during the process of developing the virtues when our virtuous deeds might be viewed as deceptive, as presenting a certain claim about our “inner” character that is not (yet) true. For Aristotle, of course, this is not a semblance of virtue, but simply the ordinary process of moral development. In the early modern period, in contrast, we encounter pervasive anxiety about the virtues and the processes through which they are acquired. New features of the social context, when interpreted through the lens of Augustinian Christianity, fostered the conviction that honest or sincere self-presentation is the key element of moral goodness. It became more important to certify one’s sincerity than to acquire virtues that might, after all, be mere semblance. Hypocrisy has been named the vice of the late Renaissance and early modern periods, displacing cupidity, which itself had replaced pride as the ringleader of the vices in the Middle Ages.5 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers were preoccupied with deception, with false self-presentation, with “seeming” to be what one is not, with psychological metaphors of “inner” and “outer” and the possibility of selfconcealment that these offered. This has been correlated with rising social mobility during the period, and thus with the consciousness that it is possible to become socially what one is not yet, but that this will require, among other things, that one successfully act the part.6 Even if this social mobility was in fact strictly limited, it was enough to plant the seeds of awareness that social roles were “roles,” enacted by persons at least theoretically separable from them. To be in society, it is understood, is to be an actor. Insofar as the world is increasingly understood in theatrical terms, acting and theater take on growing importance as a path—if a controversial one—to grasping the nature of reality. While Puritans denounced theater and all things theatrical as essentially false and deceptive, the Jesuits held on to the possibilities theater offered for moral formation and transformation. Is it possible to arrive at a theatrical understanding of the moral life and an understanding of the ethical role of theater that are not anxious about false semblances but rather sanguine about the

Introduction

6

possibility of transforming character through action, what one truly is through the roles one inhabits? The tradition of Jesuit school theater helps us begin to answer this question, as does Erasmus’s understanding of true virtue as developing through the imitation of Christ. In Erasmus, and in some of the best Jesuit plays, we encounter a positive conception of virtue as the mimesis of Christ that preserves the key insights of Augustine’s understanding of the Christian life while freeing itself from its more problematic aspects. Here the imitation of Christ is understood not simply in terms of modeling oneself after an exemplar of virtue but as at the same time a divine action in which we, as copies made after the image of Christ, are restored to Christ and brought into the divine community.7 Jeffrey Stout has recently criticized Stanley Hauerwas and some of his followers for idealizing what Stout calls an “ethics of discipleship centered on exemplary lives,” the life of Christ as conveyed by the Gospels and the lives of the saints. According to Stout, these contemporary advocates of the imitation of Christ are either insincere or self-deceived. They appeal to genres that employ a “rhetoric of thin description” in service of shoring up traditional authorities but fail to recognize their own functional independence from these authorities. They demand but fail to embody a “docile relation to models,” a moral education consisting “wholly in modeling oneself on a classic life.” When these same thinkers praise the complexity and ambiguity of modern novels, they betray themselves. For even if modern novels can play an important role in moral education, it is not the straightforward one of offering “perfectly clear distinctions between good and evil and equally clear exemplifications of each—exemplifications of virtue to emulate or admire and exemplifications of vice to denounce or reject.” 8 The culture in which we live is too aware of complexity and too wary of idolatry to embrace this sort of ethics of discipleship. Even when they say otherwise, these Christian ethicists reveal themselves to be members of this culture, not the premodern cultures they idealize. The wariness of “slavish idolatry” pinpointed by Stout might be seen as another way of articulating the modern ideal of authenticity to which I alluded above. When authenticity is prized, imitating an external model can be seen as falsifying oneself. Stout, though, takes pains to differentiate what he regards as an innocent, even a necessary, place within the moral life for the emulation of models from slavish idolatry. While hailing Emerson, he distances himself from Emerson’s declaration that “imitation is suicide,” terming it hyperbole. On Stout’s account, in our

Introduction

7

society the relationship persons have with their models is more one of apprenticeship than one of discipleship. We admire and emulate our moral exemplars, but we also criticize and challenge them. Stout’s ideal is that of Emersonian perfectionism, which is “committed to an ethics of virtue or self-cultivation that is always in the process of projecting a higher conception of self to be achieved and leaving one’s achieved self (but not its accumulated responsibilities) behind. The force of ‘always’ here is to cancel the fixed telos of perfection toward which earlier perfectionisms directed their ethical striving.” Stout’s ideal is thus in tune with our society in a way that a docile Christian ethics of discipleship is not.9 It is helpful to juxtapose Emersonian perfectionism to the ideal of authenticity reclaimed by Charles Taylor. Just as Taylor works to detach the authentic ideal of authenticity from degraded versions thereof, Stout distinguishes Emersonian perfection from an outright rejection of moral exemplars. For Taylor, authenticity at its best and most coherent does not imply ignoring all moral demands that transcend the self or instrumentalizing all relationships to the end of individual self-fulfillment. What it does require is that each person be true to himself or herself, in the sense of grasping the particular way of being that is properly and uniquely his or her own and living it out. The moral life is fundamentally one of self-discovery and self-expression, rather than conformity to external models: “the notion that each one of us has an original way of being human entails that each of us has to discover what it is to be ourselves. But the discovery can’t be made by consulting pre-existing models, by hypothesis. So it can be made only by articulating it afresh.” Like Stout, Taylor advocates this ideal both simply because he believes it to be ours, at the root of our culture, and because of its intrinsic worth. He articulates this worth not in terms of a negative freedom from what lies beyond the self but rather in terms of a positive account of fuller selfhood: “authenticity points us towards a more self-responsible form of life. It allows us to live (potentially) a fuller and more differentiated life, because more fully appropriated as our own.” 10 Both Stout and Taylor seek to articulate an ideal that prizes “self-trust” or “self-responsibility” rather than either conformity to or defiance of external moral demands. Stout is more willing to articulate a positive, if limited, role for moral exemplars. How are we to assess such reformulations of the modern ideal of authenticity? Do they manage to articulate an ideal that is not simply a hyper-Augustinian expression of the fear of “false virtue”? And are such ideals truly in fundamental tension with an

Introduction

8

ethic centered around the mimesis of Christ? I begin with the last question. Here I think it is important to say two things to properly delineate the features of a defensible Christian ethics of discipleship. First, we may note that in practice, the imitation of Christ is, or very often is, creative and constantly evolving. Rather than functioning as a rhetoric of thin description to constrain interpretation, the Gospels function to invite constant reinterpretation. Is Christ exemplary rabbi? Wisdom teacher? Martyr? Revolutionary? Pacifist? The rainbow cast of saints underscores this interpretive openness; all are understood as having imitated Christ, but they are nevertheless a far cry from carbon copies of one another. The lives of the saints, moreover, come to function as a supplementary text open to communal interpretation as well as individual emulation. We come to see new things in old saints—witness contemporary liberationist interpretations of St. Francis’s “solidarity” with the poor—and come to see as faithful imitation of Christ what might once have been seen as faithless insubordination.11 Second, that this is so is not just a reflection of the fact that Christians are moderns despite themselves. Rather, the existence of multiple and evolving interpretations throughout Christian tradition is made theologically intelligible for Christians by the affirmation that Jesus Christ is the perfect human image of God. Christians thus expect to encounter inexhaustibility in Christ’s exemplarity. This inexhaustibility licenses, even requires, the ongoing interpretation just noted. To imitate Christ is not to idolize a finite human virtue but rather to reflect in our finite way some limited aspect of God’s inexhaustible perfection. Stout notes that for him Jesus exemplifies virtues, but “imperfectly and defeasibly.” 12 For Christians, Jesus exemplifies virtues perfectly and indefeasibly. Nevertheless, Christians, like Emersonian perfectionists, must constantly strive for a higher perfection, potentially critical of any point already reached—not because of the imperfection of Christ but because of our own imperfect grasp of Jesus as the image of God. And this imperfection characterizes the church as much as it does individual Christians, so that each serves to critique the other. Moreover, the inexhaustibility of Christ’s exemplarity grounds the uniqueness of each person’s reflection of divine goodness. There is here no hostility to Taylor’s authentic authenticity, the premium it places on discovering what it is for me to be excellent, or to Stout’s rejection of any fixed telos. These are grounded, though, not in a Romantic affirmation of the inexhaustibility of the self, or by listening to one’s own genius, but in a Christian affirmation of the infinitude of

Introduction

9

God. One crucial addendum to this second point remains: if in imitating Christ we are instantiating some aspect of divine perfection, this is possible only insofar as we are enabled to do so by grace. Christ is not simply an external model offered for our emulation, but in the very act of emulating Christ we are being acted upon by God. Our exercise of moral agency, that is, our critical assessment of existing interpretations of our moral exemplars and our further acts of interpretation, are not declarations of independence from grace but always at least potentially grace enabled.13 What of the question I posed to these reformulations of the modern ideal of authenticity? How are Stout’s Emersonian perfectionism and Taylor’s authenticity to be assessed from the standpoint of a Christian ethic of mimetic virtue? They do, I think, succeed in freeing themselves from the aspects of the modern ideal of authenticity that reflected the problematic legacy of the splendid vices.14 Particularly important is Stout’s insistence on the possibility of Emersonian piety, where piety is defined as “virtuous acknowledgment of dependence on the sources of one’s existence and progress through life.” 15 The Emersonian perfectionist goes beyond relying in fact (if to a limited degree) on moral exemplars; she also understands it to be a virtue to acknowledge dependence on these exemplars and on all the sources that have contributed to the formation of her character. In fleshing out this notion of piety, Stout draws on a passage from Emerson’s essay “Experience”: “When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square, for, if I should die, I could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.” 16 According to Stout, “the genius of the passage from Emerson lies in the grateful but life-affirming spirit in which he was able to receive—and acknowledge dependence on—gifts that could not be fully reciprocated. . . . He is saying that what he really does deserve to be praised for, whether it be his genius or his character, is itself conditioned. His merit does not go all the way down. It is rather part of the receiving, part of the gift.” That is, we encounter in Emerson what is crucially missing in the modern ideal of authenticity as shaped in reaction to hyper-Augustinianism, what Augustine failed to see in pagan thought, and what was in fact missing not from pagan thought as a whole but from certain strands thereof, such as the Aristotelian ideal of magnanimity: a willingness to acknowledge dependence even for what might seem to be most one’s own, one’s moral character, a willingness

Introduction

10

to concede that one’s achievement is gift.17 Of course, Christians will affirm that while we may in this sense appropriately show piety toward a variety of persons and things, only God is to be worshiped. God is not just another object of piety, as Burke would have it when he includes God along with family, country, place, state, and tradition as proper objects of piety. Still, the fact that pagans and Emersonians can and do exhibit piety is important, since it shows that it is unjust to accuse them of outright superbia, that pride that claims for itself a false independence.18 If their grasp of the dependency of their moral agency is imperfect, it is not nonexistent, and Christians can in hope regard them as moving toward a fuller grasp of their dependency, ultimately on God. In the pages that follow, I look to Erasmus as offering a model for this sort of generosity toward pagan virtue. For Erasmus, Christians and pagans alike are in via, both grasping only in an obscure and clouded way the full truth of our dependent agency. Thus, not only does Erasmus sustain a Christian ethic of mimetic virtue free of the distortions that entered in with hyper-Augustinianism but in this respect he also offers an important corrective to Augustine himself. One final remark before I sketch the structure of the argument of the book: in the course of this study I will most often be speaking of “virtue” in the singular rather than of plural “virtues.” For the most part, this reflects early modern moral discourse rather than my own predilections. One of the important contributions the contemporary revival of virtue ethics has made to ethical discourse is to restore the capacity to speak in a differentiated way about specific aspects of character that equip a person to act well in very different respects. While sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury thinkers do speak of certain specific virtues and vices, notably charity, humility, sincerity, self-love, pride, and hypocrisy, just as often they speak of virtue in the singular, as something that one acquires or loses wholesale, as opposed to virtue by virtue, in confronting various particular sets of challenges or contexts of activity. That this is so grows on the one hand out of Renaissance humanists’ optimism regarding the possibility of human perfection and on the other hand out of their enthusiasm for Cicero’s vir virtutis, the perfectly virtuous (manly) man.19 In this context, virtue in the singular implied a rejection of Augustinian anthropology. But a tendency to think of virtue in the singular also made sense in light of the intense anxiety over personal salvation that was characteristic of early modern Augustinian thought.20 Just as one was finally either saved or damned, so there was a corresponding tendency

Introduction

11

to think that one was finally either good or wicked, virtuous or vicious. Moreover, if justification and the acquisition of virtue are sharply distinguished from one another, as in Protestant thought, then while a variety of natural virtues may be acknowledged, they are nevertheless finally all sinful and not worthy of sustained attention.21 They may be reduced to singular sin or vice. When in the seventeenth century increasing attention is once again given to natural virtue, the tendency remains to speak of virtue as unitary. The use of the singular virtue is appropriate to this study for another reason: I am in fact focused here on issues surrounding the general structure or framework of good character and its acquisition, rather than on concrete moral norms or specific virtues. While surely courage is acquired in particular sorts of contexts, which differ in various ways from the contexts in which one is likely to acquire the virtue of temperance, at the same time it remains possible to generalize from these particularities to some extent in order to talk about the acquisition of virtue as such while remaining attentive to the fact that we are then dealing with generalizations.

Part 1 takes up three thinkers who provide essential background for understanding early modern anxiety over acquired virtue: Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. I make no attempt here to give a comprehensive account or even a connected narrative of virtue and its acquisition in ancient and medieval discussions of virtue. Instead, I highlight the aspects of the moral thought of each of these three thinkers that prove most salient for making sense of the later discussions. For Aristotle, this involves taking stock of his account of habituation in virtue, of what it means to come to act virtuously for virtue’s own sake, and of how eudaimonia can serve as a final end that does not undermine the pursuit of virtue for its own sake. It also involves examining his account of magnanimity as the crown of the virtues. I argue that Aristotle’s ideal of magnanimity stands in tension with the central insights of his moral thought. The magnanimous person represents a corruption of the capacity to act virtuously for its own sake; the magnanimous person acts instead for the sake of his conception of his own moral excellence and falsely conceives of his virtue as his own independent achievement. Like Aristotle himself, the magnanimous person is unconcerned about the fact that most persons continue throughout their lives to act for the wrong reasons and thus lack virtue.

Introduction

12

Augustine’s critique of the pridefulness of pagan virtue may be apt as an attack on Aristotle’s magnanimous person but not, I argue, as a critique of pagan virtue as such. While himself a eudaimonist, and thus perceiving correctly that the pursuit of eudaimonia need not compete with acting virtuously for its own sake (as also it does not compete with pursuit of God as our true final end), Augustine was too quick to assume that the exclusive alternative to proper acknowledgment of dependency on God was prideful assertion of independent agency. He gave insufficient attention to the pagan virtue of piety as acknowledgment of the dependency of one’s character and agency on family, teachers, and society. If Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue as glittering vice was thus too harsh, it is important also to recognize that Augustine bequeathed to subsequent Christian thought a positive account of the Christian life as a life of habituation in virtue, where Christ is the ultimate exemplar of virtue and where imitation of that exemplar is understood simultaneously in terms of the Christian’s aspiration and effort and in terms of divine agency in bringing Christians into conformity with Christ. Aquinas represents the synthesis of Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions of reflection on these issues. Aquinas offers an account of pagan virtue as true if imperfect, directed not toward our true final end but at least toward proximate ends capable of being directed beyond themselves to our true final end. Pagan virtues are thus not simply expressions of self-love and prideful denials of dependency. Even magnanimity is rehabilitated, as Aquinas offers a skillful reinterpretation of Aristotle that manages to align, rather than oppose, magnanimity and humility. But Aquinas’s generous account of pagan virtue relies on distinctions between acquired and infused, moral and theological virtues that prove ambiguous and that thus leave his synthesis vulnerable to later critique. These distinctions were powerful insofar as they provided a conceptual means for articulating that only God can direct us to our true final end, since in inviting us into fellowship in the divine life, God raises us above the ends of our created nature. The category of infused virtues also allowed Aquinas to avoid Aristotle’s moral elitism—the infused virtues do not require great intellectual capacity, a good upbringing, or any other capacity or achievement on the part of the agent. Through grace all may be virtuous. More problematic was the fact that Aquinas was forced to give an account of the infused virtues as in one sense perfectly infused and in another sense only potential, impotent, and requiring a form of development that looked very much like the habituation involved in the

Introduction

13

acquired virtues. The distinction between acquired and infused virtues cast a shadow over the process of habituation. In parts 2 through 4 I isolate three distinctive strands of reflection on the problem of the semblance of virtue within the early modern period: the Erasmian-humanist, which sustains a positive account of habituation in Christian virtue; the hyper-Augustinian, which is hostile to virtue, identifying it with works-righteousness; and the Anatomist, which is preoccupied with the analysis and unmasking of merely natural human virtue. While all three can in some sense be understood as Augustinian, it is the second and third that represent and exacerbate the legacy of the splendid vices; the first I lift up for selective retrieval in the service of overcoming this inheritance. The relationships among them are complex: while Erasmus champions mimetic virtue as a cure for the superficiality and hypocrisy of his fellows, Luther accuses even this understanding of virtue of exacerbating rather than healing human alienation from God. Some of Erasmus’s key insights are embodied in the Jesuit theatrical tradition, but the Jesuit tradition as a whole betrayed these by moving in a Pelagian direction. This elicited in turn the further suspicion of the Jansenists. Countering what they regarded as the false virtues presented and promoted by the Jesuits, Jansenists embraced an account of true Christian virtue so riddled with paradox that it served not only to foster the Anatomist enterprise of unmasking false natural virtue but also to lend that natural virtue a new independence and respectability. I proceed through selective close readings of key thinkers, teasing out the shifts and interrelationships that emerge through a very particular lens: how each differently defines and responds to the problem of merely apparent virtue. Part 2 identifies Erasmus as a figure who, while launching a critique of the hypocritical virtues of his society, refrained from magnifying this into a wholesale attack on habituation or on virtue itself. He sustains some of the best features of an Augustinian/Patristic account of the imitation of Christ as gradual habituation in Christian virtue but marries this with a characteristically humanist generosity toward pagan virtue. And unlike Aquinas, he does so without employing potentially misleading distinctions between natural and supernatural ends or acquired and infused virtues. To some extent, this reflects a weakness of Erasmus’s thought: he offers no detailed, systematic account of human moral psychology, habituation, or the virtues. But Erasmus’s refusal to separate and distinguish is sometimes a strength. This is the case, I argue, when

Introduction

14

he sustains an account of Christian virtue as acquired through human effort and aspiration while insisting at the same time on human agency as dependent on and empowered by grace, as thus in a sense always both acquired and infused. This salutary holism appears as well in Erasmus’s sense that our grasp of our true final end, of the divine fellowship into which we are called, and of our dependency on God to bring us to that end, will dawn on us only very gradually as we grow in virtue’s conformity to Christ. In the tradition of Jesuit school theater I find a concrete embodiment of this Erasmian-humanist notion of mimetic virtue. At a time when theater was often suspect, seen as a betrayal of God-given identity or sure corrupter of the character of both actors and spectators, the Jesuits defended theater as a school of virtue. Both through their promotion of theater and in the substance of the plays they presented, they reflected on the role of imitation in the acquisition of virtue. How, they asked, does one act a part so as to make it one’s own? If Christian virtue is fundamentally the imitation of Christ, Jesuit theater understood this as a role requiring interpretation, where the saints offer particularly compelling embodied interpretations of Christ as exemplar and where acting the part of a saint may be a means of grace. At the same time, in the broader tradition of Jesuit-influenced theater, in which I include the great Jesuittrained Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega, we can identify some corruptions to which the Erasmian-humanist tradition of mimetic virtue was prone: to forget the dependent character of human activity and to regard human virtue as a performance applauded and rewarded by God. Over the past several decades, a number of theologians have suggested that we consider the Christian life as a form of performance or drama, faithful to an existing script and yet creative in its interpretation.22 I pause at the conclusion of part 2 to engage with this “performative theology,” particularly as it emerges from the movement of postliberal theology. It is appropriate that I situate the Erasmian-humanist tradition of mimetic virtue alongside other more recent forms of performative theology, both in order to clarify what it is I propose to retrieve from the mimetic tradition and in order to orient the subsequent parts of the book, particularly the hyper-Augustinian eschewal of performance. My concern here is to defend a form of performative theology that is fallibilistic and Christocentric/pneumatocentric rather than fideistic and ecclesiocentric. Part 3 turns to Luther, in whom the critique of false virtue becomes a critique of virtue as such. For Luther, the aspiration to virtue is an

Introduction

15

expression of sinful self-assertion, and natural virtue thus is never more than a deceptive shell. Christian righteousness requires the complete interruption of ordinary processes of habituation in the virtues and a foundational moment of pure passivity in which human agency is wholly abandoned. It is not that Luther offers no positive account of habituation in the Christian life but that this must be sharply cut off from ordinary habituation. The moment of passivity that marks the boundary between these is a perfect truthfulness concerning human sinfulness and incapacity; this truthfulness preserves those who “put on” Christ. It is Christ’s righteousness, not their own sinfulness, that is imputed to these Christians, but their “hypocrisy” remains innocent. Luther has no tolerance for the messiness of Erasmus’s mimetic virtue; the Christian life must be founded on, rather than culminate in, the clear recognition of absolute human dependency on God. The natural life and the graced life are utterly discontinuous, and the natural aspiration to virtue thus blocks, rather than advances, true Christian righteousness. Moreover, Luther’s inaugural proclamation of Christian freedom ends, when faced with antinomianism and social unrest, in an acceptance of coercion and an education of rote repetition as securing external conformity. False external righteousness is socially necessary, even if utterly sinful. If Jesuit theater embodies Erasmus’s mimetic virtue, Puritan autobiographical narratives are the literary transcription of Luther’s elevation of honesty over moral aspiration, though with a twist. Instead of attempting to preclude false external piety through honest self-assessment, admission of corruption, and lack of agency, Calvinists sought above all to preclude self-deception. Despite Calvin’s own efforts to keep the doctrine of predestination from having anything but a reassuring impact on the practical life, given the doctrines of unconditional election and irresistible grace, ordinary Calvinists became preoccupied with the question of personal election. Sanctification and moral progress became not simply fruits but signs of election, to be scrutinized tirelessly for their authenticity. It proved very difficult ever to put to rest once and for all the nagging question, Is this true sanctification, or a mere simulacrum thereof? Moreover, too great a confidence in one’s own election could simply be a manifestation of pride and thus an indication of sin and reprobation. Certain paradoxes of passivity, apparent already in Luther, are again evident here: human agency directed toward the acquisition of virtue is always potentially empty self-assertion rather than grace-filled sanctification, and agency is thus limited to the often paralyzing role of

Introduction

16

self-examination. The rich tradition of Puritan life-writing grows out of the impulse publicly to fix, or at least to stabilize, this restless selfscrutiny. Here Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners will be our paradigmatic guide. Part 4 turns to the Anatomists of virtue, to those who sought to probe the social processes through which human character and habitual patterns of action are formed. The Anatomist project so evident in seventeenthcentury (particularly French) thought is in part an outgrowth of the genres of mirrors-for-princes and courtiers’ manuals. These flourished in contexts in which a keen understanding of social roles and relationships and the capacity to manage the perceptions one leaves on others were key to maintaining social position. The Anatomists tended to see deception and hypocrisy as essential to natural human “virtue” and its formation. Persons do not develop the virtues for their own sake but rather cultivate the appearance of virtue for the sake of garnering respect from others. The Anatomists unmasked the false pretensions and self-deceptions of natural human virtue, proclaiming as their own moral achievement their exceptional clear-sighted honesty. Not all concluded that Christian virtue must be something utterly distinct from this natural virtue. In Balthasar Gracián we see how a Jesuit thinker might regard Christian virtue as a more sophisticated refinement of worldly virtue. But we also see how Gracián reproduces Lope de Vega’s corruption of the Erasmian-humanist tradition—he cannot conceive of Christian virtue as finally transcending the cultivation of reputation, which in turn exposes the fact that he conceives of it finally as achievement rather than gift. Such attempts to place the enterprise of anatomy at the service of Christian virtue thus aroused the ire and suspicion of the Jansenists, for whom Jesuit virtue was just one more mask for vice. For the Jansenists, moral anatomy was intended to underline the absolute difference between Christian and worldly virtue, and we see how Pascal employs it to this end. In Pierre Nicole, though, we observe how the Anatomist enterprise, even in Jansenist hands, begins to break free from its apologetic function. While the phenomena surrounding natural moral formation required a surgeon’s skill to penetrate its depths, they were at the same time open to scientific scrutiny. If true Christian virtue, in contrast, is a gift of inscrutable divine grace, the Holy Spirit’s activity within the soul, it was admitted to lie wholly beyond the reach of the Anatomists’ instruments. Nicole sought to show how natural virtue functions providentially despite the fact that it is nothing more than

Introduction

17

refined and concealed self-love. But if natural virtue was analyzable, open to conscious control, and beneficial to both the individual and society, it could be seen as a legitimate object of attention in its own right, quite apart from any contrast with true Christian virtue. Christian virtue could come to seem both mysterious and, increasingly, irrelevant. In La Rochefoucauld and Bernard Mandeville we see the anatomical enterprise at the service of the project of creating new forms of pagan virtue (the former an aristocratic ethic, the latter bourgeois). Both interpret natural virtue through the lens of Jansenist critiques of self-love, and both understand themselves as having in some sense escaped the ordinary dynamics of social formation, deception, and self-deception through their keen analysis of self and society. Both, therefore, in the very act of setting aside the ideal of Christian virtue, nevertheless display how deeply shaped they are by the hyper-Augustinian tradition and its tendency to allow honesty to displace active aspiration. Part 5 brings us up to the eighteenth century and to some of the defining figures within modern moral philosophy: Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. My aim in engaging with these thinkers is to indicate how deeply some of the most central strands within modern moral thought were shaped by the hyper-Augustinian critique of apparent virtue, even as they sought independence from Christian faith. This is not to say that they were all shaped by this tradition in the same ways. Rousseau, despite his rejection of original sin, remains deeply worried about the ills of social formation. In this sense, he embodies a further exacerbation of inherited worries over the acquired virtues, even as he attempts to root true virtue in nature rather than grace. Moreover, he shares the hyper-Augustinian emphasis on honesty as the fundamental purification from the false virtues ingrained by society. To be honest is no longer, though, to confess the emptiness of one’s agency and one’s utter dependence on God. Rather, it is a way of preserving one’s independence. In Rousseau, the ideal of sincerity begins to give way to the modern ideal of authenticity, being true to oneself, good or bad. If the ideal of honesty is problematic insofar as it paralyzes agency, the ideal of authenticity is problematic insofar as it functions as an exaggerated assertion of autonomy and a rejection of what Charles Taylor calls “moral sources.” Hume, meanwhile, is much more sanguine about habituation and social formation, no longer preoccupied with the danger that these might simply entrench the worst vices. He is nevertheless shaped negatively by the hyper-Augustinian tradition in that his explicit effort to retrieve

Introduction

18

and renovate a pagan ethic forms itself in the image of the splendid vices, notably pride. If Hume succeeds to some extent in defending a properly construed pride, he is unable to distinguish between goods internal to the life of virtue and external goods. He thus fails to reconstruct pagan eudaimonism. In contrast to Hume, Kant is concerned quite centrally with the possibility of acting for virtue’s own sake (although this is not the vocabulary he characteristically uses). But in rejecting Hume’s moral thought, Kant also reproduces misplaced critiques of eudaimonism. Moreover, Kant preserves the hyper-Augustinian preoccupation with a pure will cleansed of all self-love, even as he defines the pure will not with reference to selfless love of God but rather with reference to the moral law. Lastly, for Kant, as for Luther, a pure will requires a pure foundational disposition that calls into question all phenomenal progress in the moral life, even if for Kant this must be secured through autonomous human agency rather than through a confession of ultimate dependency on God. Hume and Kant are important to my project in a further way: both have been central to the contemporary philosophical revival of virtue ethics. If this movement looked initially to Aristotle primarily and, especially among philosophical Thomists, to Aquinas secondarily, Hume has more recently been the focus of intense interest, not least because he has been seen as a modern advocate of a secular virtue-centered ethic, unburdened by Aristotle’s unsavory attitudes toward women, slaves, and barbarians. Kant, meanwhile, though originally seen as the arch enemy of a virtue-centered ethic, has more recently been reinterpreted in ways that underscore significant affinities between his thought and that of Aristotle as well as other (notably Stoic) pagan ethics of virtue. Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy,” often seen as having issued the clarion call for the return to virtue, offered as its central justification the presence within the dominant forms of “secular” moral philosophy of certain no-longer-generally intelligible Christian remainder concepts, notably that of obligation. Virtue ethics was to offer an alternative. What I have tried to do in these final chapters is to show the ongoing influence on secular moral philosophy, and precisely on some of the thinkers in whom contemporary philosophical virtue ethics has shown the greatest interest, of hyper-Augustinian concerns. My contention is that the elevation of honesty, foundational purity, and passivity over aspiration, gradual progress, and enabled activity has proven problematic both for Christian ethics and for secular moral philosophies. These tendencies

Introduction

19

jeopardized both a Christian ethic of mimetic virtue and the possibility of a retrieved pagan eudaimonism. Even if this study is finally loyal to the former rather than the latter, I hope that it will be of value to theologians as well as to philosophers interested in virtue. For both have a stake in coming to terms with the legacy of the splendid vices so as to be able to free themselves from it.

splendid v ices a nd imperfect v irtues

i

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

1

According to Aristotle, we acquire virtues largely by habituation, that is, by acting as if we already possess them. This means that we inevitably begin by doing the right thing for the wrong reason, thus failing to instantiate the virtues after which we strive. At what point, then, and how, can we ever come to embody true virtue, doing the right things for the right reasons? How do we move from semblance to reality, overcoming what we might term the “habituation gap”? Aristotle himself raises the issue from the opposite angle: “Someone might raise this puzzle: ‘What do you mean by saying that to become just we must first do just actions and to become temperate we must first do temperate actions? For if we do what is grammatical or musical, we must already be grammarians or musicians. In the same way, then, if we do what is just or temperate, we must already be just or temperate.” 1 If the capacity to perform specified actions constitutes virtue, then it seems there is no need for a process of habituation, for the process is completed as soon as it is begun. Aristotle points out, though, that virtue is not just a matter of performing certain right actions but also of the way in which these actions are produced. Truly virtuous action issues forth from knowledge, decision, and stable character: first, the agent “must know [that he is doing virtuous actions]; second, he must decide on them, and decide on them for themselves; and, third, he must also do them from a fi rm and unchanging state” (1105a32). This distinction between right action and virtue helps us grasp how it is possible to perform something like the same actions we associate with virtuous people without actually exemplifying virtue. It does not, though, explain how the repeated imitation of certain actions in

ch a p t er one

24

itself would transform our wrong reasons and misdirected desires into right ones. Rightly understood, habituation is not just like mechanically breaking in a pair of shoes.2 Rather, on Aristotle’s account, a person’s nonrational desires must come to be in accord with practical reason’s grasp of what is good so that she acts easily and harmoniously and takes pleasure in following reason’s dictates. Since for Aristotle all human virtues are acquired, it is hardly surprising that he is untroubled by virtue’s status as acquired or by the rocky path to its acquisition. This is not to say that he is unconcerned by the existence of false virtues, semblances that mislead both their possessors and the community at large. This concern is perhaps most prominently displayed in the Nicomachean Ethics’s discussion of five states that are falsely called courage or bravery. We will take these up in due course. But since the trajectory of this study lies in Augustinian anxiety over acquired virtue, for our purposes the problem of the semblance of virtue must first be explored in connection with the puzzle of how habituation into virtue is possible. Our consideration of Aristotle thus begins with a discussion of habituation. Understanding habituation requires grasping not only how we move from semblance of virtue to actual virtue by coming to act “for the right reasons” but also what constitute right reasons for acting. Often this is put in terms of choosing virtuous actions “for their own sake,” so this will be discussed next and compared with what Aristotle means when he speaks of acting “for the sake of the noble.” Both the “merely good” and the “nobly good” choose virtuous actions for their own sake, but only the nobly good person does this reflectively. We must also ask in what sense virtuous action is at the same time performed for the sake of happiness and for the sake of the good aimed at by political science. Finally, we will take up the virtue of magnanimity, which involves acting for the sake of one’s own conception of oneself as virtuous. While Aristotle terms magnanimity a crown of the virtues, in fact it betrays tensions within Aristotle’s account of virtue between an acknowledgment of human dependency and a striving for godlike self-sufficiency. It is hardly surprising that magnanimity would become a focal point for much medieval Christian criticism of pagan moral thought, but it is important to see that this Aristotelian virtue can also be subjected to a purely internal critique. Aristotle, in many respects a paradigm of reflection on pagan virtue, at this point fails to sustain his own insights into what it means to act for virtue’s own sake.3

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

25

Habituation The mystery of habituation seems at times to recede back into the mists of childhood, as Aristotle repeatedly insists on the importance of early upbringing for the formation of virtuous character. “It is not unimportant, then,” he notes, “to acquire one sort of habit or another, right from our youth; rather, it is very important, indeed all-important” (1103b23). Within a single sentence he moves from a casual “not unimportant” to an admission of the “all-important” stakes of character formation in youth. Crucially, a proper upbringing from early youth allows us to “find enjoyment or pain in the right thing” (1104b12). We are given a sense of urgency here—the most must be made of this period of malleability, and much luck will be involved in whether a child in fact receives an appropriate upbringing. How does a good upbringing allow us to find enjoyment or pain in the right things? We may sketch the following Aristotelian account.4 First, the young child learns that there are some things we do whether we want to or not, and others that we don’t do even if we want to. She has learned this because there are some things her parents or other early teachers have not given her a choice about, some things she has simply been expected or required to do or not do—not screech at the top of her lungs in the library, not hit the baby, share toys.5 To say that the child has not been given a choice is not quite accurate. It is better to say that if Susie chooses to screech, hit the baby, and hang on for dear life to each toy eyed by another child, she will experience some natural or social consequence she finds highly unattractive—she will be taken right home, have to listen to both Mommy and the baby yelling, or watch the prized toys be taken away and placed on a high shelf. From this Susie learns to moderate her most immediate desires—what she wants to do, for example, pull the cat’s tail, she knows she is expected not to do, and furthermore at a higher level she no longer wants to do this, because she knows that it will have a result that she will not like (whether that be the most natural and immediate consequence of a scratch from the cat, a rebuke from a parent, separation from the fascinating cat, etc.). Children also learn through positive reinforcement of desired forms of behavior. When Susie softly pats the cat and Mommy says, “That’s nice, Susie. You know how to be gentle with the kitty. Kitty likes that,” Susie learns that softly patting the cat makes both Mommy happy and kitty happy and

ch a p t er one

26

may therefore be more fun than alternative ways of playing with kitty, such as by pulling his tail. Up to this point we may still find ourselves speaking of “conditioning” or “behavior modification.” The child is learning to take pleasure in doing things approved of by her parents and is learning how to restrain her desire to do things marked as unacceptable by her elders. The child acts sometimes simply out of an immediate desire to do something, but sometimes also for the sake of a more mediated desire to fit in socially or in order to avoid an undesirable consequence. Interactions with her physical and social worlds have created in the child a set of higher order desires and aversions. An important element in the process will be repeated attempts to imitate paradigmatic elders. Mimesis is instinctual in all animals and is the basic means by which animal young learn from their elders; Aristotle calls human beings the most imitative animals in the world.6 At all levels of being we see mimesis at work, in what Karl Morrison has termed a process of “corrective reversion—of egress from and return to a primordial model.” 7 Whereas Plato had understood corrective reversion as a process of recollection, Aristotle focuses on generation and growth in nature as the model for corrective reversion. The end is realized through growth, as particular instances come to conform to universal principles. This might falsely suggest, though, that imitation, as animal instinct, is somehow to be opposed to reason. In fact, human rational capacities permeate the mimetic process. So “the same model of generation and growth applied to the potentialities of the human mind, although in view of man’s rational capacities, the process was refined through habit, of which education was a particular mode.” 8 Habituation into virtue relies on instinctual imitation, but human action does not finally instantiate virtue unless it is performed for the right reasons, reflective of the reason-giving character of human agency.9 Clearly, while the child may fairly reliably exhibit good behavior, she cannot be said to have a virtuous character. She takes pleasure in acting appropriately not simply as such but because acting appropriately brings her further pleasures, notably acceptance, praise, and approval. She does not yet act for reasons characteristic of the virtuous. Alasdair MacIntyre’s distinction between goods external and internal to a practice, developed through the example of teaching a seven-year-old to play chess, helps us to think more fully about what is involved in this stage of habituation. As MacIntyre constructs the example, at the outset the child has no particular desire to learn chess but is motivated to learn to play by the

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

27

offer of a certain amount of candy just for playing, with an additional amount of candy each time the child wins. At this point, the child is motivated to play only by a good—candy—external to the practice of chess playing. One telltale sign that this is an external good is the fact that there is no reason for the child not to cheat in order to win and thus obtain more candy. “But, so we may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands.”10 When this occurs, the child has grasped the goods internal to the practice of chess, goods that—unlike candy—can be achieved in no other way than by playing chess. MacIntyre does not so much offer an account of the transition from motivation by external goods to motivation by internal goods as simply gesture in the direction of this transformation with a “so we may hope.” There is no guarantee that this shift will take place, no mechanical process that, once set in motion, will lead inexorably from one set of goods to the other. What one hopes here is that the child’s experience of playing chess, and of growing mastery of its moves, will allow her to begin to take as much or more pleasure in the playing of chess as in the candy reward. What is unclear from MacIntyre’s development of this example, though, is whether any way of getting the child initially engaged in playing chess is as good as any other. A child who plays chess in order to avoid a weekly beating (five lashes, say, for refusing to play; two lashes for playing but losing, none at all for playing and winning) may be even more strongly motivated than the child who plays for candy but seems much more likely to learn to hate than to love chess, since she is likely to hate the one who beats her and to conclude intuitively that any activity embraced by this hateful person must itself be perverse. Even the child who is given candy might be less likely to come to grasp the internal goods of chess if he is overweight, has rotten teeth, and has learned that both result from the consumption of lots of candy. While the child might still be unable to resist the candy, he might well distrust the chess player who temptingly offers it and be equally suspicious of the game itself. We might relate this to Aristotle’s insistence that the state is a better moral educator than are parents. In comparison with the laws of a state, “a father’s instructions . . . lack this influence and compelling power; and so in general do the instructions of an individual man, un-

ch a p t er one

28

less he is a king or someone like that. Law, however, has the power that compels. . . . Besides, people become hostile to an individual human being who opposes their impulses even if he is correct in opposing them; whereas a law’s prescription of what is decent is not burdensome” (1180a22–24). This suggestion that moral training is better exercised in an impersonal and coercive rather than in a personal mode is called into question just a page later, though, when Aristotle notes that “a father’s words and habits have influence, and all the more because of kinship and because of the benefits he does; for his children are already fond of him and naturally ready to obey” (1180b5–7). While Aristotle mentions this only in passing, it seems key to understanding the process of habituation. A proper upbringing is not achieved simply through effectively “compelling power,” nor through such power in concert with laws that offer a summary of or instructions for virtuous action, nor through these joined with exemplars of virtuous action, offered for imitation. What is crucial in order for one’s desires to be transformed into those of a virtuous person (such that one not only performs the actions characteristic of a virtuous person but does so with the accompanying enjoyment in doing the right things for the right reasons and in the right ways) is that one love and be loved by the moral exemplar set before one. Aristotle writes that “in general feelings seem to yield to force, not to argument” (1179b28). But if feelings yield to force, they are transformed by other feelings.11 Certainly there is coercion involved in the early education of children, but the effects of coercive power will be embraced only if that power is exercised within a broader context of trust and care.12 Moreover, forced compliance alone cannot give rise to more than continence; it might over time relieve the pain of unfamiliarity and yield a mechanical conformity, but not a positive enjoyment of virtuous action.13 The game of chess, then, is most readily learned in the context of a good and nurturing relationship—it is a beloved mother, a favorite uncle, or an admired teacher, say, who is seeking to introduce the child to the joys of chess. Because the child knows she is loved, she trusts her teacher, and not just for reliable delivery of candy. The child trusts her teacher as someone who seeks her good, and therefore trusts that the teacher is introducing her to a good activity, even if the child does not at the outset find it intrinsically pleasurable. The teacher, meanwhile, seeks to advance the child’s good, has some grasp of that good, and has some understanding of how to advance it. Insofar as the child loves the teacher, she wants to become more like her teacher and wants to love

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

29

what her teacher loves. As the child learns to play chess, she senses that she is becoming more like her teacher; when she wins, she takes pleasure not only in her demonstrated skill but also in her teacher’s pleasure at her success. The flip side of this is that the child who struggles to learn the game, who repeatedly fails to win, who is unable to anticipate the moves of her opponent, will feel frustrated not simply because the extra candy is eluding her grasp, nor simply because success at any endeavor is more satisfying than failure, but because she fears disappointing her teacher and perhaps even senses that her teacher will feel her failure as in some sense the teacher’s own failure. Mastering any complex task involves frustration, disappointment, and failure as well as satisfaction and the glow of success, even when—or perhaps especially when—the learning process takes place within the context of a loving relationship. If the child is motivated to attempt to learn chess by her love for her teacher and thus by her desire to please her teacher, is she motivated by an external good? 14 MacIntyre gives “prestige, status and money” as examples of external goods that tend to motivate adults.15 While prestige and status (unlike money) are relational goods, having largely to do with how we are regarded by others, they do seem importantly different from the relational good of love between student and teacher, child and parent, or friend and friend. Insofar as we are motivated by the desire for prestige, our grasp on the internal goods of a practice is likely to become progressively weaker. So the desire to be admired as the greatest chess player in the world could erode one’s enjoyment of the game or even tempt one into cheating in a crucial match. The same is not true of the child’s desire to please those who love her and whom she loves. Those who love a child seek to promote her good, her flourishing and perfection. What most pleases those who love her, then, are actions that promote her own good. What most pleases a good father about the gift his daughter gives him is her budding generosity, not the benefit to himself. The child sees that her father is pleased when she is generous, so she wants to be generous. And while early on she might be satisfied with seeming generous, she knows that this seeming would not really please her father, would not satisfy his desire for her good, so she wants really to be generous. Her desire to please has generated a genuine, if derivative, desire to be generous. In order truly to be generous, moreover, she must do more than mimic Father or follow his precise instructions; she must be able herself to discriminate among potential courses of action. If he has helped her toward this by indicating at various points, “this is

ch a p t er one

30

what generosity requires of us now,” she herself must generalize from such particulars to form her own grasp of what it is to be generous.16 The child can now take pleasure in the act of generosity itself, not just in her father’s delight and praise. In the case of a conflict between the pleasure of acting generously and the pleasure of being praised by Father (if, say, Father is more likely to praise her for saving her allowance rather than sharing it with a panhandler), the child might even choose the former rather than the latter. Still, the child is not yet virtuous; while she now derives pleasure from acting generously, not just from the praise and approval she receives for acting generously, she pursues virtue as a natural good, qua pleasant, not qua virtuous. It is still a contingent fact about the way she acts that what she does is virtuous.

The Student of Virtue Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is aimed at an audience of young people who have had an upbringing of the sort sketched above; their characters have been shaped by virtuous elders in a context of care and trust. They have learned to take pleasure in virtuous actions, to appreciate or enjoy them as virtuous. They have thereby not just learned to do what is just but have learned experientially that these actions are just, in the sense that they (at least sometimes) subjectively appreciate the goodness of so acting. Such a young person does not yet, though, possess either a settled character or a full understanding of what she is doing in acting virtuously, that is, a reflective understanding of the fact that these actions are choice worthy for their own sake.17 The pleasurable and the good have begun to converge for such a person, but as yet imperfectly. Aristotle holds that young people typically follow the feelings of the moment. Therefore, even someone who has had a good upbringing, and who thus appreciates the intrinsic pleasures of virtuous action, may nevertheless at times pursue an immediate pleasure that is not that of virtuous action. Whereas the virtuous pursue only rational desires, desires to act in ways that fulfill ends endorsed by reason, young people do not pursue ends insofar as they are endorsed by reason but simply insofar as they are perceived as pleasant. Sometimes, presumably, virtuous action will appear pleasant, but at other times, food, sex, or fame will appear pleasant. Having pursued as pleasant something other than virtuous action, however, well-brought-up youth will feel ashamed (1128b10–21).

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

31

“Insofar as [the well-brought-up person] realizes [these actions] are unjust or ignoble, they do not appear to him as pleasant or enjoyable; insofar as he does not realize this and so desires and perhaps does such things, he feels badly about it, ashamed of his failure.” A sense of shame is felt for having done something ignoble or dishonorable; it is thus, for Aristotle, contingent on a love for what is noble or fine, kalos. Nobility is the beauty of virtuous actions, that which elicits admiration. Burnyeat suggests that Aristotle relies here on Plato’s tripartite soul, and in particular on the middle, spirited part of the soul, which develops prior to reason. The spirited part of the soul, which aims at what is noble, is also the seat of shame. The well-formed young, though they have no reflective understanding of how virtuous actions constitute the good life, do perceive the beauty of virtuous action and aim at this with their spirited desires (1179b4–31). When they follow competing desires and act ignobly, they are ashamed because they perceive the ugliness of their actions. One who is on the way to virtue thus experiences continual confl ict, much like the akratic or incontinent person, except that the akratic has fully developed rational desires that nevertheless do not determine action, while in the young reason is not yet fully developed, so neither are rational desires.18 Because the well-brought-up student already loves the noble and is ashamed when she nevertheless does what is ignoble, she is disposed to learn from Aristotle’s lectures and to move in the direction of a fuller, reasoned grasp of the good life, integrating a well-disposed spirit or appetitive element with newly formed rational desires. At this point, we can be robustly hopeful that the student of virtue can through reflection strengthen her commitment to virtue, arriving at a settled view of the good and rational desires to do what conduces to it, and bringing her appetites—already well disposed through their love of the noble—into steady harmony with reason’s grasp of the good. Those, in contrast, who have no experiential grasp of virtuous action cannot benefit from argument and discussion concerning virtue. They are unable to express their theoretical commitments in action because their appetitive elements are not in harmony with reason (1179b25–30). The fully virtuous agent, then, is one who has learned to take pleasure in virtuous action; even as a youth, her pursuit of pleasure has been at the same time an attempt to perform the actions characteristic of the virtuous. Second, she has come to perceive the beauty of virtuous actions and has pursued through her spirited desires virtuous actions as noble and admirable. Lastly, she has formed a reflective understanding of the

ch a p t er one

32

good life as constituted by virtuous activity, and this has given rise to rational desires to so act. It is no longer the case that she pursues virtuous activity as a source of pleasure, but rather that she takes pleasure only in acting virtuously. For the virtuous agent, the pleasurable, the noble, and the good coincide. The self-indulgent, in contrast, never move beyond the pursuit of pleasure as such. If they are to behave decently, they will require laws that are coercive, with penalties attached; “for the many yield to compulsion more than to argument, and to sanctions more than to what is fine” (1180a3–5). Unlike the incontinent person, the virtuous agent’s appetitive desires do not distract his attention so as to undo the decision he has made to act in accordance with his rational desires.19 And unlike the continent person, the virtuous agent’s appetitive desires are in harmony with her rational desires, so she does not find it difficult to act virtuously.

Choosing Virtue for Its Own Sake In order to choose virtuous actions for their own sake, rather than simply because a good upbringing has rendered them pleasurable, it is not necessary to have a theoretical grasp of some common feature that renders virtuous actions virtuous, or a theory about why certain actions are virtuous. The agent need not consciously think, “I’m doing this because it is virtuous,” even though we say that when the agent chooses the virtuous action for its own sake, she chooses it qua virtuous. Rather, as Rosalind Hursthouse suggests, we may specify that “ ‘The virtuous agent chooses virtuous actions “for their own sake” ’ means ‘the virtuous agent chooses virtuous actions for at least one of a certain type or range of reasons, X,’ where X reasons differ from virtue to virtue and where they are reasons that allow us to understand what made that action appropriate for a virtuous agent under these circumstances.” That is, the virtuous person does the right thing for the right reason, where the reason shows why the action was appropriate to the situation. X reasons are multiple and potentially infi nite; they are not a distinctive kind of reason. All we need to add in order to be confident that the virtuous agent is really choosing virtuous actions for their own sake is the requirement that the agent chooses virtuous actions for X reasons not by accident but out of a stable character.20 Since choosing virtuous action for its own sake means something

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

33

different in different contexts, Aristotle sheds light on this characteristic of virtue indirectly by exploring states that falsely go by the name of various virtues. So Aristotle’s discussion of the semblances of particular virtues is directed toward identifying apparently virtuous actions that are not in fact performed for their own sake. The courage of a citizen is merely apparent if the citizen’s brave actions are performed in pursuit of honor. Similarly, the courage of professional soldiers, the spirited, the hopeful, and the ignorant are merely apparent so long as the professional soldier is calm because he does not feel threatened, the spirited are sustained only by emotion, the hopeful are confident merely due to past victories, and the ignorant are simply unaware of the danger facing them (1116a8–1117a28). Some of these semblances of courage are akin to the inevitable imperfections of those on the way to virtue: learners, too, at various points are sustained by their desire for honor, by emotion, or by mere ignorance, but they move beyond these as mere stages in the acquisition of virtue. One who exhibits these semblances is acting as she does for reasons other than those characteristic of the truly courageous, one who “stands firm against the right things and fears the right things, for the right end, in the right way, at the right time, and is correspondingly confident” (1115b17). It is this sort of semblance, given its capacity to deceive both its possessor and the community at large, that troubles Aristotle. It is the need to identify these semblances and distinguish them from true virtues that leads him to speak of the virtuous as always choosing virtuous actions simply for their own sake. Why, then, is ethical reflection worthwhile, and why is Aristotle hopeful that it will foster more complete virtue in students of virtue? And does Aristotle’s insistence that the virtuous always act for the sake of the noble not suggest, after all, a distinctive reason for action shared by all particular examples of acting virtuously? Let us wrestle first with the latter of these two much-controverted questions. Of the kalon, the fine or noble, Aristotle says that the brave person stands firm against the things she fears “in the right way, as prescribed by reason, for the sake of what is fine, since this is the end aimed at by virtue” (1115b12) and later that in spending money “the magnificent person will aim at what is fine, since that is a common feature of the virtues” (1122b7). This sounds like “the fine” does provide a distinctive reason for acting; virtue is chosen for its own sake, certainly, but apparently also for the sake of the fine. Some commentators argue, though, that acting for the sake of the noble means nothing more nor less than acting for virtue’s own sake. “What marks

ch a p t er one

34

the virtuous disposition is that the virtuous person now does the virtuous action just for its own sake; discerning that this is what virtue requires is enough to motivate her, and no counter-motivation is produced in her. This is what it is for her to act ‘for the sake of the fine.’ ” 21 A distinction Aristotle introduces in the final chapter of the Eudemian Ethics, between the good and noble (kalos kagathos) and the (merely) good (agathos) man, suggests, though, a real distinction between acting for the sake of virtue and acting for the sake of the fine. According to the Eudemian Ethics, the nobly good person values virtue and virtuous actions because they are good in themselves, whereas the merely good person, while embodying in practice a commitment to virtuous activity above everything else, mistakenly conceives of virtuous activity as performed for the sake of natural goods (EE 1248b37–1249a3). Above, we discussed the fine as the beauty of virtuous actions, grasped and pursued by spirited desires. The young perceive the fine and noble without a reflective grasp of it. But the nobly good person of the Eudemian Ethics account not only perceives and pursues the fine but also understands that she acts virtuously because of the inherent beauty or value of those actions and not for any other reason. When asked for first-order reasons for acting, the nobly good and the merely good person will give the same answers—“because she was drowning,” “because he was not my husband.” But when asked a second-order question, “Why be courageous? Why be temperate? Why be virtuous?” the merely good person has no answer to offer or wrongly answers that virtue pays. So Sarah Broadie comments that “nobility is goodness reflectively valuing itself and its actions as they should be valued: not as natural goods which can be used and misused, still less as means to such goods, but as admirable in themselves.” 22 Both the nobly good and the merely good person are committed in practice to doing virtuous action for its own sake, regardless of the costs or consequences for the agent. But the merely good person does not grasp this fact about herself. This also means that in some sense the merely good person fails to meet one of the requirements Aristotle stipulates in the Nicomachean Ethics for virtue—she does not really know what she is doing, that is, choosing virtuous actions (for X reasons) for their own sake. Thus the distinction between the nobly good and the merely good person verges—though Aristotle does not state it as such—on becoming not simply a distinction between different gradations of virtue but a distinction between true virtue and one of its semblances.

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

35

If this account is right, then doing virtuous actions for the sake of the noble does not mean, at least in the ordinary sense, doing them for some distinct additional reason. It does mean, though, grasping reflectively what all virtuous actions do have in common—being (not simply appearing) choice worthy for their own sake. At a first-order level both the merely good and the nobly good person perform virtuous actions for their own sake, but at the second-order, reflective level only the nobly good person performs virtuous actions for their own sake. The noble is thus clearly not an external good, not a good to which virtuous action might be instrumentally ordered. Rather, it is constituted by virtuous actions performed necessarily for their own sake, along with a reflective grasp of this fact. It deepens, rather than competes with, the “for their own sake” that distinguishes the reasons for virtuous action from all other reasons for acting. Acting for the sake of the noble is thus structurally analogous to acting for the supreme end, that of happiness or eudaimonia. To say that virtuous actions are done for the sake of happiness does not compete with the claim that they are done for their own sake, because virtuous activity is not a contingent means to the end of eudaimonia, but for Aristotle a significant component (the most significant component) of it. One cannot act virtuously solely in order to, or as a means to, secure happiness, for this would mean one was not in fact acting virtuously and would therefore fail to secure happiness. There is no alternate route to happiness that takes a detour around the virtues but nevertheless arrives at the same goal; happiness is not a subjective state that could be somehow artificially induced. “The way in which happiness functions as an end seems to be not that the happy man does things in order to be happy, but rather that he does, for the sake of their own nobility, the noble things which in fact constitute the happiness which makes life worth while.” 23 We simply cannot characterize the end of eudaimonia without reference to the virtues, or act for the sake of nobility without choosing virtuous actions for their own sake. We are now in a position to begin to see also why ethical reflection is worthwhile, not because it arrives at a theory of virtue but because of how it reinforces the commitment embodied practically in the merely good person’s actions by giving such a person an understanding of why she is doing what she is doing. Similarly, such reflection gives the akratic student of ethics a way of distinguishing between the pleasure she has learned to take in virtuous action from its choice worthiness regardless of

ch a p t er one

36

cost or benefit to herself, and thus a way of reinforcing her commitment to choosing virtuous actions for their own sake. We might even suspect that “mere goodness eventually degenerates unless safeguarded by noble natures who knowingly and articulately prize fine deeds for their own sake.” 24 Unreflective goodness is vulnerable in a way that might lead us to term it a semblance of true virtue.

Politics, Friendship, and the Common Good As we have just seen, acting virtuously for its own sake, for the sake of the noble, and for the sake of eudaimonia are not on Aristotle’s account competing or conflicting ways of acting. The virtuous person simultaneously does all of these. How do these reasons for acting, though, stand in relation to the common good? Do tensions arise here? Aristotle argues at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics that political science is the ruling science, since it is concerned with the greatest good. He also states that ethics is subordinated to political science (1094a27). This might suggest that individual goods are completely subsumed by Aristotle into the common good, such that individuals may be sacrificed for the sake of that good. In fact, though, Aristotle articulates the relationship between individual and common good in such a way as to affirm the common good as the more complete good without requiring that the individual directly pursue the common good in each of her actions or demanding that the individual good be given up in favor of the common good.25 By the same token, though, Aristotle does not allow concern for the common good to be made an instrumental means to private happiness. Aristotle does claim that the good is the same for a city as for an individual (1094b7). However, while the individual’s private good depends on the common good, in that the individual depends on the community both for survival and in order to flourish as a social being, this does not mean that the individual good is completely absorbed by the common good. While Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics from the standpoint of political science, as concerned with the greatest and most complete good, in his attempt to define the highest good he quickly turns to the end of eudaimonia and gives an account of eudaimonia in terms of an individual human being: the human good is “the soul’s activity that expresses virtue” and does so “in a complete life” (1098a15–20).26 Most of the remainder of the Nicomachean Ethics, including the vexed discussion

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

37

of theoretical study in book 10, is focused on developing an account of the virtues as the activities of individual souls. Only in book 8, where Aristotle turns to friendship, do we begin to understand how the virtues, as excellences of individuals, relate to the common good. Not only is it the case that a life without friends is not choice worthy (1155a5) but also friendship is something noble insofar as it is a central arena for the exercise of the virtues, in which persons wish good to others for those others’ own sake (1156b10). Aristotle identifies friendship as an arena within which relationships are just; of any group of people it can be said that “the extent of their community is the extent of their friendship, since it is also the extent of the justice found there” (1159b30). He is reluctant to admit that the best sort of friendship can be extended to an entire political community, given that what friends “find most choiceworthy is living together,” and we cannot live in the requisite sense, sharing conversation and thought, with very many people (1171b30, 1170b10; cf. 1171a1–20). Still, he also insists that partial communities are subordinate to the political community (1160a20). Thus, complete justice would seem to require political friendship, which Aristotle terms concord or unanimity (homonoia). And only insofar as citizens are virtuous is political friendship possible, since only the virtuous are capable of seeking in common what is just (1167b3). The good politician seeks to inculcate virtue in the citizens of the polis because only when citizens are virtuous can the greatest good, the end of political science, in fact be secured (1102a7). So while the virtues are for the most part understood as excellences of the individual, whose exercise over the course of a lifetime centrally constitutes eudaimonia, without concord—the fellowship of virtue— eudaimonia remains incomplete. In pursuing the common good, seeking in common what is just, one will help others for their own sakes, and this may involve substantial self-sacrifice. In so doing, the virtuous person’s act is “an expression of her love for the life of actively virtuous practical reasoning, which is what she most deeply feels herself to be and to be identified with.” 27 It is in this sense that the virtuous person can secure eudaimonia through self-sacrifice—not in the sense that is truly acting to secure a good for herself through (apparently) sacrificing her interests to those of others. Someone who sought the common good as an instrumental means to her own private happiness would on Aristotle’s account not in fact be helping to constitute political friendship, since she would not be seeking for its own sake what is just.28 While eudaimonia is incomplete in the absence of political friendship and concord, where

ch a p t er one

38

these are lacking, more limited friendships remain an important arena for the exercise of the virtues and allow for a more restricted flourishing for social animals such as ourselves.

Self-Preoccupation, Truthfulness, and the Problem of Magnanimity There is thus far no reason to accuse Aristotelian virtue of fostering any problematic self-preoccupation on the part of the agent, nothing that might suggest that Aristotelian virtue as such is a mere semblance of virtue. At times, acting for the sake of the noble is described in terms that might seem to raise these concerns. So, for example, Broadie writes that “ ‘for the sake of the noble’ captures what we might think of as the sense of owing it to oneself to do what is right or best even when this is costly. Aristotle would more naturally see it as the sense of being enhanced by the doing. The agent who does A because it is noble to do it does A as one who, by the doing of this independently right action, renders himself noble or fine.” This suggests that a particular image of oneself as noble or as becoming noble might serve a first-order motivating role in one’s action. Broadie takes pains to dispute this, insisting that doing something for the sake of the noble or fine does not depend on “the agent’s seeing himself at the time as one who generally responds in this way, or on his seeing himself as ‘exercising a virtue.’ ” The “agent need not (and very likely does not) act as he does in order to do what a good person would do.” 29 And once we have grasped that acting for the sake of the noble means having a reflective grasp of the fact that virtuous actions are chosen for their own sake, we can see why this is the case. The same worries about self-reference are raised in a more pressing way, though, by Aristotle’s discussion of magnanimity, the crown of the virtues (1124a2). For magnanimity has essentially to do with the virtuous person’s own self-perception. Aristotle defines the magnanimous or “great-souled” person as one who “thinks himself worthy of great things and is really worthy of them” (1123b3). The magnanimous person possesses complete virtue, is aware of this, and knows himself to be worthy of the greatest things. Among the great goods of which the magnanimous one is worthy, the greatest is honor, “the one we award to the gods, the one above all that is the aim of people with a reputation for worth” (1123b18). Thinking oneself worthy of the greatest things may seem extreme, but Aristotle explains that while

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

39

such a person “is at the extreme in so far as he makes great claims, . . . in so far as he makes them rightly, he is intermediate; for what he thinks he is worthy of reflects his real worth” (1123b15). Part of what is at stake in magnanimity, then, is honest self-appraisal or accurate self-knowledge. Aristotle contrasts magnanimity on the one hand with vanity, which takes itself to be worthy of greater honor than it receives, and on the other hand with pusillanimity, the characteristic of one who “thinks he is worthy of less than he is worthy of” (1123b10). Aristotle argues that pusillanimity and vanity both involve a peculiar sort of error—a failure of self-knowledge. The pusillanimous person “would seem not to know himself; for if he did, he would aim at the things he is worthy of, since they are goods” (1125a22). For Aristotle, then, it is crucial that the virtuous person both know and acknowledge his or her own worth.30 In terming magnanimity “a sort of adornment of the virtues,” Aristotle seems almost to suggest that it is not itself a distinct virtue (1124a2). After all, it would seem that the virtues could be complete without magnanimity, in that one could be worthy of great things, worthy in particular of honor, without pausing to reflect on this. Yet Aristotle does include magnanimity among the virtues and clearly regards this capacity for accurate self-assessment of one’s greatness as an enhancement of virtue. Conceding that vanity and pusillanimity are not more eligible, why would it not be better for the virtuous person to be self-forgetful? Why devote time and energy to reflecting on one’s own worth, rather than dedicating oneself wholesale to virtuous activity? Aristotle does not answer this question directly, so we must speculate. Certainly it is the case that Aristotle is concerned with proper naming—we must call a spade a spade. And yet, one cannot be magnanimous by rightly assessing one’s lack of courage or temperance. What we might say, extending what we said above about the value generally of ethical reflection, is that by reflecting on and affirming her own worth, the magnanimous person is helping to sustain the communal understanding of virtue, in particular of the heights of moral excellence that few citizens will actually attain. Only those who actually possess great virtue are capable of fully grasping, recognizing, understanding their achievement. Were these few not to reflect on their own virtue, the community as a whole would suffer a loss of reflective understanding of moral excellence.31 Of course, in order to be magnanimous, the virtuous person must not only know her own great worth but also be able accurately to assess the worth of various goods, most centrally the good of honor, which

ch a p t er one

40

is said to be “the greatest of all external goods” (1123b20). While the magnanimous person is said to be particularly concerned with honor, this does not mean that she is concerned above all with winning honor from others. In fact, even when the magnanimous person “receives great honours from excellent people, he will [only] be moderately pleased, thinking he is getting what is proper to him, or even less” (1124a6). While honor is a good, “there is no honour worthy of complete virtue” (1124a8), and honor that comes from those who have a false understanding of what is truly worthy of honor is actually worthless and to be disdained by the magnanimous person. Aristotle is at pains to point out that the magnanimous person does not stand in need of honor from others, even from those who know that only virtue is truly worthy of honor. For the magnanimous person is, like the gods, self-sufficient (1125a12). It is the magnanimous person’s own awareness of her worth, her deservingness of honor, that constitutes magnanimity, not actually receiving honor from anyone. Similarly, while honor is given to the gods, and the gods deserve such honor, it would detract from the greatness of the gods if they actually could be said to need this honor. Aristotelian magnanimity has often been subject to critique by Christian thinkers, and in fact the tension between magnanimity and humility is often seen as capturing the basic tension between pagan and Christian conceptions of virtue. But questions arise about magnanimity even from within Aristotle’s own perspective. We explained above that while pursuit of virtue for the sake of the noble involves reflection on the fact that virtuous activity is valuable for its own sake, it does not involve acting for the sake of one’s own self-perception as a nobly good person. But magnanimity has intrinsically to do with awareness of one’s own moral worth. Is the magnanimous person acting for virtue’s own sake? Or has he fallen into a semblance of virtue, his activity directed now instrumentally toward the end of his own consciousness of moral greatness? Certainly, consciousness of one’s own moral worth is not an external good in the way that honor is. We might receive honor by a route other than that of virtue, that is, by deceiving others or by possessing something, such as physical strength or beauty, that ordinary people tend wrongly to honor. Consciousness of our own moral worth, of our worthiness of honor, in contrast, is not something we can secure by any route other than that of actually possessing moral worth. Moreover, such consciousness supervenes on perfected virtuous activity, such that we simply cannot be fully virtuous without at the same time possess-

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

41

ing consciousness of our own virtuousness.32 To lack this consciousness would signal that our virtues were not in fact perfected. Consciousness of one’s own worthiness of honor arises immediately out of perfected virtue and is not something added to it ad extra. Still, even if we grant that consciousness of moral worth supervenes in this way on virtuous activity, might it not still be possible for a virtuous agent to become so enamored of this consciousness that she begins to make virtuous activity an instrumental means to this end? On this scenario, she begins to act for the sake of her own sense of moral greatness and no longer for virtue’s own sake. She values her “virtuous” activity because it leads to what she does now value for its own sake—her own positive self-perception. Her end is no longer constituted by her activity itself, as it is for one whose end is perfected rational action. And this in turn would mean that she is in fact no longer virtuous at all—hence the scare quotes around the term above. Sustaining consciousness of one’s own moral greatness would thus at this juncture require self-deception; just as others may be deceived in giving one honor, we may deceive ourselves, persuading ourselves that we possess a moral greatness that in fact we have lost inasmuch as we now seek consciousness of moral greatness rather than virtue for its own sake. Even if consciousness of one’s own moral worth simply supervenes on virtuous activity, it is nevertheless possible to pervert it by treating it as an external good to which the pursuit of virtue can be instrumentalized.33 Is there any reason, though, to suspect this of the magnanimous person? There would not be, perhaps, except for some of the other specific claims Aristotle makes about the magnanimous person. I mentioned above in passing that Aristotle takes the magnanimous person to be or to aim at being self-sufficient (1125a12). The suggestion that magnanimity embodies this godlike trait is integrally related to another characteristic Aristotle notes in the magnanimous person: a reluctance to receive goods from others. To receive goods reflects need or lack and undermines self-sufficiency.34 “Magnanimous people seem to remember the good they do,” writes Aristotle, “but not what they receive, since the recipient is inferior to the giver, and the magnanimous person wishes to be superior” (1124b12). When the magnanimous person does receive a good, “he returns more good than he has received; for in this way the original giver will be repaid, and will also have incurred a new debt to him, and will be the beneficiary” (1124b11). Thus the magnanimous person seeks to maintain superiority by keeping others always indebted to him. At one point, in the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterizes

ch a p t er one

42

magnanimity as “the excellence that disposes [one] to do good to others on a large scale” (1366b17–18). In the Nicomachean Ethics, though, Aristotle says almost nothing concerning the acts performed by the magnanimous person, except to note that he “is inactive and lethargic except for some great honor or achievement. Hence his actions are few, but great and renowned” (1124b25). Magnanimity is here defined not primarily in terms of service to the commonweal but in terms of securing a sense of one’s own self-sufficient greatness. We may discern a tension here within Aristotle’s thought. After all, the magnanimous person’s greatness is constituted by her virtue. But Aristotle is usually quite attentive to the fact that much luck is involved in whether one succeeds in developing or fails to develop a virtuous character. Having a good upbringing is, as we have already discussed, absolutely crucial. This in turn means that any person who possesses a virtuous character is deeply indebted to those involved in that process of character formation: to family, teachers, friends, community, laws.35 We have discussed the importance of good teachers above, but Aristotle also has much to say about the importance of friendship: friendship, he insists, is both necessary and fine (1155a29; 1170b15). Even the blessedly happy desire companionship rather than a solitary life (1157b20–24; 1169b15). Friendship aids the cultivation of virtue (1170a10). And virtuous persons are not jealous of their own virtue; they take pleasure in observing the virtuous actions of their friends (1170a1). It would seem, then, that magnanimity in fact involves serious self-deception, inasmuch as the magnanimous person fails to remember the goods she has received from others and thus arrives at a false estimate of her own self-sufficient greatness. Ironically, magnanimity, which was supposed to be constituted by proper self-knowledge, an accurate estimate of one’s own moral greatness, seems on closer examination to involve a falsifying denial of one’s own dependency on others, a dependency that Aristotle elsewhere recognizes.36 And in fact Aristotle’s account of friendship has similarly troubling features; the virtuous enjoy observing the actions of their friends because they regard their friends as other selves and their friends’ actions as their own (1169b32). Otherwise, they would be jealous at the fact that their friends were displaying greater activity than their own, just as a benefactor takes pleasure in her own actions, but those acted upon do not see anything fine in the action, even if they find it advantageous to themselves (1168a10). Aristotle does say that a virtuous person might even allow his friend to act in his stead, “since it may be finer to be responsible for his friend’s

Aristotle and the Puzzles of Habituation

43

doing the action than to do it himself” (1169a33). But this sacrifice on the part of the virtuous person is made only because sacrificing an opportunity to act may be itself on occasion a yet finer act. Even if human beings, as fundamentally social animals, are dependent on friendship, Aristotle does not conceive of virtuous friends as cultivating grateful consciousness of that dependency. This has implications for what I suggested above might be seen as a justification for the magnanimous person’s self-preoccupation, that the magnanimous person’s affirmation of her own worth sustains the communal understanding of the heights of virtue. It now seems, in contrast, that magnanimity, in failing to recognize the way in which the virtuous person is indebted to those responsible for her good upbringing, actually threatens to undermine communal understanding of the ways in which virtuous character is passed on. If ordinary people accept the magnanimous person’s claim to self-sufficiency, they will themselves be even less capable of forming virtuous character in their own children, students, and fellow citizens, since they will fail to grasp that virtue emerges through relationships of dependency and interdependency.

Semblances of Virtue in Aristotle’s Ethics Aristotle gives us reason to hope that the student of virtue, one who has had a decent upbringing and therefore has good habits and a love of the fine, will develop into a virtuous agent, knowingly choosing virtue for its own sake and out of a settled character. Vicious adults admittedly may perform the actions typical of the virtuous, but only accidentally (as the ignorant or constitutionally hopeful act “bravely”) or when constrained, as by laws. Students of the virtues, in contrast, often perform actions characteristic of the virtuous without being constrained, and already love virtue, even if this love of virtue is not always determinative of their actions. While at some point in this process we must say that the student is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (or, better, doing actions characteristic of the virtuous agent but for reasons other than those of the virtuous agent, motivated by fear of shame or desire for praise), if all goes well this ceases to be the case. She moves from a semblance of virtue to its reality—with luck, admittedly, but nonetheless through a continuous process of gradual transformation, from pursing the noble as pleasant, through the formation of a conception of the good, to pursuing the noble

ch a p t er one

44

as good, from something like akrasia to continence to temperance, from acting virtuously only when it is pleasant to taking pleasure only in virtuous action. This transformation takes place not through any mechanical repetition of action types but rather through a reflectively and affectively engaged process in which the learner repeatedly seeks to approximate an ideal that is itself progressively more fully understood. But the goal of true virtue seems to recede from grasp once more when Aristotle considers the difference between those who possess a reflective understanding of their commitment to acting for virtue’s own sake and those who do not. So what from one stage appears as a full embodiment of virtue may at a more mature stage appear only preliminary and thus as semblance. Moreover, we have seen that there is reason, even on Aristotle’s own terms, to question his characterization of magnanimity as an adornment of perfect virtue, to worry that magnanimity itself might be a different, and more intractable, semblance of virtue. For what first appears as a virtue concerned with truthfulness and accurate self-perception, and specifically with truthful acknowledgment of one’s own worthiness of honor, emerges instead as a falsifying grasp at godlike self-sufficiency. And even though the consciousness of one’s own moral greatness is not intrinsically problematic, the fact that the magnanimous “man” pretends to self-sufficiency strongly suggests that the magnanimous man is indeed preoccupied with his own moral greatness, with himself as moral actor, in a way that competes with his commitment to virtuous activity for its own sake.

Augustine

2

Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride While for Aristotle there is a logical conundrum hovering over the process of habituation, this in no way renders suspect either acquired virtue or the process of acquiring it. For Augustine the situation is more complicated. Aristotle asks how we can act justly or temperately unless we are already just or temperate, and the solution lies in distinguishing between performing actions characteristic of the virtuous and performing those actions in the way the virtuous perform them, that is, knowing what they are doing, choosing so to act, choosing to act in such a way for its own sake, and doing so out of a settled character. Rather than seeing the semblance of virtue as a stage in the ordinary process of acquiring virtue, or even as that process gone somehow awry, for Augustine the distinction is made to bear significantly more weight, since he uses it to distinguish between two cities, one constituted by those united by their love of God and one composed of those who love self. Choosing virtue for its own sake is no longer simply a shorthand for speaking of acting (reflectively) for the reasons characteristic of the virtuous (i.e., not for the sake of honor, out of ignorance, as a result of accidental features of personality or context). For Augustine, love of God and love of virtue are interdefined in such a way that those who fail to love God are unable truly to choose virtuous actions for their own sake. Habituation simply anchors them more deeply in pride and self-love. Augustine’s position on pagan virtue is far from clear. Notorious as he is for having declared the pagan virtues to be splendida vitia, glittering vices, he never actually said so.1 He did deny that pagans could possess true virtue, but his attitude toward pagan virtue was more ambivalent and ambiguous than definitive, in contrast to Reformation and early

ch a p t er t wo

46

modern appropriations of his critique. As John Rist notes, Augustine “seems to wish to assert that, if a choice must be made, such acts must be classed as vices rather than virtues, but to recoil from condemning them outright as vicious.” 2 While such Augustinian leitmotifs as suspicion of the splendid vices and the demand for pure love for God intensified in the early modern period, Augustine’s reconceived eudaimonism, his understanding of virtue as acquired through mimesis, and his sense of the encounter with grace in beauty were sustained only rarely. In part 2 of this book I shall argue, however, that in Erasmus and the early Jesuit theatrical tradition we do encounter a similar conception of Christian virtue as simultaneously actively achieved and given wholly by grace. Here virtue is understood as acquired through the Christian’s imitative act, but only as these efforts are inspired by the beauty of the example of Christ and those already captured by the power of Christ’s example, the saints. Our first task in this chapter will therefore be to try to sort through Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue. In what sense does pagan virtue constitute a mere semblance of virtue? Does Augustine’s critique encompass a critique of habituation as the path to virtue? Or can acting the part of virtue, imitating the actions of the virtuous, lead Christians from semblance to true virtue, even if it does not do so for pagans? “Virtuous” pagans fall short of true virtue because their actions fail to be directed to their true final end. Even if pagans can make progress in virtue, bringing their affections into harmony with reason and directing their actions toward the common good, their actions are not truly virtuous since they are not directed to God. Moreover, Augustine suspects that virtuous pagans can never really succeed in acting even for virtue’s own sake, for goods internal to virtue; even the most fully developed pagan virtue is actually directed toward the self. Thus, pagans are convicted of the semblance of self-direction—of failing to direct their actions to their true final end and instead of setting up themselves and their own self-image as that for the sake of which they act. Augustine concedes, though, that it is not solely pagans who can be convicted of self-direction. Those within the church, too, are often guilty of “hypocrisy,” of acting in apparently virtuous ways for their own sake rather than for God’s sake. While pagan virtue remains mere semblance because of its failure to direct action toward its proper last end, this does not mean that Augustine rejects pagan eudaimonism as such. I therefore briefly take up the vexed question of the nature of Augustine’s own eudaimonism and of the ways

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

47

in which it does and does not fundamentally redefi ne what is meant within ancient ethics by “final end,” “happiness,” and “virtue” itself. What emerges as the heart of Christian virtue is a willingness to be dependent on God and to give up all striving for self-sufficiency, since this aspiration is for Augustine the heart of pagan misdirection. Dependency does not imply passivity, however; for Augustine, Christian virtue is active insofar as it is fundamentally responsive, responsive to the grace that converts us from love of self to love of God. Once we have discussed the semblances of virtue criticized by Augustine, the balance of our discussion will unpack a bit more fully what for Augustine constitutes true virtue and consider whether acting the part of virtue can conduce to virtue. One aspect of this is a consideration of the theatricality of virtue in the context of Augustine’s critique of the theater. Augustine’s critique is not directed against mimesis as such. The fundamental problem with theater is simply that it offers bad models for imitation. This in fact underscores the centrality of imitation within the moral life. Because we are transformed by the models we find attractive, insofar as we are drawn to imitate these models, it is vitally important that our attention be directed toward models of true goodness. For Augustine there is indeed room for habituation in Christian virtue, but talk of habituation and human striving must go hand in hand with talk of conversion. True virtue, insists Augustine, requires “singleness of heart”—a pure intention, directed solely to God. In this life, Christian virtue remains imperfect, embattled, our loves divided. It is grace that converts us, that turns us from self to God by confronting us with divine beauty so irresistible that we cannot but fall in love with it—the beauty of God in Christ. Having fallen in love, we want naturally to draw closer to our beloved and seek to do so through imitation, since like assimilates to like. Habituation in Christian virtue is thus much more than the imitation of exemplars of human virtue, though it is also this. Made in the image of God, but having lost through sin our likeness to God, we are restored through mimesis of Christ. Christian imitation never attempts to become independent of its exemplar, to achieve selfsufficient virtue. Rather, mimesis unites copy with exemplar or, better, reunites copy with exemplar, restoring us to the God from whom we came. Ironically, what for Augustine constitutes true virtue might from the perspective of pagan, particularly Stoic, ethics itself be viewed as a semblance of virtue, in that the final good becomes something we must finally receive from God rather than achieving through our own action.

ch a p t er t wo

48

Augustine’s defense of Christian virtue as true virtue rests on the fact that we are responsive to grace rather than passive in the face of grace; our own agency, striving to imitate exemplars of virtue, remains central, and our final good, enjoyment of God, is possible only through our own active involvement.

Pagan Superbia One of the most important discussions of pagan virtue comes in City of God, book V, where Augustine concedes that pagans can certainly develop in virtue insofar as they move from the pursuit of dominium, driven by the desire to impose their own will on others, to the pursuit of glory and honor. Among those who pursue glory, there is a distinction to be made among those who seek praise from the masses, those who seek praise from the prominent, and those who seek praise only from the virtuous. The latter must shift from pursuing glory and honor by whatever means available to pursuing them only through virtuous, honorable means.3 Those who do so have a certain claim to being called virtuous, and indeed Augustine speaks at length about virtuous Romans, and even holds these up as examples for Christians (CD V 17, 205). Yet despite making these distinctions and holding up these examples, Augustine also insists that “no one can have true virtue without true piety, that is without the true worship of the true God” (CD V 19, 213). Augustine takes from the Platonists the notion that virtue seeks proper order—in the soul, and ultimately also in the community. But for Augustine, pagan “virtue” represents a fundamental perversion of right order, insofar as it fails to recognize that all things should be ordered to God, since nothing but God has value in and of itself.4 Pagans can achieve a sort of subsidiary order in the soul, insofar as they succeed in bringing the irrational desires under the governance of reason. This order in turn allows virtuous pagans effectively to pursue the end of earthly peace, order on the communal level. Augustine singles out for his highest praise those Romans, like Regulus, who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the common good (CD I 24, 35). As Robert Markus points out, despite the fact that Augustine speaks of Rome as an outsider, his “tone is often unmistakably and authentically Roman, and full of legitimate pride in the stock exempla of Roman virtue.” 5 The importance of this can be seen in the fact that both earthly and heavenly cities are concerned with the

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

49

common good. Earthly peace is made use of by the “Heavenly City in her pilgrimage here on earth,” which, like the earthly city, “defends and seeks the compromise between human wills in respect of the provisions relevant to the mortal nature of man” (CD XIX 17, 878). However, from a more comprehensive perspective the “order” achieved by pagan virtue is actually disorder, since it is not placed in the service of God: “The fact is that the soul may appear to rule the body and the reason to govern the vicious elements in the most praiseworthy fashion; and yet if the soul and reason do not serve God as God himself has commanded that he should be served, then they do not in any way exercise the right kind of rule over the body and the vicious propensities” (CD XIX 25, 891). This might suggest that pagans can be virtuous at a first-order level, insofar as they achieve this order in the soul and pursue virtue for its own sake. At a second-order level, though, that is, when asked, “Why act virtuously?” they give a wrong answer, that is, an answer other than “To order all things to God.” Augustine’s claim against pagan virtue is stronger than this, though, in that he claims that it is pervaded by superbia, pride, the fundamental disorder that orders all things to self; “although the virtues are reckoned by some people to be genuine and honourable when they are related only to themselves and are sought for no other end, even then they are puffed up and proud, and so are to be accounted vices rather than virtues” (CD XIX 25, 891). The passage in which Augustine first expresses his intention to write a treatise on the two cities is telling; he characterizes the first city as “considering common goods for the sake of heavenly society,” while the second is charged with “placing common things under its own dominion for the sake of arrogant domination.” 6 Already here, Augustine excludes the possibility that the common good can be pursued for its own sake.7 It is not just that pagan virtue fails at a second-order level to be directed to God but also that it is intrinsically “puffed up and proud,” alleges Augustine, that is, ordered to the agent’s own self. Virtuous pagans are not guilty of outright hypocrisy, that is, of wanting to seem to be good persons without being so (CD V 19, 212). Moreover, as the example of Cato suggests, a pagan might be capable of pursuing virtue for the sake of his own good opinion of himself rather than for the sake of honor from others (CD V 13, 200). But even the best Romans, alleges Augustine, use virtue as a means to honor. They fail to recognize that honor and glory “must be the consequences of virtue not its antecedents”; honor and glory should be put to use in the promotion of virtue, not the reverse (CD V 12,

ch a p t er t wo

50

200). Cato appeared particularly virtuous in light of Sallust’s statement that “the less he sought glory, the more it pursued him” (CD V 12, 199). Regulus appeared even more virtuous, given his self-sacrifice for the sake of the city. Both, though, continued to pursue honor and glory, even if a refined version arising from self-regard (CD V 20, 215). Even the best pagan virtue thus remains for Augustine an instance of superbia, pride, ordering all things to self. Augustine’s suspicion is that pagan virtue will always be corrupted in the way that we suspected was the case for Aristotle’s magnanimous person—the virtuous pagan acts for the sake of his own sense of moral greatness; consciousness of his own moral worth infects his motivation. Disorder at the second-order level permeates the first-order level as well. The telltale sign of this is the magnanimous person’s refusal of gratitude, his denial of dependency, his aspiration to godlike self-sufficiency. To the extent that pagan virtue is defined by the ideal of Aristotelian magnanimity, we might agree that pagan virtue is indeed ordered to self rather than simply not ordered to God. To accuse all of pagan virtue of the failings of Aristotelian magnanimity seems too quick, though. Think instead of a contrasting Aristotelian ideal, that of the nobly good person, who at the first-order level chooses virtue for its own sake and at the second-order level acts for the sake of the noble, that is, has a reflective understanding of virtuous actions as choice worthy for their own sake, regardless of cost or benefit to the agent. Here pagan virtue does not seem ordered to self in a problematic way, although it is true that it is not ordered to God. There is no self-absorption here that infects motivation at the first-order level.

Augustine’s Eudaimonism In order to make more sense of why Augustine convicts pagan virtue of superbia we must first understand what Augustine does not reject about pagan ethics—its eudaimonism. This is particularly important in that later thinkers have sometimes thought that any ethics structured around the pursuit of happiness could not fail to be ordered to self in a deeply problematic way, in effect, that any eudaimonist ethic gives rise only to a semblance of virtue.8 This is not the issue for Augustine, whose ethic, like that of the Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans alike, has a eudaimonist form. As we have already noted in connection with Aristotle, acting for the

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

51

sake of happiness need not compromise the fact that the virtuous person chooses virtuous actions for the sake of those actions. If virtuous actions constitute happiness, they are choice worthy regardless of whether or not they benefit the agent in any ordinary way. It is the Stoics who draw out the implications of this in the most uncompromising fashion—the sage is happy even on the rack, happy even when the minimal commonsense conditions for happiness are utterly lacking. She is happy because her happiness is fully constituted by her virtue. At the outset of eudaimonist reflection (of whatever camp), happiness is little more than a thin specification of our final end, that which all seek for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. It is taken for granted by the ancients that I aim not for a good thing, state of affairs, or subjective state of consciousness, but rather I aim to be acting and living in one way rather than another. Happiness “is different from the other goods we aim at; it is not just another end, but the way we actively pursue those other ends, and so can be referred to as the use we make of those ends.” 9 Even if there was consensus in the pagan world that our final end is happiness, and about these formal characteristics of happiness as our final end, there was plenty of disagreement over what happiness substantially consists in. Augustine, like the ancient pagans, assumes that the pressing task is to discern in what our happiness substantially consists; the fact that all we do is for the sake of happiness he takes for granted. Perhaps the most important debate in ancient ethics was over the relation between virtue and happiness. Aristotle and the Stoics agreed, against unreflective common sense, that virtue was necessary to or constitutive of happiness in the ways we have already discussed, but the Stoics went further than Aristotle, arguing that virtue is not simply dominant over other goods but sufficient to happiness, such that no external goods are necessary to complete happiness. One way of beginning to situate Augustine’s eudaimonism in relation to that of the ancients is to locate his position in this debate.10 Augustine agrees with the Stoics that genuine happiness must be secure, immune from loss. It is this conviction that drives the Stoics to insist that virtue, as it alone (on their understanding) is solely up to the agent, must be a sufficient condition for happiness. But Augustine does not follow the Stoics in this inference. Neither does Augustine conclude with Aristotle that one can be happy through a confluence of virtue and good luck, since a happiness dependent on good luck would not be secure and would not thus be true happiness (CD XIX 4, 852). One simply cannot be completely happy, argues Augustine, in the

ch a p t er t wo

52

face of the evils of human life (CD XIX 4, 855). Rather, Augustine concludes that “eternal life is the Supreme Good” (CD XIX 4, 852)—eternal life, a life free of the ills and miseries of this life, secure in the possession of the goods that constitute happiness. Even if Augustine’s ethics share the eudaimonistic form of ancient pagan ethics, his characterization of the supreme good does redefine the boundaries of that eudaimonism. We will have more to say below about what should be understood by “eternal life,” but if it is to be free of all the ills of age, disease, natural catastrophe, and death, as well as vice, then it should already be clear that it is not something recognizable to ancient ethical reflection as an end of human activity. For as we have just seen, the final end is for pagan ethicists a way of being and doing, a way of pursuing all other ends. Achieving my final good, living and doing well, is thus intrinsically a matter of the character of my own activity. “People do feel, then, that our final good cannot be something that other people could give us; it must be something we can achieve for ourselves. And so my final end involves my activity: it is not a thing or state of affairs that others could bring about for me.” 11 We see here the tendency, most pronounced in the Stoics but visible in the Aristotelian ideal of magnanimity as well (and hardly surprising given a conception of the gods as self-sufficient and indifferent to relationship), to assume that if my final end must be constituted by my activity, achieving it requires a certain self-sufficiency or independence on my part. As we shall see, Augustine seeks to sustain the claim that our activity is in some sense constitutive of our final end while rejecting the accompanying assumption. Augustine recognizes that eternal life cannot be in the usual sense an end of human activity; it lies beyond the scope of this life and is given to us by God. But he proclaims this a strength rather than a weakness of his account, since it is an “amazing folly” of pagan philosophers to wish “to be happy here on earth and to achieve bliss by their own efforts” (CD XIX 4, 852). Not only do we not have control over external goods but we do not even have the power to achieve virtue. Augustine rejects both the assumption that our final good must be something that we can achieve for ourselves and the assumption that the happy person seeks to be self-sufficient by making her happiness as dependent as possible on herself rather than anything outside of herself. It is this aspiration to self-sufficiency, not the eudaimonism of pagan ethics, that is the target of Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue. It is this that he brands superbia, this which renders pagan virtue a semblance of true virtue.12

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

53

Eternal Life and Enjoyment of God While Augustine finds pagan ethics guilty of hubris in its aspiration to self-sufficiency, his characterization of our final good might seem to raise problems for his own view. Certainly the notion that our final good is attained only in the world to come is problematic from a pagan perspective because it is thus decisively not up to us. But it also seems problematic because eternal life sounds like an external good, not one constituted by my activity but one to which my activity is at best instrumentally directed. And certainly some things that Augustine says lend themselves to this interpretation, as when he writes that “eternal life is the Supreme Good, and eternal death the Supreme Evil, and . . . to achieve the one and escape the other, we must live rightly” (CD XIX 4, 852). On this interpretation, my actions have no intrinsic connection to eternal life but are a means to a goal external to themselves. I need divine assistance both because I cannot even perceive my proper goal, lying as it does beyond present experience, and because I cannot even on my own live rightly and thus move in the direction of my goal: “For we do not yet see our good, and hence we have to seek it by believing; and it is not in our power to live rightly, unless while we believe and pray we receive help from him who has given us the faith to believe that we must be helped by him” (CD XIX 4, 852). God helps us to act rightly and then rewards us with eternal life for having done so. This is a familiar picture, but it is not an Augustinian one. If it were, it would no longer be clear that virtuous actions were being chosen for their own sake, and Augustinian true virtue would itself be unmasked as glittering vice. If virtuous actions did not in any way constitute our supreme good, they would be chosen solely because they are a means to that supreme good. The fact that they did so conduce would be a contingent fact; theoretically, there could be an alternate path to the same end. Moreover, as an external good, eternal life could be a state of affairs or state of consciousness that I pursue for myself in a problematically self-referential way. Even if I were to sacrifice myself in this life for my neighbor, I would do so in order that I might achieve eternal life in the world to come. We can begin to correct this picture by noting that for Augustine “eternal life” is a very incomplete designation of our final end. Elsewhere, Augustine articulates that end as fruition of God, as in De Doctrina Christiana. To say that our final end is enjoyment of God might at first seem to leave open the same problems noted above: (1) that

ch a p t er t wo

54

virtue is chosen only as a means, not as an end in itself; (2) that the relation of virtue to our final end is contingent, not constitutive; and (3) that my final end is pursued for myself in a self-centered way. It is only when enjoyment of God is fully and properly understood that this misleading picture melts away. Augustine’s famous distinction in De Doctrina Christiana between uti and frui, where “to use something is to apply whatever it may be to the purpose of obtaining what you love” while “to enjoy something is to hold fast to it in love for its own sake,” represents an early and not wholly satisfactory effort on Augustine’s part to articulate the relation between love of God and all our other loves.13 We are told there that we must enjoy God alone, using this world in order to return to the Lord (De Doct. Chr. I. 9–10). This problematically instrumentalizes virtue, suggesting that virtuous actions are not in fact chosen for their own sake. If this were the case, the virtue of Augustine’s Christian would seem to be undermined no less than the virtue of Aristotle’s magnanimous person. Augustine runs into similar problems when he grapples with the status of love of neighbor—are other persons to be loved for their own sake or for some other reason? On the one hand, Augustine insists that our neighbor and we ourselves are to be loved not on our own account but on account of God (De Doct. Chr. I. 41–42). On the other hand, he seems hesitant to state that other persons are to be used so that we may attain fruition of God. It was a conception of relative ends that initially helped Augustine to move beyond the uti/frui (use/enjoyment) dichotomy— virtue can be loved for its own sake, our neighbor can be loved for her own sake, as long as these loves are properly ordered to God.14 These things can be loved for their own sake while also being ordered to God. Love of neighbor is not a mere means to the love of God, not a way that we prove that we do in fact love God, but rather, we do not love other persons rightly unless we grasp not only that nothing other than God has “a value in and of itself, independently of God” but also that persons are lovable as made in God’s image, not simply as material objects.15 It is not, then, that all things other than God are to be used as means, are to be instrumentalized, for the purpose of my own aim of enjoying God. Rather, I cannot love properly anything in creation unless I have grasped its nature as created being, utterly dependent on God and lovable as God’s beloved creation. Thus we truly love virtue and other persons for their own sake only when we love them on account of God. We can say a bit more now about how virtue, happiness, and our final

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

55

end are related for Augustine. Virtue is not the way I demonstrate to God that I am worthy of the reward of eternal life; rather, “virtue proves to be nothing but the perfection of love to God.” 16 And it is when my love to God is perfected that I can experience the union with God, which is fruition, the love of enjoyment. Virtue proves after all to be not just instrumental but partially constitutive of my happiness, of my final end. To become virtuous is to be transformed into one enough like God to be capable of this loving relationship with God.17 My final end is not just external; even though I cannot in this life fully realize that loving union with God, my loving, virtuous activity is even now an expression of the love of God. Is my final end pursued for myself in a self-centered or problematically self-referential way? For Augustine, as for ancient eudaimonists in general, the agent’s search for fulfillment or perfection is affirmed—the eudaimonistic framework builds in an inescapable self-reference. But it is also true that the agent’s understanding of what constitutes fulfillment or perfection is radically transformed as the agent comes closer to realizing that fulfillment. Our supreme good really will be good for us, but we cannot consult our subjective desires in order to find out what will be good for us; those desires must undergo a radical transformation if we are to find our true fulfillment.18 The perfect life is something objective, not a subjective state. I do not become perfect simply by fulfilling whatever desires I happen to have. As Augustine writes in De Trinitate, perfect happiness requires both having all that one wants and wanting nothing wrongly (XIII 8). As Burnaby comments, for Augustine, “the only love of self which deserves to be so called is the love of God the Supreme Good. ‘The love wherewith a man truly loves himself is none other than the love of God. For he who loves himself in any other way is rather to be said to hate himself; since he becomes evil and loses the light of righteousness, which he turns aside from the higher and more excellent good to himself.’ ” We do not and cannot love God in order to satisfy our love of self, since such a love would not be love of God at all. When we truly love ourselves, we seek to enjoy the Supreme Good, but this means that we love God more than self, that we surrender ourselves to God.19 It is not the case, then, that the eudaimonistic framework requires that all other loves are in fact subordinated to love of self. I am not my own supreme good; my end is not self-enjoyment but enjoyment of God.20 What of love of neighbor? Among our various loves of created beings, love of neighbor is special in that our neighbor is capable of enjoying God

ch a p t er t wo

56

as we are; in loving our neighbor “on account of God,” we are seeking to bring our neighbor, too, into the enjoyment of God (De Doct. Chr. I. 64). Our desire to enjoy God is not, at least when perfected, a desire to monopolize God. Rather, insofar as we grasp that our supreme good is to return to the Creator the self-giving love that called us into being and thereby to be drawn into intimate union with the loving relationships of self-gift that constitute the Trinitarian Persons, we grasp that this good of loving union with God is enhanced, not diminished, by being shared.21 “If the Summum Bonum is by its very nature the bonum commune, a good which can be possessed only by being shared, then the desire and pursuit of it can never be the desire and pursuit of a bonum privatem.” 22 It is in this sense that we seek God in our neighbor, not that we use our neighbor as a means for getting ourselves closer to God, nor that we care really only for God and not for our neighbor, but that we desire that our neighbor, like ourselves, be brought into the communion of enjoyment of God, that heavenly peace, which is “perfectly ordered and completely harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God” (CD XIX 17, 878). To love God is to desire the fulfillment of God’s purposes for creation, including for this particular neighbor, while to love the neighbor is to desire the fulfillment of God’s purposes for that neighbor.

The Responsive Character of Christian Moral Agency Having given a more adequate account of our supreme good than the preliminary one of “eternal good,” and having sought to clear Augustine’s eudaimonism of various charges, (i.e., of making virtue and/or love of others a means to my supreme good, of rendering our supreme good an external good merely contingently related to virtue, and of fostering egocentrism or a problematic self-preoccupation), we may offer a few additional reflections on Augustine’s departure from the Stoicism that characterizes his early thought. On a fuller understanding of our supreme good, we can understand more fully how for Augustine the possibility of secure happiness runs directly counter to the desire to make one’s happiness as dependent as possible on oneself. “Happiness has not been achieved so long as it can be taken from us ‘against our will’. But the inference is not that it must be ‘within our power’, as a condition of the self-directed will; for the soul and its ‘virtue’ are no less mutable than the body and its pleasures. It must consist in a relation of the soul to that

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

57

which is ‘eternal and abiding.’ ” 23 Happiness is found not in achieving independence but in embracing our ultimate dependency. On the other hand, while our final good is not fully up to us, it is something that requires our active participation; it is not something that we simply passively undergo. If virtue is the perfection of my love for God, the end of enjoyment of God cannot be fully characterized apart from my virtuous activity, my loving response to God. We find happiness in the perfected activity of receiving and returning God’s gifts. We cannot enjoy God in this life, since in this life we cannot fully see God, and our love remains the love of desire rather than fruition, but the possibility of this enjoyment rests on our (God-enabled) response as well as on God’s call. O’Donovan argues, in fact, that it is this insistence on human activity, human responsiveness, to which the charges of Augustine’s “egocentricity” or “anthropocentricity” can ultimately be reduced: Augustine’s picture of the universe shows us one who is the source and goal of being, value, and activity, himself in the center of the universe and at rest; and it shows us the remainder of the universe in constant movement, which, while it may tend toward or away from the center, is yet held in relation to it, so that all other beings lean, in a multiplicity of ways, toward the source and goal of being. But the force which draws these moving galaxies of souls is immanent to them, a kind of dynamic nostalgia rather than a transcendent summons from the center. Such a summons, of course, is presupposed; but it is reflected by this responsive movement which is other than itself, so that there is a real reciprocity between Creator and creature.24

Critics of Augustine’s eudaimonism worry that this responsive movement undermines pure theocentrism, depriving God of sovereignty. For Augustine it instead manifests the overflowing plenitude of God, which rejoices in creating beings capable of returning themselves in love to their Creator. Augustine’s perfected human agents will thus appear too passive from the perspective of pagan eudaimonism, while too active from the perspective of Augustine’s anti-eudaimonist Christian critics. Pagan philosophers would find it unintelligible to make my final end, the end of my action, eternal life, something that lies beyond the reach of human agency. (Stoics and those who defend the ideal of Aristotelian magnanimity would go farther, decrying Augustine’s celebration of dependency, his

ch a p t er t wo

58

rejection of the ideal of self-sufficiency.) Anti-eudaimonists, meanwhile, charge that Augustine has not properly recognized that all activity is God’s activity, that only God can carry out God’s purposes and bring us to perfection, and that our total resignation of self to God cannot thus be understood as our own activity. For Augustine, it is humility that marks a proper account of human activity, one that accepts our own activity as itself God’s gift. Virtuous human activity does not rest in itself but ascribes its existence to God, like the apostles who ascribed their virtue “all to the glory of God, whose grace had made them what they were” (CD V 14, 203). The concern of the truly virtuous is certainly not to garner praise, but neither is it to disdain praise while relying on their own consciousness of virtue. Rather, the concern of the virtuous is “that praise should rather be given to him from whom man receives whatever in him is rightly deserving of praise” (CD V 19, 213). Humility is fundamentally an aspect of truthfulness, which for Augustine displaces the false claim of the magnanimous person to truthful self-appraisal. Humility is the recognition that “man is not God but that he depends on God for his existence. . . . At bottom, humility is honesty about the human condition, and it is on the basis of that honesty, that willingness to face the facts, that man’s moral and spiritual regeneration has to be founded.” 25 The anti-eudaimonists recognize their dependence on God, but wrongly think that gift precludes activity, when in fact it requires it, calling it forth and enabling it. Humility is a person’s “recognition that in his fallen state he needs the help of God’s ‘humility,’ God’s being willing to serve others, as shown above all in the Incarnation.” 26 Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist—all lacked “the pattern of divine humility.” 27 It is God’s humility in Christ, God’s willingness to become a servant rather than retain supremacy, that enables us to accept our own weakness, our utter dependency on God, even for that which we would most like to consider our own—our moral character.28 It is finally only the honesty of humility that can for Augustine guarantee that virtue is not simply a cunning mask worn by superbia.

Divided Loves and Christian Hypocrisy Christians, then, relinquish the notion that our final end is up to us, something we can achieve for ourselves, and give up the ideal of selfsufficiency, of seeking to make our happiness as dependent as possible

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

59

on ourselves and things under our control. It does not follow, though, that Christians, by understanding this, arrive immediately at the ordered soul that both pagans and Christians regarded as essential to virtue. It is not sufficient to have a theoretical grasp of our dependency on God, of the proper ordering of love, and so on. If virtue is a form of love, then the crucial question will be “What do you love?” And while Augustine insists that we cannot not love perfect beauty when we see it, in this life we cannot yet clearly see God’s perfect beauty. So we are in fact enslaved by disordered loves. These disordered loves are bad habits, to which we have consented and which have become engrained in our irrational appetites. In Christians we encounter true virtue, but this is far from perfect virtue. Not only are Christians characterized by imperfect virtue but it is also the case that we often encounter the mere semblance of virtue among those within the church. Thus, Christians as well as pagans embody false virtue. This becomes clear in Augustine’s treatise On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, which includes a sustained discussion of hypocrisy. Abetted by the etymology of the Greek word—hupocrites is an actor, while hupokrinein is to play a part—Augustine compares hypocrites to stage actors. “Hypocrites are pretenders, like mouthpieces of other persons, as in the plays of the theatre. For one who in tragedy takes the part of Agamemnon, for example, or any other person involved in the story or myth being enacted, is not really the person himself, but impersonates him and is called a hypocrite. So, too, in the Church or in any phase of human life, whoever wishes to seem what he actually is not is a hypocrite.” 29 More specifically, the hypocrite wishes to appear virtuous, but in fact is not, since “the whole purpose of his behavior is to win the praise of men.” No matter what good works they perform, hypocrites are not themselves good, since it is “strictly forbidden to place the fruit and purpose of our good work in the praise of any man whatever” (DSD II 2, 6). In order to avoid hypocrisy, it is not necessary to hide one’s good works from others; in fact, it is good to display one’s good works in order to invite others to imitate this goodness and to praise God as the source of this goodness; “as to having people imitate you, who see with satisfaction your good works, we must give this opportunity not only to believers, but also to unbelievers, that in praising our good deeds they may honor God and come to salvation” (DSD II 2, 6). What we must avoid is all seeking after human praise. Augustine concedes that this is a difficult challenge and that many have divided purposes: “they actually direct

ch a p t er t wo

60

their intention towards God when they give alms, yet at the same time there creeps into this excellent intention not a little craving for praise or for a perishable and transitory object of some sort or other” (DSD II 2, 9). We are summoned, though, to a clean and undivided heart, “and how can it be a single heart if it serves two masters and does not keep its sight clear by giving eternal things its only attention, but bedims it by the love of mortal and transitory things as well?” (DSD II 2, 9). In fact, Augustine denies that there are any sages among us, any who exemplify perfect virtue.30 Following Pauline themes of the constant struggle between flesh and spirit, Augustine regards evil desires as a result of original sin that can never be extirpated in this life, even though the guilt of original sin is washed away in baptism. Thus, the life of Christian virtue is one of ongoing inner strife. Augustine in fact claims the name temperance for what Aristotle would have called mere continence: “Although [virtue] claims the topmost place among human goods, what is its activity in this world but unceasing warfare with vices, and those not external vices but internal, not other people’s vices but quite clearly our own, our very own? And this is the particular struggle of that virtue called in Greek sôphrosynê, which is translated ‘temperance’— the virtue which bridles the lusts of the flesh to prevent their gaining the consent of the mind and dragging it into every kind of immorality” (CD XIX 4, 853–54). According to Aristotle, the continent person must continually struggle to overcome her irrational desires, while the temperate person’s desires are always properly ordered in accordance with reason (Nicomachean Ethics 1146a10–15). What Aristotle would have called true temperance is now realizable only in the next life. It is not simply pagans, then, whose virtue is corrupted by the love of praise. Here Augustine makes an important concession—the imperfect virtue of Christians is often corrupted by the same ordering to self that rendered pagan virtue merely counterfeit virtue. We cannot simply say that Christian virtue is true but imperfect while pagan virtue is not virtue at all. Just as in this world the city of God and the city of man are inextricably mixed, so the splendid vices are found among Christians as well as pagans. Moreover, given that none of us has in this life a clear grasp of God’s beauty, so neither do Christians have more than an inkling of our own dependency on God, of our own final end. Granted, the very presence of a divided heart, an intention partially directed toward God, indicates a partial right ordering, a partial grasp of God as source and

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

61

sustenance of our being and goodness. But the imperfection of Christian virtue is also a partial falseness. Still, by drawing the boundaries between true and false virtue in the way he does, Augustine makes it difficult to distinguish between pagans who pursue virtue for its own sake and those who pursue virtue for the sake of honor, glory, or—as in the case of Aristotle’s magnanimous person—their own conception of themselves as worthy of honor. Even if we were to grant that pagan virtue is always only a semblance of virtue, Augustine’s conceptual categories are not differentiated adequately enough to account for the variety of semblances of virtue found among pagans (and Christians). As we shall discuss in the next chapter, it is Aquinas who develops these conceptual resources, offering instead of two sets of binary oppositions, ambiguously related to one another (perfect/imperfect, true/false), a tripartite distinction between perfect virtue, imperfect virtue, and counterfeit virtue. Aquinas is thereby “able to make an important distinction Augustine did not: between those pagans with true, albeit imperfect, virtues and those who have the appearance of virtue but are, in fact, motivated by secret vice.” 31

The Critique of Theater Augustine’s etymological critique of hypocrisy already betrays the fact of his ambivalence toward theater. If one of the assumptions of this study is that virtue is theatrical, that we must “act virtuously” in order to become actually virtuous, what are we to make of theater proper? While sin, for Augustine, is a perverse imitation of God, imitation itself is not evil. Proper mimesis of the divine takes the form of imitation of Christ’s humility.32 Grace is active in our acts of mimesis, as our inspiration by examples and analogies serves to form and reform our imaginations. It is in this context that Augustine’s critique of theater must be placed. Although Augustine has sometimes been said to embrace a Platonic ontological critique of theater, this cannot be sustained.33 Plato’s attack has traditionally been understood to be grounded in a negative view of representation as such; if what is truly real is just the world of Ideas, then poets create a copy of what is already just a copy of reality.34 In fact, though, Plato differentiates between two forms of mimesis: general representation or imitation of reality “as it is” on the one hand and imitation of “appear-

ch a p t er t wo

62

ance as it appears” on the other.35 Poets are like the sophists in creating a deceptive appearance of reality; what they copy is public opinion, “appearance as it appears.” Some interpreters argue that this leaves room for the possibility of a poetry that is guided by the true knowledge possessed by philosophers and is therefore an imitation of reality as it is.36 As things stand, though, Plato perceives poets and philosophers as rival guides to the good life. Even if poets deal only in appearances, the effects of these appearances are potentially disastrous, since they appeal directly to the passions and weaken reason’s direction of the soul. Plato champions philosophy and reason as offering proper government of the passions and an escape from entanglement in illusion. Both Plato and Augustine, then, critique theater for offering bad models for imitation. Augustine’s critique, even more clearly than that of Plato, is an attack on a particular theatrical tradition in a particular time and place, not a general critique of mimetic arts. And the theater had become remarkably debased in the Greco-Roman period; “audiences no longer cared for comedy or tragedy, which had dwindled to insignificance among the scenic activities, their place taken by mimes, wild beast shows, lubricious pantomimes, chariot races, and gladiatorial fights.” 37 Though also critical of the tragedies and comedies composed by classical poets, Augustine terms them “more acceptable” and recognizes that they hold an acknowledged place within a liberal education (CD II 8, 56). The Roman theatrical spectacles of which Augustine was so critical were instituted not simply for pleasure but at the command of the gods, who demanded such shows to appease an outbreak of plague (CD I 32, 43). The shows are therefore not just vicious human creations but offer themselves as divinely sanctioned models; it is natural for a citizen to “think that in the way he lives his life he ought to follow the examples set by what is acted in plays instituted by divine authority” (CD II 8, 56). However Platonic Augustine’s thought, key differences remain: the world, though finite and fallen, is not just an appearance of the Forms but is an entity created and declared good by a loving God. This God invites us to participate in godly mimesis, but our tendency is to fall into perverse mimesis, which is not simply deceptive, as for Plato, but sinful. In the early books of the Confessions, Augustine’s critique of his own fascination with stage shows is clearly set in the context of a broader critique of examples of bad mimesis. Sin itself is characterized as perverse imitation of God; pride of God’s loftiness, ambition of God’s honor and glory, curiosity of God’s omniscience, and so on (Conf. II 6). Given the

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

63

chiastic structure of the Confessions, in which the events of the first half “are characterized by images of descent and falling, while the second half is filled with images of ascent and return,” we can expect what in fact is the case, that the second half of the Confessions will return to the theme of mimesis, this time giving examples of godly rather than perverse imitation.38 For what renders the provision of bad models so problematic is the fact that human beings so desperately need good models; we are in need of formation and will be formed by that which we imitate. Can theater ever provide good models for imitation? Theater, or at least any interesting theater, will always be complex, placing on stage good and bad, as well as mixed, examples of human character. Even a highly moralistic play may not succeed in its intention of endorsing good examples as models while vilifying bad examples; the very moralism of such a play may render its good examples too flat, too simplified, to be attractive. On the other hand, the fictional character of theatrical action may well enhance its impact on spectators. Fiction, because less messy, less complex than reality, can highlight certain features of character and action, can clarify connections and consequences, can employ symbolic structures that intensify the significance of what is being depicted. Hence the suspicion with which theater is often regarded—it is morally ambiguous while also potentially quite powerful. Unlike Plato, who brands poetic representation as such deceptive and false, Augustine differentiates in his early Soliloquies between two ways in which something can feign to be what it is not, the “fallacious” and the “fabulous,” where the former involves an intention to deceive and the latter is simply a desire to tell a story.39 Actors on stage he recognizes as a particularly complex case, since they must in some sense intend to deceive, or at least intend to enact a persuasive appearance of a character other than their own. Even here, though, Augustine offers quite a differentiated account: in order to be a “true” actor, the actor must enact falsehoods; in comedies and tragedies, “the only thing which helps to their being true is that in another respect they are false. So they can in no way achieve what they wish to be or what they ought to be if they avoid being false. For how could Roscius whom I have just mentioned be a true tragic-actor if he were unwilling to be a false Hector, a false Andromache, a false Hercules and countless others?” (Soliloquies II 18). Undeniably, Augustine calls Christians to seek divine truth, “that which is true, and not something which presents two faces which contradict one another so that it might be true on the one hand and false on the other” (Soliloquies II 18). Theater that does not direct

ch a p t er t wo

64

us to that truth cannot ultimately help us develop true virtue. There is, though, a theater that can and does do so, in Augustine’s eyes, and that is the liturgy, whose theatrical character Augustine explicitly recognizes. In a sermon critical of Roman spectacles, Augustine urges his hearers to “contrast that holy spectacle with the pleasures and delights of the theatre. There your eyes are defiled, here your hearts are cleansed. Here the spectator deserves praise if he but imitate what he sees; there he is bad, and if he imitates what he sees he becomes infamous.” 40 We might still, from a modern perspective, think that Augustine leaves room for “theatrical” provision only of strictly controlled models, that he distrusts messiness and complexity that complicate straightforward emulation. We might suspect that the Greco-Roman culture of paideia, in so many respects taken over by Christianity, required simplification and thin description in order to succeed in its goal of embodying exemplary models of excellence and handing these down from teacher to pupil or from saint to disciple.41 But two facts should give us pause. First, while the civilization of paideia was indeed focused on the handing down of tradition, it did not understand the imitation of exemplary models as a process that could or should result in strict uniformity. Henry Marrou argues that “ideally such an education was supposed to result in a kind of indeterminate human product of very high intrinsic quality, ready to respond to any demand made upon it by the intellect or circumstance.” This was no imposition of a narrow mold. Second, Christians in the Greco-Roman world, with very few exceptions, did not set up their own special schools. They did offer specialized religious instruction, but they did not seek to displace the usual classical education—despite the fact that this classical education, highly literary in orientation, relied heavily on the classical poets and their tales about the gods. Even in the fourth century, notes Marrou, “Christian children were still being brought up with pagans in classical schools, still being given ‘poison’—Homer, the poets, the long insidious line of mythological figures and the dark passions they symbolized or embodied. Immunity was supposed to come from the antidote of religious training which they received outside school from the Church and their parents.” 42 What this means is that, far from exerting tight control over moral education by providing only positive, thinly described models for emulation, Christians—especially children—were routinely required to grapple with deep ambiguity, with rival exemplary models sanctioned by competing authorities. Augustine’s Confessions re-

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

65

cords his own struggle with this ambiguity, his passionate attraction to “poisonous” models as well as good, but also his eventual response to the lure of divine beauty. There is one additional aspect to Augustine’s critique of theater—his concern about the pleasure audiences take in tragic suffering depicted on stage. It is this feature of Augustine’s reflections on theater that can make him seem most Platonic, that can make it seem as though Augustine’s central critique is that theater traffics in deceptive images and appearances. In fact, though, what troubles Augustine in this context is the fact that spectators of theater take pleasure in something that ordinarily would give them pain. Since they take pleasure in artistic depictions of suffering, they seek to prolong these experiences. Augustine worries that this may undermine the response we should take to actual suffering—a compassion that suffers with the suffering but also seeks actively to relieve the sufferer (Conf. III 2). Suffering observed should move us to action; so “to enjoy suffering for its own sake is to make an end of a means, to idolize suffering.” 43 Given Augustine’s willingness to allow a different sort of “reality” to theatrical representations than to lived experience, this might seem only a phantom problem. After all, it would be silly if audiences leapt on stage to try to assist the suffering protagonist. Audiences are not naïve enough to confuse reality with theater—actual suffering will not be pleasurable, and compassion with such suffering will continue to move spectators to respond. The reason Augustine seems reluctant to have his worries so matter-of-factly assuaged on this count has to do with his conviction that under the guise of rhetoric, theater has colonized the real world of Roman society. The close connections between Augustine’s critique of theater and his critique of rhetoric have often been observed, and in fact, the former is probably best seen as a way of underscoring the latter. Here Augustine did inherit from Plato a suspicion of the way in which the rhetorical tradition cultivated appearances in lieu of substance, even if not, ultimately, the determination to privilege reason over affection. “A primary concern of this rhetorical tradition,” notes E. J. Hundert, was to demonstrate how the public man—the orator and officeholder— could, like the dramatic actor, completely govern his own emotions and at the same time appear forcefully to express or, indeed, be overtaken by them, so as to move an audience. The language of acting

ch a p t er t wo

66

and of the public spectacle perfectly suited these requirements. It was consistently employed by prominent rhetoricians like Cicero, who maintained that the self was composed in the process of composing a public reputation and who famously boasted that he had taken lessons from Roscius, the greatest actor of his time, to learn how to become “Cicero,” the public figure.

Rhetoricians, Augustine alleges, care only for appearances, and manipulate these appearances in order to maximize their own honor and glory. “What centrally concerns him are the developed patterns of public performance by which authoritative standards of common morality may be corrupted into opportunities for the enhancement of pride.” 44 The solution for these abuses, though, lies not in abolishing public performances and any rhetorical attempt to move and persuade. Rather, such performance, such rhetoric, should be directed toward the honor and glory of God, should seek not to conceal reality with appearance but instead to transform reality through appearance, should foster activity rather than passivity.

Mimesis and Conversion In his efforts to subordinate his irrational appetites to the rational soul, to order his loves, to pursue a pure and undivided heart, the Christian needs both divine direction and divine assistance (CD XIX 14, 873). Our wills are transformed, our loves reordered, insofar as we are granted glimpses of divine beauty. Acquiring the virtues is not simply a matter of training through repetition, habituating our irrational desires, “getting used” to a particular form of action. In order for our loves to be properly ordered—ordered, that is, to God—we must be inspired, we must first fall in love, with God. It is only when we are in love with God that we can truly relinquish ourselves, give up our desire to be in control, accept the humble truth about ourselves. The good news is that falling in love can happen at any age; one need not have been lucky enough to have had a good upbringing. Against pagan common sense, Christians insisted that true (if imperfect) virtue remained a possibility at any age, since we may at any time encounter the transformative power of divine beauty. This is available to us most crucially in Christ. Lacking the “pattern of divine humility,” pagans are on Augustine’s account unable to embark

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

67

on return to God, the primordial model, even if they embrace the task of mimetic reformation. “God hid the entire causal doctrine of the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Logos from the wise and revealed it to babes. Thus, the causal system of the pagans lacked the essential element in human life: how man, far from God in the region of unlikeness, could be changed into Him.” 45 To know God is to love God, to love is to imitate, to move toward, to become one with God. But “we cannot see, or know, or love God unless He is in us, unless He gives Himself to us.” 46 It is Christ, by uniting in himself both divine and human natures, who makes it possible for us to know God. Insofar as we are remade after Christ’s pattern through the discipline of reading scripture and through partaking in the sacraments and other practices of the body of Christ, we are ordered to God rather than to self. A closer look at Augustine’s account of his own final conversion—or, as he puts it, of his deliverance from the chain of the desire of the flesh (Conf. VIII 6)—and the place of imitation within it, will allow us to fill out these claims. The story of Augustine’s conversion in book VIII of the Confessions is embedded within two other stories of conversion: the story of Victorinus’s conversion and the story of the two officials converted by the Life of St. Antony, itself a story of conversion. All of these accounts are meant to serve as patterns or exemplars for the reader, as sources of inspiration, as occasions for God to reveal God’s supremely attractive beauty.47 Augustine’s Confessions is not a static record of his own experience but a cascade of exemplary conversions serving as the occasion for other conversions, which can in their turn serve as exemplary. These exemplars can serve as such inasmuch as they point back beyond themselves to scripture and ultimately to Jesus as the original exemplar. None of this is about imitation of example as a substitute for or displacement of divine grace, but rather as one of the concrete ways in which human beings receive grace.48 As Lewis Ayres argues, “the Confessions presents exempla as a tool in the hands of providence.” 49 Augustine draws on the common inheritance of the Roman rhetorical tradition in his use of exempla, narratives that present actions or attitudes to be imitated or avoided. Exempla were recognized as having particular persuasive and exhortative power, rendering thoughts clearer, more vivid, and more plausible.50 For Augustine, though, exempla are no longer simply a way to inspire imitation of human virtues but the site of the creation of desire for God. While imitation is an act, there is also a chastening of human agency implied in the cascade; we cannot choose to be inspired by an example

ch a p t er t wo

68

and cannot thus convert ourselves. We rely on inspiration from beyond ourselves. “Augustine argues that God’s provision of new objects for the will is the provision of objects congruous with the will’s occluded or distorted desire for God. Grace is irresistible precisely because God always holds out to us something that will delight the soul.” 51 To imitate is to participate in something greater than oneself. Only when what we imitate is exemplary humility can we accept this fully; we then embrace dependency in both form and content and remain always indebted for the “moral virtue” that results. Augustine’s Confessions is a confession of this indebtedness, a display of truthful humility, which rejoices in relating how dependent our virtue is on that which is beyond ourselves, on divine beauty encountered in Christ and in examples of Christ’s transformative power in others. I call imitation “one of the ways” in which grace is received for several reasons: First, because, as James Wetzel has argued, any story we tell of grace preparing the conversion of our will to God can always be traced back further; there is no absolute starting point.52 And second, because conversion is not enough; Augustine also insisted on the necessity of baptism, which washes away all previous sins and brings us into the church, the body of Christ.53 Striving to imitate Christ’s humility without being incorporated into his body through baptism would be futile. The story of Victorinus, Augustine tells us, was related expressly “to draw me on to the humility of Christ.” 54 Victorinus was a learned and renowned man, a professor of rhetoric in Rome, who had read Holy Scripture and become a believer in secret, but who at first refused to confess his faith openly, fearing loss of reputation. Over time, however, “he grew proud towards vanity and humble towards truth”; finally ashamed of prizing human honor, ashamed of having been ashamed of Christian humility. “He felt that he was guilty of a great crime in being ashamed of the sacraments of the lowliness of Your Word” (Conf. VIII 2, 131). To be a secret believer is to be imperfectly converted because it is still to be full of pride rather than humility, wanting to be oneself in control of who one is and how one appears. To desire to appear a model of pagan virtue is to fail to embody Christian virtue. And Augustine, having heard the story of Victorinus’s public confession of faith, was “on fire to imitate him” (Conf. VIII 5, 134). This was the fire of a new will, a new love, “by which I willed to worship You freely and to enjoy You, O God” (Conf. VIII 5, 135). If the story of Victorinus is a story of the victory of humility, the

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

69

story of the agent told by Ponticianus is explicitly a story of the power of stories. Ponticianus tells of the imperial agent who chanced to find a copy of the Life of Antony, “began to read it, marvelled at it, was inflamed by it” (Conf. VIII 6, 137). As the agent imagined what it would be like to live as Antony, he became inspired by—fell in love with—this imagined possibility and ashamed of his life of ambition. “If I should choose to be a friend of God,” realizes the agent, “I can become one now” (Conf. VIII 6, 138). In contrast to the City of God, where Augustine emphasizes the transcendent character of our final good, here he stresses that friendship with God can begin here and now, that the end we seek is not a wholly external good. The agent is changed as he reads; a new life—a new love—comes to birth in him, as he perceives a beautiful exemplar and imagines himself imitating that beauty. These examples confront Augustine with his own ugliness, his own failure to give himself fully to God, and it is in a frenzy of shame that he flees to the garden, “aware how evil I was, unaware that I was to grow better in a little while” (Conf. VIII 8, 140). He presents himself as torn between his one-time mistresses and “the austere beauty of Continence” (Conf. VIII 11, 145). The figure of Continence lures him to herself as mistresses do, but the hands she stretches forward to embrace him are “full of multitudes of good examples” (Conf. VIII 11, 145). That is, her beauty consists in the transformative power of examples of other lives transformed. She seemed to say, “Can you not do what these men have done, what these women have done? Or could men or women have done such in themselves, and not in the Lord their God? The Lord their God gave me to them. Why do you stand upon yourself and so not stand at all?” (Conf. VIII 11, 145). Augustine must learn that he cannot convert himself, that Christian humility consists in being willing to receive what we cannot get for ourselves, that the strong and intact will he desired so much to dedicate to God’s service could not be won in a battle, but would instead be a gift received through inspiration, for which he would always be indebted.55 It is at this point that Augustine’s own transformative act of reading can take place. He hears the command to take and read “tolle lege, tolle lege,” links this with Antony’s own chance reading of the Gospel to go and sell all he had, and reads from the epistle to the Romans. “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscenses” (Conf. VIII 12, 146). In reading this text, Augustine “in that instant” does “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” his struggle ends, and he is finally at peace.

ch a p t er t wo

70

We know that Augustine’s Christian virtue is far from perfect and that his happiness is not complete. Augustine employs several striking images to capture the contrast between the moment of conversion and the long process of being renewed in the image of God. “This renewal does not happen in one moment of conversion, as the baptismal renewal by the forgiveness of all sins happens in a moment, so that not even one tiny sin remains unforgiven. But it is one thing to throw off a fever, another to recover from the weakness which the fever leaves behind it; it is one thing to remove from the body a missile stuck in it, another to heal the wound it made with a complete cure” (De Trin. 14.23).56 Much more could be said about the rest of the journey of recovery; “people become children of God to the extent that they begin to exist in the newness of the Spirit and begin to be renewed in the inner man according to the image of him who created them.” 57 People do not simply become children of God—they become children of God to some extent. Augustine’s language leaves ample room for gradual process and transformation, for spiritual exercises that habituate one slowly in Christian virtue. Through reading and listening to scripture, fasting and eating (especially Eucharistic eating), and prayer, Christians are renewed in God’s image.58 This takes place insofar as, with God’s help, our love is redirected or transferred from earthly and temporal to heavenly and eternal things: “the man who is being renewed in the recognition of God and in justice and holiness of truth by making progress day by day, is transferring his love from temporal things to eternal, from visible to intelligible, from carnal to spiritual things; he is industriously applying himself to checking and lessening his greed for the one sort and binding himself with charity to the other” (De Trin. 14.23). Augustine is thus able to absorb into the Christian life many of the ascetic spiritual exercises of pagan philosophy, although these are now chastened by the humble recognition of dependency.59 Christ, encountered through scripture, and his body the Church, are a school in which Christians learn how to live a good life. Fasting can now be a training in yearning, learning to crave God rather than earthly goods. Prayer, too, can reshape desire in accordance with God’s will, and confession as a kind of prayer can train Christians in scrupulous self-examination.60 Even our capacity to reflect on our own minds and thereby to come to a vision of the Trinity is something that can be cultivated through repeated acts of meditation; we are capable of “training the mind . . . to come in our own small measure to a sight of that trinity which God is.” 61 Although Augustine rarely uses the term

Augustine: Disordered Loves and the Problem of Pride

71

habit in connection with virtue, preferring to use it only for the vices that enslave our wills, he certainly does think that progress can be made in the Christian life by training the concupiscent appetites to submit readily to reason.62 Christian spiritual practices are indeed what we can call habituation. Far as Augustine continues to confess he is from completing this journey to perfection, he is on the way. Catalyzed by story, inspiration, mimesis, he has begun to be formed in humility. Through experiencing his wayward desires and their transformation in response to divine beauty, he has begun to realize that his putting on of Christ—even his will to do so—are God’s gift rather than his own achievement.

Aquinas

3

Making Space for Pagan Virtue As we have seen, Augustine could not consider the heroes of Rome truly virtuous, much as he admired them and even held them up as inspiration for Christians. The final end sought even by men such as Regulus, he believed, was their own glory. The apparent order in their souls was in fact disorder, manifesting a failure to acknowledge their utter dependency on God. Aquinas takes up the issue of pagan virtue in a more theoretical context, reflecting on a distinction that had arisen within scholastic thought between the natural, acquired virtues and the supernatural, infused virtues. This distinction allowed for the possibility of true pagan virtue directed toward the common good of an earthly society. Aquinas, though, broadened the category of natural virtue—the natural virtues could be directed toward the good of the individual. While such a good was understood as constitutive of and not conflicting with the common good, it did not require explicit ordering to the common good. Thus Aquinas, as we shall see, was willing to consider the possibility not only of pagan virtue directed toward the common good and not vitiated by the love of glory but even of virtuous self-love among pagans. Augustine had not denied the possibility of good self-love, but he had argued that it could exist only when God was known as the self’s true good. Aquinas is at the same time more generous toward pagan virtue and less anxious about Christian hypocrisy, more willing to credit aspiration than dwell on impurity. Yet he retains Augustine’s conviction of the importance of acknowledging the dependency of our virtue on God. We will see this in his skillful rehabilitation of Aristotelian magnanimity, which he manages to recover as a virtue by transforming it into a rendering of glory to God. By distinguishing between acquired and infused

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

73

virtues, and by insisting on infused virtue as a necessary and sufficient condition for salvation, Aquinas guards against the elitism of Aristotle’s account of virtue. At the same time, by insisting that the infused virtues are intrinsic dispositions to act, by acknowledging that the ease of virtuous action is dependent on the acquired virtues, and by speaking of the increase of infused virtue, Aquinas affirms the importance of human moral agency. Even when it comes to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which can no longer be termed virtues insofar as they dispose persons to be moved by God rather than by themselves, Aquinas is concerned to make clear that the gifts dispose rather than displace human agency. Grace heals and elevates human character, but always in ways that stand in an organic relation to human agency. Grace is not heteronomous, and proper dependency on God does not take the shape of mere passivity. Aquinas is thus able to guard the integrity of created being while also insisting on the transforming reality of supernatural grace. But the notion that the infused virtues alone are necessary and sufficient for salvation could be understood as implying that persons can be saved without being transformed. This, in turn, would make it more likely that eternal bliss would be understood as an external good, rather than as the fulfillment of a process constituted in part through graceenabled human agency. And a strong natural-supernatural contrast could have the more general effect either of mystifying the supernatural or of granting a false independence to natural human agency. Aquinas’s own thought avoids these pitfalls, but his position failed to win over voluntarist critics and failed to be sustained even by his would-be successors.

Natural Virtue and Political Virtue According to Aquinas, the natural, acquired virtues direct us only to a “proximate and particular good,” the imperfect happiness of this life. They are therefore imperfect and relative, “virtues in a restricted sense.” Only the supernatural, infused virtues are “perfect” and “virtues simply,” because only they direct us to our ultimate end, the enjoyment of God (I-II:65.2; II-II:23.7).1 But whereas for Augustine, all pagan virtues are rightly vices insofar as they reflect a fundamental perversion of right order, an ordering to self rather than to God, Aquinas distinguishes between proximate ends capable of being ordered to our ultimate good and those that are not: “Man’s secondary and, as it were, particular good

ch a p t er t hr ee

74

may be twofold: one is truly good, because, considered in itself, it can be directed to the principal good, which is the last end; while the other is good apparently and not truly, because it leads us away from the final good” (II-II:23.7). For Aquinas, then, the natural, acquired virtues are, as far as they go, true virtues. In our fallen state, we are no longer able to love God above all else and to order all our actions to God (I-II:109.4). It is inevitable that we will commit sins mortal in kind, given our lack of the infused virtue of charity, and venial sins, due to disordered appetites.2 But mortal sin is compatible with the natural virtues, which are neither acquired nor destroyed by single acts (I-II:63.2 ad 2). While pagan virtues remain imperfect unless they are referred to the final and perfect good, the fact that they are capable of being so referred indicates that they are true virtues. “It is possible by means of human works to acquire moral virtues, in so far as they produce good works that are directed to an end not surpassing the natural power of man: and when they are acquired thus, they can be without charity, even as they were in many of the Gentiles” (I-II:65.2).3 As examples Aquinas points to the prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude of a miser, which are counterfeit virtues, while pagan virtues ordered to the welfare of the state are true though imperfect.4 Although pagan virtues are not directed to our final end, since this requires infused grace, they are directed to true goods that are open to further ordering to our final end of enjoyment of God. Pagan virtues are not simply sophisticated expressions of pride. While Augustine tends to convict all pagans of the self-absorption and self-assertion of the earthly city, suspecting that their apparent virtues are in fact directed toward a corrupt peace of unjust order, Aquinas denies that pagan virtue is always an expression of pride and unjust self-love. The fact that the proximate end is not actually directed by the agent to God does not mean that its pursuit constitutes an act of rebellion against God. Whereas Augustine argued that all love is ordered either to God or to self, it might be thought that Aquinas’s main contribution is to open up the possibility of pursuing some good other than self even in the absence of ordering all things to God.5 For this would seem to open up the requisite space for proximate goods toward which pagan virtue could be directed. As for a proximate good of this sort, the common good seems to present itself as the best candidate, particularly given that Aquinas mentions it himself. Natural virtue in Aquinas has in fact been equated with political or civic virtue in some recent commentary.6 In fact, though, the natural virtues on Aquinas’s account need not be ordered directly to the

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

75

common good in order to be true virtues; they may be ordered to the perfection of the individual agent. Civic virtue is thus only one example of natural virtue. We may be tempted to make an equation of civic with natural virtue because we have inherited anti-eudaimonist suspicions of self-love that emerge only after Aquinas. Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas would all have agreed, though, that there are both proper and improper forms of self-love. If we are tempted to equate natural virtue with civic virtue because we doubt the legitimacy of the pursuit of personal perfection, scholastic thinkers prior to Aquinas made this same equation, though for different reasons: as an economical way of reconciling two distinct accounts of the virtues. Early scholastic reflection on the virtues worked with two contrasting understandings of the virtues: the first, an Aristotelian account of virtues as acquired habits, and the second, a theological account of the virtues as infused directly by God. The latter was broadly indebted to Augustine but formulated by Peter Lombard (ca. 1100–1160): virtue is a good quality of the mind, which God brings about in us without our activity.7 Scholastic theologians after Lombard sought to reconcile these two approaches to the virtues and commonly did so by distinguishing two distinct kinds of virtues, directed toward different goals. Political or civic virtues are directed toward earthly ends, namely, the good of the commonwealth, while Catholic or theological virtues are directed toward God and the enjoyment of God. In discussing the distinction, Simon of Tournai noted explicitly that unbelievers such as Jews or pagans could possess political virtues even while lacking Catholic virtues. As we have seen, Augustine had granted that the best Romans acted for the sake of the common good, but he had insisted at the same time that they did so for the sake of glory, and thus out of vicious self-love; “Virtue which is employed in the service of human glory is not true virtue” (CD V 19). In contrast, the scholastics took the common good to be the ultimate end of political virtue, rather than reducing it to self-love. Augustine had argued that nothing can be loved rightly—neither self nor the common good—apart from a recognition of all things as ordered to and dependent on God. True virtue rests not simply on properly pursuing a heavenly end but on properly ordering all goods. The scholastic position represented by Simon of Tournai suggested, in contrast, that it was possible to love the common good apart from proper recognition of God. Political virtues are directed toward natural, earthly ends, while Catholic virtues are directed toward supernatural, heavenly ends. The

ch a p t er t hr ee

76

possibility of pagan virtue was thus allowed, but at the cost of a greater separation between earthly flourishing and heavenly flourishing. However, Aquinas departs from this widespread scholastic solution. While retaining a distinction between natural, acquired virtues and supernatural, infused virtues (more on this distinction below), he does not equate natural virtue with political virtue, directed toward the common good. Natural virtues also include virtues directed toward the perfection of the individual.8 By making this shift, Aquinas made it clear that self-love, as well as love of the commonwealth, can be good. Augustine would not have disagreed with this, although he would have insisted that neither is possible in the absence of recognizing our dependence on God. Aquinas now argued that admitting the possibility of true pagan virtue meant that pagans were capable of good self-love as well as of good love of the commonwealth. Aquinas’s solution is capable of being interpreted in divergent ways. According to one alternative, it might be seen as reinforcing the separation between natural and supernatural already present within scholastic thought, and delivering over to the natural an expanded arena of action. No longer are we wholly dependent on God in order to be capable rightly of loving ourselves; we depend on God only in order to be “saved,” that is, admitted into heavenly bliss. On this interpretation, it is possible to understand Aquinas to be speaking of two distinct ends, one natural and the other supernatural.9 On a contrasting interpretation, Aquinas’s insistence that not all natural virtue is political virtue is instead read as a reassertion of the holistic character of the moral and spiritual life, in this sense closer to Augustine, but with greater generosity toward pagan virtue.10 Pagan virtue, on this reading, is true but imperfect, resting on an incomplete grasp of our final end. To the extent that pagan virtue does allow both for proper self-love and love of the common good, it is beginning to change us into the sort of persons we must be in order to be brought into the divine community, but it cannot do so fully, and so is not salvific. Virtue and salvation rest on a proper ordering of all goods, not on pursuit of a distinct, isolable end of heavenly bliss. Pagans begin this ordering task, even if they do not complete it. My sympathies are with some version of the latter reading. At the same time, the fact that the former reading is possible, and has in fact been quite common, indicates how easily the complex synthesis that is Aquinas’s thought could be destabilized. This is a topic to which I will return at the conclusion of this chapter.

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

77

Rehabilitating Magnanimity Not only does Aquinas seek to reinstate the possibility of pagan virtue in general but he also attempts to rehabilitate particular pagan virtues that arouse suspicion. Chief among these is magnanimity. Aquinas’s account appears to follow Aristotle closely. In fact, though, he works hard to resolve the internal tensions that plagued Aristotle’s account. Even more dramatically, while insisting that magnanimity is a virtue, at the same time Aquinas argues that it is properly understood only when seen as complementing rather than opposing humility. While Aquinas never explicitly questions Aristotle’s authority on this subject, it becomes clear that Aristotelian magnanimity is indeed a counterfeit virtue.11 Aquinas’s first move is to redefine magnanimity so that its focal point is the pursuit of great actions, not the agent’s self-perception as worthy of great honor; “a man is said to be magnanimous chiefly because he is minded to do some great act” (II-II:129.1). He maintains continuity with Aristotle’s account by saying that while magnanimity aims at great action, it is about honors. More specifically, magnanimity is about handling honor appropriately. He notes that “some passions have great power of resistance to reason arising from the external things themselves that are the objects of those passions: such are the love or desire of money or of honor”; hence magnanimity is a virtue of the irascible faculty (IIII:129.2). Thus far Aquinas’s account can be regarded as a clarification of Aristotle’s. But Aquinas’s distance from Aristotle becomes clear in his response to the objection that magnanimity cannot be a virtue since it is opposed to humility. Aquinas accepts Aristotle’s claim that magnanimity “makes a man deem himself worthy of great things,” but he adds to this a crucial qualification—“in consideration of the gifts he holds from God” (IIII:129.3 ad 4). The greatness of Aquinas’s magnanimous man is held as a gift from God, not as the individual’s own achievement and possession. The magnanimous man refers the honor he receives on to God, for “a man has not from himself the thing in which he excels, for this is, as it were, something Divine in him, wherefore on this count honor is due principally, not to him but to God” (II-II:131.1). Thus the magnanimous man’s self-assessment is at the same time an expression of humility. Humility is not self-deprecation but involves a recognition of our dependency on God; all that is ours, properly speaking, is defective (II-II:161.3). Thus, we think well of ourselves and others insofar as we see God’s gifts

ch a p t er t hr ee

78

in these persons; we think little of ourselves and others “in so far as they [and we] fall away from God’s gifts” (II-II:129.3 ad 4). Aquinas notes explicitly that it is not sinful to know and approve of one’s own good character and good works (II-II:132.1). In fact, he insists that self-knowledge is required for perfection (II-II:132.1 ad 3). It is, though, sinful for a person to seek any glory, including the glory of a good opinion of himself, if “he does not refer the desire of his own glory to a due end, such as God’s honor, or the spiritual welfare of his neighbor” (II-II:132.1). Just as God seeks God’s own glory not for God’s own sake but for ours, we may rightly seek our own glory for the good of others. Thus, the truly magnanimous person is aware not only that his own moral greatness is a gift from God but also that his own awareness of this moral greatness is good only when it is put to the service of others and to the glory of God. If, in contrast, a perception of oneself as worthy of honor becomes one’s last end, then vainglory becomes a mortal sin; vainglory is then contrary to charity “in that he refers his intention to glory as his last end: so that he directs even virtuous deeds thereto, and, in order to obtain it, forbears not from doing even that which is against God” (II-II:132.3). This was the perversion of motivation that threatened Aristotle’s magnanimous person and into which he seemed to fall through his desire for self-sufficiency and his refusal of gratitude. Aristotle’s magnanimous person gave in order to avoid indebtedness and in order to indebt others. Aquinas’s magnanimous person seeks to give greater favors than she receives, not in order to indebt others but in order to bestow freely rather than as a matter of strict reciprocity (II-II:106.6). She excels in the virtue of gratitude. She thus “wishes to confer the best possible benefits upon the one who has shown her a kindness, but at the same time she fully expects never to be free of the most fundamental debt. She doesn’t want to be free of it. Indeed, in this key respect she ought to revel in her indebtedness as in the very infinity of God. . . . ‘The debt of gratitude flows from the debt of love, and from the latter no man should wish to be free. Hence that anyone should owe this debt unwillingly seems to arise from a lack of love for his benefactor’ ” (II-II:107.1 ad 3, emphasis added).12 Because of her gratitude, her self-assessment remains truthful; she knows her moral greatness as gift, not as possession—as underlining her indebtedness rather than as freeing her from indebtedness. She does not aim at self-sufficiency. If magnanimity rightly understood requires a reference to God, what does this say about the possibility of pagan magnanimity? Has Aquinas

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

79

given with his right hand only to take away with his left? Has he given an account of magnanimity that refrains from open critique of Aristotle, only to deprive Aristotle of the possibility of magnanimity? How can this account of magnanimity be reconciled with the insistence that pagan virtue is true virtue? Certainly this is a decisive departure from Aristotle’s account of magnanimity. But while Aquinas’s account implies what it does not state—that Aristotelian magnanimity cannot be true magnanimity—it leaves open the possibility of true pagan magnanimity. This magnanimity would not be referred to God, but it would involve the recognition that the moral greatness of the virtuous is not an autonomous possession but a gift; that the virtuous remain always indebted to family and community for the positive ways they have shaped us; and that we are fundamentally dependent on others, not self-sufficient. If Aristotle’s account of magnanimity is strained by this reading, Aquinas finds other aspects of Aristotle’s thought, and other pagan sources (notably Seneca’s De Beneficiis), that are more at harmony with it. So in insisting that we must embrace our indebtedness, Aquinas appeals to Seneca, who writes that “he that hastens to repay, is animated with a sense, not of gratitude but of indebtedness” and “he that wishes to repay too soon, is an unwilling debtor, and an unwilling debtor is ungrateful” (De Benef. iv., quoted in II-II:106.4). This points to a virtue of willing indebtedness, aspects of which were captured in the pagan virtue of piety as acknowledged dependency (particularly on parents). And indeed Aristotle’s own ideal of truthful self-assessment by the virtuous would seem actually to be enhanced, rather than diminished, by such piety. Pious magnanimity, if we might so call it, upholds communal standards of virtue by naming virtue where it is to be found—in oneself, but also in others. It also further upholds communal virtue by naming the processes of dependency through which virtues are formed and fostered. Pious magnanimity abandons the myth of godlike self-sufficiency embedded within Aristotle’s account. Of course, pagan gratitude will fall short of perfect gratitude, and pagan magnanimity will fall short of perfect magnanimity, insofar as pagan gratitude is not gratitude to God and as pagan magnanimity does not recognize its moral greatness as gift from God. As long as God is understood, as in Aristotle, as neither constituted by nor seeking relationship, there will always be a temptation to conceive of human virtue in similar terms. But pagan gratitude to family and community is nevertheless open to being ordered beyond family and community to God; it is not a

ch a p t er t hr ee

80

prideful assertion of self-sufficiency. It is thus true gratitude, not simply a counterfeit, ordered to self, that would undermine even the possibility of choosing virtuous actions for their own sake.13

Christian Hypocrisy and Innocent Semblance Not only does Aquinas carve out conceptual space for true virtue among pagans but he also recognizes the possibility of merely apparent virtue among Christians. Question 111 of Part II-II of the Summa Theologica treats “Of Dissimulation and Hypocrisy” among the vices opposed to truthfulness. While dissimulation is any form of deceptive self-presentation through one’s actions, hypocrisy specifically denotes the simulation of virtue (II-II:111.1, 2). Drawing on Isidore and Augustine, Aquinas explains that the hypocrite is like an actor, who comes on stage with “a disguised face,” seeking through makeup “to imitate the complexion of the person they simulate . . . so as to deceive the people in their acting” (II-II:111.2). Most centrally, for Aquinas the hypocrite is one who wishes to have the appearance of virtue and who performs virtuous deeds for this reason. The hypocrite employs good acts purely instrumentally, failing to act for virtue’s own sake. Simulating a given virtue, the hypocrite “performs acts of that virtue, not as intending them for their own sake, but instrumentally, as signs of that virtue” (II-II:111.3 ad 1). Hypocrisy represents the short-circuiting or corruption of the process of habituation into virtue. Hypocrisy offends against the truth in that actions are natural signs of intentions. When a person performs an action, observers tend to draw conclusions about her reasons for acting. A hypocrite wishes the natural conclusion to be drawn but in fact acts for a different reason. So a hypocrite may seek to appear saintly or pious, performing actions that observers naturally conclude are intended to please God but that in fact are performed in order to impress observers; “when a man does good works pertaining by their genus to the service of God, and seeks by their means to please, not God but man, he simulates a right intention which he has not” (II-II:111.2 ad 1). The hypocrite pretends to a piety that does not reflect his actual intentions. How can we ever be sure that we are acting for the right reasons, seeking by our pious actions only to please God, acting virtuously for virtue’s own sake and never for the sake of impressing others with the

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

81

appearance of virtue? How can we achieve purity of intention, particularly given that virtue naturally begins to develop in the context of our desire to please and be approved by those we love and respect, our parents and teachers? For Aquinas, these are not particularly pressing questions; he does not see hypocrisy looming as a global infection. In part, this is because he differentiates between greater and lesser degrees of hypocrisy. Most strictly speaking, the hypocrite is one who “cares not to be holy but only to appear so,” that is, has no desire to be holy or good but only the desire to appear so (II-II:111.4). The intention of one who sincerely wishes to be virtuous but who also wishes to appear virtuous is vitiated, but much less so; Aquinas distinguishes between hypocrisy as a mortal sin and hypocrisy as a venial sin. If the end in view is not contrary to charity, hypocrisy will be venial. We could imagine, for instance, a person striving for virtue who desires already to appear perfect in order that others will praise God for her goodness. Given that this is a deceptive self-presentation, it is vicious, but there is much that is good here as well, including the desire to become virtuous and the desire that God be glorified for this goodness. So Aquinas gives a deflationary rather than inflationary account of hypocrisy; not all hypocrisy is a serious evil. Aquinas goes even further in his deflation of the phenomenon of misleading self-presentation; some patterns of activity that fall short of truthful self-presentation or at least full self-disclosure are not to be termed hypocritical at all. He gives here as an instance those clerics and religious whose character does not measure up to the actions they perform. One might take them to be hypocrites, pretending to a perfection they lack. In fact, though, they are obliged to perform these actions, having taken vows that require them to do “works of perfection.” As long as their intention in taking these vows was genuine, that is, as long as they wish truly to enter a state of perfection, the failure of their character to measure up to their actions is weakness but not itself an additional vice: “when a man puts on the habit of holiness, with the intention of entering the state of perfection, if he fail through weakness, he is not a dissembler or a hypocrite, because he is not bound to disclose his sin by laying aside the habit of holiness” (II-II:111.2 ad 2). In contrast, if the original vows were taken in order to appear perfect rather than in order truly to become perfect, then such a person would indeed be a hypocrite. Does this apply only to those who have taken special vows? Clearly Aquinas does think that the fact of having vowed to perform works of

ch a p t er t hr ee

82

perfection alters the situation; one who has made such a vow must perform certain actions whether or not they are always performed in charity. But the vow signifies not just an obligation to act in certain ways. If it is rightly made, the vow also signifies the intention to be transformed into one whose character does match up to those perfect actions. The person who makes such a vow has entered on a process, something not completed in an instant. Performing certain actions will create new habits in this person, transforming her character. If the primary focus of such a person were on honest self-presentation and full self-disclosure, she would be reluctant to perform any action that seemed to reflect greater perfection than her own present state of character. But this reluctance would undermine the process of transformation on which she had set out in taking the vow. It is fair, I believe, to extrapolate beyond the special case of those who have taken vows of perfection. Performing characteristically virtuous actions that do not reflect one’s actual state of character is not hypocrisy unless these actions are performed for the sake of appearing virtuous. If they are performed instead for the sake of becoming virtuous, they are innocent actions. Confessing at every instant how our characters fall short of the actions we are performing, insisting on the deceptiveness of our activity, obsessing over our lack of purity of intention would short-circuit our movement toward perfection. There is here a subtle but significant divergence from Augustine, for whom achieving purity of intention, a perfect match between character and action, is a more pressing concern. For Aquinas, habituation in virtue requires that we learn to focus more on our exemplars than on ourselves, imitating their actions as well as we can, keeping our eyes on the prize and trusting that our character will be transformed through our action. Hypocrisy, then, is not endemic to the acquisition of virtue, even if it is true that our actions do not always perfectly reflect our character and intentions during the process of acquiring virtue.

The Infused Virtues Habituation, then, is not hypocrisy. But not all virtues, according to Aquinas, arise through habituation. Aquinas’s account of the acquired virtues follows Aristotle closely, and like Aristotle, Aquinas accepts the habituation gap as unproblematic for the acquired virtues. But when it comes to the infused virtues, Aquinas seems to suggest that these skip the

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

83

habituation gap; as their name indicates, they are not acquired through repeated action that strives to approximate an ideal or indeed through human actions at all but rather are given directly by God. Why the need for virtues not acquired through repeated action? The very distinction between acquired and infused virtues threatens the integrity of one or the other. If virtues acquired through human action fail to allow us to attain our true end, how can they be true virtues? And if the virtues that do allow us to attain our true end are not acquired through human action, in what sense do they perfect rather than undermine human agency? Since, as we shall see, they do not carry along with them the facility of action characteristic of a habit, are they mere would-be virtues, virtues in only an analogous or qualified sense? Sorting this out requires that we say more first about the virtues as such, and then about the relation between the acquired and infused virtues in Aquinas. Simply stated, human virtues are good habits, which make both the agent and her acts good (I-II:55.3, I-II:56.3). Aquinas draws on an Aristotelian definition of habit, according to which a habit is “a disposition whereby that which is disposed, is well or ill disposed either in regard to itself, that is to its nature, or in regard to something else, that is to the end” (I-II:49.3). A good habit, then, is one that disposes a person well toward herself and her end. There are two other characteristics of a habit that are important to understanding virtue. First, a habit is a relatively fixed disposition, one that is difficult to change (I-II:49.2 ad 3). Second, a habit renders action according to it pleasant and easy (I-II:53.1, 78.2). Human beings need habits in order to operate well because by nature our appetitive powers are underdetermined, inclined in various and conflicting ways toward apparent as well as real goods (I-II:50.5). Acquired habits are formed by repeated actions, through which the appetitive powers come to conform to reason (I-II:51.2–3). Repeated action is required “because the appetitive faculty obeys the reason not blindly, but with a certain power of opposition” (I-II:58.2). Particular passions, concupiscible and irascible appetites, can impede the use of reason (I-II:58.5). Moreover, habituation is not simply a matter of the will being tamed by reason, since reason’s own proper grasp of the end as a good to be pursued itself requires rectitude of the will (I-II:56.3). Reason and will are thus formed in tandem through habituation; the will must learn to conform reliably to reason’s grasp of the good, but the intellect cannot rightly direct the will how to act in view of a particular end unless the will is already disposed to, already loves, that end as good. Thus both intellectual virtues

ch a p t er t hr ee

84

(notably prudence) and moral virtues are required in order for a human agent reliably to perceive its ends, love them as good, and act for their sake in an efficient and effective way. Virtues dispose us well in relation to our ends. But the acquisition of a virtue requires that we be capable of perceiving the end and loving it as such.14 So the acquired virtues can dispose us to act for our end insofar as this is grasped by human reason, but they cannot dispose us well in relation to our ultimate end, since this end, the enjoyment of God, “exceeds the proportion of human nature” (I-II:51.4). We cannot naturally grasp this good or act in view of it (I-II:62.2, 63.2). In order to be disposed well in relation to our ultimate end, we need virtues infused in us by God rather than acquired through human action: “it is necessary for man to receive from God some additional principles, whereby he may be directed to supernatural happiness” (I-II:62.1; see also II-II:23.7). The natural, acquired virtues dispose us to the realization of proximate ends and natural happiness; the supernatural, infused virtues dispose us to the realization of our ultimate end and supernatural happiness. The infused virtues are composed of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, as well as infused cardinal virtues (prudence, courage, temperance, justice) corresponding to the natural virtues. The object of the theological virtues is God’s own self. Through faith we believe revealed truths that make God known to us (I:1.1). Through hope, the will persists in tending toward our end despite the fact that it is only imperfectly known through faith (I-II:62.3, II-II:17). Through charity we anticipate our eschatological participation in the divine reality, since charity brings about “a certain spiritual union, whereby the will is, so to speak, transformed into that end” (I-II:62.3). This infused virtue makes it possible for human beings to love God “for His own sake: wherefore charity regards principally but one aspect of lovableness, namely God’s goodness” (II-II:23.5.2). Since in charity we love God for God’s own sake, charity can be said to be friendship with God—“a spiritual union with God that could only be characterized as a fellowship of friends,” made possible by God sharing God’s own happiness with us.15 Charity is the greatest of the virtues because of the fact that it attains God and moreover attains God “that it may rest in Him, but not that something may accrue to us from Him” (II-II:23.6). Charity so transforms the will that the person wills only what God wills, and loves as God loves, so as to desire the neighbor’s friendship with God and with self (II-II:25.1–2). Charity also has a special relationship to all the other virtues in that it

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

85

directs the acts of all other virtues to our ultimate end; it is thus said to be the form of the virtues (II-II:23.8). Charity does not take away the specific character of the other virtues but allows an act of virtue to serve its own proximate end while also being directed to the ultimate end. We may now say that “every act proceeds from the will to deepen the agent’s participation in his lovelife with God.” 16 So I seek, say, to secure a just peace, but the end of a just peace is directed beyond itself to the end of extending the fellowship of friendship with God. While charity directs the acts of all other virtues to our ultimate end, this does not mean that we must always be thinking of God or of how each particular action we undertake will direct us to God. Aquinas takes for granted that this kind of purity of intention is impossible in this life. While it will be a characteristic of heavenly charity, it should not be taken as a practical standard for our actions short of heaven. He is perfectly willing to call charity “perfect” so long as the Christian acts “habitually” for the sake of God. The passage is worth quoting in full: On the part of the person who loves, charity is perfect, when he loves as much as he can. This happens in three ways. First, so that a man’s whole heart is always actually borne towards God: this is the perfection of the charity of heaven, and is not possible in this life, wherein, by reason of the weakness of human life, it is impossible to think always actually of God, and to be moved by love towards Him. Secondly, so that man makes an earnest endeavor to give his time to God and Divine things, while scorning other things except in so far as the needs of the present life demand. This is the perfection of charity that is possible to the wayfarer; but it is not common to all who have charity. Thirdly, so that a man gives his whole heart to God habitually, viz., by neither thinking nor desiring anything contrary to the love of God; and this perfection is common to all who have charity. (II-II:24.8)

Whereas Augustine reminds us that we are commanded to have perfect purity of intention, Aquinas reassures us that this can only be an eschatological perfection. While we should not forget it as an ideal, we do no wrong in recalling at the same time that it is not a practical rule or measure of our activity this side of heaven. Just as acting for the sake of virtue does not mean that our actions are all expressions of the same generic superintention to virtuous action, but rather is a shorthand expression

ch a p t er t hr ee

86

for acting for the sorts of reasons characteristic of the fully virtuous, so acting for God’s sake means acting for the reasons characteristic of those who live in perfect charity with God. It does not mean thinking about God to the exclusion of all else or possessing a conscious intention “for God’s sake” that somehow accompanies all of one’s actions. To expect such a thing in this life is to misunderstand the grammar of intention.

The Infused Moral Virtues It is clear enough why Aquinas holds that human beings require the infused theological virtues. It is less immediately obvious why infused moral virtues are needed or why, once they are infused, the acquired virtues also remain. Why cannot charity simply work through the acquired virtues, directing them to our ultimate supernatural good? Aquinas considers this possibility but rejects it, arguing that while the theological virtues direct us to God’s own self in an adequate way, the person needs also “those virtues which dispose him well to whatever is referred to the end” (I-II:65.3 ad 1, see also I-II:63.3 ad 2). However, the acquired virtues, arising from preexisting natural principles, are not “proportionate to the theological virtues,” so moral and intellectual virtues that are, like the theological virtues, infused are also needed. Dell’Olio comments helpfully on the need for infused moral virtues: The infused moral virtues are those habits that enable us to act well in relationship to our supernatural end, although, unlike the theological virtues, they do not themselves have God as their direct object. They are needed since the theological virtues direct the person to an end that exceeds the natural powers, rendering the acquired moral virtues insufficient to guide those actions in the world that fall under their proper objects to that end. . . . It may then be said that the infused moral virtues are indirectly related to the supernatural end of the person through their modification of actions that are themselves directly related to their own proximate ends. The infused moral virtues so modify these actions that they may serve as means towards the person’s goal of realizing his or her supernatural end.17

Actions that may appear irrational from the perspective of acquired virtue may be fully appropriate from the perspective of infused virtue, since

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

87

the acquired virtues are directed toward a good determined according to the rule or measure of human reason, while the infused virtues are determined according to a divine rule or measure. So, according to acquired temperance, limits on the consumption of food are set by what promotes bodily and mental heath, while infused temperance might dispose a person to fast in accordance with scripture (I-II:63.4). This example might suggest that the infused virtues should supplant the acquired virtues. But cases of outright confl ict between the two are the exception rather than the rule. “Acquired temperance still disposes the person to acts of eating that are in accord with the good of the body, for the Christian is not called to fast all the time in a way that will harm the body. The good of the body retains its own goodness, even if it is now understood as serving the love of God.” 18 Moreover, the infused virtues, while more perfect than the acquired virtues given their orientation to our ultimate end, are nonetheless incomplete without the acquired virtues. On their own, the infused virtues do not make it easy or pleasant to act virtuously. Aquinas takes note of the fact that “many have charity, being free from mortal sin, and yet they find it difficult to do works of virtue; nor are these works pleasing to them for their own sake, but only for the sake of charity” (I-II:65.3). In response, he notes that “sometimes the habits of moral virtue experience difficulty in their works, by reason of certain contrary dispositions remaining from previous acts. This difficulty does not occur in respect of acquired moral virtue: because the repeated acts by which they are acquired, remove also the contrary disposition” (I-II:65.3 ad 2). Since the infused virtues are not acquired through habituation, the concupiscible and irascible passions have not been trained to follow readily the will’s adherence to the ultimate end through charity. The infused virtues alone thus seem to render a person continent rather than virtuous, able to perform good acts and to refrain from bad acts, but only with a struggle. This has led to a debate as to whether the infused virtues are virtues proper, with some commentators conceding that the infused virtues “are habits only in an analogous sense,” virtues “only in a carefully qualified sense,” or “more potency than habit,” while others argue that it is sufficient for an “authentic habitus” that infused virtue work without sadness.19 Aquinas certainly considers them virtues, but he insists at the same time that full virtue requires both infused and acquired virtues. When he takes up the question of whether prudence exists in all who have grace, he notes that infused prudence “is merely sufficient with regard to things

ch a p t er t hr ee

88

necessary for salvation.” There is a second prudence, which is “more than sufficient” or “fuller,” “whereby a man is able to make provision both for himself and for others, not only in matters necessary for salvation, but also in all things relating to human life” (II-II:47.14 ad 1). This form of prudence does not exist in all who have grace, the implication being that full prudence requires both infused and acquired prudence. Only when both infused and acquired virtues are present is it possible to act readily and harmoniously for the sake of our ultimate end.20

The Increase of Infused Virtues and the Insistence on Agency It might be expected that virtues infused by God would, by virtue of that fact, be perfect from the moment they are given. However, the infused virtues are not static, not given in a finished form. Charity increases, and this increase looks very much like the process of habituation into acquired virtue: “each act of charity disposes to an increase of charity, in so far as one act of charity makes man more ready to act again according to charity, and this readiness increasing, man breaks out into an act of more fervent love, and strives to advance in charity, and then his charity increases actually” (II-II:24.7). What differentiates this increase through action from the acquisition of virtue is that “acts produced by an infused habit, do not cause a habit, but strengthen the already existing habit” (I-II:51.4 ad 3). If we consider infused prudence, we discover that what is infused is, as Jean Porter notes, “present only potentially in those who lack the use of reason, and . . . present only in a minimal degree even in some of those who possess the use of reason.” 21 So in baptized children “there is prudence as to habit but not as to act,” and in those who have come to the use of reason, it is present “also as to act, with regard to the things necessary for salvation” (II-II:47.14 ad 3). Prudence with regard to human life must be acquired, and even prudence with regard to salvation requires repeated action in order to become perfect; “this by practice merits increase, until it becomes perfect, even as the other virtues” (II-II:47.14 ad 3). So while the very notion of infused virtue might seem to render unnecessary all those things that normally contribute toward habituation into virtue—the presence of virtuous exemplars, parental instruction, personal aspiration, and so on—these things remain key to the increase of infused virtue.

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

89

As Mausbach notes, infused virtue is “at first a pure potential for supernatural action, and is first expressed in actual activity when instruction in the faith and the ethical norms of Christian life are impressed on a child from without.” 22 Nevertheless, Aquinas insists that actions performed out of charity are not acts in imitation of charity or aspiring to charity but truly acts expressive of charity, even if they always also dispose to an increase of charity and thus reveal any existing stage as preliminary. The baptized child who possesses prudence as to habit but not as to act, and who imitates the prudent actions of those whose prudence is possessed more fully, is not displaying a mere semblance of virtue. Why is it important to Aquinas that this be the case, that infused virtue be regarded as true virtue rather than an analogy or qualified version—a semblance—thereof? Most simply, so that it will be possible for all the baptized, regardless of how good or bad their upbringing, how perfect or imperfect their acquired character, to attain their ultimate good. So Aquinas makes a point of saying that although the infused virtues alone do not render action in accordance with them easy or pleasant, these virtues do suffice to allow a person to do all that is necessary for salvation (II-II:47.14 ad 1). Aristotle was willing to accept that luck would determine whether or not a person was capable of virtue and happiness. Christian thinkers characteristically have not been willing to do so, both because theodicy issues loom large and because what is at stake is no longer a finite temporal good but an eternal good.23 The fact that the ultimate good of human beings is beyond our natural capabilities dramatically equalizes human moral agency, a result that Aquinas underlines by insisting that no human actions in any way condition or prepare the way for the bestowal of grace (I-II:112.1–4). So the infused virtues level the playing field by signaling that upbringing, intellectual capacity, and so on, are not decisive for one’s capacity for friendship with God. (Of course, if they introduce equality in this respect, they could also be thought to introduce a glaring inequality in that those to whom grace is not given are wholly unable to reach their ultimate good. This, though, is not yet felt to be a pressing problem, in part because Aquinas seems to assume that all peoples have either accepted or knowingly rejected the offer of grace.) The playing field is leveled, but the game is not over: the infused virtues do not after all imply the displacement of human action. Salvation is made possible through the bestowal of infused virtues, dispositions to act. Human beings must act to increase these virtues and bring them to perfection, and only through

ch a p t er t hr ee

90

this process will they become persons capable of enjoying God, capable of their own ultimate good. It is true that, since they are infused rather than acquired through human action, these virtues are most basically divine gift rather than human accomplishment. As Dell’Olio comments, the “infused virtues are primarily conceived in terms of their openness or receptivity to a power that transcends the self, rather than in terms of the discharge of the power of one’s self.” 24 At the same time, it is important to recall Aquinas’s insistence that the infused virtues are indeed virtues, that they transform the person’s own will such that she herself is intrinsically oriented to God, rather than being shoved mechanically.25 So in charity the human mind is not “merely moved, without being the principle of this movement, as when a body is moved by some extrinsic motive power” (II-II:23.2). Nor is it the case that the human mind is moved as an instrument, which, “though it be a principle of action, nevertheless has not the power to act or not to act” (II-II:23.2). Acts of charity must be fully voluntary actions, and this is possible only if charity is not simply a matter of the human will being moved by the Holy Spirit, but rather a gift given to human agency, a “habitual form superadded to the natural power” (II-II:23.2).26 The infused virtues, rather than functioning as an excuse for passivity, are a disposition to act and are therefore fulfi lled only through action. While Aquinas is less squeamish than some of his modern commentators about allowing infused virtues the title of virtue despite the fact that they do not carry facility of action along with them, he does insist that nothing could truly be a virtue that supplants human action, full human engagement. Happiness cannot simply be given to us, but requires our total involvement. What, then, should we say about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, with which Aquinas’s discussion of the virtues culminates?27 Do they give the lie to Aquinas’s insistence that grace works through virtue by expanding human agency and that our happiness is constituted by our own activity? The gifts differ from the virtues in that while the virtues “perfect man according as it is natural for him to be moved by his reason,” the gifts dispose human beings to be moved by God. Not only are they infused by God but they also dispose a person “to become amenable to the Divine inspiration” (I-II:68.1). They compensate for an inherent inadequacy in even the infused theological virtues. Given that the theological virtues inform human reason of God only in an imperfect way, Aquinas argues that human reason alone cannot move the will to our ultimate end: “in matters directed to the supernatural end, to which

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

91

man’s reason moves him, according as it is, in a manner, and imperfectly, informed by the theological virtues, the motion of reason does not suffice, unless it receive in addition the prompting or motion of the Holy Spirit” (I-II:68.2). Wadell concludes from this that “only God has the agency requisite for attaining God; consequently, we attain God not principally through our own activities, but through a love which allows God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.” Ultimately, the virtues “prepare us to rely on an agency other than our own.” 28 Such comments can be misleading, however, insofar as they suggest a culminating displacement of human activity. Aquinas, though, is concerned to link the gifts very closely to the virtues. He refrains from calling them virtues proper (although he is willing to call them “Divine virtues, perfecting man as moved by God” [I-II:68.1.1]). He does insist on calling them habits. They are habits because they are actual “perfections of man,” which “abide in” human beings (I-II:68.3). That is, they are stable dispositions to act, not simply the Holy Spirit coming over someone for a passing moment.29 If the gifts of the Holy Spirit dispose human beings to act, they cannot displace human agency. And sure enough, Aquinas denies that the Holy Spirit moves a human being as a mere instrument that “has no faculty of action, but only of being acted upon.” Rather, the human person “is so acted upon by the Holy Ghost, that he also acts himself” (I-II:68.3 ad 2). So even the gifts perfect rather than displace human agency. As Bernard Lonergan argues, Aquinas’s mature account of the gifts “is a very adequate answer to the objection that external intervention is violent, or as we should say, unnatural.” 30 There is no competition between divine and human agency here, such that if human beings are moved by God they must themselves be passive. At the same time, human agency is fulfilled not through independence or self-sufficiency but instead by being willingly dependent, fully open to God’s gift, thus perfecting the charity that unites human beings with God.

Conclusion I have sought in the preceding pages to do justice to the complexity and nuance of Aquinas’s thought, to show how he makes room for natural, pagan virtues while at the same time articulating the difference made by infused virtues; to indicate how he balances the defense of human agency with an affirmation of the dependence of this agency on divine agency

ch a p t er t hr ee

92

and grace; and to show how he defends while also qualifying the place of habituation in the moral life. Regardless of how great an achievement we regard Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelian with Augustinian virtue to have been, though, it is clear enough that it was not found fully adequate by many of his contemporaries. Scholastic debates over the status of pagan virtues, over magnanimity, over the relationship between natural and supernatural, acquired and infused virtues, continued unabated. When we recall that the full text of the Nicomachean Ethics had been available in Latin only since 1246, it is unsurprising that there was so much ferment over issues like magnanimity in the late medieval period. While Aristotle’s philosophy continued to be regarded as authoritative by virtually everyone, many thought Aquinas had failed to show how Aristotle’s thought could in fact be reconciled with Christian, notably Augustinian, commitments.31 Much of the ferment surrounded Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between will and intellect, which was seen as dangerously deterministic and naturalistic, that is, too close to Latin Averroism.32 Seeking to affirm a strong sense of human freedom and moral responsibility, Duns Scotus, followed by William of Ockham and other Franciscans, fatefully argued that freedom must be understood as the will’s indifference. This had enormous implications for moral psychology insofar as it called into question the positive value of habits and thus of virtues. On the new picture of freedom, the human will remains free to obey or reject the conclusions of the intellect, free to act either in accord with or against an existing habit, free to follow or prevail over the appetites. From such a perspective, habits, even good habits, seemed of peripheral importance. What matters are one’s free choices, rather than the character that provides the context for those choices.33 In fact, good habits might seem to detract from moral achievement insofar as they diminish moral struggle. Augustine had concluded regretfully that the life of the Christian wayfarer is one of unremitting moral struggle; now the life of moral struggle began to emerge as a heroic ideal.34 Reflecting this shift, the Condemnations of 1277 denounced the statement “that continence is not essentially a virtue.” 35 Aquinas had called continence a perfection of the rational faculty but not a virtue, since in contrast with temperance it implies an imperfection in the sensitive appetite (I-II:58.3). But if the glory of human freedom is manifested in resisting contrary impulses, continence will appear more praiseworthy than temperance. On such a view, the habituation gap, the gap between the virtue to which one

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

93

aspires and one’s actual state of character, is no longer something to be gradually closed with the development of the virtues but a permanent feature of the moral life. We never achieve perfect inner harmony. Instead, we live in a state of internal division. Humility, then, becomes simply the confession of this state of inner disorder, however belied it may be by the consistent goodness of our actions. It is the way to live with the habituation gap while avoiding hypocrisy. Humility is now less about confessing how our goodness depends on God than about confessing the gaps between aspiration, appearance, and hidden reality. This new account of freedom characteristic of late medieval voluntarism was associated with a contractual rather than a participatory account of the relationship between human and divine agency.36 In Heiko Oberman’s words, “man is no longer primarily a second cause moved by the prime mover and first cause. In the nominalist view man has become the appointed representative and partner of God responsible for his own life, society and world, on the basis and within the limits of the treaty or pactum stipulated by God.” 37 Via moderna theologians (including William of Ockham, Robert Holcot, Marsilius of Inghen, Pierre d’Ailly, and Gabriel Biel) defined God’s actions de potentia ordinata through the concept of a pactum, a covenant or contract between God and humanity. While Aquinas understood divine and human agency in noncompetitive terms, nominalist thinkers, intending to preserve freedom, tended to think disjunctively of divine gift and human responsive action. Within this context, Aquinas’s recognition of infused moral virtues seemed problematic, for these seemed to infringe on the space within which human persons were responsible for themselves and their own action.38 Even the notion of infused virtues as such, at once both divine gift and intrinsic disposition of the human agent, might seem to muddy the waters. It might seem more natural to affi rm that God’s agency within human persons displaces human agency, that what God gives is not an intrinsic modification of human character but God’s own self, uncreated rather than created grace. According to the pactum, God agreed to regard not the inherent moral value of human actions but rather their stipulated value. Thus human beings are capable of meriting justification de congruo, by meeting the terms of the covenant, even though their actions are inherently of little value. Within the graced context of God’s covenant, one who does what is in him, quod in se est, can earn justification. Divine agency establishes the covenant; human agency fulfills the stipulated condition

ch a p t er t hr ee

94

for justification. The respective spheres of agency are clearly marked out. Moreover, within such a perspective, a person understandably aims to fulfill the terms of the pactum, rather than striving to develop in virtue and perfect his or her character. The connection between human acts and human happiness becomes opaque; happiness is no longer a proper end of our action, constituted in part by that action, but an external reward bestowed in exchange for obedience to divine commandments.39 “With this development,” writes Anthony Levi, “the movement towards the performance of apparently arbitrarily chosen acts in the attainment of spiritual perfection was off to a firm start. The concomitant divorce of spiritual perfection from moral achievement was to become a main cause of the reformation, as the movement worked itself out through chantry bequests and indulgences, onerous works and the relative indifference of later fifteenth-century teaching to ethical standards and interior moral values.” 40 At the outset of the next chapter, I briefly sketch the roots of early modern hyper-Augustinian forms of thought in voluntarist concerns to defend the freedom of the will; freedom seemed to require the possibility of disinterested choice, which in turn demanded a break from eudaimonism, a new kind of pure love for God, and an accompanying nagging fear of hypocrisy, of the failure to achieve the requisite purity. Aquinas’s noncompetitive account of human and divine agency, according to which divine determination does not exclude human freedom, was no longer satisfying or even fully intelligible in this context. But if those who rejected Aquinas’s thought occasioned hyper-Augustinianism through their pursuit of a false and illusory form of freedom, it is also the case that those who have sought to sustain Aquinas’s account of human agency and the virtues have taken certain characteristic missteps, usually stemming from the desire to integrate Aquinas’s nuanced account of the multiform activity of grace with a simple distinction between natural and supernatural. So, for instance, the greater the pains taken to show that the divine bestowal of infused virtue does not cancel out human agency, the more this could seem to imply that the acquired virtues at any rate must be purely the product of human agency. And if we defend Aquinas on this count by showing that he conceives even of natural human agency as radically dependent on God, then the distinction between natural and supernatural seems compromised. Second, in insisting that the infused virtues are sufficient for salvation from the moment they are infused, prior to any substantive transformation of character, Aquinas makes it

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

95

possible to regard salvation as after all the bestowal of an external good unconnected to character. But this stands in tension with the main lines of his thought, according to which salvation (i.e., the beatific vision) is conceived as participation by persons in a good made possible in part through the transformation of their own characters. Finally, when the distinction between natural and supernatural is used to safeguard the integrity and intelligibility of the natural, thus allowing us to explore human moral psychology and habituation in the moral life, this tends by the same token to suggest that infused virtue is off-limits for empirical exploration and ordinary moral reflection. Not only does this introduce a sharp division within the moral life that fails to mesh with experienced reality but it also mystifies the Christian life. Jean Porter has recently offered an exceptionally nuanced adjudication of these issues in Nature as Reason, a Thomistic theory of the natural law.41 Porter positions herself between two-tiered neo-Thomism on the one hand and a Rahnerian interpretation on the other. Without a clear distinction between what in human persons is connatural and what stems from grace, she argues, it is impossible both to safeguard the integrity of nature as a principle of action and to have a meaningful conception of grace. She notes that Aquinas distinguishes between “two forms of happiness and their corresponding virtues,” even if not between two distinct human ends. There must be a natural form of happiness achievable through the natural powers of human persons. She concedes that this natural human agency is not in fact independent of divine agency, but, as she points out, Aquinas makes “systematic distinctions between the kinds of divine activity and assistance necessary to sustain the existence and operation of any created nature and the properly supernatural activities of grace.” So the distinction between acquired and infused virtue can be sustained without implying any radical independence of natural human agency from divine agency. Porter qualifies the distinction by granting that the infused virtues can only be understood by reference to the acquired virtues while at the same time emphasizing the distinction by stressing the mysteriousness of grace. So, on the one hand, since grace perfects nature, “the practical imperatives of grace are informed by, and to some extent constituted by, the imperatives stemming from nature.” On the other hand, though, “because it is oriented toward participation in God’s inner life, grace itself is mysterious in somewhat the same way that God is mysterious—that is to say, it shares in the incomprehensibility of God, in a way that natural acts of creation do not.” The infused

ch a p t er t hr ee

96

virtues end up looking very much like idealized forms of the acquired virtues; we may, and indeed must, grasp what it means to possess both the infused cardinal virtues and the theological virtues by reference to the acquired virtues. Still, Porter affirms that nothing in Aquinas’s analysis rules out the possibility that our considered judgments about the substantive demands of charity might rest, in part at least, on grounds that would be inaccessible to us apart from revelation and our experiences of trying to live by its demands. This, I want to suggest, is in fact the case. That is, our judgments about the requirements of charity stem from an extended process of communal discernment regarding what it means concretely to love the neighbor for the sake of God, and also, to the extent possible and appropriate, to love the neighbor as God loves the neighbor.

She then adds, though, that while “the infused virtues are paradigmatically expressed in kinds of actions which presuppose distinctively Christian beliefs and practices”—and she points to almsgiving, forgiveness, and fraternal correction as concrete examples—“nothing prevents us from acknowledging that these same virtues might appear, in different but recognizably analogous forms, in other contexts.” This means, as she acknowledges, that “grace is operative in those contexts.” 42 Porter successfully demonstrates with what nuance and sophistication Aquinas’s distinctions can be employed. She defends the distinctions between natural and supernatural, acquired and infused virtue while insisting that the latter do not cancel out human agency any more than the former are independent of divine agency. Not only this, but she does so while showing that it is possible at the same time to move beyond Aquinas in asserting that grace is not confined to distinctively Christian contexts. Still, after much insistence on the need to safeguard the integrity of both grace and nature, she has rather little to say about the distinctiveness of the virtues infused by grace beyond the assertion of their mysteriousness. The danger, then, is that the natural virtues take over, since at least we can talk about these. Rather than defending the distinction between natural and supernatural and then qualifying it by insisting that grace is operative beyond the boundaries of Christian belief and practice, rather than insisting on the distinction between acquired and infused virtues and then allowing habituation of the infused virtues to enter in through the back door, we

Aquinas: Making Space for Pagan Virtue

97

might, then, reach for a more holistic model. The moral life, we might suggest, is not divided into two regions, one subject to empirical exploration and the other mysterious, but is rather always at once both ordinary and mysterious. We encounter, after all (as Aquinas himself affirms), not a simple dichotomy between nature and grace but manifold forms of grace-enabled human agency.43 We can affirm the radical dependence of all human agency on divine sustenance while also insisting that the quality of that dependence is transformed when acknowledged and embraced. We can affirm the redemptive activity of the Word at work throughout created-but-fallen nature while also insisting that the quality of that redemptive activity is transformed when the Word is known as Jesus Christ and His Spirit is known in the church.44 Just such an account is offered, I will argue, by the Christian humanism of Erasmus. For Erasmus, grace works through a process in which realities already present, though as yet unknown and unacknowledged, are gradually rendered explicit. In lifting up an Erasmian holism, I do not mean to deny that much was lost between Aquinas and Erasmus. Erasmus does not have anything close to an adequate account of the structure of the human act, of habituation, or of individual virtues. His antischolasticism leaves him unable to guard adequately against a creeping Pelagianism. He does, though, affirm with Aquinas that habituation and grace do not exclude one another, while moving beyond Aquinas in his affirmation that grace is not confined to the regions within which it is explicitly acknowledged. If much of the Augustinian thought of the early modern period further deepened problems associated with the legacy of the splendid vices, Erasmus’s thought did not; while wrestling with the challenges posed by semblances of virtue, it offered both a positive account of habituation in Christian virtue and a generous account of pagan virtue. And it did so while preserving several of the most significant positive features of Augustine’s account of virtue.

mimetic v irtue

ii

Erasmus

4

Putting On Christ Renaissance moral thought has been something of a puzzle for scholars. On the one hand, it has been characterized as an ethic of glory, instrumentalizing virtue to the pursuit of honor and fame. On the other hand, it has been understood as a restoration of a eudaimonist pursuit of perfection, in which virtue is constitutive of our true end. This chapter will not attempt to offer a comprehensive account of Renaissance thought. It does make sense to begin, though, by offering some context for our consideration of Erasmus, often called “Prince of Humanists.” Erasmus sometimes uses the language of an ethic of glory. He does so, though, in order to combat a view of morality as mere external conformity, to restore genuine spiritual and moral aspiration, and ultimately to open up an avenue for understanding virtue as divine gift. He thus employs one semblance of virtue against another, ultimately subverting an ethic of glory in favor of divine Folly, the virtue of humility. Despite the fact that Erasmus offers nothing to rival Aquinas’s systematic account of human action, habit, and virtue and despite the fact that his account of philosophia Christi was subject to Pelagian readings, he nevertheless has something important to offer: like Augustine’s, Erasmus’s is a mimetic account of virtue, but without Augustine’s anxiety about splendid vices and pagan virtues. Jacob Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance as essentially pagan and anti-Christian is no longer accepted by scholars, even if it is still alive in the popular imagination.1 Paul Oskar Kristeller is no doubt the key figure in its demise. Kristeller set forth a strictly delimited, formal definition of humanism. According to Kristeller, humanists were characterized by their devotion to the studia humanitatis, a specific group of studies based

ch a p t er fou r

102

on the reading of ancient Latin and Greek classics, with rhetoric foremost among them. The humanists were united first by their rhetorical concerns and their reliance on classical modes for rhetoric rather than by a substantial normative position.2 Influential as Kristeller’s thesis has been in allowing the internal diversity of humanist thought to appear, other scholars have sought to characterize anew the defi ning commitments of Renaissance scholarship. They have argued that the shared emphasis on rhetoric must itself be understood as a substantive commitment. As Charles Nauert suggests, “study of the humanists’ intellectual methods, especially their attempts to make rhetoric the center of humanistic education, points directly toward ideas which lay at the heart of all Renaissance thought—ideas of the relation between truth and eloquence, and ideas about the relative importance of knowledge and action in the life of man.” 3 Humanistic studies as revived in the fourteenth century included grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history, and moral philosophy, but not natural philosophy, logic, or theology. Moral philosophy was treated as something to be studied in the context of the humanist retrieval of classical learning and especially of rhetoric, and thus as newly distinct from theology. Despite important points of continuity between medieval rhetoricians (dictatores) and fourteenth-century humanists, the latter recognized in a new way the discontinuity of their own society with that of ancient Greece and Rome. The ancient schools of philosophy were understood more nearly in their own terms as opposed to being read always through the lens of Patristic and medieval commentary. Quentin Skinner suggests that one of the discoveries that most excited the humanists was their new grasp of Cicero’s ideal of an education centered on rhetoric and philosophy and aimed at cultivating “the single virtue” (virtus), which has been “found to outshine the rest.” 4 Rhetoric was crucial because of the need to argue “in such a way that our hearers are not only instructed in the virtues but incited to the performance of virtuous acts.” 5 The humanists’ newfound appreciation for Cicero is crucial also, argues Skinner, to understanding why ethical discourse increasingly spoke of virtue in the singular, even while continuing to assume that this required the cultivation of plural virtues. Virtue so conceived went hand in hand, he argues, with an anthropology substantially at odds with that of Augustine. For Cicero, the derivation of virtus from vir, “man,” was significant. The virtuous man is thus the truly manly man, the embodiment of human perfection, and the human capacity to acquire virtue is

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

103

regarded as nearly without limit. In the medieval period, in contrast, “it is of course accepted that a man of saintly disposition may be capable of attaining a number of individual virtues, and thus of avoiding most of the grosser forms of vice. It is always assumed, however, in line with St. Paul’s teachings in Corinthians, that virtus generalis is possessed by God alone and personified only by Christ.” 6 If Renaissance humanism reflected a greater sense of confidence in human capacities and downplayed the effects of original sin, Skinner notes that it remained self-consciously Christian.7 Faith is one of the virtues characteristic of the vir virtutis, the truly virtuous man. While human beings are capable of achieving virtue and ought to strive ardently to that end, they must at the same time acknowledge that their ability to do so has been given them by God. Petrarch insists, notes Skinner, that the virtuous must honor God, not congratulate themselves. At times, particularly among the quattrocentro Florentines, such comments often appear as little more than lip service. The godlike qualities of human beings become cause for self-congratulation rather than humble gratitude, as in Pico della Mirandola’s famous oration. Honor, glory, and praise are properly due to the virtuous person, not solely to God. Similarly, while the humanists continue to insist that the virtues are to be pursued purely as good in themselves, this claim appears increasingly empty alongside their enthusiasm for inspiring persons to pursue virtue as the path to worldly glory and fame. So Alberti argues that “the principal aim of education must be to guide young men ‘in the ways of honour and praise,’ leading them in ‘the path of virtue and honour’ and showing them that this is also ‘the path to glory and fame.’ The value of this training is of course said to be that it produces the fully manly man, the true vir virtutis who finally comes to prize ‘the beauty of honour, the delights of fame and the divineness of glory’ above everything else in life.” 8 It was perhaps the humanists’ emphasis on rhetoric that led them to recommend the pursuit of glory. After all, this easily engaged with natural human aspirations and could be hoped to bridge the gap between knowledge of virtue and “incitement” to perform virtuous actions. Skinner notes that like the Italian humanists, the northern humanists, too, often wrote educational treatises and concerned themselves in particular with the education proper to future government leaders, those charged with serving the common good. Like their Italian predecessors, these thinkers worried that political leaders would pursue individual or factional interests rather than those of the community as such, and that

ch a p t er fou r

104

they would tend to take advice only from hypocritical flatterers. The solution lay in persuading these leaders of the importance of cultivating the virtues. In general, the approach taken, as in quattrocentro Florence, was to promote the desire for glory, fame, and honor and to claim that only the virtues finally guarantee the possession of these goods. In addition to the four cardinal virtues, governors should acquire the princely virtues of liberality, clemency, and fidelity to one’s word, along with affability, placability, mercy, and godliness. While this final virtue was more strongly insisted on by Italian humanists, it remained the case that godliness was typically seen by northern humanists as instrumental to the achievement of glory.9 Skinner’s account of Renaissance humanism is useful in indicating with what enthusiasm an ethic of glory was embraced by some thinkers during this period. Even if what they advocated was not an outright pagan ethic, it sought to repristinate precisely what Augustine had regarded as most problematic in pagan virtue. Skinner’s account falls short, though, insofar as it abstracts the humanist movement from a broader intellectual and social context within which, for instance, it came into constant contact with scholasticism.10 Just as problematic is the fact that it suggests an overly homogenized view of humanism itself. Some humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla, were emphatic Augustinians, and as Jill Kraye notes, “the attempt to establish the proper relation between Christian and classical moral doctrines and the effort to determine the supreme good of man were two of the most important issues in Renaissance ethics.” 11 Scholastic worries over the status of pagan virtue in general, over magnanimity and the desire for honor versus humility, and over virtue as secure achievement versus continual struggle did not disappear, and indeed took on added urgency. Anthony Levi, in an interpretation strikingly at odds with that of Skinner, has suggested that what was at stake in the Renaissance debate over pagan virtue was the inseparability of supernatural from natural aspiration, of religious from moral perfection. The humanists rebelled against a “view of man as perfectible by norms of belief and behaviour extrinsic and irrelevant to his rational needs and moral aspirations.” 12 The humanist critique was directed against those who wrongly regarded their final good as something contingent on external conformity to commandments, rather than as the culmination of an inner transformation. For reform-minded humanist thinkers, the most sinister semblance was not that of pagan virtue, which they were, like Aquinas, inclined to regard

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

105

as directed toward true if proximate goods, but rather the semblance displayed within Christendom by those who performed certain actions, not for the sake of a process of inner transformation initiated by these actions but simply as instrumental means to a purely extrinsic end of eternal heavenly reward. It is somewhat paradoxical that late medieval scholasticism should have fostered a conception of final end as external reward. After all, Scotus had picked up on Anselm of Canterbury’s doctrine of the two affections of the will in order to stress the capacity of human beings for disinterested choice. Only this capacity to will a good that in no way is our own, argued Scotus, could guarantee the freedom of the will.13 Scotus does not reduce moral goodness to compliance for the sake of personal benefit; quite the contrary, he understands it in terms of the capacity to transcend the natural desire for the advantageous in favor of the affection for justice.14 It is not enough to say with Augustine that our love of God fulfills us only by transforming our desires, or with Aquinas that perfect charity is love of God for God’s own sake, not for the sake of any derivative benefit to oneself. Scotus and others insisted on a newly unconditioned form of disinterestedness. According to Scotus, “everyone according to right reason should be willing to cease to exist for the sake of a divine good.” 15 Ironically, Scotus carved out the possibility of this pure love for the divine good by appeal to Aristotle: if Aristotle could assume that the brave citizen will accept death for the good of the state, without assuming any reward in the afterlife, this shows that a proper love for God, too, is purely disinterested.16 Love of God is tainted by any connection with self-fulfi llment, even if, as Scotus concedes, it is impossible that we should not in fact be benefited by our love of God.17 If Augustine had radically stretched and redefined pagan eudaimonism with his denial that happiness is fully attainable in this life, late medieval voluntarism demanded an utter break with eudaimonism—which Scotus accomplished through reinterpreting a pagan eudaimonist. This is hyperAugustinianism, emerging out of a demand for a kind of freedom and thus a kind of disinterestedness that Augustine himself would not have found intelligible. On such a view, habits that render a life of virtue pleasant and easy do not seem to be the kind of heroic exercise of will that would prove one’s selfless love for God. Rather, the key could easily seem to be subordination of one’s will to God, obedience to God, a free but finite will bending to a free and infinite will.18 If one can discern in divine laws no

ch a p t er fou r

106

intrinsic benefit to oneself, in which only a sacrifice is required, obedience seems indeed a heroic testament of love. So a demand for obedience that initially revealed intense concern for interior moral values could, ironically, result in a lack of concern for interiority—if the required actions carried with them no intrinsic meaning for the agent, either they could be performed with a purely selfless intention or they could be performed without regard for intention. It was in this context that hypocrisy could rival pride for the place of chief vice and that the problem of semblance could take on gargantuan proportions. Renaissance humanists, claims Levi, insisted “that human perfection, including the religious perfection which was grace-aided and necessarily rewarded by eternal salvation, had to be intrinsic to the fulfillment of the highest human moral aspirations inscribed on rational nature itself, and not something different from or in addition to human moral achievement, as measured by rational norms.” 19 On this account, the humanists sought to sustain a teleological, eudaemonist conception of human moral activity. They did not pursue virtue as instrumental to glory, fame, and honor, but they did seek to show that spiritual and moral aspirations are not alien to one another, that the pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of salvation, properly understood, are one and the same. Levi’s account has the virtue of viewing humanism not solely against the backdrop of an abstract Augustinian anthropology but as involved in an active debate with late medieval theologies and popular religious practice. As an allencompassing portrait of Renaissance humanism, it is probably no more adequate than that of Skinner.20 It does, though, help to make better sense of the so-called Christian humanism of John Colet, Thomas More, and Erasmus. These thinkers insisted that the pursuit of virtue was important first and foremost not because it could secure the peace and order of the commonwealth but because virtue is the essence of Christianity and only a virtuous commonwealth can be truly a Christian commonwealth. The pursuit of virtue thus has ultimate religious significance and is not simply an avenue to private glory or to communal security. Erasmus in particular can be seen as navigating between Florentine humanism, late medieval scholastic theology, and the popular piety of his day, striving to articulate a robustly Christian virtue capable of generosity toward splendid vices and pagan moral aspirations. Erasmus offered an account that was able to absorb the energies and insights of those promoting an ethic of glory while showing how such an ethic properly transcends itself.

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

107

Erasmus and the Mask of Piety Long regarded as little more than a skeptical moralist, Erasmus, and his theological seriousness, is now increasingly appreciated. Erasmus critiqued both the scholastic thought and popular piety of his day for their lack of heartfelt devotion and called for a renewal of philosophia Christi, the philosophy of Christ. His prescription sought to reunite theology with spirituality, placing classical learning and rhetoric at the service of a simple, heartfelt piety that owed much to what Erasmus had absorbed as a boy in schools of the Brethren of the Common Life.21 And while Erasmus sought as a young man to reform contemporary thought and culture simply by recovering the riches of antiquity, the mature Erasmus saw scripture as the touchstone against which the purity of everything mined would have to be tested. Theology should once again become what it had been for the church fathers, sacra doctrina, centered on scripture, and on scripture studied and taught in a way that could reform whole persons, not simply inform the intellect. For Erasmus, the only thing that could truly renew the church of his day was a fundamental transformation of “the heart.” This would be made possible by the learned art of persuasive rhetoric applied to scripture, designed most fundamentally to encourage imitation (mimesis) of the perfect pattern of Christ. Erasmus, deeply concerned though he was with undoing the exterior semblance of virtue through an inner transformation, a transformation of the heart, of character, of desires and intentions, did not see this as incongruous with a prescription that called for imitation, for acting out a part that is thus necessarily not yet who one really is. Like so many of his era, Erasmus was persuaded that his own generation was by far the most corrupt in the history of the world.22 Everywhere he looked, he found tyranny, greed, ambition, evil-speaking, and lack of charity. Erasmus’s particular concern, though, were vices that wear the semblance of virtue, that “make themselves respectable under a mask of religion and duty.” These are particularly dangerous because they not only pervert their possessors but also divert others from their true goal, Christ; “if in place of this heavenly goal you set up an earthly one, the man who strives to make progress will have nothing to which he can rightly direct his efforts.” This is what happens when “we exercise tyrannical power under a pretext of justice and right, when we make religion an excuse for personal gain, when we seek worldly rule in the

ch a p t er fou r

108

name of defending the church, when laws are laid down which purport to serve Christ’s cause and in fact are poles apart from the teaching of Christ.” Along with vices that masquerade as virtues, Erasmus worries about indifferent things that are falsely claimed to be gateways to sanctity, things that wear the “mask of piety without its genuine force.” 23 In this category Erasmus places what he calls the religion of ceremonies. Far from expressing a pure heart/soul/mind, “ceremonies” such as celebrating Mass daily, venerating the relics of the saints, holding vigils, fasting, even silence and prayer serve too often to conceal the lack thereof. If you focus on such externalities, he says, “outwardly you are a Christian, but in private you are more pagan than the pagans.” 24 In his effort to capture what has gone awry in the monastic practices of his day, and in the lay spirituality that aped these practices, Erasmus aligns Pauline with Neoplatonic dualisms.25 True piety is “inner,” “invisible,” “real,” of the “spirit” or “heart,” while ceremonies are “outer,” “visible,” “deceptive,” “fleshly.” 26 If we are able to move beyond our distaste for these dualisms and attend to Erasmus’s deployment of them, we find, underlying apparent inconsistencies in his application of them, a central concern with differentiating between proximate or preliminary goods on the one hand and ultimate goods on the other, where our ultimate good is to become bearers of humble, Christlike love able thereby to enter into a perfect community of love with Christ and neighbor. So for all his dismissive comments concerning external ceremonies, Erasmus does not fail to appreciate how liturgical and devotional practices work to form Christians into the body of Christ. Rather, he perceives that they do so fully when those who partake in fact come eventually to understand themselves as living members of the body of Christ. If a virtuous spirit is “inward” and “invisible,” we might inquire how we are to know such a spirit. As worried as Erasmus is about the potential deceptiveness of “external” behavior, though, it becomes clear that actions as such are not always “external,” since some reveal the true state of the heart. Thus, if you celebrate Mass daily but live only for your own welfare, with no concern for the needs of your neighbor, you are “still in the flesh of the sacrament,” while “if you consider all your goods to be the common property of all men, if you are afflicted by the misfortunes of others as if they were your own, then you celebrate mass with great profit, since you do so spiritually (LB V 30F; CWE 66:71). The way we habitually act toward our neighbor reveals our hearts, suggests Erasmus, even if our other actions may not. It is Christlike love “to edify our

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

109

neighbor, to consider everyone as members of the same body, to regard everyone as one in Christ . . . Just as he was not born for himself and did not live for himself or die for himself, but dedicated himself entirely to our needs, so let us also devote ourselves to the interests of our brethren, not to our own” (LB V 35E, cf. 49A; CWE 66:79, see also 101). Similarly, the most proper veneration of the saints is the imitation of their virtues, the example of their lives: “Would you like to win the favour of Peter and Paul? Imitate the faith of the one and the charity of the other, and you will accomplish more than if you were to dash off to Rome ten times” (LB V 30F; CWE 66:71). Erasmus does not indulge in the worry that even our charity, our generosity toward our neighbor and her needs, might itself be merely an “act” of piety and an expression of pride. To imitate exemplary virtues—the charity of Christ and the saints—is not to do something merely “external”; to honor and admire exemplary virtue without imitating it is. Erasmus shows himself time and time again to be optimistic about the possibility of gradual progress toward perfection in Christ; “I approve of what you do as long as your purpose is not vitiated and you do not consider as a fixed goal a stage from which you must make further progress towards salvation” (LB V 23E; CWE 66:74). At their best, then, all the practices of popular piety have the potential to habituate us in Christlike virtue. What is “exterior,” what appears, can shape what is “interior,” the character of our hearts. Such practices can do so insofar as they center our attention on the virtues of Christ and the saints, insofar as relic and image and sacrament serve to capture our imagination and draw us into the practice of humble charity. Often, though, Erasmus alleges that they simply render us captive, distracting us from Christ and from the active cultivation of virtue. They are misunderstood as fully constituting piety. This is what Erasmus terms “the common plague of Christianity, all the more insidious because in appearance it bears a great resemblance to piety. There are no vices more dangerous than those which simulate virtue” (LB V 32B; CWE 66:73). If not accompanied by a dawning awareness of our proper end as conformity to the humble, loving character of Christ, then these things become an obstacle, engendering a false semblance of virtue that rests in “externals” and, moreover, glories in them as the self’s own achievement: “To worship Christ through visible things for the sake of visible things and to think of this as the summit of religious perfection; to be complacent with oneself and to condemn others on this basis; to become transfixed by them and die there and, to put it succinctly, to be

ch a p t er fou r

110

alienated from Christ by those very things that should be employed to lead us to him—this would be to desert the law of the gospel, which is spiritual” (LB V 32E; CWE 66:74). The beauty of image and liturgy is central to their power to capture our attention. And Erasmus certainly recognizes the transformative power of beauty. He deplores the theologians of his own day for their tangled scholasticism and suggests that students of Christian virtue return to the fathers of the church, who “could adorn and enrich arid and tedious subjects through their eloquent command of language” (LB V 29E; CWE 66:69). A pastor should seek not just to teach but to move and to please, “otherwise his message, no matter how sublime, will rest inert and never reach the hearts of those for whom it was intended.” 27 But for Erasmus, not all beauty is equal. The beauty of rhetoric is trustworthy in a way that visual beauty is not; words are closer to mind and heart than are paintings. “You give homage to an image of Christ’s countenance represented in stone or wood or depicted in colour. With how much more religious feeling should you render homage to the image of his mind, which has been reproduced in the Gospels through the artistry of the Holy Spirit” (LB V 31D; CWE 66:72). Erasmus’s belief in the power of rhetoric to form character was shared by many humanists, but Erasmus was distinctive in his particular emphasis on exempla—paradigmatic stories.28 In an important work on the rhetoric of example in early modern France and Italy, John Lyons has argued that example became for a number of important thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—notably Montaigne, Machiavelli, Marguerite de Navarre—no longer a way of promoting the authority of the past but rather a process of discovery, “in which the tension between instance and general statement forced modifications in that statement.” Lyons argues that practice ran ahead of theory; most theorists continued to understand exempla simply in terms of proposing models of conduct for imitation, failing to attend to the complex ways in which examples must be constructed, and even when corrected to fit authoritative models, can nevertheless have a variety of effects. For Lyons, Erasmus stands as a refreshing exception among Renaissance theorists of composition, one who provides “a richer view of example, closer to the view of the practicing writers than to the view of the authors of treatises of poetics.” 29 Erasmus recognized the need for selection in the use of example and argued that the criterion of selection is what is most “striking” or “distinguished.” “Despite Erasmus’s undeniable emphasis on the moral

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

111

and religious utility of the act of writing, this emphasis does not provide the key to the selection of material. Instead the ‘striking’ or ‘outstanding’ (praecipua), an aesthetic-rhetorical criterion, is for Erasmus the criterion for selection in the gathering of copia. An example of good conduct that is not striking would be of no use, for example is not a moral concept but a discursive one.” 30 Erasmus grasps, then, that examples are discursive constructions—they are not simply pieces of reality that can on their own function to model conduct. Perceptive as Lyons’s analysis is, though, he does not recognize the fact that Christ in the Gospels is for Erasmus the ultimate exemplum, the paradigmatic paradigm. He can function as such because, as we shall see below, there is for Erasmus no gap between the reality of Christ and the Christ of the Gospel narratives. This is not because the example of Christ is not rhetorically constructed but because Christ himself constructs his own exemplum or, even more powerfully, is the exemplum that he provides. It is the beauty of Christ as conveyed in scripture that is the most “striking” example of all, the one that can most truly transform our affections and habituate us in virtue.31 While the Gospels hold a special place in bringing Christ to us, there is in Erasmus, as in Augustine, also the hope that human rhetoric placed in the service of Christ will itself become a vessel of transformative grace. In the Paraclesis, Erasmus wishes for the purpose of exhorting others to study the New Testament that “an eloquence far different from Cicero’s be given me: an eloquence certainly much more efficacious, if less ornate than his.” 32 And having recited a litany of pagan accounts of rare and wondrous eloquence, he concludes, “if there were any such kind of incantation anywhere, if there were any power of song which truly could inspire, if any Pytho truly swayed the heart, I would desire that it be at hand for me so that I might convince all of the most wholesome truth of all. However, it is more desirable that Christ himself, whose business we are about, so guide the strings of our lyre that this song might deeply affect and move the minds of all.” 33 Rather than ask the pagan Muses to attend him, Erasmus’s wish is after all that Christ’s transformative presence work through his prose. If the pagans dreamed of rhetoric with magical power, it is after all only God’s Word that truly possesses this. This shift from magical power to divine grace is reminiscent of Praise of Folly, in which Folly’s magical power to create the illusion of comedy in the midst of the earthly scene of real tragedy is finally and utterly overshadowed by God’s power to replace fragile and mutable illusion with lasting, real bliss.34

ch a p t er fou r

112

Christ is himself at work not only within his exemplum in scripture but also in the very response that hearers have to scripture. Christ’s power is not confined to the original historical event of Jesus, nor to the scriptural narrative, but encompasses even the response of hearers of the Word. Moreover, the rhetoric of Christ’s example is for Erasmus a process of discovery, not simply the imposition of a static authority. One of the characteristics of example to which Lyons draws our attention is that of “excess.” “Example is excessive,” he writes, “because any element of historical reality and even any fiction adduced to support a generalization will have characteristics that exceed what can be covered by the generalization.” 35 Lyons believes that this subverts efforts to deploy examples as models for character. But because it is Christ himself, and not any generalization, that is authoritative for Christians, this excess serves not to undermine the authority of Christ’s example but rather to generate an ongoing transcendence of any attempt to distill Christ’s example into a fixed and final statement.

The Imitation of Christ The heart of philosophia Christi is the re-formation of human nature through conformity with Christ.36 The notion of “putting on Christ,” mimesis of a perfect exemplar, Erasmus draws from his return ad fontes—from the Pauline epistles and from Patristic thought.37 It is not just that sixteenth-century society is to be renewed by a return to its sources in classical culture; more fundamentally, human nature is to be renewed by a return to its own proper font, Christ himself. “Our plight would be sorry indeed, had not Christ left us some live coals of his teaching, some living unfailing rivulets from the spring of his mind” (OE lines 181–83; CWE 6:78). Christ, God’s Word, has left us his words, and if we return to this spring, clearing it of the dirt of texts and interpretations corrupted through ignorance, ambition, and false ceremonialism, it will well up in us as transformative, living water.38 This does not mean that Christians are, in imitating Christ, fundamentally agents of their own salvation.39 It is true that we are sometimes left with this impression, or the sense that Christ saves just through teaching: “You must only conceive in your mind with great courage the ideal of the perfect life and once it has been conceived, pursue it with vigour. The human mind has never made vehement demands upon itself that it

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

113

has not accomplished” (LB V 16B; CWE 66:46). To be sure, these lines are immediately preceded by the remark that subjecting flesh to spirit is easy with God as one’s helper, but the resounding note of the passage is one of self-reliance. Particularly in the Enchiridion, Erasmus espouses Neoplatonic assertions of human perfectibility that seem to leave little room even for the doctrines of sin and atonement, let alone the radical dependency of created being.40 “We have such a capacity for divinity that we can soar past the minds of the angels and become one with God”; “the soul, remembering its heavenly origin, strives upwards with all its might and struggles against its earthly burden” (LB V 12D; CWE 66:41). Certainly there is in Erasmus no room for the critique that Christian virtue is passive, something simply received or infused. The greater danger from a theological perspective is the heresy of Pelagianism, the claim that human beings, despite the Fall, possess an autonomous capacity for goodness. There are, in fact, scholars who argue that Erasmus did slide into a semi-Pelagianism that lost sight of the priority of grace insisted on by the Augustinian-Thomist tradition.41 Certainly the confrontation with Luther’s extreme position on sin and freedom of the will made it easy to shift in this direction. The famous example of the child and the apple from Erasmus’s Diatribe Concerning Free Will can be read in a variety of ways: “The child could not have raised himself without the father’s help; he would not have seen the apple without the father’s showing; he would not have stepped forward without the father’s helping . . . ; he would not have reached the apple without the father’s placing it into his hand.” 42 The child did do something, he did try with all his might to reach the apple, but the child had first to be shown something attractive in order for his active powers to be engaged; not only does the initiative lie thus with the father, not the child, but the child’s activity remains both free and dependent at every subsequent step as well. This is hardly a systematic discussion of grace and human freedom, and thus it is not surprising that it is subject to a variety of interpretations. Its lack of systematicity is also a virtue, though. It does not attempt to pin down the respective contributions of divine and human agency as synergism does; it simply insists on the priority of grace, on free human response, and on the dependency of this response. Human freedom is not defined as acting within a space devoid of divine agency. Moreover, read in light of Erasmus’s affirmation that grace is active in the ways that beauty lures our attention and inspires our activity, the example of the apple captures something of the way Erasmus sees grace as enabling rather than displacing human agency.43

ch a p t er fou r

114

It is Erasmus so understood whose account of Christian virtue might be worthy of retrieval. Levi makes much of Erasmus’s dependence on the Neoplatonic tradition “because that tradition contains both the belief in intrinsic human perfectibility, which was the pole of Erasmus’ opposition to the scholastics, and the belief in an autonomous power of self-determination, which was to be the pole of Erasmus’ opposition to the reformers.” 44 There was, argues Levi, no way in the sixteenth century (and really no way until Rahner’s account of the supernatural existential in the twentieth century) to insist both that human beings are perfected only by norms of belief and behavior that answer to intrinsic rational needs and moral aspirations, and also that human beings can determine themselves to pursue these goods, without thereby falling into Pelagianism. Erasmus and other northern humanists, claims Levi, were in fact striving to articulate just such a power in human nature, “a power of self-determination to good in which faith itself is implicit and in which the acceptance of grace therefore no longer carries Pelagian implications.” But because he did not quite have the conceptual resources at his disposal to articulate such a view, Erasmus “deliberately chose to write obliquely, insinuating much but stating only that which he felt he could defend theologically.” 45 This is an intriguing interpretation. Erasmus certainly did insist that spiritual and moral perfection cannot be divorced from one another, that philosophia Christi fulfills the best impulses of human nature, and that human persons must be fully active in the process of becoming conformed to Christ. But it is also the case that Erasmus’s mature stance is highly critical of Neoplatonic accounts of self-divinization. Against Levi, I would argue that Erasmus ultimately allows no autonomous power of self-determination. While in the Enchiridion Erasmus seemed at times too sanguine about human powers of self-perfection, in Encomium Moriae Folly attacks the Stoic wise man for his aspirations to godlike self-sufficiency: “What contrast between these divine pretensions and the real condition of the wiseman Folly described! What hypocrisy and self-delusion on his part to attack men as fools when he is first among Stultitia’s servants!” 46 As Wayne Rebhorn has noted, the goddess “fires her heaviest barrage of criticism at [the sage’s] arrogant self-divination, in what must be considered a significant rejection of a fundamental humanist tendency.” In her culminating persona, as sincere devotee of Christian foolishness, Folly reveals that true wisdom, paradoxically, is humble dependence

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

115

on Christ. Far from striving for self-deification, the truly wise “do not trust in their own weak reason or feeble strength, but rely completely on Christ.” 47 Christians are indeed called to imitate Christ, but this act of imitation is not a willful grasping after divine perfection. Rather, to imitate Christ is fundamentally to imitate Christ’s humility and thus to be willing to be dependent, receptive, open to transformation from without.48 Erasmus thus exhorts Christians to be on guard against two forms of the semblance of virtue: one that relies on mere performance rather than transformation of the heart, and one (that of the Stoic sage and Neoplatonic aspirant to divinity) that relies on self rather than God, fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of Christ’s example and its transformative power. So we may conclude that even when Christ is depicted as teacher, the imitation of Christ is not a moralistic displacement of grace but an acceptance of grace. Christ’s “word has an inner and transforming force that other teachings lack.” 49 Christ’s word is strongly identified with Christ’s person, “for as he was the essence of simplicity and truth, there could be no dissimilarity between the archetype of the divine mind and the form of speech that issued from it” (LB V 31D; CWE 66:72). In the Gospel we encounter not just persuasive rhetoric but Christ himself, fully present with the power to remake us in conformity with himself. A statue of Christ “represents only the form of the body—if indeed it represents anything of Him—but these writings bring you the living image of His holy mind and the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ himself.” 50 As Lewis Spitz argues, the imitation of Christ for Erasmus “involved the mystic and spiritual indwelling of Christ in the human heart, not merely the outward mimicking of his actions.” 51 Moreover, because power lies ultimately with the Word rather than with the interpreter of the Word, Erasmus is confident that true theology is open to all; “the journey is simple, and it is ready for anyone. Only bring a pious and open mind, possessed above all with a pure and simple faith. Only be docile, and you have advanced far in this philosophy. It itself supplies inspiration as a teacher which communicates itself to no one more gladly than to minds that are without guile.” 52 No special intellectual gifts or achievements are required, only a willingness to receive what Christ imparts. It is here that Erasmus can sound most like the Devotio Moderna, with its disdain for scholarship and its insistence that the spiritual life is open to all Christians.53

ch a p t er fou r

116

Imitatio and Aemulatio Erasmus’s embrace of the Devotio Moderna ideal of the imitation of Christ comes into sharper focus against the backdrop of his broader reflections on the important Renaissance topoi of imitatio and aemulatio. Erasmus makes his most significant contribution on this topic in his Dialogus Ciceronianus. This dialogue, subtitled The Ideal Latin Style, develops a subtle critique of the so-called Ciceronians of Erasmus’s day, who regarded Cicero as the epitome of Latin style and sought to imitate him as closely as possible. Some Ciceronians went so far as to refuse to use any Latin words unless they were actually present in Cicero’s corpus. In the dialogue, Nosoponus, a caricature of the Ciceronian ideal, is gradually cured of his insanity by Bulephorus and Hypologus. Bulephorus, who represents Erasmus’s views, reveals the ridiculous nature of Nosoponus’s efforts to imitate Cicero while urging him to seek a higher form of Ciceronianism. What emerges is a contrast between imitation and emulation, in which imitation seeks to be like the model and emulation seeks to surpass the model.54 While such a contrast is implicit even in the classical period, Erasmus appears to have been the first to make it explicit.55 G. W. Pigman has argued that aemulatio never fully emerges as a technical term because of negative associations that cling to it: aemulatio is often seen as inherently confl ictual and expressive of negative emotions or dispositions such as envy, even if some authors argued for a distinction between competition and contentiousness that could be used to redeem aemulatio.56 Erasmus can thus be seen as working in this dialogue to redeem aemulatio from these negative associations. He defends the effort to surpass Cicero’s style on three complementary grounds. First, in order to become a genuine Ciceronian it is necessary to work as Cicero did, not copy the results of his labor. After all, Cicero did not simply imitate any particular exemplar of style (LB I 1002A–D, CWE 28:401–2). Second, one of the features of excellent style, and thus something to which any true Ciceronian should aspire, is decorum, sensitivity to context. In this sense, the true Ciceronian must actually abandon the example of Cicero, since “wherever I turn I see everything changed, I stand on a different stage, I see a different theatre, a different world” (LB I 992C, CWE 28:383). While Bulephorus remarks on changes of “religion, empire, government, constitution, law, customs, pursuits, even men’s physical appearance,” the most significant changes are due to the arrival of Christianity. So he

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

117

insists that someone is a Ciceronian “only if he speaks as Cicero would be likely to speak if he were living today as a Christian among Christians, endowed with his original native ability and his oratorical experience, possessed of the same understanding of our concerns that he once had of pagan ones, inspired, finally, with love and loyalty for the Christian world as he was once fired with pride and passion for the city of Rome and the honour of the Roman name” (LB I 997B, CWE 28:392). Third, Bulephorus demands that the true Ciceronian must display something we might be tempted to call authenticity, but that is better termed “expression of natural form.” Each person has his own natural gifts and abilities, and a successful stylist must work with these, not fight against them: “If you want to express the whole Cicero you cannot express yourself, and if you do not express yourself your speech will be a lying mirror.” So “it may well be that the most Ciceronian person is the one least like Cicero, the person, that is, who expresses himself in the best and most appropriate way, even though he does so in a manner very different from Cicero’s—which would be hardly surprising, considering that everything has been completely altered” (LB I 1001A, CWE 28:399). Erasmus is not simply ridiculing the Ciceronian ideal, even if he is transforming it. His admiration for Cicero is genuine.57 While descriptions of aemulatio by some authors betray a definite resentment of dependence on authoritative models, this is not the case in Erasmus.58 Bulephorus joins genuine respect and gratitude for the model offered by Cicero together with a call to express that very acknowledgment of dependence through the attempt to surpass Cicero.59 Still, if the appropriate response to Cicero’s excellent style is emulation rather than imitation, what implications does this hold for Erasmus’s embrace of the ideal of imitatio Christi? One obvious difference between Ciceronian and Christian confronts us at once: Christians are called to imitate not Christ’s style and rhetoric but Christ’s character and action. At the same time, we should not exaggerate this difference, since for Erasmus rhetoric forms character, and character is powerfully conveyed by rhetoric. Moreover, each of the three arguments Erasmus offers on behalf of emulating Cicero is in some way also appropriate to the task of imitating Christ. First, Christians, no less than Ciceronians, will fail if they copy an external result rather than the mode in which their respective models set to work. We have already examined in some detail Erasmus’s critique of false externals. And at one point in Ciceronianus Bulephorus draws a parallel between bad

ch a p t er fou r

118

Ciceronians and bad Christians. Those who simply ape Cicero’s writings “darken Cicero’s name by putting themselves forward under the title of Ciceronian when that is the last thing they are,” and “maybe Christ” is defamed, too, “by those who have nothing of him but his name” (LB I 994D, CWE 28:387). So the imitation of Christ involves more, as we have seen, than claiming the name Christian or performing a wooden action.60 Second, Christians too must observe decorum, acting suitably to their own social-historical context, if their imitation of Christ is to be meaningful; they should not pretend to be a wandering rabbi in Galilee or seek to be crucified by the Romans. Determining positively what will constitute appropriate imitation of Christ within one’s own context is, of course, an immensely challenging task, but at any rate the principle of decorum offers a meaningful constraint on this aspiration. And third, just as aspiring Ciceronians fail if they work at cross-purposes to their own natural forms, Christians too must express themselves as the finite human persons they are, persons with particular characteristics, gifts, and weaknesses. Christ, too, as fully human, was possessed of a particular human character, the peculiarities of whom it would be futile to imitate. If imitation is futile and self-defeating, what is the point in noting that Christians are called not to aemulatio Christi but to imitatio Christi? Certainly if we might have been inclined to consider the aspiration to imitate Christ hubristic, the contrast with aemulatio makes clear that the attempt to imitate should rather be viewed as expressing humility. Christians strive to surpass their own previous attempts to imitate Christ, but they do not strive to surpass Christ. The competitive aspect of aemulatio, however positively construed, is wholly out of place in this context. In relation to Christ as model, Christians recognize no progressive aspect to historical change; to act suitably to our own historical context rather than that of first-century Galilee does not mean that we have surpassed Jesus, though it does mean that we must grapple with weapons of mass destruction and stem-cell research. To recognize Christ as God incarnate is to find in him an inexhaustible exemplarity, which Christians can image or reflect only in some limited and finite respect. Insofar as each human person is capable of imitating this inexhaustible model, we do so in a way expressive of what Erasmus would call our own particular natural form. There is, then, no conflict between imitation of Christ and what we might call authenticity, originality, or self-expression. And, as noted in the previous section, we fail to grasp what is involved in the imita-

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

119

tion of Christ if we understand it only as an exercise of human agency. For Erasmus, the exercise of human agency involved in the imitation of Christ is at the same time an indwelling of Christ in us and thus a human participation in divine agency. Erasmus sustains what Karl Morrison has termed “mimetic Christology,” in which mimesis unites copy with exemplar or, better, reunites copy with exemplar, restoring us to the God from whom we came. To know God is to love God, and to love is to imitate, to move toward, to become one with God. But fallen as we are, “we cannot see, or know, or love God unless He is in us, unless He gives Himself to us.” 61 It is Christ, by uniting in himself both divine and human natures, who brings God to us, makes it possible for us to love God. To imitate Christ is thus to participate in something greater than oneself. Joan Lockwood O’Donovan helpfully characterizes this in terms of ecstasis: “the single movement of divine love in which God in Christ ecstatically united himself with sinful humanity so that sinful humanity might be ecstatically united with him in the Holy Spirit.” She rightly grasps that for Erasmus mimesis is fundamentally a matter of participation: Erasmus “conceives the redemption of society in terms of communicating participation in the perfections of Jesus Christ who is the final exemplar of the good and the beautiful.” She worries, though, that Erasmus fails to discriminate sufficiently “the goods of created human community from their disordered condition.” 62 This is a perceptive critique. As we shall see, however, Erasmus certainly shows himself willing and able to critique disordered goods and communities—always, though, refusing to appropriate to himself the right to draw any absolute line in the sand that would effectively deny that God is already at work to redeem them. For Erasmus, 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. While imitation is an act, there is also a chastening of human agency implied in the cascade. We must be inspired by our exemplars; we cannot simply decide to love them, to find them beautiful. In a sense, then, Erasmus subverts the distinction between acting and being acted upon, fiction and reality, hypocrisy and honesty. Accepting the essential theatricality of virtue involves embracing a paradoxical convergence of outer and inner, ideal and real, grace and nature, other and self. It gives up the preoccupation with control betrayed by the need to draw clear distinctions between self and not-self, acting and being acted upon, giving and receiving.

ch a p t er fou r

120

The Body of Christ James Tracy has recently suggested that Erasmus’s vision of Christian piety is stamped by his opposition to the traditional corporative structure of late medieval society.63 Far from fostering the common good and forming persons into Christs, the traditional guilds, religious orders, and schools had, Erasmus believed, degenerated into conflicting interest groups.64 Those in authority—princes, popes, and prelates—Erasmus accused of seeking only the enhancement of their own power. Against the enslavement to human rules concocted by the power hungry, Erasmus called for liberty in Christ (OE 858, line 511, CWE 6:87). Tracy terms Erasmus’s vision a form of “religious individualism.” 65 But even if Tracy is right about Erasmus’s “reaction against the densely corporatist character of civil and religious life in his native provinces,” it does not follow that Erasmus promoted individualism in any usual sense of the word. Christian liberty means for Erasmus accepting as addressed to oneself the command to “Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Those in authority do wrong in keeping those under their leadership in a state of perpetual infancy, requiring them to obey the whims of those over them without allowing them to make the least progress toward their true goal, that of putting on Christ (OE 858, lines 504–10, CWE 6:87). They promote a passive piety, one that will obey without questioning and venerate without emulating. “They love to hear themselves called fathers; and yet what father is there in real life who wishes that his children may remain infants always, that he may rule them more easily at his own sweet will?” (OE 858, lines 507–10, CWE 6:87). But Erasmus’s vision is not of a host of independent, self-sufficient sages. Those at “liberty” nevertheless make up the Body of Christ.66 The letter to Paul Volz, with its conception of the church as composed of three concentric circles surrounding Christ, presents what at first appears as a corporatist vision, in which fixed higher social orders mediate salvation to lower social orders—clerical and religious orders to princes, princes to common people. But as the letter proceeds, it subtly dismantles this authoritarian hierarchy from within. So after saying that the common people belong in the third circle because they are as yet only infant Christians, Erasmus adds, “if now someone thinks that this circle is more suitable for princes, there will be no serious difference of opinion between us. For if we observe their characters, we shall hardly find Christians more rudimentary than they” (OE 858, lines 333–35, CWE 6:82). Princes

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

121

may not in fact be closer to Christ than common folk. And Erasmus goes further—“among monks there are some who are barely included in the outermost circle,” while “among those who have married twice there are some whom Christ thinks worthy of the first circle” (OE 858, lines 354–57, CWE 6:83). So it is not the case that the badge of membership in any particular group carries with it spiritual authority. But neither is this simply a vision of private pursuits of perfection. Rather, those more fully formed in Christ—whoever they may be, clerical or lay, royalty or commonfolk—assist those farther from the goal.67 There is a vital place for human authority within the Body of Christ, but it should be held by those who are mature in their piety, those capable of inspiring by example rather than coercing by threats. At its origins, the monastic life approached this ideal; “they ruled this great concourse of men without violent language and whipping and prisons, but solely by teaching and exhorting, by mutual service and by examples of godly life” (OE 858, lines 558–60, CWE 6:88). Real spiritual authority is a teaching authority, and so temporary and limited. Only the example of Christ cannot be superseded; any human example can go only so far in conforming others to Christ. Erasmus can recognize gratefully how existing Christian authorities and practices have formed in him piety and virtue while at the same time calling these authorities and practices to something higher in the name of Christ. He refuses to separate from communion with the Church of Rome, but at the same time he is an untiring critic of corruption within its ranks, unafraid to acknowledge that “sometimes it is none too clear where the church might be found” (OE 734, line 50, CWE 5:233).

One Step Closer Erasmus offers what is at once a demanding and an indulgent vision—all are called to the perfection of Christ, “there is no reason to excuse any walk of life from pursuit of this goal,” but at the same time “piety like other things has its infancy, it has its periods of growth, it has its full and vigorous adult strength” (OE 858 , lines 352–53, CWE 6:83, 82). We start out in a realm of illusions, of false appearances, relying on externals, and we progress insofar as we come to discern that these are indeed externals that point beyond themselves, rather than mistaking them for ultimate reality. For Christians, this may involve moving beyond an understanding of eternal bliss as a reward for devotional observances. For pagans,

ch a p t er fou r

122

this may involve growing appreciation of the dependent character of all human virtues. As we see in this final section, Erasmus at his most indulgent can seem simply to buy into an ethic of honor, self-interested pursuit of heavenly bliss, or Neoplatonic absorption into the spiritual realm. In fact, though, Erasmus refuses to demonize any of these while calling each beyond itself into the humble fellowship of divine love. For all his insistence that Christians aim at their true end, conformity with Christ, Erasmus is quite tolerant of “impurity” of intention.68 So, for instance, he does not shy away from setting up a contrast between the illusory rewards available in this life and the true and lasting rewards offered by God, even if this would seem to instrumentalize the goal of conformity with Christ. Speaking of the soul’s combat against vice for the sake of virtue, Erasmus reminds his reader that “since heaven is promised to him who fights valiantly; would not the lively courage of a noble spirit glow with ardour at the prospect of such an auspicious reward? Especially since the author of this promise is one who could no more deceive than he could cease to exist” (LB V 3D; CWE 66:27). Similarly, Erasmus contrasts the false honor offered by the world with the true honor that comes from being approved by God; “the only honour to be sought after by a Christian is to be praised not by men, but by God” (LB V 62B; CWE 66:121). Virtue, conformity to Christ’s charity and humility, rather than constituting our final end, seems here to be a prerequisite for an external goal, one that can be conceived of independently of the means or path that leads to it. If so, we might also pursue the reward of heaven for ourselves in a selfish or problematically self-referential way. These are of course the same set of objections with which we wrestled in connection with Augustine’s thought. For Augustine, though, it is in fact clear that virtue is partially constitutive of our final end. Eternal life, properly understood, is life in the enjoyment of God, which is possible only for friends of God, those whose love of God and creation has been perfected—that is, for the truly virtuous. The same is true of Erasmus, although it is also typical of him that for all his insistence that Christians must aim at their true end of conformity with Christ, Erasmus is at the same time quite tolerant of “impurity” of intention. If we pause to consider Folly’s final contrast between illusion and reality, we will be in a position to grasp both the ambiguity/impurity of Erasmus’s depiction of our last end and the reasons for it. In her final persona, as devotee of Christian piety, Folly interprets Pauline foolishness of the cross through Plato’s myth of the cave: “the common herd of men

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

123

feels admiration only for the things of the body and believes that these alone exist, whereas the pious scorn whatever concerns the body and are wholly uplifted towards the contemplation of invisible things” (LB IV 501C; CWE 27:150). From the perspective of those entrenched in what is visible, bodily, and material, the pious appear foolish or even mad. And in a sense they are indeed mad, explains Folly, as she sets out to show that “the supreme reward for man is no other than a kind of madness” (LB IV 520D; CWE 27:152). Following Plato, she insists that all lovers are mad, since “anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love.” Analogously, “when the soul is planning to leave the body and ceases to make proper use of its organs, it is thought to be mad, and doubtless with good reason.” Life in heaven will be the fulfillment of this lover’s madness, for “then the spirit will itself be absorbed by the supreme Mind, which is more powerful than its infinite parts.” One thing that is evident from this discussion is that the “reward” of heaven is not the fulfillment of the self’s subjective desires but in fact is a radical unselfing; “and so when the whole man will be outside himself, and happy for no reason except that he is so outside himself, he will enjoy some ineffable share in the supreme good which draws everything into itself” (LB IV 520D; CWE 27:152). Also clear is that “heaven” is not merely an external reward; while only a foretaste of heavenly madness is possible in this life, the struggles of the pious transform them in ways that make possible absorption by the supreme Mind; in heaven “the spirit will be the stronger, and will conquer and absorb the body, and this it will do the more easily partly because it is, as it were, in its own kingdom, partly for having previously in life purged and weakened the body in preparation for this transformation” (LB IV 520D; CWE 27:152). We might still worry that this Neoplatonic vision bears few if any distinctively Christian marks. Although heaven is depicted as the perfection of love, it is described in impersonal terms: “absorbed by the supreme Mind,” “some ineffable share in the supreme good.” But here, as always, Erasmus preserves the language of Neoplatonism while interpreting it through the lens of Christian charity. Immediately prior to this Neoplatonic vision, Folly, discussing the “spiritual element” of the Eucharist, offers a glimpse of a fully relational account of the new life. Christians must express the death of Christ “through the mastery and extinction of their bodily passions, laying them in the tomb, as it were, in order to rise again to a new life wherein they can be united with him and with each other” (LB IV 501C; CWE 27:151). Here asceticism serves

ch a p t er fou r

124

the prior demands of charity, and acts of charity are partly constitutive of our final end of unity. Folly’s litany of the acts of Christian “folly” can also be read in this way: Christians “squander their possessions, ignore insults, submit to being cheated, make no distinction between friends and enemies, shun pleasure, sustain themselves on fasting, vigils, tears, toil, and humiliations, scorn life, and desire only death” (LB IV 498C; CWE 27:149). We are reminded, then, that ultimately we must grasp our final end as communal enjoyment of God, the culmination of a growing friendship in charity. Three distinguishable accounts of our last end appear together across Erasmus’s writings: (1) eternal happiness, given by God as a reward to those who have valiantly sought it and have rejected merely temporal happiness; (2) reabsorption of the human spirit into the supreme Mind or spirit, made possible by leaving the body and anticipated through asceticism; and (3) unity with Christ and one another, made possible when we are all conformed to Christ’s charity and humility. For the first, but not the second and third, heaven is an external good that is granted in response to the presence of certain prerequisites. Moreover, for the first, heaven is sought as a good for the self. Virtuous action is primarily understood as rejection of false goods, as contemptus mundi, rather than as the growing perception of true goods. For the second and third, heaven is anticipated by the pious in this life; it is not purely external, since it is constituted in part by a transformation of human character that begins here and now. From these perspectives, heaven is not sought as a proprietary good of the self; for the second, it is possible only through absorption of the self, while for the third, it is possible only when shared. But though for the second the end is not purely external nor sought merely for the good of the self, to conceive heaven in this way empties much of the activity of Christian charity of all but instrumental significance. Only for the third is neighbor-love itself properly constitutive of our last end. This ambiguity about the last end reflects once again Erasmus’s inclusive instincts and his pedagogical optimism: to understand our end as external reward is incomplete and immature, but it has its role to play in engaging the aspirations of human persons (kindling the lively courage of a noble spirit); “if it is not granted to all to arrive at the perfect imitation of the Head, all must none the less strive with all their strength to reach it. He who has earnestly resolved to become a Christian has already acquired a good share of Christianity” (LB V 23B; CWE 66:58).

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

125

In this sense, Erasmus’s ongoing exhortation to Christians to think of the reward that awaits them is of a piece with his exhortation to a young man inclined to sin: “if neither hope of immortality nor fear of eternal punishment can restrain him, then let the thousand disadvantages that attend the sinner even in this life act as a deterrent. . . . If Christ is of little account to you, although you cost him dearly, refrain from base conduct at least for your own sake” (LB V 51C; CWE 66:105). Neither focusing on winning a reward for oneself nor abstaining from vice for one’s own sake is conformity to Christ’s charity (even if Erasmus sees the former as closer to that end than is the latter), but insofar as each has the chance of engaging human affections, each also has the chance of beginning to transform those affections: “although it is dangerous to remain any longer in this state, as if at the crossroads, as they say, nevertheless for those who cannot yet rise to heroic virtue, it would be much more advantageous to have a firm footing in civic virtue than to plunge precipitously into all manner of immorality. This is not the final goal of happiness, but from there one is one step closer to happiness” (LB V 51C; CWE 66:105). Even the splendid vices of pride and love of honor can be transformed from within; they can engage us in practices of charity whose intrinsic goodness we come to grasp as we participate in them. That such things can constitute steps in the right direction rather than the opposite exposes one of Erasmus’s underlying assumptions—original sin has not meant loss of the image of God in humankind. Erasmus does not share the acute consciousness of sin and hatred of the world that Jean Delumeau has argued was developed in the monasteries and then spread to society as a whole at the end of the Middle Ages.69 In fact, for Erasmus everything in creation still contains an imperfect resemblance to God and thus has the capacity, when rightly understood and employed, to bring us nearer to God. Pagans, too, then, by practicing virtue, imitating the beautiful exemplars set before them, and acknowledging their dependency on these exemplars, may be embarking on a journey whose end they do not yet grasp. They, too, are in the process of being transformed by Christ’s beauty, even if they do not yet know how to name this. Erasmus had few qualms about insisting that pagans who lived before Christ are saved, though he was to be censured for this.70 “Saint Socrates, pray for us!” exclaims one of the characters in “The Godly Feast” (Convivium religiosum), adding that reading the treatises of Cicero has convinced him that this pagan, at least, must truly have been favored by divine inspiration.71 In the preface to his edition of the Tusculan Disputations, Erasmus suggests

ch a p t er fou r

126

in his own voice that there is good reason to think that Cicero, with his innocent, even saintly, life, was saved. Moreover, if pagans are saved through their virtue, this is not a dismissal of grace; those saved prior to the preaching of the gospel were nevertheless saved by Christ, communicating Himself to them in some other way.72 While Erasmus is explicit only about pre-Christian pagans, Levi, as we have seen, argues that Erasmus sought to articulate the necessity of grace for salvation while at the same time insisting that this grace is available to all.73 Even if Levi’s argument is too conjectural, it remains clear that Erasmus’s attempt to make room for pagan virtue coheres with his general trust that we can take baby steps toward conformity with Christ even when we do not yet even explicitly desire this conformity. While one might expect that an ethic of mimetic participation in Christ would require explicit recognition of Christ, in fact Erasmus is open to the possibility that persons can, in imitating the exemplars whose moral beauty they are able to recognize, already begin to be assimilated to Christ by grace.74 What is sometimes presented by Erasmus as a simple distinction between false and true goods, illusion and reality, exterior and interior, turns out to be a telescoping set of contrasts, in which what from each stage appears as an adequate grasp of truth and reality is shown at the next stage to have been inadequate. It is to be expected that in via we are simply not yet able fully to distinguish ultimate truth from penultimate illusions. What finally distinguishes our muddied virtue from a false semblance of virtue is our recognition, however inchoate, of the merely provisional character of whatever virtue we now have, of the fact that wherever we have arrived is merely one step in a continuing journey, a stage that must be surpassed. Erasmus’s aspiration for invisible reality, despite its Platonic heritage, is not finally an expression of contemptus mundi but a yearning for a community of perfect love as yet only tasted. Those deceived by the semblance of exteriority make the mistake of taking as final what is only preliminary. So they regard the performances that should serve to transform the heart’s affections as themselves sufficient for virtue and piety. And rather than grasping their agency as enabled by and participating in divine agency, they hold on to an illusion of themselves as independent and unconditioned and therefore worthy of honor. The remedy against the false semblance of virtue, which denies its own provisional status, is acceptance that all human virtue remains a semblance of perfect virtue insofar as it is still preliminary, impure, clothed in illusion. Moreover, it remains fundamen-

Erasmus: Putting On Christ

127

tally always mimetic, a copy, not an original. This recognition should not, though, lead to self-castigation, despair, and immobility, but rather continually feed our aspirations. Since neither we ourselves nor the communities and practices that have formed us are perfectly conformed to Christ’s virtue, we are summoned always to critique both personal and social semblances and seek to embody something higher. We recognize that we are only in via, but we grasp at the same moment that we are on The Way. Hence the whole program of philosophia Christi, more a matter of the affections than of syllogisms, “inspiration more than erudition, transformation more than reasoning.” 75 We must fall in love with the truth that is Christ, even if we are not yet able fully to understand our beloved, and even if in order to do so we must be progressively and dramatically transformed by our love. We emulate that which we love and in so doing are transformed, restoring the likeness to God in which we were first created.

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

5

Acting Virtuous As we have seen, Erasmus offers what could be considered a performative conception of virtue: we develop the virtues only by enacting them, and so transform being through doing. Part 4 will take up a full-blown theatrical conception of virtue, in which the social context, the fact that we are acting in the presence of others and in response to others, becomes central to the analysis. In the present chapter, though, I turn to an actual theatrical tradition that can be seen as embodying an Erasmian trust in habituation-through-acting. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to close readings of three dramas, two by Jakob Bidermann (1578–1639), arguably the greatest Jesuit playwright, and one by Lope de Vega (1562–1635), one of the greatest vernacular dramatists to have been trained in Jesuit school theater. These specific plays have been chosen because, within a theatrical age always preoccupied with the play of apparent and real, they take up with particular attention, in content as well as in form, the issue of how action can both transform and conceal character. Bidermann’s Cenodoxus shows us the Jesuit tradition’s ongoing concern with hypocrisy but also displays the conviction that theater, that supremely “hypocritical” art, can serve positively to inoculate against the vice of deceptive and selfdeceptive virtue. However dangerous the threat of apparent virtue is, it does not undermine the fundamental possibility of mimetic transformations of character. Bidermann’s Philemon Martyr and Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero, meanwhile, both take up the story of a pagan actor who is converted to Christianity in the course of acting the part of a Christian. These two plays reflect, though in strikingly different ways, on the moral and spiritual power of acting, on the possibility of becoming the part one acts, and on the interplay of divine and human agency

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

129

in this process. It may seem odd to include within a study of habituation into virtue a consideration of plays focused on conversion and salvation, not only because we often think of habituation as an extended process and conversion as an isolated event but also because we tend to think of conversion as having primarily to do with belief rather than character. But if (as from an Augustinian standpoint) entering into the fellowship of charity with God and one another is possible only insofar as we become like God in our charity, then virtue and salvation, habituation and conversion, have everything to do with one another—which is not to say that salvation is a reward for virtue. These dramas were not, of course, written as contributions to theology or moral philosophy.1 They were written in order to delight and entertain, to mold the young (especially in Bidermann), and as an avenue for artistic experimentation and exploration (and self-exploration, in the case of Lope de Vega). They are an embodiment of the conviction that moral education can work through this ambiguous artistic medium. As we have already seen, a Christian ethic of exemplarity, centered on the imitation of Christ, is sometimes tempted to rely too heavily on a “rhetoric of thin description.” “For that,” comments Jeffrey Stout, alluding to John Lyons’s concept of the “excess” of example, “is the standard way for an author to keep the problem of excess under sufficient control to establish the desired relationship of exemplification.” 2 Examples, argues Lyons, always contain some degree of excess, which is revealed by the fact that they “must be corrected in order to fit ideological models.” 3 He discusses the problem of excess in the course of tracing a transition from medieval genres like the morality play, which employed example in an ideologically controlled fashion, to new genres like Montaigne’s Essays, which exploited the subversive potential of thickly described examples, paving the way for the morally ambiguous modern novel, drama, and essay. There is a danger that advocates of imitatio Christi will become preoccupied with controlling excess and will rely too heavily on a rhetoric of thin description that sacrifices the complexity for the sake of establishing and maintaining exemplification. But though Jesus Christ does offer for Christians an indefeasible example, I have in the previous chapter already pointed out how for Erasmus (who was well aware, as Lyons concedes, of the rhetorical construction of exempla) the example of Christ serves not to constrict ongoing moral development or shut down critical reflection but to foster these. Nor need the example of Christ exclude other, defeasible, exemplars. The example of Christ in

ch a p t er f i v e

130

the Gospels, however unsurpassable, is always in need of interpretation, and this takes place in part through interaction with other putative exemplars, both historical and literary. In this chapter, I explore how drama was embraced by the Jesuits as complementing rather than threatening Christ-centered virtue, even as they wrestled with the problem of excess. As Lyons notes, examples are unlike authoritarian assertion in that they appeal “to something that diverts the audience from a direct affirmation and says ‘see for yourself.’ ” 4 Thus, examples engage the individual and elicit her response and activity, and do so all the more as excess is less controlled. A concern for engaging persons’ active powers was central for the Jesuits. It made sense, given their understanding of the moral life, that the Jesuits did embrace theater, a form of extended and embodied example. Their focus on primary moral formation, rather than on cultivating a critical understanding of moral complexity, limited, though, their tolerance for excess. Within this chapter, I move freely between reflections on the role of theater within moral education and analysis of the life of virtue as itself theatrical or performative in character. The two are logically distinct, but are usually intertwined. That is, it makes the most sense to be interested in the institution of theater as capable of shaping character if virtue is itself understood in theatrical terms. In the excursus that follows this chapter, I take a step back from the historical narrative to focus on contemporary expressions of the latter claim, that virtue or the Christian life is best understood in dramatic categories. This affords me the opportunity to indicate briefly how an Erasmian-humanist understanding of mimetic virtue relates to contemporary performative theologies, even if a full constructive development does not fit within the scope of the present project. It was long thought that the Jesuits were hostile to Erasmus and that Ignatius had issued a blanket prohibition on reading Erasmus’s works. However, it is now recognized that Jesuit piety is substantially Erasmian in its humanism and that works by Erasmus were regularly used as textbooks in Jesuit schools.5 The grain of truth in the old myths arises from the fact that the Society of Jesus was founded at the high point of criticism against Erasmus for “laying the egg that Luther had hatched.” The Jesuits held Erasmus at arm’s length largely to avoid contaminating themselves by association. Erasmus’s shining reputation as the Prince of Humanists was tarnished by the upheavals of the Reformation. He was attacked and distrusted by both sides: Catholics accused Erasmus of

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

131

sympathy with Luther, while Protestant reformers attacked Erasmus for his continued loyalty to the church. Erasmus’s efforts to remain neutral, his irenic spirit, seemed only to make matters worse. Despite his faithfulness to the church and his effort to distance himself from Luther through his 1524 publication of De Libero Arbitrio, many of Erasmus’s writings (including Praise of Folly and the Colloquies) were condemned and placed on the first Roman Index of prohibited books.6 It now appears that the restrictions Ignatius of Loyola issued on the use of Erasmus’s works as textbooks had to do with the controversial reputation of their author rather than with the ideas contained therein. A letter Loyola wrote in 1555 said as much: “Since the author is not in favor, it is not appropriate for students to get to like his books.” 7 Ignatius would not, it is true, have appreciated the satirical tone of Praise of Folly and some of the Colloquies; the Jesuit “Rules for Thinking with the Church” reflect a hostility toward even well-meant criticism of the church. Erasmus himself confessed that he almost regretted having published Praise of Folly.8 But when we consider instead works such as the Enchiridion, the harmony of outlook is apparent. The Jesuits shared with Erasmus a conviction of the importance of rhetoric, of displaying the beauty of truth so that it could engage and transform human dispositions.9 While refraining from criticism of the scholastics, Ignatius, like Erasmus, praised the church fathers because of their ability to “rouse the affections so that we are moved to love and serve God our Lord in all things.” 10 The Jesuits also shared with Erasmus the conviction that traditional devotional practices could serve to educate and sustain piety, even as they subordinated such practices to the end of inward godliness. In their eyes, too, “outer” practice could be a route to “inner” transformation, though it could also potentially become an ossified substitute for true devotion. And like Erasmus, the Jesuits were relatively sanguine about the possibility of human effort directed at the achievement of virtue (so the lurking danger was that of falling into the heresy of semi-Pelagianism, of rendering salvation contingent on individual human effort rather than on grace). The Jesuits saw nothing inherently hypocritical about human moral achievement, nor did they think passivity the only way to avoid such hypocrisy and dispose themselves to the activity of divine grace. The Jesuits felt called to labor strenuously for their own moral and spiritual perfection and that of others. The Jesuit educational mission was taken up soon after the founding of the order, and Jesuit schools soon assumed a formidable cultural

ch a p t er f i v e

132

influence wherever—around the world—the Jesuits were present. And Jesuit schools did not educate Catholics alone: Lutherans and Calvinists often attended these schools as well. Jesuit schools were from very early on operated under a centralized curriculum and plan of study, the Ratio Studiorum. A great deal is known, therefore, about Jesuit schools and their curriculum, which was strongly humanist in orientation.11 The aim of Jesuit teachers, one former student recalled, had been “to arouse in us the love of good, and to guide us by their own will and through our own efforts.” 12 Jesuit education aimed not simply at presenting the student with moral imperatives but at fostering in students an active emulation of moral ideals. Jesuit education incorporated much reading of Latin and Greek authors, not solely as models of rhetoric but also as models of virtue; the Jesuits found much that they could appropriate, if also elements that had to be repudiated, within pagan moral thought.

The Golden Age of Theater One of the tools used for purposes of moral education and rhetorical training alike was school theater.13 Humanists had promoted the use of oratory, dialogues, and declamation in order to teach language skills, poise, and rhetoric, and in the sixteenth century they had revived Latin theater based on comedies of Terence and Plautus and tragedies of Seneca. Neoclassical theater displaced outdoor spectacles such as vernacular medieval mystery and morality plays.14 Prior to use by the Jesuits, Latin plays had been used in Lutheran schools in Germany as well as public schools in England.15 However, Lutheran embrace of a humanist educational model came at the expense of faithfulness to Luther’s insistence on the impossibility of decisively transforming character through action.16 Puritan condemnations of theater, in contrast, which culminated in the 1642 dissolution of the English stage, sustained Luther’s preoccupation with seeming to be as one is, with the honest confession of one’s own true self.17 For the Jesuits, though, the embrace of theater as part of a humanist education stood in fundamental harmony with their theological commitments. Even the Spiritual Exercises themselves, with their deliberate effort to create in participants a vivid inner drama for purposes of discernment and self-transformation, confirm this.18 Although playacting and earnest cultivation of virtue are normally distinct, in that our emulation

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

133

of exemplars does not normally take the form of impersonating these characters on stage, the Jesuits sought to unite the two as far as possible. So one form that aspiration to virtue can take is the enactment of an exemplary character on stage. Another, more complex, form is to enact a vicious character and vicariously experience his or her inner conflicts and ultimate downfall. The Jesuits were sensitive, moreover, to the gap between actor and audience. Here, too, they sought to elide the distinction insofar as possible, planting actors in the audience to make the audience feel more part of the action, incorporating within plays actor-spectators to model ideal audience reactions and in general seeking to move spectators from passive to active responses. The students themselves were both actors and spectators of the plays they put on, and so both performative effects, having to do with the experience of acting, as well as theatrical effects, having to do with the experience of watching and being watched, were operative for them. The significance of Jesuit theater is only now beginning to be appreciated. It has been most fully studied in Germany, where it achieved the influence held elsewhere only by national vernacular theater. Even where Jesuit theater has been less studied, its influence is nevertheless indubitable: Jesuit schools trained nearly all of the greats of seventeenthcentury drama, notably Lope de Vega, Molina, Calderón, Corneille, Molière, and Voltaire. By 1650 there were around 500 such theaters, each of which produced plays a minimum of three or four times per year. The plays were usually written by the professor of poetry or rhetoric, and it is estimated that around 100,000 such plays were written between 1550 and 1700.19 As these were written for specific occasions, not to be read but to be performed, very few were printed, and so a bare fraction survive. These incorporate profane as well as sacred subjects and build on models from Greek and Roman drama. The importance of theater to Jesuits’ understanding of their own mission is signaled by the fact that Jesuits studied and wrote theory of drama as well as plays. Jesuit theory of drama was ostensibly Aristotelian and Horatian but tended in fact to be rather eclectic, departing from the unities and from the five-act rule and taking up the issue of the admissibility of fiction within theater and the relation of art to morality more generally. While one might expect Jesuit plays to have been used as venues for anti-Protestant polemics, this was rarely the case, perhaps because Protestants were often among the actors as well as the audiences. Audiences consisted in a broad cross-section of

ch a p t er f i v e

134

society, including not just the friends and relatives of students but also clerics, nobles, and townsfolk of all classes. Vernacular summaries were distributed for the sake of those who did not understand Latin. It was not just Jesuit theater that flourished in the seventeenth century. The dramatic arts prospered in Europe then as never before or since, and culture itself was pervaded by theatrical concepts.20 The metaphor of world-as-theater was ubiquitous and often—in a self-reflexive move—represented on stage, from Shakespeare to Calderón’s Gran teatro del mundo. As the metaphor has it, the world is a stage, and we are the actors. The drama we enact is earthly life, at the conclusion of which we meet God, author and director, spectator and critic, who ushers us from illusion into eternal reality. Why, asks Richard Alewyn, would an age entrust to theater the key to its identity—theater, a suspect, worldly, and frivolous medium if there ever was one? 21 Because, he answers, theater is what many seventeenth-century thinkers saw the world as— meaningful but not ultimately real. Theater, though, is safer than the world because we remain conscious during a performance that it is only appearance. Stage dramas thus assist us to become conscious that even the “real” world is only appearance.22 And this in turn will allow us to be better actors, because we are aware of the fact that we are actors. The special characteristics of “Baroque” art, architecture, and theater all come into focus through this lens. Masks and costumes are always part of the form of theater, but in this period they become also part of the substance of theater. Deception, confusion of identities, and clothing and identity switches make up much of the action within seventeenth-century drama.23 The reflexive structure of play-within-play also becomes a common feature, as perhaps most famously for English-speaking audiences in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Elaborate trompe l’oeil effects were designed not to fool spectators into mistaking appearance for reality but to call into question the reality of the real. Picture frames, for instance, were so constructed that they served also as elements of the interior decoration of the room, and it was not possible to tell quite where the room left off and the picture began—as when three-dimensional limbs project out of the edges of a painting into a room. The same was true both of stage sets and of the lavishly painted ceilings of Baroque churches, which were designed in such a way that the moment of transition from three dimensions to two dimensions was difficult to pinpoint. Also striking in this regard is another element of church architecture of this period—massive facades that made one think the church building taller than it actually was. And

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

135

in fact, given the bright interior and ceiling paintings, the worshipper did have the illusion of being in a larger space, even opened toward heaven. “The Baroque path into the transcendent realm,” suggests Alewyn, “is a glide and not a leap.” 24 Just as Erasmus reassured the student of virtue that she was indeed already on the way, while reminding even “virtuosos” that they were still only on the way, so the play of perspective and illusion in Baroque art was designed such that “one should believe one is still in the world when one is already in the transcendent realm, and one should never fully cease wondering whether one is truly already over there and not perhaps after all still over here.” 25 Even if theater in the seventeenth century was valued because it could reveal the transience and illusion of this world, it should not be thought that the Jesuits’ driving concern was to cultivate an attitude of contemptus mundi. It was not necessary to hate the world, just to recognize it as the imperfect, preliminary, incomplete, transient thing it is. This recognition freed persons from idolizing and absolutizing this world, equipping them thereby to act more effectively within the world. So the Jesuits understood themselves not only to be weaning spectators from overcommitment to the reality of this world but also to be training public leaders for this world. They believed that acting could develop some of the skills necessary for such leadership, notably confidence, ease, and grace. The student actor was taught “all that is implied in the ability to appear advantageously before an audience. This sort of training for the boy squared perfectly with the general intent of the Jesuit educator to influence the outside world by sending forth into it Christian leaders of men.” 26 As this comment implies, training for leadership was seen by the Jesuits as having largely to do with how the self appears before or is presented to others. To be a leader is to assume a public role; whereas an ordinary peasant is nearly invisible to society, to be a leader is to be looked up to and therefore to be looked at, to be scrutinized, by those one leads. A good leader must inspire trust and confidence, and this requires looking and acting the part. Bouwsma suggests that the “Renaissance preoccupation with education can be understood as a concern with shaping and fixing the self in a socially acceptable, agreeable, and profitable mode,” and the Jesuit theatrical tradition represents this same preoccupation.27 Along with awareness that the self can inhabit a variety of roles, and in fact that everyone does inhabit a variety of social roles, comes the possibility of making the process of shaping and forming a self-conscious one. In seeking to form public leaders, the Jesuits sought to shape social

ch a p t er f i v e

136

actors who were both good and effective. That is, rather than seeing the appearance of virtue as fundamentally deceptive, Jesuits pointed to the insufficiency of hidden goodness; virtue must be displayed in order to be publicly effective.28 But the possibility that appearances could be used to conceal or undermine reality rather than display it was just what worried critics of theater. Along with awareness of the presence of role-playing in everyday life came a sense of uneasiness about this. The loudest critics of theater, the Puritans and Jansenists, worried about a gap between the social self and the underlying true self.29 Actors impersonate others and therefore enact a lie. They are dangerous because they tempt the rest of us to cultivate hypocritical public personae and thereby deceive others about who we really are. Against this, the Puritan ideal was uncompromising honesty—we are to reveal our true selves and abandon all concern for appearances. William Prynne’s Histriomastix (1632) shows how the critique of theater was linked with a theologically rooted demand for honesty: “For God, who is truth it selfe, in whom there is no variablenesse, no shadow of change, no feining, no hypocrisie; as he hath given a uniforme distinct and proper being to every creature, the bounds of which may not be exceeded: so he requires that the actions of every creature should be honest and sincere, devoyde of all hypocrisie . . . Hence he enjoy[n]es all men at all times, to be such in shew, as they are in truth: to seeme that outwardly which they are inwardly; to act themselves, not others.” 30 Having been given this “uniforme distinct and proper being,” it is our responsibility to affirm that being with all sincerity, to show ourselves to be as we truly are. There was an intriguing asymmetry in antitheatrical critiques: acting the part of one more virtuous does not improve one’s character, since it is hypocrisy and deception. On the other hand, acting the part of one more vicious endangers both one’s own virtue and that of others. Here the worry is that theater makes wickedness attractive and thus engages the affections in the service of vice and evil. As one critic, Stephen Gosson, wrote, the human mind “is simple without mixture or composition, therefore those instructions that are given to the mind must bee simple without mingle mangle of fish & flesh, good & bad,” since “where both are profred, the hereditarie corruption of our nature taketh the worst and leaveth the best.” 31 Persons come closest to God when they, like God, are unchanging; to change is to fall—despite the fact that, as already fallen, it might seem that change is what we actually most need.32

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

137

The Jesuits were certainly far from issuing a blanket approval of theater; Jesuits did at times offer critiques of the immorality of the public stage. Whereas school theater united medium, content, and reception, the public stage separated these and allowed the institution to become, problematically, an end in itself.33 But against indiscriminate condemnations of theater as hypocritical, as undermining God-given identity, and as a source of pleasure, the Jesuits championed the theater, not just as training in rhetoric and the cultivation of appearances but as a powerful force for moral education. Theatrical impersonation, in their eyes, was not hypocrisy, and we come closest to God not by remaining as we are but by changing for the better. Jesuit drama was openly didactic in intent, showing the rewards of virtue and piety and the downfall of vice and unrepentant sin. This does not mean, though, that it was not also intended to entertain—in its use of music, dancing, and elaborate special effects, Jesuit school theater often rivaled court theater. In some cities in the seventeenth century, such as Vienna and Munich, it served essentially as a court theater. But entertainment was valued as a means of engaging the affections, where this in turn was understood as the path to moral transformation.34 And it seems clear at least that the plays did serve to engage the affections of their audiences: there are frequent reports of spectators being moved to tears, and some productions kept audiences spellbound for two days solid. Some bemoaned the fact that pageantry and special effects were needed to command the attention of the crowds. Most Jesuits, though, simply regarded the spectacle as serving their didactic purpose. As late as 1786, when the Jesuits had been recently suppressed, Goethe observed a Jesuit play and seemed to grasp the way in which Jesuit concern for appearances avoided falling into hypocrisy: “This public exhibition served to convince me still more strongly of the worldly prudence of the Jesuits. They neglect nothing that is likely to produce an effect, and contrive to practise it with interest and care. In this is not merely prudence, such as we understand the term abstractedly; it is associated with a real pleasure in the matter in hand, a sympathy and fellow-feeling, a taste, such as arises from the experience of life. . . . Just as they decorate their churches with appropriate ornaments, these clear-sighted men take advantage of the world’s sensual eye by an imposing theatre.” 35 Jesuit “prudence” is here seen not as concealing inner vice but rather as uniting deep feeling with “ornaments” for the eye, and more specifically as using the latter as the key to transforming the former.

ch a p t er f i v e

138

Jacob Bidermann’s Cenodoxus If the Jesuits believed that moral and religious transformation could come about through acting as well as through watching others act, that is, through mere external appearances, this is not to say that they did not also, like the rest of their contemporaries, worry about merely apparent virtue. In Cenodoxus (1602), perhaps the most famous of Jesuit plays, Bidermann wrestles with the problems posed by someone who is taken by all to be, and who takes himself to be, a model of virtue and piety but who in fact is riddled with pride and hypocrisy.36 Cenodoxus shows us how the Jesuits, like Erasmus, sought to distance themselves from some of the prideful excesses of Renaissance humanism and in particular from neo-Stoicism. The main body of the drama, dealing with the doctor Cenodoxus, his hidden vices, and the struggle between his guardian angel, Cenodoxophylax, and the forces of evil, led by Self-Love (Philautia) and Hypocrisy, emphasizes the dangers of trusting outer appearances and warns against the pitfalls that lie in the pathway of those who aspire to achieve virtue. The final scene, which serves as a framing device for the play and draws on the founding legend of the Carthusian order, insists nevertheless on the edifying power of even—or especially—this negative example: the noble Bruno, terrified to see Cenodoxus condemned to hell, resolves to leave the world and goes off into the wilderness to found the Carthusian order. And the transformative power of theatrical representation, of a model that is, after all, only an act or appearance, was underscored after the 1609 performance of Cenodoxus at Munich, when fourteen members of the audience immediately went into retreat to perform the Spiritual Exercises, and the actor who played Cenodoxus soon thereafter entered the Society of Jesus and led an exemplary life.37 That this account of the 1609 performance comes from the 1666 edition of Bidermann’s play and may itself be mythical does nothing to detract from its significance in revealing Jesuit trust in the transformative power of theater.38 Cenodoxus is clearly based on the Everyman motif, which remained popular well into the sixteenth century—a sinner repents in the nick of time and is saved, by good works in Catholic versions, by faith in Protestant versions.39 Cenodoxus repents too late, only after he has died and stands before the judgment seat, where Christ sternly tells him that the time of mercy has passed. According to the Carthusian legend, when the unnamed Doctor of Paris, renowned for his learning and virtue, died,

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

139

“he sat up on his bier, proclaiming that he was accused; the following day that judgement had been passed on him; and finally that he had been consigned to the everlasting flames.” 40 The sin for which Cenodoxus is condemned is pride or self-love: hence his name, Cenodoxus, based on cenodoxia, the vainglory mentioned by Paul in Galatians 5:26 and Philippians 2:3.41 Bidermann tells the reader in his preface that the Bruno legend names no particular sin, so “we have chosen that sin which of all the sins could be most properly and fittingly portrayed.” To select pride was to stand in continuity with the entire medieval tradition reaching back to Augustine; superbia was the chief of the seven deadly sins and often regarded as the source of all others. And yet there is much in Bidermann’s depiction of Cenodoxus that reflects the particular concerns of his period, notably the preoccupation with false appearances, deception, and hypocrisy.42 The play opens with a bit of comic relief; we meet Mariscus, a sycophant who praises Cenodoxus to the skies because he knows this will earn him free meals at Cenodoxus’s table: “Whether he’s worthy of it I hardly know,” he ponders for a moment, but then, thinking of his stomach, “I do know he’s worth it!” 43 Cenodoxus’s servant Dama, tired of this sycophant, plays a practical joke on Mariscus, sending him on a wild goose chase all over town. The play is sprinkled throughout with comic scenes, all of which play on similar themes of hypocrisy and deception. Although it is only Cenodoxus who is condemned to hell at the end of the play, Bidermann subtly reminds his audience of the ways in which false appearances permeate the social relationships of nearly all the characters in the play. As is typical of Jesuit plays, allegorical figures are prominently present, making visible the need for discernment of spirits taught by Ignatius of Loyola.44 Among Jesuit dramatists, Bidermann is particularly skilled at drawing these figures into the action of the play. In Cenodoxus, Hypocrisy and Self-Love are devils who tempt and flatter Cenodoxus, while Conscience assists Cenodoxus’s guardian angel, Cenodoxophylax, in attempting to thwart Hypocrisy and Self-Love and rescue Cenodoxus’s soul. Although the sin for which Cenodoxus is condemned is pride, Hypocrisy is the first allegorical figure we encounter. Preparing to leave the underworld on a mission to ensnare Cenodoxus, wily Hypocrisy banishes the more open evils, “Tyranny, the Furies, Cruelty,” and asks only for Self-Love as his companion. Times have changed, he says, and open warfare is no longer as effective. He is now the leader of men’s crimes, he

ch a p t er f i v e

140

claims, “I am their mentor: / Born of baneful night, Hypocrisy,/ I lead, sole general” (169–70). The hosts of hell agree to give Hypocrisy pride of place; so sophisticated are his methods that he can succeed in having those who lead a virtuous life justly condemned to hell: “The nature of my powers is briefly put:/ Virtue itself increases them, it fattens me/ on its own food, suckles me at its breast./ I urge to righteous actions, teach, encourage,/ persuade, propel, spur on, draw, force/ to heights of probity; and make men fall/ to baser depths, the higher I make them climb./ Teaching them virtue, I teach them how to sin” (175–83). “Virtue” has become an ambiguous term; here it is used simply to indicate actions characteristic of the virtuous, which continue to bear the title “virtue” even if they are animated by pride and so sinful. “Virtue” here, we might say, is Augustinian pagan virtue, suspect precisely because of its ambitions to excellence. It is the hypocrisy of pride, its deceptive nature, that particularly fascinates Bidermann and that renders his treatment of pride so appropriate to the concerns of his day. He takes for granted the fact that the sinfulness of pride lies in the way it wrongly places self rather than God at center stage; he dwells on pride not so much because of the fundamental misvaluation this involves but because of the way that pride corrupts at its root what would otherwise be virtue, the way that it makes virtuous action mere appearance and even has the power to deceive the prideful themselves. This is indeed the case with Cenodoxus. He is regarded by those around him as highly learned, deeply pious, and a man of exemplary virtue. His central preoccupation is to cultivate this impression in others and thus to win honor. As Hypocrisy notes, “puffed up with pride and love of self, his aim/ is to seem good” (195–96). That this is only a seeming is shown by the fact that “his virtue/ needs an audience; unregarded, it disintegrates” (198–99). Cenodoxus’s virtue is only a performance, an act: virtuous actions that do not issue from virtuous character but conceal a fundamentally vicious one. It is Cenodoxus who is acting, but Hypocrisy intends to “give the finish to this play/ of his” (209–10). Thus, while Cenodoxus believes himself to be in control, he is really handing his soul over to the powers of hell. It is not just that Cenodoxus thinks he is in control of his performance of virtue. Rather, he believes that he has achieved governance of his character, that he has achieved true virtue. He believes that his central aim is not to seem but actually to be virtuous. Despite some telltale signs that he willfully ignores, he is unconscious in his hypocrisy; while he believes himself truly virtuous and pious, he also

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

141

believes himself modest: “How great a thing it is, when fortune smiles,/ and all acclaim me, not to be puffed up/ with pride” (262). Later, at the throne of judgment, Cenodoxus will claim that he did not know the gravity of his sins, but Conscience will demur, insisting that he stung Cenodoxus relentlessly, filling him with anxiety, but that Cenodoxus’s love of praise was so strong that “he became inured to all my pangs” (1937). Cenodoxus’s passion for praise, his desire to appear virtuous, has thus allowed him to become habituated to hypocrisy. Although Hypocrisy claims that no one suspects Cenodoxus of hypocrisy, this is not quite true. His performance is convincingly sustained only for those whose praise Cenodoxus values. Thus, while his noble companions trust him utterly, his servants and other persons from the lower classes see through his act. So Dama, whom Cenodoxus threatens to whip for failing to give a glowing enough report of the praises he has ostensibly overheard being given of Cenodoxus, decides to lie and fabricate some; “true praise there’s none,/ it has to be made up; it’s all delusion” (616–17). Noble Guarinus, in contrast, although he enters bemoaning the hypocrisy of the times, saying, “Where now is found/ integrity and trust? Who now inclines/ to modesty? We hate pride, but in others;/ our own, we cherish!” (479–82), goes on to praise Cenodoxus as a living refutation of his complaints. Moreover, he allows himself to be convinced that nobility is inherently able to differentiate between true and false virtue: “a noble audience can still descry/ heroic virtue” (483). His friend Philaretus insists further that a virtuous exemplar has the power to create virtue in others: “Where Cenodoxus is, though he’s but one,/ Count on it, many good men will be found./ For his example draws good men—and makes them!” (499–501). Guarinus and Philaretus are sincere seekers after virtue, but despite their own confidence in their capacity for moral discernment, they are wholly taken in by Cenodoxus’s act. We are left to wonder if Cenodoxus’s false virtue might nevertheless assist them in developing true virtue, as long as they remain free of pride and desire virtue itself rather than the appearance of virtue (which garners praise and honor). In any case, it will be Cenodoxus’s downfall, his shocking condemnation to hell, that will have the greatest influence on these men. On what is destined to be Cenodoxus’s last day of life, Cenodoxophylax is still working assiduously to save him. He puts Cenodoxus to sleep and sends him a dream in which the devils come to take him to hell, thus foreshadowing his actual fate. Thus, the forces of good are (like the playwright himself) shown employing illusion as well, but in a way that

ch a p t er f i v e

142

serves to reveal rather than conceal truth. What the dream seeks to reveal to Cenodoxus is the truth about himself. “Have you no memory of your own true self?” Cenodoxophylax has asked Cenodoxus at the beginning of the act (935). When a shipwrecked sailor comes upon Cenodoxus alone and asks him for assistance, Cenodoxus refuses, since Hypocrisy points out that no one is present to witness his generosity. The sailor, loathe to take no for an answer, suggests that if Cenodoxus is merciful to him, God will be merciful to Cenodoxus and forgive his sins as well. Cenodoxus, though, is outraged rather than softened by this appeal—how dare the sailor imply that he is sinful, “whom the world proclaims stainless and sinless?” (702). Cenodoxus here so far forgets himself that he claims to be “a model for all posterity” (704). He thus usurps the place of Christ as the perfect, sinless exemplar of virtue. The dream, then, is intended to burst Cenodoxus’s illusion, to remind him of his sinful humanity: “Do you/ Behold your wiles, your tricks? You may hoodwink/ Mere mortals; but you cannot fool or trick/ Almighty God. Do you not see your pride?” (965–66). The dream does frighten Cenodoxus. He tries to defend himself in the dream from the devils’ accusations and calls on God to save him from them, but the devils taunt him, saying, “You were your own God, call upon yourself!” (1003). So also was Christ taunted on the cross, “Let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!” (Luke 23:35). The devils’ taunt thus emphasizes the fact that Cenodoxus has usurped Christ’s role. In reply, Cenodoxus insists that he has never rejected God, but the devils point out that he never spurned his own pride and arrogance. In effect, then, he has rejected God, placing his own self in God’s proper place. Finally, as the devils are dragging Cenodoxus off to hell, he does repent, but they say it is too late and that his repentance cannot be trusted, “his pride cannot keep faith” (1026). He is set free only when he appeals to Cenodoxophylax, “Save miserable me.” “Only if you do truly/ Believe you’re miserable,” responds Cenodoxophylax (1027–28). Thus the dream has forced Cenodoxus to enact the repentance he must truly embody in order to be saved. To recognize and admit himself to be a miserable sinner, incapable apart from dependency on Christ of achieving true virtue; this is the truth that he must confront and accept. Awakened, Cenodoxus is troubled and frightened by the memory of his dream, but Self-Love manages to convince him that the devils tormented him only because they were jealous of his virtue, and soon Cenodoxus has dispelled his sense of uneasiness.

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

143

As Cenodoxus is suddenly struck ill by Sickness, who will deliver him to Death in short order, it becomes apparent that Bidermann’s critique is not simply of Pride and Hypocrisy in general but of the Stoic sage in particular. With the assistance of Self-Love and Hypocrisy, Cenodoxus, thinking only of his self-image, bears his sufferings bravely, claiming that his illness is God’s judgment on his sins and that nothing truly disastrous can befall the wise man, while carefully adding that he does not claim to be wise. Noble Philaretus visits Cenodoxus, “if not to hear his teaching,/ To see his patient suffering, for he’ll show,/ At least, how anguish can be overcome./ Thus may examples teach us more than words” (1198–1200). Cenodoxus, too, despite his pious words about expiating his sins through suffering, continues to regard himself as a model of virtue; “My tongue can teach/ No longer, overcome by fleshly ills./ But in endurance and in strength my spirit/ Still can teach. To practice deeds, not words,/ Virtue has taught me” (1372–76). As we have already seen throughout the play, though, deeds can be just as deceptive as words. Just as Erasmus in Praise of Folly indicted the Neoplatonic urge to self-divinization, an urge to which he himself had fallen prey, Bidermann here critiques a neo-Stoicism that his own earlier letters give us reason to think he himself earlier embraced.45 Bidermann judged that neo-Stoicism embodied “the pride of man in seeking to work out his salvation independently of God. However praiseworthy it may have been in extolling the virtues of constancy and moderation, inward harmony and self-integration, and in seeing learning and study of the arts as a means to this end, it was ultimately ascribing to man the ability to achieve these goals and leaving God out of account.” 46 The self-mastery of the Stoic sage creates only a sham of true virtue precisely because it seeks control and independence rather than relying on God. It is, then, only an act. In the fi nal act, we fi nd Cenodoxus’s Spirit at the judgment seat, pleading for mercy. The devil Panurgus accuses him before the throne of Christ; “Day and night his single aim was glory./ For this his studies, culture, noble arts/ Were all perverted; and for this the best,/ The holiest means abused for basest ends” (1695–97). Erasmus and Luther worried over spiritual practices used to create a mere external righteousness; here the preoccupation is with humanist learning abused to win honor and renown. “All those good deeds you boast of,” Panurgus tells Cenodoxus, “You can call bad./ You are so lost to good,/ That even your good deeds are rendered sinful” (1711–12). Ironically, then, “Through doing good you’ve guaranteed your guilt” (1723). This leaves Cenodoxus without defense, for

ch a p t er f i v e

144

all his virtuous deeds have been entered on the wrong side of the ledger. At the sentencing, Christ, the judge, confronts Cenodoxus with the enormity of his sin. Ultimately, what Cenodoxus is guilty of is the rejection both of Christ’s salvific work and of his example: “I descended/” says Christ, “From heaven that you might live in heaven; I lived/ On earth to enable you to leave the earth./ Honours I scorned, that following my example/ You might scorn honours” (2020–24). Christ stresses that everything he has done, he has done out of love and in order to win Cenodoxus’s love, not for the sake of honor. For the sake of Cenodoxus Christ has suffered humiliation and been subjected to hatred. But, Christ concludes, “your arrogance/ Defeated my humility, your pride/ My candour, your hypocrisy my trust,/ Your evil deeds my good” (2046–49). Insofar as we attend to Christ as savior we learn of our own radical dependence; insofar as we attend to Christ as exemplar we learn that the hypocrisy of virtue can be avoided only insofar as our focus is love rather than honor and glory. As the play draws to a close, Bruno calls his noble companions together and announces his intention to shun the world, go into the wilderness, and become a hermit. He is haunted by fear and incapable of enjoying any worldly pleasure. Since he has no idea why Cenodoxus has been condemned to hell, he must avoid every possible source of sin; “He did well,/ By specifying none, to make us learn/ To fear each single one” (2170–71). Bruno does perceive that in order to avoid Cenodoxus’s fate he must avoid a life such as his, and he takes this to mean he must abandon all hope for glory and honor as well as a life of wealth, indulgence, and worldly living, which he calls “the age’s ills” (2216). Bruno’s six companions immediately pledge to join him, and so the curtain falls. Thus the words of Cenodoxophylax are fulfilled: “In furthering others,/ You’ll fail yourself; yes, you yourself will perish/ In teaching others life” (935–37). Cenodoxus will be an example, but only a negative one. What he enables in Bruno and his companions, it seems, is not a gradual habituation into virtue but rather a conversion, a change of direction, dramatically conveyed by the physical flight away from the world and into the wilderness. Bruno and his companions were all along portrayed as genuine students of virtue, but they, like Cenodoxus, had thought of virtue as a human achievement that garners glory and thus had fundamentally misunderstood the humble, self-giving love that constitutes true virtue. True to Jesuit teaching, Bruno need not be wholly passive to God’s working. Fleeing to the wilderness is an action he can take in response to his situ-

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

145

ation. But it is an action that removes him from the usual stage of action. The play does, then, seem to model contemptus mundi. As we shall see, though, when we focus not purely on the play but on the play in relation to its audience, the matter becomes more complex. The figure of the hermit makes a frequent appearance in Bidermann’s plays, and Dyer notes in the introduction to Cenodoxus that “flight from the world and devotion to God is the answer provided by Bidermann to the deceptiveness of appearances and the transitory and fleeting nature of worldly things” (17). Bruno understands himself to be acting in a way that will preclude the possibility of sin in the future. While he does not act to end his life, since suicide would itself be a sin, he does in a sense seek to act so as to end acting, to avoid at least human audiences who lead him to care falsely for appearances. He says very little about the life he will lead in the wilderness. What he does say is that it will be a life of severe asceticism, aimed at mortifying the flesh and releasing the soul. The account Bidermann gives of Carthusian spirituality is negative rather than positive, focused on what it seeks to defeat rather than on what it seeks to build up: “This sackcloth will enclose/ My worthless mortal frame. This shirt of hair/ Will mortify my flesh, which shall be racked/ With fasting, tamed by prayer and scoured with blows:/ I’ll ruin it, less it should ruin me./ I am resolved to seek the harshest wilderness/ And thus set free my soul” (2224–28). Bidermann does not hint at something that any cenobite or monastic knows well, that hypocrisy, pride, and self-love can follow one into the wilderness or into the monastery, that they flourish equally well in an atmosphere of sanctity as in that of the world. Bidermann’s attention is focused on the dangers that beset the student of virtue who confuses the quest for virtue with the quest for glory, and it is in the world, where persons present themselves on a public stage, that he sees men and women becoming preoccupied with how they appear to others. Certainly at some level the play is intended to transform the spectator in the way that the example of Cenodoxus transforms Bruno. The response that Bidermann hopes to elicit from the audience is modeled by Bruno within the play itself. And yet Bidermann himself, though a Jesuit and thus dedicated to the religious life, did not leave the world. And we might think that our response can rightfully be less dramatic than that of Bruno, since after all we know more about the sin of Cenodoxus than he does. Perhaps we can manage to remain within the world, remain on its stage, while avoiding Cenodoxus’s preoccupation with appearances,

ch a p t er f i v e

146

with the success of our performance. This is subtly suggested by the 1666 account of the 1609 performance at Munich. After all, the fourteen members of the audience so lauded in the account went into retreat to perform the Spiritual Exercises; they did not join the Carthusians. The Jesuit ideal was to be a warrior for Christ. One can hardly think of a more active image than that of the warrior; no retreat into the wilderness, no retreat from the stage of human action, is condoned. We may still wonder whether the fact that the ideal response is modeled for us by Bruno makes it more or less likely that we will take action. Augustine might have worried that we would applaud and admire Bruno but feel that our approval of his action is action enough for us. We would, then, remain passive while hypocritically thinking that our response to Bruno indicates our own virtue. Bidermann, though, trusts that spectators can become actors. His hope is that as actors we will avoid display.

Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero Cenodoxus sought to demonstrate—and enact—the transformative power of negative example. But there were also plays coming out of the Jesuit tradition that sought to engage spectators through positive example. Among the most intriguing were those drawing on the story of St. Genesius, patron saint of actors. According to legend, Genesius was a pagan actor asked to play the part of a Christian martyr, who in the process of acting the part was converted to Christianity and became an actual martyr. Given the prominence of conceptions of world as theater in the seventeenth century, it is hardly surprising that the legend of St. Genesius, exploring as it does the relationship between fiction and reality, would prove popular with playwrights. On the one hand, it could be used as a vehicle for reflection on stage acting as such. What constitutes a good actor? How does the actor achieve a realistic performance? Can one act without being transformed? On the other hand, it could offer a context for reflection on moral and spiritual transformation. Can one become a Christian by acting like one? Where does human action leave off and divine action commence? The most influential Genesius drama is probably Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero (1608), though Rotrou and Desfontaines, among others, also wrote plays based on the legend.47 But Bidermann’s version of the subject, Philemon Martyr (ca. 1610–1620), is considered one of Bidermann’s most important dramas and has a claim

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

147

to being ranked alongside Lo fingido verdadero. Both Lo fingido verdadero and Philemon Martyr reflect the broader Erasmian-humanist tradition of moral and spiritual transformation through acting. While Bidermann can be regarded as a substantially faithful carrier of that tradition, it is impossible to discuss Lope de Vega’s work without reference to his own idiosyncratic biography. Bidermann’s play is theologically more complex and more adequate, while Lope de Vega’s play engages us particularly through its savvy grasp of human longing for applause and approval. We will see how, in one sense, Lope de Vega represents a corruption of the mimetic tradition of moral formation insofar as Lope himself and his hero Genesius remain always preoccupied by their own artistic virtuosity, their own power, and unable to be self-forgetfully swept up by divine beauty. At the same time, we will see in Lope de Vega how great drama tends to explode moralistic constraints. If theater is to play a role in moral education, it cannot—pace the Jesuits—simply be the foundational one of offering virtuous models for imitation. Much has been written in recent decades about the novel as a school of virtue.48 But while the novel can explore the inner worlds of its characters and can capably encompass broad expanses of time, theater is more public, more communal, and so in some respects at least would seem to have a claim to be more suited to shaping the moral life. To proscribe theater, as the Puritans did, out of fear of the damage it might do to character was at the same time to forgo a powerful tool for positively shaping the self. If our true self is static, resistant to human shaping, or capable only of being corrupted through human effort, then it makes a certain sense to vilify theater and wait for a better self to be granted by divine agency. But if our true self is not given but made, if it can be shaped for the better through our enactment of a variety of roles, then it makes sense to embrace acting and theater. Acting in or watching theater on stage can give persons an opportunity to “try on” different forms of life, and for an imperfect person, role-play of this sort should carry with it as much the possibility of character improvement as of worsening one’s character. If such role-play is carried out with a self-conscious sense of its possibilities for transforming character, and with an understanding of world as theater or of the moral life as theatrical, this is particularly true.49 Virtue is performative insofar as it is acquired through acting virtuously. It is also theatrical: persons are moved by observing virtue in action and thus inspired to emulate that virtue. Moreover, identity—our sense of our own character—is formed in large part by others’ perceptions of

ch a p t er f i v e

148

ourselves as actors. An embrace of the theater and the theatrical need not mean a rejection of the identity assigned one by God or a refusal to receive from God one’s true self. It does, though, involve trust that one’s true self is arrived at through an extended process of striving to emulate the exemplars one most admires while also discerning the ways in which these exemplars fall short. It can be understood as a process in which we are lured by God to become the kind of person capable of loving fellowship with God and one another. All this having been said, it is also true that theater, like the novel, will have a tendency to exceed any particular moral that might be drawn from it. It cannot be used purely to present exemplary models for imitation, since in order to enact a story it must portray conflict and change, and thus departures from the ideal. The Jesuit embrace of theater meant a willingness to accept a certain degree of ambiguity—the Jesuits were willing to depict, and allow children to act the parts of, bad characters as well as good. On the other hand, they made certain that good and bad were clearly evident as such and that each received their just deserts. One of the notable ways in which Jesuit dramatists sought to rein in the “excess” of dramatic example in various ways was by depicting the response of spectators-on-stage like Bruno in an effort to model an ideal audience reaction. However, even such modeling cannot truly control audience responses, particularly as characters become increasingly complex and ambiguous. In this sense the critics of theater were right to be afraid that the effects of theater on audience were beyond any tight control. Jesuit dramatists were more concerned with primary formation of moral character and moral judgment than with cultivating nuance, questioning prejudice, and qualifying judgment. It is these latter virtues that both theater and the novel are probably best suited to cultivate. If a more realistic, less moralistic theater were to play a central role in moral formation, it would need to engage not simply the affections but also powers of reflection and analysis. It could lead us not simply to embrace models but to compare and critique them, to test them imaginatively. Lope de Vega’s dramas begin to move in this direction. This development of the theatrical tradition can, I think, be viewed as standing in harmony with Erasmus’s understanding of the ways in which examples are, inevitably, rhetorically constructed. The ambiguity of theatrical exempla need not be regarded as antithetical to a Christian understanding of theatrical habituation, but rather as a wise readiness to question not only the extent

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

149

to which we exemplify our own ideals but also the extent to which we have properly grasped the ideals toward which we grope. Lope de Vega was not himself a Jesuit, though, as mentioned earlier, he attended a Jesuit school and thus was formed by the Jesuit theatrical tradition. His works belong, alongside those of Calderón de la Barca, Miguél de Cervantes, and Tirso de Molina, to the Golden Age of Spanish literature, which was above all a golden age of drama.50 Born in 1562 in working-class Madrid, Lope became a scholarship student at a Jesuit high school in Madrid and did so well there that he was sent on to the University of Alcalá, where the bishop hoped he was destined for a distinguished career in the church. Lope, though, left the university to join the Portuguese navy, and from this point on his life was as dramatic as his plays, characterized by a complex series of marriages and passionate love affairs, rising fame as a dramatist, and a haunting sense of inadequacy. While Lope’s plays were immensely popular, critics of the day chastised him for departing from the precepts of classical drama. His New Art of Writing Plays (1609) sought to defend his artistic approach on the basis of the principle of verisimilitude. But Lope’s insecurity is shown in the fact that he habitually exaggerated the number of plays he had written. As he may well have written more than a thousand plays, exaggeration on this count seems particularly gratuitous. Having passionately sought public recognition throughout his life, on his last day of life (in 1635), he said he would “gladly have traded all the applause he had ever received for one more virtuous deed.” 51 This was not simply a deathbed scruple—in 1609 he joined several religious confraternities. One commentator suggests that “he was increasingly preoccupied with a yearning for respectability and perhaps also gnawed by feelings of guilt for his past immorality.” 52 After his mistress, wife, and child died in quick succession, Lope became convinced that he was being punished for failing as a youth to embrace a religious vocation, and in 1614 he entered the priesthood. In just over a year, though, Lope was involved in another delirious love affair, which lasted until his mistress’s death seventeen years later. Throughout his life, Lope battled with his love of fame and his sexual passions, unable to govern them and unable to reconcile them with his vision of Christian virtue. For Genesius, role and reality became one and the same. Lope, though, was never himself able to achieve this unity, always striving after roles that never seemed quite to fit. Lo fingido verdadero was for Lope an opportunity to engage in metathe-

ch a p t er f i v e

150

atrical reflection. Critics have suggested, in fact, that the life of St. Genesius served Lope essentially as a pretext for the exploration of “teatro dentro del teatro,” theater within theater or play within a play.53 But these reflections on theater and acting carry a more personal and spiritual meaning as well; they capture Lope’s longing for a role that will never be shattered by the hard knocks of reality or fade into illusion, and his effort to fathom how assuming such a role, an eternal role, can be possible for a finite human actor. Much of the action of the play centers around Diocletian, an ordinary Roman soldier who becomes emperor after avenging the murder of Numerianus, brave general and Caesarapparent following the deaths of emperor Aurelius Carus and his son Carinus. Emperors too are just actors; their kingly role ends at death (52).54 Early on in the first act, we learn that Aurelius’s son Carinus, who leads a life of dissipation, has made the mistake of losing sight of this and of denying that death can touch him: “I’m the Roman Caesar, sovereign lord, not some make-believe emperor. I’m not an actor like the man who lives here; I was born king and Caesar to rule and command. When Genesius comes on stage to play a king in a tragedy, he’ll rule for an hour and a half and then will no longer be king. But I, who by my good luck am really king, will be king in life and in death” (53). Both Carinus and his father, Aurelius Carus, see themselves as gods, as authors of their own play, rather than merely as actors in a drama written by God. Stabbed by a consul whose wife he raped, Carinus recognizes at last that he was indeed only an actor, and perhaps one less successful than Genesius; “I suspect that my whole life hasn’t lasted an hour and a half” (57). Laelius, whose wife he raped, accuses him of not being king at all; “No one can be king unless he rules in his people’s hearts” (56). Aper, who has his son-in-law Numerianus killed in hopes of being chosen as emperor in his stead, points out “how lovingly I’ve ruled and guided you since Aurelius died. . . . I’ve always been like a father to every soldier. Do you recall how much money I’ve handed out? What poor man have I not helped? Whom have I ever wronged? Nor have I been ungrateful” (61). He has already begun to act the part of the emperor. But these appearances do not suffice to outweigh his murderous deed, once it is known. Diocletian stabs Aper in order to fulfill what he was once told in jest by a woman selling bread, that “You will be Caesar when your famous sword kills a wild boar” (62). He decides to treat this joke as a prophecy, snatching at the prospect of eternal fame and honor. Even as he stabs Aper, he, too, invokes illusion, claiming that “the fearful image of your

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

151

son-in-law Numerianus, transformed into a dark shade, appeared to me last night and told me with hoarse voice that I should give Rome this revenge for his innocent blood” (63). Yet despite Diocletian’s use of deception, he is a decidedly better emperor than Aurelius Carus or Carinus. And he is better precisely because he never loses sight of the fact that he is, after all, only playing the part of emperor. He knows that he is not a god, not the author of the play; he recognizes that it is Fortuna, not the emperor, who is in control over his situation and his status. Precisely by recognizing the limits of his power, he retains some control over his own soul. Fortune, he tells his friend Maximian, “raises or lowers whomever she wishes. She abandons some, exalts others, and has no constancy at all. She has this immense power over temporal things, but not over our celestial souls, for that is impossible. Thus you should know that, though my status has changed, my soul has not, nor do I think it ever will” (66). Because he recognizes that his power and status are not really his own, he is generous with them, making Maximian co-emperor and giving the bread seller Camilla the right to enter and leave his presence at will. The first act, then, seeks to establish how important it is for a public figure like an emperor to recognize that he is playing a role. Implicitly, it honors Diocletian’s stance as a form of authentic, if imperfect, pagan virtue. Perhaps most fundamentally, though, it is an implicit reminder to every spectator, however lowly, that he or she, too, is an actor with an assigned role in life, one with inherent limits and yet carrying real responsibilities. The second act turns explicitly to the world of theater; one critic terms the act a cape-and-dagger comedy, “la comedia de capa y espada.” 55 The actor Genesius, summoned to perform a play for the emperor, notes that although “acting is just imitation,” an actor must truly know and feel the passions he plays; “If an actor doesn’t feel love’s passion, he can’t perform it. If he feels the pain of absence, jealousy, insult, the rigor of disdain and other tender feelings of love, he’ll play them tenderly, but if he doesn’t feel them, he won’t know how to play them” (69). He proceeds to demonstrate this by performing a play that fictionally enacts his own spurned love for the actress Marcella. The emperor is longing to see Genesius imitate what he feels. But “it hardly seems proper,” says Genesius, “to use the word imitation for what is truth itself. My will is the play, my intellect the poet of the story I’m inventing, wherein with worthy verse it paints the inevitable stages my thought has gone through” (70). As the play is performed, reality and illusion become confused; Genesius ad-

ch a p t er f i v e

152

dresses Marcella by her real name, and Marcella runs off with her lover, the lead actor. Diocletian becomes angry when Genesius calls on him to send troops to pursue them, uncertain whether this is reality or fiction: “By Jupiter, I suspect that you want me to perform, and I don’t know whether to refuse. Are you acting or not?” (83). In order to pacify him, and because it is ultimately more important to him to impress Diocletian as an actor than to recover Marcella, Genesius manages to convince him that this has all been part of the play. Diocletian, relieved, is pleased that he was so drawn into the fiction of the play that he himself became an actor. But in fact Marcella’s disappearance is no act, and Genesius is left to mourn the way in which his drama of jealousy and spurned love has become all too real. Here we see Lope de Vega challenging the boundaries between reality and fiction; one can become the other, and the transformation of this romantic play into reality foreshadows the more fundamental transformation that will take place in the final act.56 Genesius has shown Diocletian how well he can act in imitation of reality, but can he bring to life a role foreign to him? Diocletian has been told that Genesius is at his best when playing the part of a Christian martyr: “everything you’ve seen—even the way Genesius can move the very stones when he plays a lover—is nothing compared to what he does in the role of a Christian” (82). So he requests this performance from Genesius, who obliges. As Genesius makes preparations for the martyr play, we discover that he is a changed man, jaded—or perhaps made wiser—through his experience of love rejected. Love, even “true love,” he says, is a deception. Before, he was “lost on its sea of lies as in a maze.” But the jealousy of the rejected lover “soon will strip him of his last delusion,” showing him that the faithfulness that lovers claim is really an illusion (88). Just as the power of the emperor is finite and limited ultimately by death, so is human love. Recognition of the finitude and illusion of earthly existence prepares the ground for the embrace of heavenly reality.57 The crux of the drama comes when Genesius, pondering how to make his enactment of a Christian convincing, finds imagination transformed into reality; he is no longer imitating a Christian but has been granted a true heavenly baptism. His soliloquy is worth quoting at length: What shall I do to convince them that I am that very Christian when they lead me off to be tortured? How shall I move, what kind of facial expression, what gestures shall I use to win their praise? Shall I talk with Christ? Yes. And what about Mary? Yes, her too, for I

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

153

understand she was his mother, and I think I can write that scene really well! Just like them, I’ll cry out to the saints, who shed their blood here, for help! I’ll furiously knock down the idols they hate. I’ll just make believe that I’m being cruelly tortured and that I see the firmament open, for that’s what they all say, and that some previous martyr is talking to me, or that I’m talking to him. Oh, what a clever idea, what a great scene! I’ll call Caesar cruel, right to his very face. “You dog, you bloody tyrant!” Oh, this is good! I’m really getting mad! “You’re hurting only yourself by torturing me, for God is pleased with me. You ferocious beast, don’t think that your iron and fire nor even the most atrocious martyrdom will make me blindly worship your gods!” I sound terrific when I shout! Now I should look up to heaven and call upon the saints, as if I’m waiting for this fierce torture to make me one of them. “Holy martyrs, pray to Christ, in whose Passion you found the strength to bear less fearful tortures, that he may give me courage, and since you said yourself that I cannot come to you unless I be baptized, give me baptism, Lord.” (90–91)

It is clear that Genesius knows relatively little about Christianity. It is also clear that he is motivated primarily by love of glory, that is, by his desire to be regarded as a great actor. As he imagines how he will act, he is increasingly impressed with his own (imagined) performance, so much so, it seems, that he loses sight of the fact that this is fiction rather than reality (and indeed, thrice removed from reality, since it is not the actual performance but only an anticipation of the performance, and is itself only a scene being played out on stage). Having asked to be baptized, Genesius realizes he has lost control over his own imagination; “Why did I ask to be baptized? I didn’t write anything about baptism in the original version of this play. And how is it that I heard such joyous and harmonious sounds in the heavens?” (91). Struggling to make sense of the situation, Genesius is torn and confused. He attempts a moment longer to retain his sense of illusion, deciding that asking to be baptized was an unconscious stroke of dramatic genius; “What a lot of nonsense I’m saying, and all because I want to give a convincing performance as a Christian for Caesar” (91). The next moment, hearing an offstage voice telling him he will be saved, Genesius begins to accept that the illusion he thought he had created is in fact spiritual reality; “I suspect I should believe that that voice which reached my

ch a p t er f i v e

154

very soul was Christ, since it has touched and moved me so” (91). The touchstone of reality, then, is the language of the heart, the passions and emotions. This is something Genesius in some sense understood all along, having insisted early on that an actor cannot play a passion he does not know from experience. Then, though, he was still deceived by the illusoriness of human love; now he understands that it is Christ who truly moves the heart. Genesius’s confl ict continues for several more pages, but as the performance begins, he vows to follow Christ. In doing so, he gives up his control over the play; it is God’s play and no longer his own, and thus it is reality rather than fiction. An angel appears, responding to Genesius’s desire for baptism, “God has heard your thought, for God understands the language of the heart, Genesius, and He is pleased with your desire. Come up, come up to me. I want to baptize you” (95). The angel emphasizes that this is not appearance; it is not spoken but thought and therefore is hidden, known only by God. Genesius further underscores the fact that this is not his own performance; “Lord, though I don’t know how to talk, I’m sure you’ll understand me, since you understand the silent language of my thoughts. Take me where you wish” (95). The great actor confesses that he does not know how to talk; he has—at least momentarily—given up acting and, with it, his initiative, his self-assertion. Earlier he vowed to follow Christ; now he recognizes that he can follow only if he is taken. He can act in God’s play only insofar as God enables that action. Thus, a moment later, having been baptized by the angel, Genesius prays to God, “Perform with me from now on. You play the mercy of Jesus, and I will play the martyrdom of Genesius” (96). There is still a role for Genesius to play, but the lines are now given him by God; playing his earthly role as God writes it is what will allow Genesius to enter fully into heavenly reality, upon which no curtain will ever fall. The other actors and the audience become first confused and then enraged, as Genesius departs more and more from the script they know and expect. Genesius defends himself: “God put these lines in my part. I couldn’t follow Him if I skipped these lines. . . . I spoke my lines for God, not forgetting the ‘Hail, Mary,’ what was also in my part. The audience on high knew that I played the role with all my heart, and I won them over so much that now they’re taking me to heaven” (97). When Genesius continues to insist he is a Christian, then calls Diocletian a tyrant and denies Jupiter, the emperor finally decides this is no act and sentences Genesius to death. As he dies, Genesius proclaims, “the human

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

155

comedy, all meaningless nonsense, is done. I’ve played the divine comedy instead” (103). How has Genesius been converted? Why has he been saved? Although it is difficult to speak of habituation within the compressed time frame of a drama, and we are unused to thinking of conversion in terms of habituation, it is illuminating to compare what has happened here with what takes place within the aspirant to virtue. Like the student of virtue who strives first to perform the actions of a virtuous person, Genesius has attempted to act like a Christian; he thought about what facial expressions, gestures, and words to use in order to bring the part to life. In order to do this convincingly, he sought to imagine vividly that he is undergoing the tortures of a martyr and that he feels the way the Christian martyr feels. The student of courage does not rest content with simply aping the actions of a person of courage; she wants to be a person of courage and therefore tries to imagine what it is like to be such a person, how the person of courage actually feels when confronting danger, and so on. Both, then, employ imagination—Genesius, in an attempt to make appearances as convincing as possible; the student of courage, in an attempt to move beyond appearances to an “inner” reality. Genesius does not, at the outset, want to be a Christian but just to seem to be a Christian; what he really wants to be is a great actor. This is not so unlike the situation of the child whose desire is to please his parents but who, in seeking to please them, does develop habits that come to be virtues, that come to be embraced for their own sake. And there is of course the lurking danger that the student of virtue may desire to be honored as a person of virtue but never develop a true love of virtue, remaining content with appearances. Genesius is like the student of virtue gone awry, who cares only for outward appearances, and yet he is ostensibly transformed through his own acting. Because Genesius’s act seems so real, God takes pity on him and changes appearances into reality. Despite himself, he moves from imagining what the Christian would feel to actually feeling this way, to being a Christian. His attempt to perfect outward appearances catalyzes an inner transformation, a moment of genuine feeling, a transformation of the heart, to which God responds:

My God, I only meant to play the role Of Christian, but You took me at my word. I thought ’twas all a game, but now I’ve heard

ch a p t er f i v e

156

The stakes were high; I risked my very soul. How could I know that heav’n’s exalted throng, Assembled in the theater on high, Attentively beheld the play as I My moment of applause sought to prolong? But You took pity on my heartfelt zeal And saw how I outstripped the other players. I played my part so well that it seemed real. “Bravo!” You cried, “since this Genesius dares To play a saint, we’ll hark to his appeal; He’ll have the part, we’ll answer all his prayers.” (101) As Lope de Vega tells St. Genesius’s story, it is only because Genesius achieves this state of the heart that God responds, but it is, in turn, only because God does respond that Genesius moves beyond feeling to committed faith. We have here to do with a semi-Pelagian understanding of the interplay of divine grace and human action, which seeks to apportion a certain autonomy to both. Lope de Vega leaves us with a complex message concerning hypocrisy, appearances, and acting. Appearances can be deceiving; earthly reality is illusory insofar as it claims a permanence and validity that it really lacks. But appearances can also be a route to transformation and salvation; through acting we can find our way from earthly appearances to spiritual reality. Hypocrisy can, it seems, lead to true virtue and piety; the habituation gap can be overcome. Even if we desire only to put on a good show, God can touch us through our heartfelt acting. But this already implies that we have moved beyond mere outward appearances to the truth of inward feeling, even if our passions are still wrongly directed toward our own glory rather than to God. For Lope, feeling rather than intention is the touchstone of inner truth. Despite Lope’s two key insights, that actors do well only when they recognize God’s authorship of the play in which they act and that Christian actors are touched and moved by Christ, rather than autonomously creating the feelings that animate them, there is a limit to the transformation he is able to depict in Genesius. While recognizing at his moment of conversion his dependence on God as playwright and director, Genesius also, in asking God to perform with him, reduces God to the status of a fellow actor. And although we are told that God has transformed his act into reality, and thus his concern for appearances into a concern for

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

157

truth, there is reason to doubt that this conversion has in fact taken place. For Genesius remains to the end preoccupied with his own acting ability, with the way in which he has impressed God and the heavenly throng. There are limits to his capacity to give himself over to the love of God. These limits come into clearer focus when we juxtapose Lope’s Genesius with Jakob Bidermann’s Philemon.

Bidermann’s Philemon Martyr Bidermann’s Philemon Martyr unites elements of the Genesius myth with the legend of the pagan flute player Philemon, who agreed during an early fourth-century persecution of Christians to impersonate the fearful Christian Apollonius, offering in his stead a sacrifice to Jupiter.58 As he enacts the persona of Apollonius, Philemon finds himself an actual Christian, refuses to make the sacrifice, and is martyred. There are, of course, many differences between Bidermann’s Philemon and Lope’s Genesius. The most important, for our purposes, stem from the fact that Bidermann, rather than allowing the actor’s desire for applause to hold center stage, sees acting as something that can dispose the actor to fall in love with the beauty of Christ—the actor, rather than compelling God to act through his own performance, simply becomes open to God’s transformative action. Where Lope depicts heaven primarily as a reward given to the approved, Bidermann sees it as the intimate fellowship of those who love Christ. Both regard acting a part not as hypocrisy but as a potential route to moral and spiritual transformation. Bidermann’s, though, is the more adequate theological understanding—or, as Erasmus might suggest, one that has penetrated a few more veils of illusion. On the other hand, there is undeniably something engaging in the more ambiguous character of Lope de Vega’s Genesius. Our very suspicion that his conversion is in fact less complete than he thinks it to be stimulates reflective engagement on our part. No longer passive recipients of the parts modeled for us, we become critically engaged in their revision. Bidermann altered the Philemon legend—bringing it closer to the story of Genesius—by making Philemon not just a flute player but also a mime, a professional actor.59 But whereas Genesius is converted in the course of a stage play, Philemon is converted while enacting in real life a part that is not his own. The likelihood not only of play-within-play but also of the enactment of world-as-theater exists from the outset. And

ch a p t er f i v e

158

the play is indeed filled with the kind of clothing switches, confusions of identity, and playing within the play that are so characteristic of the drama of this period. But if Lope’s Genesius is preoccupied with his acting abilities, Bidermann’s Philemon is a fun-loving party boy, obsessed not so much with acting as with his insatiable sensual appetites, above all for food and strong drink. In one of the early humorous scenes of the play, Philemon fools his friends into thinking that he is in a drunken stupor, hoping by entertaining them to secure an invitation to the next drinking party. Playfully pretending that he is awaking in a confused state, Philemon asks, “Where am I, where? Where shall I search for myself? For I am lost. Jupiter, where can I find myself?” 60 This indeed is a driving question—where can Philemon find his true self, his true identity? So the importance of the fact that Philemon is an actor lies not in his exceptional acting gifts but in his lack of a fixed role. Insofar as he has a character, it is a character marked by absence rather than presence; he is his unquenchable desires and his lack of substantial identity. If Lope’s Genesius represents Lope himself, with his driving love of fame, more than anything else, Philemon—even if his addictions make him an extreme case—represents an Augustinian Everyman, whose heart is restless until it finds its rest in God.61 In his most reflective moments, Philemon recognizes that he is a slave of his addictions and that they define the very meager identity that he has.62 “Long have I searched for one, who skillfully could stop up these holes, but I searched in vain” (II, 5). In a wistful scene, he reflects that his mother taught him only two arts—to still his thirst with drink and to still his hunger with food, dying before she could teach him the third art of securing drink and food (I, 4). Necessity was his nursemaid, along with her servants, stomach and throat, who, he says, soon grew voracious and vicious (improbus). So Philemon lacks any social formation in virtue, lacks the good upbringing that might at least promise a substantial character. Agreeing to play the part of a Christian is only another action dictated by the desires that enslave him; he expects to be well paid by Apollonius. There is certainly no admirable intention in this first step that Philemon takes (unbeknownst to himself) toward conversion. If there is anything special about Philemon that makes him particularly open toward Christianity, it is just the fact that he lacks any strongly competing identity and so is “an open field of activity for God’s intervention.” 63 Philemon’s conversion takes place in three discernable phases. First, Philemon puts on the clothing of Apollonius and attempts to mimic

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

159

his bearing and character. In an earlier scene of the play, Philemon had switched clothing with a servant in order to avoid being punished for a practical joke he had played (I, 10). Although he successfully avoided that punishment, he received instead a beating intended for the servant (I, 11). In this instance, too, unintended consequences will follow the exchange of clothing. The martyrdom that ought to await Apollonius will be assigned instead to Philemon. This time, though, Philemon will claim as his own both the identity he has assumed—that of a Christian—and the punishment/reward that attends it. When Philemon first dons Apollonius’s clothing, his first concern is the reward he will receive for having successfully acted the part. But the clothing has an immediate effect on him, as do his efforts to mimic Apollonius in speech, glance, and stride. He finds the clothing irksomely confining and grumbles that it constrains his normal restless mobility (III, 5). Seeking to assume not only Apollonius’s clothing but his demeanor, Philemon emphasizes the grave bearing of a Christian. To act the part of Apollonius is fundamentally to act the part of a Christian. At this stage, we receive our first hints that Philemon is not just assuming yet another role here but accepting one that will give him for the first time a defined self. “In a dialectical movement he is seduced into a role, which only at first is just a role, but which lies on a qualitatively higher plane and transcends the availability to all roles that characterized the first plane. This role, unlike Philemon’s earlier roles, does not allow itself to be taken up and set aside at will, and it no longer contains that element of dishonesty or deception, which clings by definition to all other roles.” 64 In the second phase, still in the same scene, Philemon, approaching Jupiter’s altar to offer a sacrifice as Apollonius, is frightened away by an angel. “I perish, I perish,” Philemon exclaims, but convinces himself that he is just hallucinating. The angel warns him that he will perish everlastingly unless he comes to his senses but recognizes that Philemon will not be able to save himself in this way. Other tactics will be needed, and his conversion will require that Philemon be allowed to approach the altar once again as Apollonius. “Philemon does not know what deception he is enacting,” notes the angel. “He will mislead himself, though to happiness” (III, 5). Fear is capable of keeping Philemon away from positively evil acts, but it cannot positively convert Philemon, cannot bring him to God. In the final stage, Philemon, still trembling a bit but impelled by his desire for the promised gold, vows to proceed to the altar (IV, 1). Once

ch a p t er f i v e

160

again the angel appears but this time announces that he will attract Philemon with love rather than shock him with fear. Could Philemon only hear the beauty of heavenly music, the angel reflects, he would abandon his hollow flute forever. So the angel summons a heavenly choir to give Philemon a taste of the sweetness of heaven. The choir sings of Jesus, while the angel tells Philemon that Jesus will be sufficient for him, will finally satiate his boundless appetites. The choir, beautiful as its music is, cannot compare with the beauty of Christ himself. Philemon, listening to the choir, falls in love with the Jesus of whom they sing (IV, 2). He bemoans the fact that he only now has come to know the sweetness, the pleasure of his beloved Christ. How could he ever have refused to love Christ? he asks himself. From henceforth Philemon no longer recognizes himself as Philemon or as Apollonius, but only as Christian. Having been “essentially” changeable, Philemon now becomes steadfast, unwavering in his loyalty to Christ. Commentators have sometimes complained that Philemon’s conversion is not psychologically realistic, that it is too sudden, too miraculous.65 But while schematic and foreshortened, it is in some sense realistic. First, it implies that we can be changed—we can acquire a “true self,” only insofar as we enact the part of a virtuous exemplar. Second, it stands with an Augustinian understanding of mimetic transformation in suggesting that we are changed most fundamentally by pursuing what we desire and find attractive—Philemon the flautist is converted by heavenly music. Lastly, along with Erasmian humanism it insists that God can lure us into the fellowship of charity even as we think we have set out for some other goal. Philemon does not decide to become a Christian, but neither is he forced against his will to convert. Rather, he discovers that the desires he has always had can be satisfied only by Christ, and thus that he has misunderstood himself and his own desires up to this point. Food and drink have never given him true satiety, earthly flutes have never satisfied his longing for beauty. Bidermann avoids, then, a semi-Pelagian account of Philemon’s conversion, restoring a genuinely Augustinian understanding of grace and freedom.66 Two further aspects of Bidermann’s play require comment. First is the way in which Bidermann draws attention to the communal nature of Christian identity. We have already noted the fact that the climax of Philemon’s conversion is occasioned by his hearing a heavenly chorus singing of their love for Christ. The beauty of Christ is thus mediated by

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

161

the beauty of the community that worships Christ, or more specifically by the beauty of their worship. Bidermann also draws attention to the importance of community to Christian identity through his treatment of the close identification that develops between Philemon and Apollonius during the course of the play. Philemon has appeared before the pagan officials, proclaimed himself a Christian, and refused to sacrifice to Jupiter (IV, 7). Once he is recognized as Philemon, the mime, everyone is greatly amused and impressed with his lifelike performance. It is only with great difficulty that he finally manages to persuade them that he is sincere, and he is imprisoned to await martyrdom. Apollonius, meanwhile, has recognized that his efforts to avoid both sacrificing to Jupiter and the sacrifice of martyrdom have failed (IV, 5). He is as guilty as if he had actually made the sacrifice, and he now longs for the death from which he once fled. He visits Philemon in prison in order to demand his clothes and identity back (IV, 8). At this point, there is an asymmetry between Apollonius and Philemon. Apollonius sees no way forward for himself except by taking back from Philemon what he has given him. He bemoans the fact that he has made someone else a Christian but has lost himself. Philemon, meanwhile, refuses to return what he has assumed, wanting to play the part through until the end. He does, though, express deep gratitude to Apollonius—for without Apollonius, he would not now know Christ. He hails Apollonius as his savior. His gratitude, though, cannot be expressed by returning the identity, for this would be disloyalty to Christ. Although Apollonius departs from the prison in despair, when we next encounter him he is before the high priest, declaring himself a Christian (V, 5). Evidently he has arrived at an important realization—that the identity of Christian need not be returned by Philemon in order for Apollonius to claim it as well. This is a role that more than one can play. The two men meet once more as they are being led to their deaths. This time they embrace, and each one proclaims the other as his savior. Apollonius is no longer ashamed of the fact that he allowed Philemon to play his part, since he gained thereby a fellow Christian. Although in a more fundamental sense Christ is the savior of both men, both now recognize that their salvation has been mediated through a fellow Christian. Grace has acted through their own activity and through their encounter with one another. They have become their true selves by playing each other’s part, paradoxically gaining their true identity by apparently losing their

ch a p t er f i v e

162

identity.67 There is no need to fathom and cling to the idiosyncratic self, since their true selves are found in the fellowship of Christ. The communal nature of heavenly joy is anticipated in their embrace. The final aspect I wish to discuss briefly has to do with exemplarity. Apollonius, visiting Philemon in prison, insists that he ought to have been an exemplar for Philemon, not just an accidental cause of his becoming a Christian. It is Philemon who has been an exemplar. Still, as at least one commentator has pointed out, there are limits to Philemon’s exemplarity for the spectators of the play.68 Philemon lives in a world where loyalty to Christ requires martyrdom; the spectators do not. And while the spectators of the play can, like Philemon, seek to act out the part of a good Christian, they cannot summon angels and heavenly choruses to render effective their love of Christ. In an intriguing way, the pagan Arrianus appears as a supplement to Philemon’s exemplarity, particularly effective since Arrianus moves in the play from being a spectatoron-stage, watching Philemon “act” the part of a Christian, to being an active participant, just as the spectators offstage should respond actively to the play and not simply wallow in passive admiration for Philemon. Also important is the fact that Arrianus converts to Christianity but does not become a martyr. Instead, he issues his final command, with which the play closes—no longer to hate Christ but to love him (V, 11). Arrianus is, finally, the model public leader, whose concern is not simply for his own private salvation but for the common good. It was men such as this whom the Jesuits hoped to train in their schools and through their theater, men who remained in the world but saw that world through the lens of Christ’s love. Tellingly, Lope’s Genesius insists that God wants him to go on acting in heaven. He belongs now to the company of Jesus rather than that of the devil, but the drama continues in heaven, so he can continue to win applause. He does not, then, envision that Christians move from theatrical illusion to reality, but rather from a theater of fiction to a theater of reality. And he glories in the thought that “Genesius will henceforth be known as the supreme actor” (102). Bidermann’s Philemon, in contrast, claims after his conversion only the name of Christ. He seeks no exceptional identity beyond his identity as Christian. He understands his shift as one from joking to earnestness. He seeks no applause, no opportunity to go on acting, only treasuring his newfound love for Christ. Philemon has found bliss, but it is a self-forgetful bliss. Genesius is happy only when the center of attention.

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

163

Conclusion I hope I have made convincing the suggestion that Bidermann’s dramas illustrate and uphold the mimetic conception of virtue that we identified in Erasmus. This is an outlook that understands and embraces the theatrical aspects of the moral life even while appreciating the dangers of action concealing, rather than transforming and revealing, character. It is an outlook that demands human activity even as it construes this activity always as response to a prior divine calling and always as itself grace-enabled, not autonomous and undetermined. And it is content to allow a messy interpenetration of activity and passivity, nature and grace, human and divine action, rightly affi rming that Christian virtue and piety, like “pagan” virtue, result from a gradual process of imitation and habituation, even as this is understood as a process in which God is actively luring us toward divine goodness. This messiness is not a failure to recognize a nature/grace distinction but rather an affirmation that all we encounter is nature fallen-and-in-process-of-redemption, fallen nature shot through with grace. Human agency and divine agency do not compete for control, and human agency need not step aside in order for divine agency to enter in. In Lope de Vega, in contrast, we see how this outlook could easily shade away into something quite different. Lope de Vega might have written a play about a superb actor whose ruling desire to win applause was transformed into love of God and neighbor. In some sense, he even tried to do so, insofar as he wrote a play about an actor who, in acting the part of a Christian, actually did become a Christian. In fact, though, he wrote a play about an actor whose passion for human applause was transformed into passion for divine applause, but who thus remained preoccupied with himself as actor. Genesius’s understanding of his true end is transformed during the course of the action, but it remains rather rudimentary, shrouded, full of illusion. We might even say that, like Cenodoxus, Genesius is self-deceived, failing to see his overweening pride in his artistic virtuosity. And audiences of Lo fingido verdadero, used to keen analyses of hypocrisy and self-deception, might themselves have come to this conclusion. Looking at Lope de Vega’s own passions and insecurities, we can easily make sense of the particular shape that a theatrical understanding of the moral life would take in his work. But this is not simply an idiosyncratic corruption. Rather, it reveals how difficult it was to maintain a position that makes room for ambiguity and fluidity, for gradual progress and transformation from illusion to reality, from

ch a p t er f i v e

164

vice to virtue, from impiety to piety. It is not hard to understand why the Jesuits were often suspected of extenuating vice rather than eliciting virtue, why Jesuitical became a bad word. One commentator even suggests that Bidermann’s Cenodoxus is best understood as an insider’s critique of an overpreoccupation with self-representation, simulation, and dissimulation that was overtaking the Jesuit order as a whole.69 Jesuit humanism did often eventuate in overwrought casuistry, semi-Pelagianism, and a fixation on divine approbation and heaven as reward (rather than affirming the priority of grace and heaven as fellowship of charity). The confessional oppositions of the time period hardened and simplified all sides, making it increasingly difficult to sustain a noncompetitive understanding of human and divine agency, to maintain that human agency does not require a vacuum of divine agency.70 If human and divine agency are mutually exclusive, then on the one hand virtue may seem a human achievement rewarded by God, or on the other hand it may seem a divine gift passively received by human persons. If true goodness is a pure gift that excludes human agency, then any virtue acquired by human effort is necessarily tainted. Part 3 explores this passivist alternative.

e xc u r sus: pe r for m at i v e t he ol og y Before tracing further in parts 3 through 5 the troubled legacy of the splendid vices in the early modern period, I pause to consider contemporary theological appropriations of the theatrical in light of aspects of the mimetic conception of virtue I have sought to identify as ripe for retrieval. In conversation with these voices, most particularly with Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s Drama of Doctrine, I begin to identify the epistemological and ontological commitments implicit in such a conception. The Anglo-American theological world has recently rediscovered the seventeenth-century fascination for theatrum mundi.71 Given a narrative understanding of human agency and a growing awareness of how allegiance to authoritative narratives forms communal identity, it was a natural step to conceive of the ongoing life of a tradition as an enactment of narrative and thus to begin to think in terms of performance.72 And of the performing arts, it is theater (along with its close cousin, fi lm) that can most obviously be understood as a performance of narrative. So Nicholas Lash, searching for a more adequate way to capture how scrip-

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

165

ture is interpreted by the believing community, has suggested that “the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity, and organization of the believing community” and “Christian practice, as interpretative action, consists in the performance of texts which are construed as ‘rendering,’ bearing witness to, one whose words and deeds, discourse and suffering, ‘rendered’ the truth of God in human history.” 73 Yet, as both Samuel Wells and Shannon Craigo-Snell point out, there is something a bit odd about the claim that Christians perform scripture. “Clearly this is untrue if taken in the most literal sense,” notes Craigo-Snell. “My life is too surprising to be scripted, the plot-line looks decidedly un-biblical, and the characters who walk the boards with me are not named Melchizedek or Jeroboam.” Wells, meanwhile, holds on to the analogy of performance but rejects the identification of scripture with script, suggesting instead that improvisation be taken as the guiding metaphor, since “there is a dimension of Christian life that requires more than repetition, more even than interpretation—but not so much as origination, or creation de novo.74 Wells’s point is analogous to what I have said about the indefeasibility of the example of Christ, although, by focusing on Christ rather than scripture, I have held the notion of script at even greater arm’s length. Christ’s exemplarity is indefeasible for Christians, and yet it is constantly open to interpretation, endlessly reenacted, but not reiterated, in the lives of the saints. There is indeed something creative about imitatio Christi. Craigo-Snell nevertheless defends a loose application of the analogy between scripture and script: “When we enact scenes from the life of Jesus, breaking bread and washing feet, we are performing [the scriptures]. When we obey a direct commandment, we are, in some sense, performing that commandment. And perhaps most importantly, we ourselves are characters who have been crafted by this text. While the present performances of our lives are undeniably extemporaneous, Christians enter each scene and engage in each dialogue as characters delineated and delimited by this text.” 75 Craigo-Snell’s suggestion that Christian character is formed by the text of scripture reflects the postliberal theology championed by George Lindbeck: “it is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text.” And in fact theatrical analogies do lend themselves particularly well to the cultural-linguistic approach to theology articulated by Lindbeck. A cultural-linguistic approach rejects “cognitive-propositionalism” on the one hand and “experientialexpressivism” on the other. That is, it denies that Christianity is either

ch a p t er f i v e

166

simply a matter of assembling a set of true propositions that correspond to external reality on the one hand or a matter of expressing some inner experiential truth on the other hand. Instead, it focuses on the ways in which Christianity serves as a language together with its correlative form of life.76 Becoming a Christian is thus analogous to acquiring a culture or learning a language; experience is socially formed and mediated. The meaning of doctrinal or theological statements is defined by their use within the Christian community, and the center of gravity for theological reflection thus shifts from doctrinal theology to practical or moral theology. In a rich and engaging recent book, The Drama of Doctrine, Kevin Vanhoozer seeks to conjoin the theatrical metaphor with an appreciative critique of postliberal theology. Accepting from postliberalism the claim that doctrines arise from practices, Vanhoozer is nevertheless concerned that postliberalism fails to give an adequate account of the objectivity of doctrine and of the possibility of critiquing and correcting the practices from which they arise: “Does doctrine refer to God, or does it merely describe how members of the Christian community talk about God? If church practices serve as both source and norm for theology, how can we ever distinguish well-formed practices from those that are deformed?” These could be seen as cognitive-propositionalist worries, and indeed Vanhoozer does describe himself as seeking “to rehabilitate the cognitivepropositionalist approach by expanding what we mean by ‘cognitive’ and by dramatizing what we mean by ‘proposition.’ ” But Vanhoozer also addresses a concern that might be seen as experiential-expressivist: that an emphasis on doctrine as performance might foster a form of hypocrisy; “it trains disciples merely to go through the external motions rather than to experience the inner emotions from which action springs.” Vanhoozer’s response to both concerns is the same: to emphasize doctrine over practices and reaffirm the principle of sola scriptura, scripture as the norm for doctrine and practice. Hence the subtitle of his book: A CanonicalLinguistic Approach to Christian Theology. Authority must rest, he insists, with biblical canon rather than with ecclesial culture; scripture must be allowed to critique church practices. He says explicitly that “neither tradition nor practice can be the supreme norm for Christian theology, because each is susceptible to error.” 77 The implication is some kind of inerrancy claimed for scripture. Vanhoozer is in search of an external criterion that can be used to assess the adequacy of tradition and practice; he finds this in scripture,

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

167

even as he denies that his position amounts to foundationalism, since it does not privilege propositional truths abstracted from scripture, nor abstract knowledge from knower and process of knowing. Still, scripture is for him the supreme norm, “not Scripture as used by the church but Scripture as used by God.” Of course, we might ask how we are to know how scripture is used by God as opposed to by the church, but this question goes unanswered by Vanhoozer. Or again, while all Christians surely share Vanhoozer’s “ ‘evangelical’ conviction” that “God has spoken and acted in Jesus Christ and that God speaks and acts in the canonical Scriptures that testify to him,” it is question begging to equate this conviction with the following sentences: “In the beginning, God—not philosophy, not religion, not nature, not ethics, not genius, not even the church. An evangelical theology begins at the beginning, with God’s speech and action.” 78 So even as Vanhoozer embraces the postliberal emphasis on performance, in his concern for an external authority capable of guaranteeing truth and knowledge, he takes away with one hand what he gives with the other. Vanhoozer clearly wishes to differentiate himself from the noncognitivism and pragmatism he finds in postliberalism.79 But are they really there? Lindbeck certainly leaves room for ontological as well as intrasystematic truth: “if the form of life and understanding of the world shaped by an authentic use of the Christian stories does in fact correspond to God’s being and will, then the proper use of Christus est Dominus is not only intrasystematically but also ontologically true.” He does not reduce truth to utility, as on a crude account of pragmatism. He does deny that scripture offers the sort of external authority Vanhoozer seeks.80 Does he transfer this authority to the church, substituting “the life of the church for the set of indubitable beliefs” relied on by foundationalists? 81 There is perhaps a danger in postliberal theology of a fideistic ecclesiocentrism that slides from an affirmation of the ineliminability of interpretation to a claim for the final authority of the believing community. We do encounter in the landscape of contemporary theology forms of ecclesiocentrism that betray the same kinds of anxiety present in Vanhoozer’s recuperation of sola scriptura. But in itself postliberalism, like an Erasmian-humanist understanding of mimetic virtue, is more naturally Christocentric or pneumatocentric than ecclesiocentric. For while meaning is defined by use and is thus a social artifact, this does not mean that the social practices of the church are insulated from critique or that truth claims are merely provincial. Rather, given that the relevant social relationships

ch a p t er f i v e

168

that define the meaning of Christian virtue include human relationships with God, relationships not exhausted by God’s relationship with the church, God’s being and will may well stand in judgment on particular practices of the church.82 Vanhoozer writes, “With the prophets and apostles, then, I affirm Jesus Christ as the sole foundation of the church. The biblical testimony to Christ is similarly foundational.” 83 But scripture is at best a secondary Word of God, in contrast to Christ as Word. Scripture is not the second Person of the Trinity. It is we who must listen for the Word of God in scripture, and we may err in so doing, just as (Vanhoozer is right to point out that) tradition and practice may also err. We must rely on the Spirit in order to hear the Word of God, and yet here again we may err in thinking the Spirit is with us. We hold Christ as indefeasible example, and yet we must concede our imperfect understanding of Christ’s exemplarity. There are in fact no guarantees, which is not to say there is no faith, no hope, no willingness to go on in the absence of guarantees. Thus far, I have focused primarily on Vanhoozer’s efforts to rehabilitate the cognitive-propositionalist approach. But his attention to the problem of hypocrisy is also telling, reflective of an anxiety over identity that echoes a hyper-Augustinian anxiety about the splendid vices. If Christians are called to perform a script, to take on a role, is there a danger that the result will be merely playacting? Vanhoozer argues that “like good actors, we have to learn not simply how to play-act a role but rather to become the role we play. The drama of doctrine has nothing to do with pretending but everything to do with participating in the once-for-all mission of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Such participation is neither play-acting nor a matter of Platonic ontology. Christian participation is rather pneumatic: those who participate in the theodramatic missions do so through union with Christ, a union that is wrought by the Spirit yet worked out in history by us.” 84 Vanhoozer rightly argues that there is no other way to become who we are called to be except by acting the part. Moreover, he perceives that this enactment is not an assertion of human agency over against divine agency, but a participation in divine agency. Why, then, his concern with hypocrisy? And how can we ensure that we really do become the role we play? Vanhoozer appeals to Constantin Stanislavski’s theory of method acting to extend the metaphor and address the issue. Stanislavski, reacting against an externalist approach to acting, in which actors studied the bodily expressions of various emotions and sought perfectly to reproduce them, but without feeling, taught his

The Jesuit Theatrical Tradition

169

students to act from the inside out, by imaginatively inhabiting their characters, fi lling out the unwritten details of their backgrounds and experiences, so as to be able to act naturally and with sincerity, feeling and acting “in unison with” their roles, to sustain the “through line” of actions. This is possible only when characters act for a reason, and this reason must connect with the “superobjective,” or main idea of the play. Applying the analogy, Vanhoozer argues that doctrine is vital. Doctrine “exposes our mechanical acting” and “discloses our true identities.” It helps us understand “the main idea of the play and the through line of creation and redemption.” Fundamentally, it “defines our role and disciplines the imagination so that we do not simply go through the motions but really inhabit the theo-drama.” 85 Doctrine, then, secures our connection to our roles, even as scripture, for Vanhoozer, secures our connection to God. It is hardly surprising that societies enraptured by theatrical metaphors would at the same time be troubled by the possibility of a slippage between actor and role. The remainder of this book traces the primary manifestations of this anxiety from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, understanding them in terms of their own immediate contexts as well as in relation to the inherited Augustinian suspicion of the splendid vices. As we shall see, this anxiety was expressed in a summons to passivity, a call to relinquish human agency, a suspicion of acquired virtue—and yet a growing fascination with the processes of social formation through which such “virtue” was acquired and enacted. As I discuss more fully in the conclusion, contemporary Christian theologians seem in many respects to have overcome this legacy of the splendid vices. Crucially, Christian ethicists have recovered noncompetitive accounts of human and divine agency that allow for the rehabilitation of acquired virtue. And yet many theologians remain preoccupied by a need to distinguish Christian from “pagan” or “secular” virtue. Whether they focus on scripture, doctrine, or the practices of the church, they seem intent on discovering that which can secure the distinctive identity of Christians, even if they relinquish Vanhoozer’s effort to secure an external authority for that identity. This is, I shall suggest, the contemporary residual of the legacy of the splendid vices. Recent attention to the liturgy and practices of the church and the ways in which they form Christian character has been immensely fruitful. But a falsification of Christian virtue takes place if it is depicted in isolation from the rest of human moral reality. We should ask about the formation of the characters of Christians, not just

ch a p t er f i v e

170

about the formation of Christian character, and not because we should isolate individuals from the communities that form them, or forget that meaning is defined by use, but because we are formed by an immense variety of texts, practices, and institutions. The church is one of these, and unique insofar as recognized by Christians as the Body of Christ. Yet to focus solely on the church and its formation of Christian virtue is to ignore Christ’s lordship over the rest of creation, the fact that it is human nature that is assumed by Christ. We must be willing to speak of the human community, not simply of the more particular communities in which we have our being. Nicholas Lash, in the closing sentences of “Performing the Scriptures,” points the way with his recognition that Christian virtue is, after all, truly human virtue: “The stage on which we enact our performance is that wider human history in which the church exists as the ‘sacrament,’ or dramatic enactment, of history’s ultimate meaning and hope. If the texts of the New Testament are to express that which Christian faith declares them capable of expressing, the quality of our humanity will be the criterion of the adequacy of the performance. And yet this criterion is, in the last resort, hidden from us in the mystery of God whose meaning for man we are bidden to enact.” 86 Lash suggests that we might view “humanity” as a criterion according to which we can test Christian virtue. Ultimately, Christian virtue is not to pride itself on its distinctiveness, and Christians are not consigned to fideism. Yet he also claims that we cannot know what it is to be truly human apart from the church. This criterion is “hidden from us in the mystery of God”; we have no unmediated access to it. There is much wisdom here. I would place just a slightly different accent on these claims: to recognize that the criterion of the adequacy of our performance is hidden in the mystery of God is also to recognize that we must not be content to look only within the church for the signs of God’s grace. Creation is God’s own, however fallen, and human nature as assumed in the incarnation is being redeemed by God’s love in ways we cannot always fathom, for now we see through a glass darkly.

the e xodus from v irtue

iii

Luther

6

Saved Hypocrites It is easy to understand why Erasmus was sympathetic at the outset to Luther’s calls for reform. After all, they shared the worry that most apparent virtue in their culture was just that, merely apparent, and that contemporary social practices were inculcating only surface virtue. Both sought to uncover what they regarded as rampant hypocrisy within the church, the monasteries, and society at large. Both attacked the religion of ceremonial practices in the name of heartfelt piety. And like Erasmus, Luther made extensive use of Pauline language that contrasted the inner, spiritual person with the outer, bodily or fleshly person. True goodness, true piety, had to be inner and spiritual. But the similarities in their approach to the problem of the semblance of virtue end here. While he critiqued the deceptively “virtuous” results of some spiritual practices, Erasmus accepted in principle a habituation in virtue that proceeds from “outside in,” from engaging in formative practices and emulating models to transformed character. And while he insisted that Christian virtue transforms the “heart,” Erasmus did not consider the heart radically private; our actions toward our neighbors do reliably reveal our character, so no mere pretense of virtue can wholly deceive. For Erasmus, true virtue and piety require the renewal in us of our likeness to God, lost through Adam’s fall even though we remain as before creatures in God’s image. This renewal is made possible by Christ, who presents to us the perfect exemplar of virtue (notably of charity and humility) and moreover whose perfect example is itself a channel of grace that inspires and transforms us. Through the grace of Christ we are able to imitate and thus become progressively conformed to Christ, anticipating the eschatological union of all spirits with and in the Spirit.

ch a p t er si x

174

The fundamental failure is not impurity, for any virtue achievable in this life remains provisional and impure. More problematic than impurity is a falsifying denial of the preliminary, impure character of the virtue we now possess, the substitution of way station for goal, of external means for final end. So Erasmus, while critical of false semblances of virtue and of the distorted social structures and powers that foster them, remains tolerant of process and impurity and optimistic about the possibility of grace-filled transformation through external performance—provided always that the “external,” instrumental character of this performance is acknowledged. Acting the part of virtue is not fundamentally suspect; it is the path to an ever more perfect virtue. For Luther, in contrast, there is no route from “external” practices to fundamental inner transformation, no confidence that heartfelt piety can be the culmination of a process of purification, of a progressive lifting of the veils that root us in external, bodily illusion and separate us from spiritual reality: “it is evident that no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom, or in producing unrighteousness or servitude.” 1 The image of God in us has been utterly destroyed by Adam’s fall. This means that we cannot hope through imitating Christ to become participants in the divine activity of assimilating copy to exemplar. Imitation becomes “mere” imitation, branded as external, superficial, potentially deceptive. It is not sufficient to recognize the partial and provisional character of human virtue, not sufficient to recognize that we are in process and have not yet arrived. Nor is it the case that the active practice of neighbor love can foster virtue of the heart, though passive veneration cannot. Rather, the starting point must be a moment of utter passivity, in which we relinquish any reliance on human agency. We must begin not by “acting the part” of virtue but instead by seeming to be what we are in fact—sinful. The spiritual exercises that Erasmus advocates—reading scripture; imitating Christ’s charity and humility; engaging in heartfelt prayer; battling vices of jealousy, anger, and gluttony; seeking concord with neighbor—will lead to hypocrisy and false piety just as much as going on pilgrimages, venerating saints’ relics, exercising rote prayer, and buying indulgences (WA 7:50; LW 31:345). They, too, reinforce what for Luther is the root of sin; they exhibit trust and confidence in our own abilities rather than in God. So long as we have not acknowledged this fully, we make no progress at all, but simply mire ourselves deeper in sin. Works of the soul are no better than works of the body, for we should not be work-

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

175

ing at all. A special sort of self-emptying must be the starting point, not something toward which we gradually advance. This is not to deny that Luther seeks to articulate the possibility of gradual growth in Christian righteousness. His insistence, though, that its starting point and foundation be a perfect recognition and acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of human agency renders what in Erasmus is a dawning recognition into an absolute prerequisite. The cost of this is not only that it makes any true pagan virtue very difficult to countenance but also that it threatens the coherence of any account of Christian moral agency. Moreover, it undermines the possibility of a differentiated critique of the social practices in which Christians are formed. Since social formation as such can in any case affect only appearances, create only “pagan” virtue, Luther cannot sustain the kind of critique Erasmus offers of the infantilizing practices of authoritarian religion. Luther’s initial declaration of Christian liberty ends by shoring up the repressive tactics of Lutheran princes, tactics aimed not at securing true virtue and Christian righteousness but only external order.

Christ’s Union with the Honest Sinner Luther believed that scholastic theology (which for him meant the theology of the via moderna, with earlier theology interpreted through that lens) was blinded by a basic misconception, thinking that there is something that we can do to earn God’s favor and to avert God’s wrath.2 Theologians had forgotten what Luther regarded as fundamental Christian truth—that human agency is utterly enslaved to sin and incapable of anything good. Certainly we cannot, as the via moderna suggested, simply “do what is in us” and so earn grace by the divine-human pactum, which rewards our effort even if that effort is objectively insufficient.3 It is not the case that we fall short through our inability to perform with a pure intention the actions required by the law, but that we are nevertheless able to fulfill the law by at least performing the actions. Scotus, Ockham, and Biel had argued along these lines, suggesting in effect that the Gospel adds to the Old Testament law an additional requirement of a pure intention, that this intention is beyond our abilities, and that it is granted to us through grace when we do what we are able to do, that is, when we perform the actions required by God’s law. For Luther, this betrays a misunderstanding not only of Gospel but also of law. The law does

ch a p t er si x

176

not simply require certain external actions, which could be performed either with a good or a bad, a pure or an impure intention. What the law fundamentally requires is that we put our trust in God rather than in ourselves. As Luther explains, the first of the ten commandments, “thou shalt have no other gods,” means “Since I alone am God, thou shalt place all thy confidence, trust, and faith in me alone and in no one else.” 4 So any attempt to earn God’s favor is not only disobedient to God’s law but is also a form of idolatry. For Luther the honest sinner is closer to righteousness than the aspirant to virtue. At the outset of his scholia on Romans, Luther remarks that “the whole exodus of the people of Israel formerly symbolized that exodus which they interpret as one from faults to virtues. But it would be better to understand it as an exodus from virtues to the grace of Christ, because virtues of that kind are often greater or worse faults the less they are accepted as such and the more powerfully they subordinate to themselves every human emotion at the expense of all other good qualities.” 5 It is better truthfully to confess one’s enslavement to sin than to put on an act of virtue, struggling to free oneself from sin. Only one who knows herself as a sinner truly knows herself, and the law, says Luther, is given to humanity in order to “teach man to know himself” (WA 7:52; LW 31:348). Only when we are truthful about our own inability can we be truthful about God’s ability, trusting only in God and not in ourselves. This is the fulfi llment of the fi rst commandment, not something we do, not something we work at, but what happens when we cease working. So it is at the same time the fulfi llment of the spiritual Sabbath commanded by God. This Sabbath rest, which we should observe at all times, not just once a week, requires “that we not only cease from our labor and trade but much more—that we let God alone work in us and that in all our powers do we do nothing of our own” (WA 6:244; LW 44:72). God wants to give us a gift, but we want to buy it. We think we can earn it and thereby demonstrate that we are somehow independent of God, that we are capable of our own productive agency and possess our own economic power. But we are called not to do works but to rest, to truthfully confess our inability to buy what God would give us, to receive the gift. Our “accursed hypocrisy,” Luther accuses, “refuses to be merely passive matter but wants actively to accomplish the things that it should patiently permit God to accomplish in it.” 6 In order to avoid this hypocrisy, our stance must be receptive or even passive; God alone should work in us, and “the highest and first work of God in us and the

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

177

best training is that we let our own works go and let our reason and will lie dormant, resting and commending ourselves to God in all things” (WA 6:245; LW 44:74).7 So justifying faith, which cedes all human effort and relies wholly on God’s mercy and promises, is itself a gift and not a human work or achievement. Faith “does not come from your works or from your merits, but only from Jesus Christ, freely promised and freely given” (WA 6:216; LW 44:38). Luther’s own theology of around 1509–1510 was just an Augustinian variation on the via moderna view of justification, according to which human beings were expected to fulfill a condition for justification according to God’s gracious pactum.8 At that point Luther held that humility, the recognition of one’s need for grace, was the human act regarded by God as meritorious de congruo, fulfilling the covenant condition for justification, though possessing only trivial inherent goodness. Luther’s postbreakthrough position, in contrast, is that we are incapable of fulfilling even a minimum condition, incapable even of congruent merit, since the whole notion of earning justification through merit is itself a reflection of human sin and corruption. It is thus God who must humble us; we cannot humble ourselves, and if we seek to do so, we are actually seeking sinfully to elevate ourselves, attempting to do something that will earn God’s favor.9 God humbles—or even humiliates—us through his opus alienum, his alien work, that threatens us with eternal damnation and so drives us to despair. In this way we are forced by God to admit our utter unworthiness. We are driven to the cross of Christ, where we encounter Christ bearing the wrath of God on our behalf. We do not humble ourselves and thereby fulfill the condition of God’s favor; we are humbled by God. The theologians of the via moderna, in which Luther was formed, lacked the Patristic understanding of mimesis as assimilation, even if they retained some emphasis on Christ as moral exemplar. Persons are justified through having fulfilled the minimum condition specified by God’s covenant with humanity, with no inherent reference to the incarnation and death of Christ. “Christ can only assist man externally, by means of his example and instruction, to perform the demands of the law,” that is, to do quod in se est, whatever that may be.10 Luther is hostile to such a notion of Christ as external exemplar of merit. To hold up Christ as exemplar, he suggests, is to “imagine Christ as an innocent and private person who is holy and righteous only for Himself.” 11 What restores to us the image of God, he insists, is not successful imitation of Christ but

ch a p t er si x

178

a marriage that unites otherwise alienated parties.12 Through faith, the soul and Christ are married, become one flesh, and exchange attributes; Christ takes on human sin and bears God’s wrath on the cross, while “the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own” (WA 7:54; LW 31:351). For Erasmus, as for the Patristic tradition, our grace-enabled imitation of Christ is a long healing process, renewing the faithful in God’s image so as to culminate in union of lover and beloved. Friendship with God is the assimilation of copy with original, and thus the union of like with like, of copy assimilating with original. Baptism brings forgiveness from sins and gives us a new start on the path of salvation, but it is one step in an extended healing process, a process of renewal in God’s image that culminates in union of lover and beloved. For Luther, in contrast, friendship is predicated not on likeness but on a union with Christ that is therefore quite differently conceived. Union with Christ is not the culmination but the precondition for any process of sanctification. Through this union God can accept us, different as we are—and different not just in that we are created and finite but in that we are rebellious and sinful. For Luther, what is front and center here is our juridical relationship with God. Having sinned, having claimed independence, refused to trust in God, refused to allow God to work in us, we have offended against God’s law and are subject to God’s wrathful judgment. The fundamental question is not whether or not we have sinned, since of course we have, nor is it whether or not we are able to cease sinning and become virtuous, since we are not, but whether or not our sins will be imputed to us. We are justified, reckoned as righteous and acceptable to God, when our sins are not imputed to us. Justification puts us in right relationship with God, makes us friends of God, despite the fact that apart from our union with Christ we remain sinners and thus fundamentally unlike God. Luther does not separate justification and sanctification in the way Melanchthon and the Formula of Concord were later to do. Justifying faith cannot be separated from the indwelling of Christ in faith, since justification is not mere imputation, or rather imputation is predicated on the presence of Christ in the believer. There is a forensic aspect of justification, but justification is not purely forensic.13 At the same time, Luther’s insistence that union with Christ is precondition rather than culmination of justification radically changes its meaning; participation in the divine life is no longer understood as requiring transformation of the human person, but is understood in almost physicalist terms as

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

179

Christ’s presence “inside” the sinner, who is otherwise alien to, and alienated from, God.14 Ironically, despite Luther’s insistence on frank self-knowledge and honest confession of our sinful state, we are finally “justified by the merits of another” (WA 7:51; LW 31:347). This might seem just to replace one sort of “hypocrisy,” the act put on by the student of virtue, with another sort of deception. We do not put on an act by imitating Christ, but we do “put on” Christ; God recognizes in us Christ’s alien righteousness (iustitia Christi aliena), rather than our own inherent sinfulness. We exchange roles with Christ; we are “clothed in” (induti et vestiti) Christ, while he takes on our “mask” (vestem et larvam) as sinner (WA 40.1:443, 448, 452; LW 26:284, 288, 290). And God, audience of this cosmic drama, applauds the disguises. Luther recognizes that Christian righteousness is therefore itself a kind of pretense, but he insists that it, rather than that of the aspirant to virtue, is the truly innocent form of semblance: “The righteous serve God absolutely, for that has to do with the person, but the hypocrites serve him only with the flesh, because they do so only with works, not with faith from the heart. Just as the latter are damnable hypocrites, so the former, as I might say, are saved hypocrites, because they serve sin with the flesh and are evil in appearance, but in truth are good” (WA 8:125–26; LW 32:256). The righteous person is simul justus et peccator, simultaneously justified yet a sinner. To human eyes, which see sinful character and actions, the righteous are sinners (WA 40.1:444–45; LW 26:285). We are tempted to say that they are really sinful, though accepted by God. But Luther insists that “in truth” they are good, good through their marriage to Christ. What lends innocence to this “hypocrisy” is the justified one’s recognition that her righteousness, though truly hers in God’s eyes, is hers only through marriage to Christ. That is, the bride of Christ perpetually confesses her inability to achieve virtue through any work of her own. Through this confession the soul’s “hypocrisy” remains innocent and the justified person retains her honest, passive stance. By trusting wholly in God’s promises rather than in ourselves, by regarding God as truthful, we are assured that Christ’s righteousness will be considered truly our own, not just something “put on”: “when . . . God sees that we consider Him truthful and by the faith of our heart pay Him the great honor which is due Him, He does us that great honor of considering us truthful and righteous for the sake of our faith” (WA 7:54; LW 31:351). Thus our honesty about our own failure to achieve virtue is enhanced by our trust in the truth of God’s promises; “it is true and just that God

ch a p t er si x

180

is truthful and just, and to consider and confess Him to be so is the same as being truthful and just” (WA 7:54; LW 31:351). As we have seen, Luther does employ theatrical metaphors to explain justification—the Pauline baptismal language of being clothed in Christ, which alludes to the baptismal rite in which the new Christian rises up through the water and is clothed in a clean, white robe, is transformed into the vocabulary of the stage—it is masks and costumes that create characters in a drama, and these can be exchanged by different actors. In Luther these theatrical metaphors are not fully explicit; we do not yet see the seventeenth-century intoxication with the image of the world as stage or theater. For Luther God is primarily judge rather than author or audience. And yet in some sense God is audience, less concerned with which actor plays what role than that the roles are properly played out, with sinner condemned and righteous embraced. Simo Peura notes, as “a fact that is in general central for Luther’s doctrine of justification,” that “God judges deeds in accordance with the quality of the acting person.”15 Since only Christ is in fact worthy of God’s favorable judgment, it is only through union with Christ that we are rendered acceptable in God’s eyes. So Christians must remember that while we have “put on” Christ, we ourselves remain sinners. We are acceptable to the divine audience not by virtue of our own active righteousness but by virtue of the righteous costume to which we have submitted.

Aristotle and the Sophists Given his repudiation of the impure process of social habituation into virtue and the possibility of imitating exemplars of virtue as a path to authentic virtue, it comes as no surprise that Luther is highly critical of Aristotle and of the universities of his day, “where only the blind, heathen teacher Aristotle rules far more than Christ.” 16 Aristotle’s “book on ethics is the worst of all books,” since “it flatly opposes divine grace and all Christian virtues” (WA 6:458; LW 44:201). Aristotelians regard virtue as something that can be “produced by works”—that can be achieved through human effort, from outside in, as aspiring students of virtue imitate the actions of virtuous exemplars and gradually acquire stable dispositions to act with ease and pleasure in ways characteristic of the virtuous. Luther does not altogether deny the possibility of Aristotelian habituation into virtue. In fact, he is willing to grant that Aristotle gives

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

181

an adequate account of the social formation of civic virtue. Civic virtue does not affect our standing in the sight of God, but it does conduce to temporal goods of political and physical life (WA 40.1:402; LW 26:256). Aristotle conceives of our final good as merely temporal, the common welfare of the state, and Luther concedes that civic virtue is adequate to this end, although not to our true end (WA 40.1:410–11; LW 26:262). Luther’s judgment of Aristotle is therefore less harsh than his condemnation of the “sophists,” scholastic theologians of the via moderna, since they should know better than to think that Aristotelian virtue can win God’s approval and eternal life. Luther’s accusation is not that either Aristotle or the theologians of the via moderna fail to recognize that virtue cannot consist merely in external actions. He concedes that both Aristotle and the sophists differentiate between “pretended” moral works and true moral works, where the latter are those done with a sincere heart, good will, and “true command of reason” (WA 40.1:410, 457; LW 26:261, 294). Even in civil matters, argues Luther, a right heart, will, and intention are required. The real failure of the sophists is that they do not understand that a sincere heart and good will mean something different in theology than in temporal affairs, and that in fact, by virtue of their interpretation of the requirement to do quod in se est, they treat mere works as good coram Deo even if not coram hominibus (WA 40.1:411; LW 26:262). But the kind of sincere heart and good will required by Aristotle, honestly seeking “the common welfare [communem utilitatem] of the state and tranquility and honesty,” cannot constitute a sincere heart and a good will before God (WA 40.1:411; LW 26:262). Nor can a good will be earned from God as a reward for the external performance of moral works. For this would imply that this external performance possessed some goodness, however minimal, capable of pleasing God and earning a reward—even if only de congruo. But in fact, such an external performance has no intrinsic goodness at all and, since done with the hope of pleasing God, is positively sinful (WA 40.1:414; LW 26:264). We might fill out Luther’s train of thought as follows: a whole new dimension is added to moral agency once temporal life is seen as a drama enacted before God. What happens when the virtuous Aristotelian becomes conscious of acting in the sight of God? She hopes that her performance will win God’s applause. But this means that she no longer chooses to act virtuously simply for virtue’s own sake. If Aristotelian magnanimity even on its own terms is at least in danger of being compromised

ch a p t er si x

182

by its preoccupation with the agent’s self-perception, the Aristotelian performing before God is compromised all the more by a preoccupation with winning God’s approval. How can we avoid seeking to win God’s praise? Only, Luther answers, by allowing the indwelling Christ to take over our agency. Civic, Aristotelian virtue does not require the displacement of human agency but rather its cultivation. This will be gradual, and perfection is out of reach, but for civic purposes an approximation of virtue is fully adequate. In contrast, insists Luther, God’s law is kept only when it is done “not only in appearance but in the Spirit, that is, truly and perfectly” (WA 40.1:398; LW 26:253). Hence, Luther concludes that “it is necessary for the person to be justified morally before the work” (WA 40.1:410, 7:617; LW 26:261, 31:361). He cherishes Jesus’s statement in the Gospel of Matthew that “a good tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:18). Only if the person is already justified, married to Christ, can actions be performed with the right sort of good will and right intention, uncorrupted by any thought of demonstrating one’s agency and of thereby winning approval or merit. Any change that human effort can bring about in our character does not go deep enough, because it reinforces our tendency to rely on ourselves, to think that we can claim credit for having formed our own character. The kind of purity of intention central to Christian virtue is not something we can create in ourselves; the pursuit of it, and therefore of virtue, is self-defeating, like trying deliberately to be spontaneous or unselfconscious. It might be thought that Luther could, after all, leave room not simply for a pagan civic virtue that remains always prideful sin but even for pagan justification and salvation. After all, if our marriage to Christ is predicated not on likeness and assimilation but simply on God’s gratuitous self-gift, why could God not choose to accept nonbelievers? Such a position is found in Zwingli, with his emphasis on the invisibility of the church. Luther, however, insisted on an explicit, institutionally mediated faith. The Holy Spirit’s inward work in human persons, enabling us to receive the indwelling Christ, always comes through Word and Sacrament, something Luther proclaimed with mounting intensity as a result of his encounters with Schwärmerei.17 Moreover, participation in the sacramental life of the church, though necessary, is insufficient for the reception of faith; Luther emphasizes just as strongly the subjective character of faith. Faith is “a sure trust and firm acceptance of the heart,” which “takes hold of Christ” (WA 40.1:228; LW 26:129). Once again, explicit trust in

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

183

and acceptance of our absolute dependence on God precede and ground any positive transformation of the human person, rather than dawning gradually. Absent this “sure trust,” we are not on the way to virtue but simply becoming ever more hardened in splendid vice. The Christian’s works embody a spontaneity and freedom Luther believes is denied to the student of virtue (WA 7:64; LW 31:359). Truly Christian works of mercy express genuine care and concern for the neighbor rather than serve as avenues to self-cultivation or praise and recognition. Works of mercy are truly what they seem to be only when they are not performed as exercises of habituation in virtue or demonstrations of human effort: “here faith is truly active through love . . . that is, it finds expression in works of the freest service, cheerfully and lovingly done, with which a man willingly serves another without hope of reward” (WA 7:64; LW 31:365). The works that Christians perform in order to discipline the body, too, are finally done for the sake of being able to serve the neighbor’s need more fully, not as an athletic ascesis directed toward self-perfection. When we spontaneously serve the neighbor in love, we become a Christ to the other. It is not that we imitate Christ, the perfect exemplar of virtue, and in that sense “put on,” act the part of, Christ, but that good things flow from God through us to the neighbor because Christ has “ ‘put on’ us and acted for us as if He had been what we are” (WA 7:69; LW 31:371). In fact, as Mannermaa stresses, “the true agent of good works and the person performing them is Christ who is present in faith.” 18 Christ has acted our part and now dwells within us, not in order to perfect his virtue but for our sake. And because the Christian is thereby freed from the need to achieve the virtue that will merit salvation, he is freed to “ ‘put on’ his neighbor and so conduct himself toward him as if he himself were in the other’s place” (WA 7:69; LW 31:371). So it is Christ’s redemptive acting of our role that brings to life, that makes genuine, our acts of love. In other words, we might say that on Luther’s account the student of virtue is preoccupied with external goods, and necessarily so, insofar as she is not yet virtuous. Luther does not trust that the aspirant to virtue can progress gradually from acting for the sake of external goods to acting for the sake of internal goods, caring for the neighbor for her own sake, since preoccupations with oneself and one’s own efforts stand in the way. Luther argues that the student of virtue cannot avoid thinking about how the virtuous perceive her actions, how actions are shaping her

ch a p t er si x

184

character, whether she is acting in a way worthy of her own approval, and ultimately whether she is acting in a way that will win God’s praise. This is for Luther such a severe problem that it can be resolved only by making the indwelling Christ the agent of human virtue.

Growth in the Gift For Luther, the pursuit of virtue poses such ineradicable barriers to proper trust in and acknowledgment of God that it must be abandoned and moral agency ceded to Christ within. At the same time, Luther affirms the reality of gradual progress (sanctification) in the Christian life. Within the context of an existing union with Christ—once the tree is good, once the sinner is perfectly righteous coram Deo—Luther does speak of a gradual transformation of character that constitutes assimilation with, not simply marriage to, Christ. It is difficult, though, to integrate this account of habituation with Luther’s prior insistence on human passivity and the displacement of human agency by the indwelling Christ. One of the most helpful approaches to this topic is through Luther’s contrast between grace and gift, which he develops at some length in his 1521 response to Latomus.19 Both grace and the gift are given freely by God, but they are distinct in that grace affects our forensic status before God, while the gift transforms our characters. Grace is “an outward good, God’s favor, the opposite of wrath” (WA 8:106; LW 32:227). Grace affects us as whole persons, something that Luther relates to its externality: “it follows that these two, wrath and grace, are so related—since they are outside us—that they are poured out upon the whole, so that he who is under wrath is wholly under the whole of wrath, while he who is under grace is wholly under the whole of grace, because wrath and grace have to do with persons” (WA 8:106–7; LW 32:228). Through grace we are justified before God, despite our sinfulness. The gift, in contrast, which Luther equates with both faith and the indwelling Christ, gradually cleanses us from sin: “faith is the gift and inward good which purges the sin to which it is opposed” (WA 8:106; LW 32:227). Faith is an infused gift, which works to transform us from within. “Everything is forgiven through grace, but as yet not everything is healed through the gift. The gift has been infused, the leaven has been added to the mixture” (WA 8:107; LW 32:229). While we are married to Christ despite our unlikeness, so that our sins may be imputed to him and his righteousness to us,

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

185

through the gift we are gradually assimilated to our Spouse: “he does not want us to halt in what has been received, but rather to draw near from day to day so that we may be fully transformed into Christ” (WA 8:111; LW 32:235).20 Luther always sustains these two perspectives, what Wilfried Joest called the Totalaspekt and the Partialaspekt, always in tension with one another; the Christian is both totally justified before God and partially justified/partially sinner, moving toward the goal already anticipated in its completion by God’s judgment.21 Thus, while it is true that our acceptance by God is not contingent on our resemblance to Christ, it is not quite right to claim that Luther retained only “Christ’s exemplarism in moral conduct” solely “for the welfare of the community,” thereby locating “what was left of mimetic doctrine in the outer context of existence, rather than in the internal one of faith.” 22 The process of transformation through the gift begins in this life but remains always incomplete this side of eternity. God’s acceptance of us through grace is as a whole, as it were in anticipation of our having reached our destination. But we are still on the way, and unlike God we do not see ourselves as completed wholes but rather in process—with a variety of dispositions, character traits, ongoing struggles, choices to make. Grace sets us free from a self-defeating preoccupation with our character and its asymptotic approach to virtue, liberating us for true virtue. Here, once we trust firmly that God has accepted us and judges us righteous in Christ, there seems after all to be room for human activity. Coram Deo, before the face of God, the Christian is always passive. Coram hominibus, in contrast, and having been given the gift, we are always working.23 So in the 1520 Treatise on Good Works, Luther notes against critics who accused him of antinomianism that “the fact of the matter is that I want very much to teach the real good works which spring from faith” (WA 6:205; LW 44:24). He insists repeatedly that the justified Christian has “more work to do than any one man can do” (WA 6:212, cf. 220, 223; LW 44:33, cf. 43, 46).24 Moreover, he insists in the strongest terms that human existence is constituted by activity: “the being and nature of man cannot exist for an instant unless it is doing or not doing something, putting up with or running away from something” (WA 6:212; LW 44:34). While Luther leaves no room for autonomous human agency, he does think it important that God’s work is done within and through human persons rather than inanimate objects. We are called, he says, to resist all violations of truth and righteousness, all wrongs, even those perpetrated on the powerless and insignificant. “But you might

ch a p t er si x

186

ask, ‘Why does God not do it all by himself, since he is able to help everyone and knows how to help everyone?’ Yes, he can do it; but he does not want to do it alone. He wants us to work with him. He does us the honor of wanting to effect his work with us and through us” (WA 6:52; LW 44:52). God wants to share God’s own blessedness with us, and this becomes possible only insofar as we partake in God’s work in the world. Here we glimpse something akin to Augustine’s vision of human persons entering into loving community with God. In part, Luther finds it important to affirm human activity in opposition to those—on both ends of the theological spectrum—whom he saw as complacent in their reliance on grace. Pure passivity coram Deo had to be distinguished from complacency in the world of time. So in his treatise Against Latomus, Luther insists that we must fight against the very real sin that remains in us after baptism, sin that remains despite the fact that coram Deo we are accounted just. Even if it is fair to say that sin is now ruled rather than ruler, and therefore that progress in overcoming it is possible, to name such sin only weakness is a dangerous falsification (WA 8:88–89; LW 32:202–3). In this context, then, honest recognition of the sin that remains in the justified is seen as a stimulus to action rather than a catalyst of pure passivity. Intent on undermining false security, though, Luther slips at times into implying that our salvation is after all conditional on our fulfillment of the minimal condition of moral effort. So, for instance, he writes that God “has promised mercy and forgiveness to all who, at the very least, do not consent to this [sinful] part of themselves but fight against it and are eager to annihilate it” (WA 8:95; LW 32:212). Again, he writes that “God has made a covenant with those who are in Christ, so that there is no condemnation if they fight against themselves and their sins” (WA 8:114; LW 32:239). Such assertions always come within a broader context that affirms, first, that the fundamental reason that the faithful are not condemned is because “they are in Jesus Christ” (WA 8:114; LW 32:239) and second, that the saints’ combat against sin is best understood as “the work of God, who is wonderfully present in his saints, doing all his will in them while we yet seem to have sin and, truly, have it” (WA 8:124; LW 32:254). Still, Luther’s position is a precarious one to maintain—either Luther stresses that all Christian activity is in fact the activity of the indwelling Christ, to which the human person is passive, or he emphasizes human activity at the expense of slipping back into the contractual language of the via moderna. In the latter case, it can seem after all that what saves us from false semblance is our own ongoing

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

187

effort, this that marks the distinction between those who believe they have received grace and the gift, but have not produced the corresponding fruits, and those who have indeed received grace and the gift. In some texts, such as Freedom of a Christian, Luther suggests that growth and progress can be consigned to an “outer” or “bodily” realm; it is the outer man who lives in time and who must change gradually. If we were solely inner and spiritual, we would be free from all of this, perfected immediately through the gift. But insofar as our existence is bodily, we must after all work actively to habituate our body into virtue: “here the works begin; here a man cannot enjoy leisure; here he must indeed take care to discipline his body by fastings, watchings, labors, and other reasonable discipline and to subject it to the Spirit so that it will obey and conform to the inner man and faith” (WA 7:60; LW 31:358). Here the inner man is in some sense taking on the traditional place of reason, providing the “reasonable discipline” that gradually brings the bodily affections into conformity with itself through habituation—even if Luther insists that the person must first be fundamentally good before any such process of discipline can be good. On such a model, faith would be inner and spiritual and would not be subject to process in time but would be complete at the moment of justification. Since faith is not a work, not a human achievement, not an expression of active moral agency, it is hard in any case to see how we could be charged with fostering its development. But Luther does insist that faith must grow; “a Christian, like Christ his head, is filled and made rich by faith and should be content with this form of God which he has obtained by faith; only, as I have said, he should increase this faith until it is made perfect” (WA 7:65; LW 31:366). Faith, as an infused gift, is after all “outer” and “bodily” insofar as it transforms the substance of our character, not simply our “inner,” “spiritual” relationship to God. It transforms us in our “Partialaspekt.” Luther seems here to be groping for his own substitute for the infused virtues—not acquired through human agency but given to human agency, in some sense already perfected while at the same time subject to development. But there is for Luther something important at stake in denying that this is infused virtue. The gift of faith is uncreated rather than created grace.25 Through the Holy Spirit, the Christian becomes a vessel of Christ’s own activity. To think wrongly of faith as a virtue, as a created habit, even if infused by grace, supports in Luther’s eyes a false sense of independence from God. As Simo Peura notes, Luther can “guard a Christian from disastrous self-confidence through the idea of

ch a p t er si x

188

unio cum Christo. The donated righteousness and the effected renewal are not a Christian’s ‘own’ in the sense that he can keep them in his possession or because they constitute permanent qualities in him. He is renewed and made righteous only on condition that he is one with Christ, that he remains in Christ, and that his righteousness permanently flows from Christ.” 26 At no point, then, does Luther trust that human agency has been sufficiently cleansed of its prideful aspiration to independence, its self-serving character. Luther’s perspective is consistently anti-eudaimonistic, and in this respect not only anti-Aristotelian but also non-Augustinian. Human love of God, he insists, is always impure; it is always “directed toward the good that God is able to give us and not toward the triune God himself.” 27 Peura goes so far as to say that “Luther’s entire theological work can be viewed as an attempt to solve the problem of self-serving love.” 28 Even an infused virtue of charity would not be capable of pure love of God, fears Luther. Only if our love for God is itself Christ’s love for God within us, only if all our aspiration, all our striving, is quelled, can we be sufficiently protected from the human tendency to seek our own private good. As Mannermaa states, “according to Luther, the modus of a Christian is always passio: a person is neither inwardly nor outwardly active; one experiences only what God affects in him or her.” 29 Luther’s insistence that prideful human agency be displaced by the indwelling Christ makes it difficult to fathom his account of gradual assimilation to Christ. How is a passive, displaced agency to be gradually transformed? How can we be habituated except through our own action? What we encounter in Luther is an exaggerated insistence on passivity arising out of a competitive understanding of human and divine agency. This makes it difficult for him to develop anything but a paradoxical account of growth in Christian virtue. The exercise of human agency is for Luther inherently an attempt to displace divine agency. Hence, it must itself be displaced. But to insist that God’s gifts to us must displace human agency, to leave no room for created grace, is to place a limitation on God’s gifts to us, even if under the guise of emphasizing God’s self-gift. Luther is right to remind us that human agency remains always dependent on God, right to remind us that human goodness is never autonomous, but wrong to insist that this requires human passivity. To move wholly in this direction would be to make it impossible meaningfully to speak of a “we” who might share in God’s blessedness, who might be made righteous, and who might partake in God’s work. Luther does not go so far as to erase human personhood altogether. But for Luther

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

189

human participation in God’s agency takes place via an emptying out of human agency, and only this can safeguard its purity. Augustine demands purity of intention and yearns for it in a way that casts a shadow over all the impure strivings of this life. Luther goes beyond this, requiring that this purity be already fully present coram Deo and that even in the world of time human agency be exercised as the yielding of agency.

Forming the Young Luther’s attitude toward education of the young provides an illuminating concrete application of his attitude toward habituation and virtue. If growth in faith and works of love is possible only for those whose activity is grounded in God’s grace and God’s gift, and apart from this all human activity is sinful self-assertion, what should be the aims of Christian education? Although we cannot, according to Luther, prepare ourselves or others for the reception of faith, it is also true, as we have already discussed, that the Holy Spirit works through Word and Sacrament, not coming to the individual unmediated. And this means in turn that the Word of God must above all be preached. Luther’s aim was to impress (einbilden) God’s Word like a seal or brand mark on people’s hearts. Those who preach the Word in faith thereby provide occasion for the working of the Spirit in others. But Luther goes further than this; children (and childish adults), lacking a mature understanding of faith and the spiritual life, must be coaxed and “enticed with external, definite, concomitant adornment, with reading, praying, fasting, singing, churches, decorations, organs, and all those things commanded and observed in monasteries and churches, until such time as they too learn to know the teachings of faith” (WA 6:214; LW 44:35). External enticements are here depicted as capturing the attention of the childish and in this way as paving the path for the hearing of the Word. Having admitted the necessity of these external attractions, Luther adds that they are dangerous things, particularly if they are substituted for faith; “they ought always to teach faith along with these works, just as a mother gives her child other food besides milk, until the child can eat solid food by itself” (WA 6:214; LW 44:35). So even if faith transforms from inside out, Luther is forced to concede that children must be transformed from outside in, at least in the sense that the beauty of external practices can render them receptive hearers of the Word.

ch a p t er si x

190

Gerald Strauss, in a study of the educational program that accompanied the German Reformation, argues that Luther’s pedagogical statements “were remarkably unsystematic, if not self-contradictory.” 30 Luther even reluctantly concedes a role for the love of honor in moral education. He begins by insisting that the person of faith must be unceasingly on guard against the love of honor and praise, “an exceedingly dangerous sin, yet the most common of all,” since it is regarded by the world as virtue rather than vice and is practiced through good works rather than bad (WA 6:220–21; LW 44:42–44). He then pauses for a brief digression on the role of honor in education. “Some think,” he notes, “it is a good thing for young people to be encouraged by reputation and honor and discouraged by shame and dishonor, and so be induced to do good” (WA 6:220; LW 44:44).31 At first he distances himself from this position; “I hold that a young man could be more easily trained and encouraged by the fear of God and by his commandments than by any other means” (WA 6:221; LW 44:44). This sounds decisive—education should proceed simply by the preaching of the Word, which confronts children with God’s law and God’s wrath and thus provides the occasion for God’s alien work in them. But at the next moment Luther wavers a bit; “where these do not help we just have to put up with their doing the good and leaving the evil for the sake of shame or of honor. . . . In fact, we cannot do much more about it than tell them that what they are doing is not satisfactory and right in God’s sight, and leave them alone until they, too, learn to do right for the sake of God’s commandments” (WA 6:221; LW 44:44). There is a note of resignation but also of hope here. There is little we can do to disentangle the young from this most dangerous of vices, yet Luther seems also, with the telling word “until,” to regard it as a passing stage. “It is just as young children are encouraged to pray and fast and learn their lessons and so on by gifts and promises from their parents, yet it would not be right to motivate them all their lives by such methods lest they never learn to do good in the fear of God, or what is still worse, lest they become accustomed to doing good for the sake of praise and honor” (WA 6:221; LW 44:44). Here Luther does not even express his disapproval—he takes for granted that children will (just as they are enticed by external beauty to open their ears to God’s Word) be induced through the use of external rewards to learn the rudiments of Christian doctrine and practice. The arena of moral and spiritual education is a perilous one for Luther. On the one hand he reluctantly recognizes the need for outside-in trans-

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

191

formation, the necessity for parents and teachers to engage the young through their love of beauty and pleasure. While recognizing in principle that original sin is present from birth, Luther held that it remained latent until the age of five or so, as the child begins to assert his own will. So Luther often spoke of the innocence of very young children and did see them as tractable and pliable. He even insisted that the renewal of the church would be possible only by starting with the young. What begins in the young as mere performance, rote recitation completed for the sake of a sweet reward (playing chess for candy), can—if it is an occasion for encounter with the Word—become something genuine, a spontaneous expression of love of God. Children learn best, emphasized Luther, in an atmosphere of play, love, and trust; parents (assuming that they are faithful Christians) are the best teachers, inspiring trust as our heavenly Father inspires trust.32 Apart from the ever-sounding warning bells, Luther on education can sound remarkably like Erasmus. And yet the danger is always there; although we cannot refrain from habituating the young in these ways, we may well succeed only in miring our children in the most dangerous—because the most hidden—vices of all. We may habituate our children in the worst semblances of virtue. The Holy Spirit, after all, works only through Word and Sacrament, not through the beauty of external adornment, not through ordinary processes of habituation, not through anything that might tarnish Christian righteousness with the marks of the splendid vices. Strauss argues that ambivalence characterized Lutheran pedagogues throughout the sixteenth century and spelled the defeat of their program: “torn between their trust in the molding power of education and their admission that the alteration of men’s nature was a task beyond human strength, they strove for success in their endeavours while conceding the likelihood of defeat.” However, where Luther had focused on the Holy Spirit working within the Word of God, later Lutheran pedagogues emphasized the words themselves and arrived at a more mechanical understanding of einbilden. To impress the Word of God on the young meant above all to induce them to repeat it over and over; repetition and memorization were equated with habituation.33 Given their focus on the Word, and their conviction that transformation of the heart comes through the Word, it seemed that impressing the Word was all that teachers could do to foster true Christian righteousness among the young. Lutheran pedagogues certainly recognized that habits of acting could also be inculcated, but here they were clear that the result was external conformity, rather

ch a p t er si x

192

than changed hearts. After fears about social chaos were aroused by the events of the 1520s, and turbulence continued in the 1530s and 1540s, the initial optimism of reformers wore off; educators continued to hope that their efforts would provide the occasion for transformed hearts, but they increasingly emphasized the fact that even if it failed to do this, it would nevertheless secure social order. As early as 1524, Luther himself wrote that “both law and gospel must continue to be preached and people forced by the law to be outwardly pious.” 34 In the end, then, Luther accepted the infantilizing practices of authoritarian state religion and the danger of hypocritical goodness because of his fear of disorder.

Freedom and Paralysis Luther’s key insight was to see that habituation in virtue, “growth in faith,” is possible only within a context of loving trust and acceptance, not in a context of judgment and fear. Within an atmosphere pervaded by anxiety, “habituation” will not result in a fundamental transformation of character at all, but only in a false semblance thereof. Luther rightly sees that we cannot fall in love and begin to be transformed so long as we are trapped in fear. Even if Althaus misses the fact that for Luther God’s gift is not simply a new relationship but the indwelling Christ, his words still capture much that is central in Luther’s outlook: As long as a man deals only with the God of the law and with his ethical demands, he does not see and experience the true nature of God. We confront the true God and his real deity only when we hear the gospel of God’s spontaneous gift to the sinner: he gives himself to men as a gift in order to enter into a loving relationship with them. God now fully confronts man entirely as the self-giving love he really is. God thus gains a new kind of power over the human heart which previously maintained its inner distance from God through mistrust, slavish fear, and flight. God now enflames this heart with love for God.35

By insisting that the starting point is one of receptivity rather than activity, of recognizing and accepting the gift God offers us, Luther highlights the context of participation in the divine life within which the capacity to love takes shape and grows. Through his insistence on the priority of

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

193

justification to sanctification, Luther strives to capture the sense in which virtue is gift rather than achievement. It is insofar as we are loved that we are able to love, to relax our frantic grip on our selves and focus on the other. Apart from this context of loving relationship, we cannot hope to progress beyond the love of our own honor that is Aristotelian love of the noble become a dead end. God’s grace, by anticipating our complete restoration in God’s image, and the gift of the indwelling Christ together enable that restorative process to get under way. Luther saw all this particularly keenly because his starting point was one that emphasized God as righteous judge, wrathfully condemning all those who failed to perform the condition specified in God’s gracious pactum with humanity. While Luther’s insight into the transformative power of God’s forgiveness and love was genuine and powerful, I have already begun to note some of the accompanying problems in Luther’s thought, intensified by his predilection for paradox. Luther is right to insist on the absolute priority of God’s free and gracious acceptance of human sinners and further on the utter dependency of virtuous human agency on divine agency. However, problems enter in when a perfect subjective acknowledgment of these truths is required as the precondition for sanctification. To some extent, Luther’s theology of the cross serves to guard against reliance on human consciousness. The theology of the cross, with its emphasis on the contradiction between God as revealed on the cross and our expectations of divine strength and glory, forms an expectation that external appearances will more generally contradict inner truths. And Luther emphasizes the contradiction between our own self-assessment (mapped as mere appearance and thus as “external”) and what we are informed of ourselves by God’s Word.36 We feel ourselves to be condemned sinners, but the Word assures us that we are forgiven and accepted by God. But in fact Luther cannot avoid relying on a conscious experience of faith in Christ (though not of righteousness). Randall Zachman has rightly identified this as a fundamental instability underlying Luther’s efforts to distinguish between the foundation of assurance in the Word and the confirmation of assurance by a good conscience. On the one hand, Luther points to Gospel affirmations of universal reconciliation in Christ. On the other hand, he acknowledges only a limited election. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Luther’s attempts to reassure individuals by directing them to Gospel promises of the mercy of God in Christ fail to provide a solid foundation of assurance to individuals. “In light of individual reconciliation by faith in Christ,

ch a p t er si x

194

the assurance of faith is qualified by the fact that God is gracious only toward those sinners who sincerely believe in Christ, making it necessary for believers to find confirmation of their assurance within themselves.” 37 Individuals are thus driven to examine the purity of their acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of human agency and the sincerity of their faith, rather than relying solely on the promises of the gospel. Given his fears over the inherently prideful character of human agency, Luther reinterprets union with Christ as displacement of human agency and makes this a prerequisite for, rather than the culmination of, a process of assimilation to Christ. This displacement of human agency threatens the intelligibility of any account of growth in faith as gradual transformation of human agency. It undermines the possibility of any differentiated critique of communal practices, since habituation and social formation are placed under blanket suspicion as merely “external.” Moreover, it suggests that social formation in virtue and imitation, even of Christ, cannot be understood as part of a grace-filled process of assimilation unless preceded by conscious faith in Christ. This leaves no room for the activity of grace within pagan aspirations to imitate virtuous exemplars. There is a danger, then, that Luther might after all fail to navigate successfully between despair and complacency and might mire persons in a paralyzing self-scrutiny even more intense than that facing the via moderna Christian who asks herself if she has really done what is in her. First, knowledge that the foundational starting point is pure passivity can lead to a sort of paralysis. Are we not likely paradoxically to expend all our effort trying to suspend all effort? And are we not likely at some point to be overwhelmed by our sinfulness, by the fact that our best attempts to be wholly passive are, after all, our attempts, and thus self-defeating? Despair seems a likely result.38 But of course it is just this despair and paralysis that Luther sees as God’s alien work, humiliating us in order to lead us to the point of pure passivity. For despair and paralysis allow for what Luther regards as a truthful confession of how sinful we actually are, of how unable we are to do any good or to make any progress at all toward virtue. Even if this first paralysis can be understood as the alien work of God’s grace, a second occasion for immobilization follows. For how are we to distinguish, even within ourselves, between the moral striving that exemplifies hypocritical works-righteousness and that which is the spontaneous fruit of grace and the gift? It is easy to see how obsessive selfscrutiny, rather than peaceful trust, could be the result. Despite the fact

Luther: Saved Hypocrites

195

that Luther sought to turn Christians away from a preoccupation with their own works and achievements, freeing them to focus on glorifying God and serving neighbor, it was easy for a follower of Luther’s theology to become focused on herself, on whether she had indeed relinquished her independent moral agency, given herself over to God, and on whether her works were now the spontaneous fruits of faith or rather still attempts to win God’s favor. She could, that is, become obsessed with the possibility that her humility, love, and defense of God’s Word were in fact hypocritical semblances, mere performances. Erasmus summoned those who cultivate themselves in virtue to ascribe to God all the glory for their own moral achievements, recognizing God as their source. Thus their moral aspiration could coexist with an ever-deepening honest humility. Luther tends instead to regard honesty as precluding moral aspiration. Where Erasmus would call on Christians to praise God for their good works, Luther insists that even “the saints of God are ashamed of their works before him and glory in him alone” (WA 8:73; LW 32:181). Absent Luther’s juridical framework for thinking of divine-human relations and his tendency to conceive of divine and human agency in competitive terms, his insistence that the starting point of the Christian life must be pure trust in God is no longer compelling. Luther insisted that the pursuit of virtue is self-defeating since it invariably expresses and entrenches pride. But why might it not instead be the case that as we actively pursue virtue we become ever more keenly aware of how dependent this pursuit and its achievements are—of our dependence on family, teachers, church—on all the beautiful exemplars that have entranced us and thereby fueled our emulative activity. Further, we may become aware of how our capacity to critique our own partial malformations and the malformations of our own formative exemplars has itself been made possible through our encounter with yet other exemplars. So the ardor of Christians to imitate Christ by emulating the heroic martyr was corrected by the ardor to emulate the ascetic Desert Father, and corrected in turn by the ardor to emulate the mendicant preacher, the foreign missionary, the civil rights worker, and so on. And by grace we may come to recognize these multiple dependencies as themselves expressive of God’s activity, restoring creation in God’s own image. Luther rightly insisted that our progress in virtue is a gift of God’s love and that it is only insofar as we are loved that we are able to love, to relax our frantic grip on our selves and focus on the other. He was wrong, though, to suggest that clear recognition of our dependence on God and despair over our independent

ch a p t er si x

196

agency must precede and ground any progress in virtue. It is God’s grace, not our acknowledgment of grace, that allows the process of our restoration in God’s image to get underway. And pagan aspirants to virtue, too, may be on the way and may discover their pious gratitude for the social formation they have received transformed into acknowledgment of God and recognition of God’s work in Christ.

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing

7

The Virtue of Self-Examination If Jesuit theater enacted humanist trust in the transformative power of acting a part, Puritan life-writing narrated the Reformed obsession with truthfully unearthing the hidden self. The two genres captured divergent conceptions of the moral life. Puritan life-writing can be seen as a later incarnation of Luther’s refusal of mimetic virtue, in which honest confession of sinfulness gives way to restless anxiety over the possibility of self-deception; signs of election, evidence of sanctification, could always be manifestations of pride, merely acquired and thus false, virtue.1 Again, a kind of paralysis of moral agency ensued. Puritan autobiographical writing is certainly a powerful example of intertextuality, in which the inner life-world is absorbed by the text of scripture. But it is characterized at the same time by an overreliance on the subjective consciousness, since it was only in one’s consciousness as addressed by scripture, and not in scripture as such, that one could ultimately discern one’s election. Puritan autobiographical writing evolved from schematic diaries kept for purposes of ongoing self-examination into unified lifenarratives offered for communal edification. As these narratives took on the latter function, however, they could not shake off concerns that this represented an unforgivable hubris and self-assertion, betrayals of Puritan ideals presenting themselves as instantiations of those ideals. The present chapter examines the paradoxes that pervade the phenomenon of Puritan life-writing, focusing in particular on John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. First, though, we must ask how the Reformed tradition as such relates to these themes.

ch a p t er se v en

198

Sanctification and Self-Scrutiny in Calvin’s Theology We might expect that Calvin and the Reformed tradition generally would succeed in evading the paradoxes of passivity endemic to Luther’s thought. After all, Calvin more than Luther emphasized a gradual process of sanctification and summoned the saints to bring themselves and the world into conformity with God’s will. One might think, then, that in Calvinist thought we would encounter a restored trust in the habituation gap, in transformation of being through doing, character through action. In the political realm, it was indeed often the case that Calvinists were particularly confident of the possibility that human persons could transform the world to bring it into more perfect alignment with God’s will. However, significant as these differences between Luther’s and Calvin’s theologies are, there was a shared instability in their thought that opened the door for a relentless self-scrutiny so paralyzing that it could be expressed only through performative self-contradiction. Sanctification is indeed a more prominent theme for Calvin than it is for Luther.2 For Calvin the principal use of the law was not that of revealing the bankruptcy of fallen human agency but rather its “third” use, that of enabling the faithful to bring their lives into conformity with God’s will. Calvin emphasized that the whole purpose of creation was to allow human persons to participate in the life of the Trinity, a participation that is made possible insofar as we mirror divine Glory through the holiness of our lives.3 While it is certainly not the case that “we come into communion with [God] by virtue of our holiness,” it is also not the case that God’s glory can have any “fellowship” with wickedness and uncleanness. It is therefore necessary that we be made holy in order to be joined with God.4 It is Christ who is the archetype or exemplar of divine purity, and, like Erasmus, Calvin stresses that we must “put on Christ” and be transformed into his image; “Christ, through whom we return into favor with God, has been set before us as an example, whose pattern we ought to express in our life.” 5 In fact, while Calvin is as concerned as Luther about the problem of hypocrisy, his primary worry is about a substantially different form of hypocrisy—not, like Luther, the hypocrisy of those whose “good works” lend them the mere appearance of righteousness but rather the hypocrisy of those whose external lives fail to express their true inward faith.6 Whereas Luther thought that external matters would take care of themselves given a total repudiation of works-righteousness, and indeed that focusing on the reform of externals

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

199

could result in the loss of faith, Calvin disagreed. These differences stem from the fact that Luther’s theology of the cross led him to expect to encounter pervasive contradictions between “external” appearances and “inner” truths, whereas Calvin’s theology of adoption led him to demand that external appearances be brought into conformity with inner truths.7 Calvin’s emphasis on sanctification was so pronounced that he has often been regarded as having introduced a new form of works-righteousness, driving anxious believers to attempt to determine how they stand before God by reference to their own works, rather than relying on the mercy of God.8 In fact, though, Calvin and Luther agreed that the assurance of salvation is founded not in ourselves but solely in what Christ has done for us as proclaimed by the Gospel. They also agreed that this assurance could be confirmed by the testimony of a good conscience, that is, by our consciousness of a sincere faith bearing fruit in works of love. And since both held a doctrine of limited election, Calvin’s thought, like that of Luther, partakes of the underlying instability diagnosed by Randall Zachman and discussed at the close of the preceding chapter: “Both theologians meant to point us away from our works and the testimony of the good conscience, toward the promise of God in Jesus Christ for the foundation of our faith. But by saying that the testimony of the good conscience confirms both our faith and our eternal election, they left the door open for the possibility that the foundation of faith might be reversed.” Zachman argues that this reversal (whereby the testimony of a good conscience became the foundation rather than the confirmation of assurance) in fact took place within the theology of Beza and was cemented at the synod of Dort. Persons can be confident that they are among the elect (and thus on the way to sanctification) only if they have sincere faith, so despite the fact that they are called to trust in God’s mercy, not in themselves, they are driven to restless self-examination. Already for both Luther and Calvin it is the case that assurance of salvation “involves not only our knowing that we find assurance and peace of conscience in Jesus Christ alone—which is itself a form of reflexive self-knowledge, even if its object is outside ourselves—but we must also know that our faith is sincere and not hypocritical, by finding within ourselves both the fear of God and the testimony of a good conscience.” 9 They want us to rely on what Christ has accomplished perfectly and completely for us extra nos, but they cannot be confident that this external work of Christ is indeed for us apart from some consciousness on our part. Despite his emphasis

ch a p t er se v en

200

on sanctification, then, Calvin, like Luther, saw as suspect any apparent virtue not preceded by consciousness of sincere faith. It is in this vicinity, in the increasing weight being borne by human consciousness, that we can locate Calvin’s most problematic departure from Augustine’s understanding of Christian virtue. Although Calvin is satisfied that Augustine sufficiently acknowledges that we are saved solely by grace and not by our own works, and agrees with Augustine that sanctification unfailingly takes place in those who have been justified, he still worries that Augustine does not guard sufficiently against a collapse of justification into sanctification: “for even though he admirably deprives man of all credit for righteousness and transfers it to God’s grace, he still subsumes grace under sanctification, by which we are reborn in newness of life through the Spirit.” 10 The worry here is that Augustine fails to make clear that it is not by virtue of our sanctification, but only by virtue of Christ’s perfect work, that we are accepted before the throne of judgment. Not only are we not accepted because of anything we have done but we are also not accepted because of anything that has been done in us. We are accepted only because we have been freely chosen by God to be called by the Spirit. Only because of this does the process of sanctification that joins us to God take place; “we are not cleansed and washed of our uncleanness by Christ’s blood except when the Spirit works that cleansing in us.” 11 Intent on marking a sharp distinction between justification and sanctification, Calvin can in the end do so only by relying on human consciousness of justification. This is a striking contrast with Augustine, who recognized that we can only imperfectly and retrospectively recognize grace at work within us. Wherever and whenever we discover grace, we discover that it has already been active. For Calvin, in contrast, only consciousness of true faith lends assurance of election, assurance that Christ’s salvific works have been made efficacious for oneself. But how can one be confident that one’s faith is, indeed, sincere and thus that one’s works are truly fruits of faith? This proved to be an intractable problem, particularly within the Reformed tradition. Why was it less troublesome within the Lutheran tradition? The paradoxes so visible in Luther’s thought receded in part because Lutherans employed a rhetoric that stressed universal atonement and deemphasized the doctrine of limited election. As we saw in chapter 6, in the generation following Luther, Reformed educators faced a difficult task. On the one hand, reminding the faithful of the incapacity of fallen human nature to do anything good might paralyze them with guilt. They might torment themselves

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

201

with unending doubt about whether they had in fact ceded their agency to God. On the other hand, an emphasis on the unconditional nature of God’s grace might lead to complacency. In general, Lutheran educators erred on the side of the latter, preferring “to play down the effects of congenital sinfulness on the individual’s inner and outer life.” In their efforts to differentiate themselves from Calvinists, Lutherans argued that God’s grace was readily available to all. Calvinists, they charged, taught that God had created the majority of humankind for damnation; they themselves stressed that God wishes to save all, and will do so if only we listen to the gospel of salvation. Lest this give rise to complacency, though, pedagogues reminded the faithful that fallen humanity had no free will in the arena of spiritual matters. While this sounds ambiguous, if not inconsistent, popular homiletics sought to employ such ambiguities productively to serve pedagogical purposes rather than attempting to resolve them.12 Religious education could at least create obedient, catechism-reciting citizens. If they were “hypocrites,” their hearts unchanged by grace, at least they did not spread anarchy. Meanwhile, given the prominence assumed by the doctrine of predestination within Reformed theology (if not within Calvin’s own theology), it is finally not surprising that the paralyzing paradoxes we have explored within Luther’s thought often made themselves even more keenly felt within the Reformed tradition than within Lutheranism.13 If Lutherans could take the edge off their teaching of the enslaved fallen will by stressing the wideness of God’s mercy, Reformed theologians rarely followed suit. Psychological energy focused on the million-dollar question—Who am I, really? Am I, or am I not, one of the elect? “The individual himself, in his ‘unprecedented inner loneliness,’ sought the signs of election, of certainty of faith since faith alone would save; in other words, he looked for a sign of the works of God within him.” 14 If Luther’s primary concern was to avoid deceptive external works through honest self-portrayal, and Calvin’s concern was that external appearances properly show forth inner faith, within the Reformed tradition following Calvin, the focus of concern shifted to the avoidance of self-deception through the search for self-knowledge. Calvin recognized the danger here: “Rare indeed is the mind that is not repeatedly struck with this thought: . . . what revelation do you have of your election? . . . The mind could not be infected with a more pestilential error than that which overwhelms and unsettles the conscience from its peace and tranquillity toward God.” 15 Despite Calvin’s own counsel simply to rest in God’s promises, many Reformed

ch a p t er se v en

202

theologians found it difficult not to trouble themselves constantly over the question of whether or not they were among the elect.16 Given Dort’s endorsement of the doctrines of unconditional election and irresistible grace, it could seem as though all one could do was to scrutinize oneself for the signs of election and of the fruits of the Spirit. It was not enough to consider whether one’s actions exemplified piety and Christian charity, since these could be mere show; it was crucial to scrutinize one’s intentions, motivations, and spiritual impulses. It hardly helped that Calvin himself had acknowledged the presence of apparent or transitory faith even among the reprobate, “so that even in their own judgment they do not in any way differ from the elect.” 17 Self-deception was a real possibility, and the only remedy was yet more self-examination.

Puritan Life-Writing One of the places where Reformed self-scrutiny can best be encountered is in Puritan spiritual writings.18 Bouwsma has suggested that Renaissance “concern with the real self lying somewhere beneath the protective layers imposed by the expectations of others” explains the fact that Renaissance humanism conceived a new admiration for Augustine’s Confessions.19 And it was in the Renaissance that significant numbers of first-person life-narratives first began to be written. This reflected a new self-consciousness about the roles that the self has enacted and of the inner self as distinct from its roles.20 It has often been said that it was with the Puritans, though, that the new genre of autobiography really exploded. Owen Watkins, for instance, claims that more than 200 spiritual autobiographies were written by Puritans before 1725.21 In fact, it is somewhat misleading to term these narratives of personal experience autobiographies, since it falsely assimilates them to genres with very different aims and functions. At the same time, the roots of modern autobiography, as “the unified, retrospective, first-person prose narrative by which the ‘I’ so popular in modernity is identified in discourse,” do lie in Puritan narratives of personal spiritual experience.22 So the dynamic Trilling discerned within the genre of autobiography remains applicable to these evolving proto-autobiographical writings; “the form continues to press towards a more searching scrutiny of the inner life, its purpose being to enforce upon the reader the conclu-

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

203

sion that the writer cannot in any respect be false to any man because he has been true to himself, as he was and is.” 23 Around 1600 we begin to see individuals using notebooks to record their personal experiences, rather than simply as ledgers and account books.24 Commonplace books, in which individuals recorded particularly memorable passages from texts they read and notes made during the hearing of sermons or while reading scripture, became increasingly widespread during the seventeenth century. A single notebook often contained a variety of kinds of writing; if a spiritual diary was included, its context revealed an emphasis on private devotional practice, not on public self-presentation. “The point of such writings,” argues Michael Mascuch, “was to reduce the self-identity of the individual voice, rather than to help it to coagulate.” 25 Richard Rogers, the Puritan author of perhaps the earliest book of spiritual direction to have been written by an English Protestant (the Seven Treatises of 1603), kept just such a personal notebook, recording an assessment of his spiritual state once a week as an aid to his daily practice of meditation, prayer, and self-examination. It is possible to discern an increasing self-consciousness in these personal notebooks, as individual writers became aware of themselves as emulating existing exemplars and so offering themselves likewise as exemplars of this new social practice. For it was of course a social practice, despite the fact of its being a private pursuit. In 1646 Henry Newcome, a nineteen-year-old student at Cambridge, began keeping a personal diary “chiefly . . . upon the occasion of hearing that Dr. Ward . . . had left a diary of his life in his study, from his being sixteen years of age. I thought it was a very brave thing to have such a thing left from so early a time of his life, and so set upon it.” 26 By mid-seventeenth century, then, young Newcome could regard Ward’s diary as a record of his life, not simply as notes on the state of his soul, and as a model worthy of emulation. For a Puritan like Newcome, the shift from self-examination to self-representation could spell the fall from humility to prideful self-assertion. Nevertheless, the practice began to be recommended for the former purposes, most likely for the first time in print in Isaac Ambrose’s 1652 manual of piety, Media: The Middle Things, in Reference to the First and Last Things. Ambrose regarded diary-keeping as a useful aid to the practice of “Self-Tryal,” or “a discussion of a man’s life, for the finding out the true estate of a mans soul toward God.” 27 Ambrose even included excerpts from his own diary, though clearly aware of the problematic character of such an act; to

ch a p t er se v en

204

advance Christ, he wrote, “though I lay in the dust, I should willingly publish and subscribe the daily Register of a poor unworthy servant of Christ.” 28 Funeral sermons began to praise persons for their pious diaries and even quote from them, inspiring others to keep similar diaries in hopes of similar commendation. Some consciously viewed this development as a regression to an ethic of glory, arguing that funeral sermons could be justified only if “directed not to the praise of the Dead, but to the instruction of the Living.” 29 In 1671 Philip Henry wrote in his own diary that “there is oftentimes now a dayes a great deal of precious time lost among professors in discoursing of their escapes & adventures, not to give God glory, but to set up self.” 30 Despite these expressions of concern, the practice gathered momentum. Individuals not only kept diaries but they also worked to “methodize” these, extracting from them a unified life-narrative, which they could bequeath as religious instruction to their children. This was Newcome’s aim in the early 1660s, to draw on his previous diaries in writing a contracted narrative “especially to the use of my children after me, that they may remember the God of their father, to the end that they might have their hope in God.” 31 At a time when nonconforming ministers were regarded as treasonous, moreover, such clergy began to view their diaries as an opportunity to justify themselves at least to their descendants, if not to the public at large. Thus persecution provided an additional, external push in the direction of autobiographical self-presentation. “The works,” writes Mascuch, “do not constitute a retreat into the interior recesses of the mind, but instead an advance from those recesses into the realm of publicity, and (modest) self-promotion.” 32 With the advent of printing, people began to write with a broader public in mind, even if they themselves did not expect to be published. Ironically, some of the earliest English treatises urging private Christian devotion (though not written diaries) were actually translations of Jesuit works. This common source of devotional piety developed in diverse directions in the two traditions. Jesuit treatises were apparently quite easily adapted by Calvinists for purposes of discerning signs of election instead of ensuring salvation.33 But the same fear of hypocrisy that drove Puritan critiques of theater also fed the Puritan passion for first-person narrative; instead of providing, as theater did, an arena for trying on alternative identities, autobiography offered a venue for the display of honesty, for the sincere search for the true self, underneath whatever roles that self might play. For the Puritan “the horror [of sin]

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

205

is amplified by the horror of hypocrisy—the presentation of a deceptive external order to which no internal order corresponds. . . . The danger is always self-deception, succumbing to illusion or seduction; the search requires an unrelenting process of testing, of experimenting, of amassing the clarified evidence.” 34 The visible, the (merely) apparent, is to be distrusted and probed. Appearances are more likely to conceal hidden realities than to initiate genuine transformations. From such a perspective, theater is either shallow or deceptive; either it fails to reveal the depths of the subject or it falsely externalizes inner transformations. What Lyons says of Descartes and Pascal, calling them “self-centered examples,” applies as well to those who rejected theater and embraced first-person life-writing as a primary avenue of spiritual and moral transformation: they “locate the redeeming force of enlightenment within the individual and thus outside the manifest world open to all people. Whether it be the certainty of the Cogito or the gift of grace, this inner force will direct the actions of the elect, not the attractive power of a reproducible earlier instance.” 35 For the Puritans, of course, the redeeming force is grace and the self an obstacle to be overcome. Newcome defended his undertaking as testimony to the work of providence: “And though I have no high thoughts of any great matters concerning myself, yet God hath done great things for me in the whole course of my life; and the more despicable and obscure I have been in my own person and parts or performances, the more admirable hath the divine goodness been extended to one so unworthy.” 36 A poor performance was safer to confess than a good one; it guarded against pride and glorified God. And yet the very effort to overcome the self establishes it all the more firmly within our field of vision.37 Autobiography, in contrast to theater, promises facticity instead of fiction, revelation of inner depth rather than presentation of outer surfaces. The author of an autobiography was called upon to confess the gap between appearances and reality, to confess her recurrent failures of exemplarity. At the same time, the very act of authorship constituted a claim to attention and so in some sense to exemplarity. An autobiography tracing the hand of grace in one’s life nevertheless also draws attention to the one in whose life grace has been active. This becomes problematic in a context in which “the self” is simultaneously coming into focus and under suspicion. Confessing the utter bankruptcy of human agency, Puritan writers nevertheless established their agency through the act of narrative self-definition. Augustine, too, traced the hand of grace in his life; he too looked

ch a p t er se v en

206

within in order to find truth, to find God. He looked within, though, primarily in order to discern the radical contingency of his own being and agency on God. He sought to know his own soul as the image of God. Despite his keen appreciation for human sinfulness, of our refusal to acknowledge the dependency of our being on God, he nevertheless always retained this conviction that the primary reason to return within yourself is to be able to discern the positive truth of one’s own participation in God.38 As for our corrupt tendency to deny our radical dependency on God, this, as we have seen, he held to be healed as through grace we encounter the beauty of God in Christ, often mediated to us through the exempla of the saints. God is honored through the celebration of these exempla. For the Puritans, in contrast, lacking an appreciation for the positive participation of human being and agency in God, self-examination was carried out for the purpose of honestly confessing the utter wickedness of the self, to stimulate a vivid awareness of one’s need for grace, and ultimately to provide reassurance that no trace of self-confidence remained to suggest that one was not, after all, truly converted and among the elect. Any movement beyond this to positive aspiration or exemplarity could not but indicate that one’s humility had, after all, been false.

Bunyan’s Grace Abounding Perhaps the most famous example of Puritan autobiographical writing is John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, written during Bunyan’s imprisonment for preaching without a license and published in 1666.39 Just as chapter 5 explored the Jesuit theatrical tradition primarily through close readings of a few select plays, we turn now to this particular paradigmatic example of Puritan life-writing. Acutely conscious that he can do nothing to change whether or not he is among the elect, all of Bunyan’s considerable energies are directed inward, to the task of honestly discerning who he is. Seeking assurance of his election, he is tossed back and forth between the objectivity of scriptural promises, which may not apply to him, and his own subjective consciousness, which may deceive him. His narrative act seeks to fix what might otherwise be a transient sense of assurance, to inscribe his identity as elect in words whose objectivity emulates that of scripture. Further, Bunyan offers his own narratively fixed identity to others as an aid to their own efforts at

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

207

self-examination, assisting them in forming themselves into a particular shape of the Christian life. Here is an interpretive assertion of agency that understands itself as a ceding of agency, which denounces as hypocritical and hubristic any aspiration to transform the self.40 Grace Abounding exists as a performative contradiction of a spirituality hostile to rhetoric, intensely individualistic and private, and suspicious of human agency and aspiration.41 It is just this sort of performative contradiction that we should expect if in fact we are formed (by grace) in Christian virtue as we work to make sense of our lives through constant reference to exemplary narratives of Christian life. Despite itself, Grace Abounding shows that even the desire to cede one’s agency wholly to divine will must express itself as active aspiration and self-formation, even if, as so often in the realm of Puritan self-scrutiny, it also gives rise to repeated paralysis and uncertainty.42 Bunyan addresses his preface to his “children,” to those “whom God hath counted him worthy to beget to faith, by his ministry in the word.”43 Bunyan’s responsibility is to care for the spiritual welfare of his children, but how can he do so from prison? Modeled from its inception on Paul’s prison epistles, Bunyan’s purpose is to edify his flock and to support them through their times of persecution.44 But the scattered autobiographical passages that we find in Paul’s letters have expanded to make up the main body of Bunyan’s work; the letter addressed to others has been reduced to an appendage to a work focused on the self. At the same time, Bunyan carefully avoids claiming his conversion to a life of Christian virtue as his own achievement. What he writes is “a relation of the work of God upon my own soul.” 45 While he does in a sense present his life as a paradigm for others, it is not as a pattern of agency to be imitated. It is offered as an example for those seeking to discern their election, to discover who they truly are, not for those aspiring to become what they are not yet. Bunyan’s narration of his own experiences cannot so much enable others to enact their own conversion or shape their own virtue as simply to help them interpret their own inner lives, to achieve a true understanding of them, to see the work of God within their souls. Bunyan focuses on his consciousness and invites others to scrutinize their own consciousnesses; not because of a fascination with subjectivity as such but because it was here that one could discover signs of election and approbation. The danger that most threatened the search for signs of grace was that of self-deception. Part of the impulse behind Puritan autobiographical writing is the hope that if we cannot achieve a full self-understanding,

ch a p t er se v en

208

a full grasp of the ways of God with us, as we live our lives, perhaps we can do so in retrospect. Perhaps the narration of one’s life can achieve that elusive honesty, can penetrate the momentary successes of self-deception. And Bunyan is clearly intent on achieving this self-transparency— ironically, honesty becomes the one virtue that Bunyan seems to claim for himself, while all else is God’s work in him. A plain and simple style is central to Bunyan’s aspiration to honesty; a “high” or “adorned” style, he says, might fail to “lay down the thing as it was.” 46 Where Erasmus embraced the transformative power of rhetoric and the Jesuits insisted that virtue must appear in order to be effective, Bunyan suspects that one who is capable of employing a polished and elevated style is also capable of deceiving through this style.47 “The deep distrust, even fear, of verbal manipulation in the seventeenth century,” writes Stanley Fish, “is a recognition of the fact that there is no adequate defence against eloquence at the moment of impact.” 48 For Bunyan, the educated are suspect because of their rhetorical skill; the unlearned are more likely to embody the virtue of honesty. And honesty is required because life is not a game, not a play, not “playing”; what is at stake is eternity: “God did not play in convincing of me; the devil did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me: wherefore I may not play in my relating of them.” 49 Honesty continues, though, to be elusive even from—or perhaps especially from—the retrospective vantage point of autobiographical narrative. Bunyan exaggerates when he writes that his family was “of that rank that is meanest, and most despised of all the families in the land”; in fact, his father was a tinker, so an independent craftsman, who owned his own cottage and had the means to send Bunyan to school.50 So while Bunyan is conscious of the ways in which rhetoric might undermine his honest purpose, he does nevertheless expect his life to fall into the shape of a recognizable plot and, in particular, assume the shape of all conversion narratives at the time: the life of sin with signs of providential care perceived in retrospect; conviction of sin and conversion; and postconversion trials giving way to a sense of peace.51 It has been argued that the didactic purpose of Bunyan’s autobiography distorted it fundamentally: “despite Bunyan’s apparent artlessness, when every incident of a man’s life is made to serve a didactic, evangelical purpose one inevitably fears that the forces of distortion and self-deception may also be at work.” 52 But this seems rather like the way in which the student of virtue seeks to shape her life

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

209

after the pattern of the virtuous exemplar. If the narrative shaping took place only in retrospect one might be tempted to say that the autobiographer has distorted what “really” happened, what he was “really” like, while the student of virtue seeks prospectively to become her ideal. But given that the narrative shaping of a person’s life also occurs as that life is being lived, it is a prospective as well as a retrospective yearning to enact an ideal, or at least to take on a recognizable shape. Bunyan sought to live a life that would conform to the ideal Puritan conversion narrative, not just to write a narrative that would so conform. The problems here are posed not so much by Bunyan’s rhetorical selfshaping as such but by his refusal to acknowledge this act. What he deceives himself about is his own agency. He aspires simply to discern who he is—hopefully among the elect—to be able to narrate that it was truly God who convicted him of his sinfulness and assured him of forgiveness and salvation. He seeks to narrate the evacuation of his agency, his sole reliance on God’s mercy. The retrospective narrative promises to make this possible in a way that a diary, for instance, would not; only after he has found firm assurance of his election can he be confident about differentiating signs of election from expressions of hubris. But in fact in narrating his conversion, Bunyan asserts his agency rather than resigning it. He interprets himself and so shapes his self-understanding. This is not to say that he does not at the same time discern the ways of God with him. But he himself—in striking contrast to Augustine—is unable to grasp that God might be at work in his own rhetorical self-shaping, that his assertion of interpretive agency could be anything but a displacement of God’s agency. Honesty is not to be equated here with revelation of idiosyncrasy; what is significant about Bunyan is not what makes him unique but what assimilates him to “sinner” and “saint.” While Bunyan might be thought to exaggerate his sinfulness in claiming to be the “chief of sinners,” this title is not so much a specific self-description as it is an identification with his chief model, Paul, through an allusion to 1 Timothy 1:15: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” 53 Bunyan’s experiences thus gain authority in proportion to the degree to which they conform to the Pauline paradigm. It is this embodiment of an earlier example that allows them to give hope to all those who are “chief of sinners,” rather than remaining a record of an idiosyncratic individual. Related to this is the fact that Bunyan does not think it important to describe his sins in any detail. At one point he refers generi-

ch a p t er se v en

210

cally to “all manner of vice and ungodliness” and at another simply to “cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming.” Reading this today, we are inclined to feel that we do not really know Bunyan, because he does not reveal enough about his particular inclinations and activities. Bunyan, though, preoccupied as he is with honesty, does not regard this silence as a failure of sincerity. There is no fascination with sinful actions as especially revealing of himself as a particular individual; looking ahead, we might contrast this with Rousseau. Indeed, while Bunyan does tell us much more about his psychological torments on the road to conversion than about his life of sin, some of his blasphemous thoughts he refuses to put to paper; “these suggestions,” he writes, “. . . I may not, nor dare utter, neither by word nor pen.” Why may he not reveal them? Because they were suggestions made by “the tempter” which, if revealed, might have the power to tempt others. And the failure to reveal them does not undermine Bunyan’s honesty, since they were not, after all, of the self; Bunyan emphasizes that although they “did make such a seizure upon my spirit, and did so over-weigh my heart,” still “by the distaste that they gave unto my spirit, I felt there was something in me that refused to embrace them.” It is different where he considers a sinful desire as his own, as something with which he at one time identified; here he does think it important to make a full confession. So, for instance, when he first experiences conviction for his sins, that is, a sense of guilt over them, he falls into despair. This did so possess my soul, that I was persuaded I could never attain to other comfort than what I should get in sin; for heaven was gone already . . . wherefore I found within me a great desire to take my fill of sin . . . and I made as much haste as I could to fill my belly with its delicates, lest I should die before I had my desire; for that I feared greatly. In these things, I protest before God, I lie not, neither do I feign this form of speech: these were really, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires; the good Lord, whose mercy is unsearchable, forgive me my transgressions.” 54

It is not enough here simply to reveal his past sinful desire, but he must add an additional claim of present honesty. Otherwise, the reader might suspect Bunyan of exaggerating for dramatic effect. Bunyan protests before God that these were “really, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires”; he insists that he was at that time wholly given over to sinful

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

211

desire even as he is now wholly dedicated to honest self-revelation. Sincere conviction of sin is a sign of election; rhetorical exaggeration, on the other hand, would be a sign of hubris, a refusal of the dependency of grace. Along with the theme of honesty comes a theme of hypocrisy.55 Even at a very early point in the narrative, at which sin is still pleasurable to Bunyan and the very mention of piety distasteful, he pauses to note that hypocritical claims to goodness caused him intense distress: “this I well remember, that though I could myself sin with the greatest delight and ease, and also take pleasure in the vileness of my companions; yet even then, if I have at any time seen wicked things by those that professed goodness, it would make my spirit tremble.” This stands in striking contrast to what takes place after Bunyan’s first pseudo-conversion, to a religion of external observances, “to wit, to go to church twice a day, and that too with the foremost, and there . . . very devoutly both say and sing as others did.” This “spirit of superstition,” as Bunyan calls it, was a sterile venture because it failed, Bunyan says, to “reach my heart” and convict it of sin. Not only does his wicked life continue unabated but his earlier sensitivity to hypocrisy is radically undermined. He comes to regard all objects and persons connected with the church as holy simply by virtue of this connection, and remarks, “this conceit grew so strong in little time upon my spirit, that had I but seen a priest (though never so sordid and debauched in his life) I should find my spirit fall under him, reverence him, and knit unto him.” 56 So Bunyan clearly marks the dangers of “superstition,” of a religion focused on external ceremony; it undermines the native rejection of hypocrisy that is one sign of God’s providential care for sinners. This emphasis continues at a later stage of Bunyan’s journey. He moves beyond simply going to church twice a day to attempting to reform his life. Bunyan stresses that this, too, was a mere “outward reformation,” though one that his neighbors considered a true conversion. His focus at the time was not on his need for Christ’s grace but on his own ability to transform his life. Looking back, he stresses not his inability to bring about a reformation but rather the hypocrisy of it all: My neighbors were amazed at this my great conversion, from prodigious profaneness, to something like a moral life; and truly, so they well might; for this my conversion was as great, as for Tom of Bethlem to become a sober man. Now, therefore, they began to praise, to

ch a p t er se v en

212

commend, and to speak well of me, both to my face, and behind my back. Now, I was, as they said, become godly; now, I was become a right honest man. But O! When I understood that these were their words and opinions of me, it pleased me mighty well: for though, as yet, I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite, yet I loved to be talked of as one that was truly godly.

The problem is not that Bunyan has failed to change his ways; indeed, he emphasizes how dramatic the change was. But he was not changed from within, something, he implies, that only God can do. The pride he takes in his conversion is a telltale sign both that he regards his new virtue as his own accomplishment and that he has, after all, failed to achieve virtue. Only later, though, will he realize this, recognize that there is “a great difference between that faith that is fained, and according to man’s wisdom, and of that which comes by a man being born thereto of God.” 57 It is by hearing the poor women of Bedford confessing their own “wretchedness of heart” and “unbelief ” that Bunyan says he became aware of “the deceitfulness and treachery of my own wicked heart” and moved decisively closer to conversion. Thus, their honest confession of sin makes Bunyan aware of his own self-deception, of the hypocrisy of his external virtue. He is attracted by their joy, but it is not as models of virtue that they confront him, but as models of honest sinners who rely wholly on the love of Christ. Bunyan begins to spend more and more time with the Christians of Bedford, but his struggle remains an overwhelmingly lonely one. He perceives the Bedford Christians as living in a new world, from which he is cut off; he is not drawn by them into the community of the Body of Christ but feels himself driven off to wrestle alone with the words of the Bible. “They were to me,” he writes, “as if they had found a new world, as if they were people that dwelt alone, and were not to be reckoned amongst their neighbours (Num. 23:9).” Bunyan’s sense of isolation is exacerbated by his fear of self-deception; aware of how appearances can deceive, he cannot trust others, even honest Christians, truly to perceive the state of his soul. So having finally begun to tell the Christians of Bedford about his spiritual struggles, he notes that the pastor “took occasion to talk with me, and was willing to be well persuaded of me, though I think but from little grounds.” He compares his own spiritual struggles with those of others, and this confirms his lonely state; “I saw some could mourn and lament their sin; and others, again, could rejoice, and bless God for Christ; and others, again,

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

213

could quietly talk of, and with gladness remember, the Word of God; while I only was in the storm or tempest. This much sunk me; I thought my condition was alone.” 58 Of course, Bunyan narrates his own experience of isolation in order to free others from theirs, to lend a sense of community in suffering.59 Bunyan’s autobiography is most likely based on the oral testimony he gave in 1653 in order to be received into the membership of the Independent church in Bedford.60 Such a narrative makes “outer” what is “inner,” achieves a synthesis between the general and the particular, and thus integrates the individual within a community. A narrative of conversion, in order to be recognizable as such, must approximate a conventional pattern. On the other hand, in order to be credible, it must display sufficient particular detail and idiosyncratic variation to convey the actual lived experience of an individual. Bunyan’s autobiography achieves this precarious balance between the general and the particular. In its final 1666 form, moreover, Grace Abounding was no longer an appeal for membership in a community, but a model for others’ efforts to understand their individual experiences in relation to communal paradigms. “I thought my condition was alone,” but in fact it was not; in retrospect he sees that his struggles have after all taken a familiar, recognizable shape. In tracing this shape he can hope to relieve others’ sense of isolation in their experiences of loneliness; they will doubtless continue to feel alone, but they may on another level be able to grasp their sense of isolation as a common stage of the journey to faith. Thus we see here the irony that Puritan autobiographical narratives do serve as a kind of social formation, but for a life of intense introspection and isolation. Bunyan’s first lonely struggle with scripture is undertaken in order to discover whether or not he has faith, which he hopes will in turn tell him whether he is among the elect. One of the obstacles to achieving knowledge of his spiritual state lies in the fact that Bunyan does not even know whether to regard these questions as stimulated, as he once says, by “my own prudence,” as temptations of Satan, or as awakened by God.61 Bunyan distrusts his own spiritual experiences; when he begins to feel that he is indeed loved and forgiven by God, he worries that he might nevertheless “be deceived and destroyed at the last.” When he takes comfort in scripture, he worries that this may be a false comfort, for the words may not apply to him: “whatever comfort and peace I thought I might have from the Word of the promise of life; yet unless there could be found in my refreshment a concurrence and agreement in the Scrip-

ch a p t er se v en

214

tures, let me think what I will thereof, and hold it never so fast, I should find no such thing at the end.” Thus Bunyan’s challenge is to discover whether it is ultimately the words of comfort or the words of wrath that are addressed to him. This tendency to question his own experiences of spiritual comfort is reinforced by the Bedford pastor, who, Bunyan notes: “Made it much his business to deliver the people of God from all those false and unsound rests that by nature we are prone to take and make to our souls; he pressed us to take special heed, that we took not up any truth upon trust, as from this or that or another man or men, but to cry mightily to God, that he would convince us of the reality thereof, and set us down therein by his own Spirit in the holy Word.” 62 So Bunyan is convinced that it is ultimately God alone who must discover and reveal Bunyan’s spiritual state and show him whether he is to take the words of wrath or of grace as his own.63 And it is perhaps because Bunyan’s own agency is useless in this matter that his process of self-discovery is so tempestuous. W. R. Owens notes that “Bunyan’s difficulties were increased, paradoxically enough, because of his absolute reliance on the Scriptures as the sole repository of religious truth, and because of what he later regarded as his inexperience in interpretation, which left him at the mercy of apparently conflicting texts.” 64 Rather than a smooth progression toward conversion, Bunyan struggles with wildly alternating moods, to such an extent that he claims to be out of his right mind, that is, he loses his grip on his own self-identity.65 The sense of assurance must reside within his own subjective consciousness, but this is notoriously untrustworthy. Scripture is objective and reliable, but are its promises addressed to him? And is this momentary confidence that they indeed are a gift from God or mere self-deception? Bunyan flounders in his tormented inner world. While it is the Word of God in scripture that must decisively address Bunyan to determine who he really is, other “words” are also important in Bunyan’s search for self-knowledge. During one vivid experience of the love of God, Bunyan longs to fix his experience and thus his own spiritual identity by writing it down; “I said in my soul with much gladness, well, I would I had a pen and ink here, I would write this down before I go any further, for surely I will not forget this, forty years hence; but alas! Within less than forty days I began to question all again.” Here is the sense that perhaps a spiritual diary might help to fix the sense of assurance, to stabilize the subjective self-consciousness. And what the

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

215

reader of Grace Abounding encounters is indeed an identity fixed through the act of writing, even if fixed through a record of restless struggle. Another point at which words prove important to Bunyan comes immediately after his initial experience of the assurance of grace. He notes that he longed to read a record of “some ancient godly man’s experience, who had writ some hundred of years before I was born.” What he desires here is an experience that confirms his own, but this experience will possess authority only if ancient and written down, truly fixed beyond all possible alteration. God sends his way a copy of Luther’s commentary on Galatians, and Bunyan is delighted, for, he writes, “I found my condition in his experience, so largely and profoundly handled as if his book had been written out of my heart.” 66 Just as it is the Word that must reveal who Bunyan really is, so it is also words that can accompany him on his paths of lonely self-exploration. In chapter 2 we considered the ways in which Augustine offers the story of his conversion as part of a cascade of examples offered for emulation. What Bunyan seeks—and what he in turn offers to others—is also an example of sorts, but in quite a different sense than within the classical cum humanist tradition of exempla. Like Bunyan, Augustine relates the battles that raged in his heart; he explores his inner consciousness, his desires, hesitations, divided will (Conf. 8.10–11). In reflecting on these experiences, he seeks to learn about the nature of the will, the mind, human nature, the soul, and from this to learn about God in whose image we are made and to whom we are called. Augustine offers examples to inspire imitation, examples that are beautiful, that attract the beholder, that in some way confront the beholder with the beauty of God. To strive to emulate these examples is not a hubristic refusal of grace but can itself be God’s transformative work in the activity of the aspirant. Bunyan seeks, fi rst, to learn whether he is among the elect or the reprobate; he is focused on himself, not on God. He examines his selfconsciousness because it can reveal his identity to him, because it is the site at which God delivers the promises of scripture to him personally. He narrates his self-examination in order to fix its results, and offers his narrative to others to assist them in the task of self-examination, not so that they can find God through their own imaging of God, and not so they can aspire to emulate a beautiful example and thereby draw nearer to God, but so that they can find out who they are. If others imitate his example, it is not in the trust that grace can act through their activity

ch a p t er se v en

216

but in the paradoxical hope that through restless self-scrutiny, perhaps even through narratively fixing their identity, they can express their utter resignation of agency. Conviction of sin, conversion, and assurance of grace do not bring secure self-knowledge to Bunyan. Looking back, he perceives how greatly he overestimated his love for Christ at this stage; “I found, as I thought, that I loved Christ dearly . . . but I did quickly find, that my great love was but little.” Tormented for over a year by the temptation to “sell and part with this most blessed Christ,” Bunyan finally gives way: “One morning as I did lie in bed, I was, as at other times, most fiercely assaulted with this temptation, to sell and part with Christ; the wicked suggestion still running in my head, sell him, sell him, sell him, as fast as a man could speak; against which also in my mind, as at other times I answered, no, no, not for thousands, thousands, thousands, at least twenty times together; but at last, after much striving, even until I was almost out of breath, I felt this thought pass through my heart, Let him go if he will! And I thought also that I felt my heart freely consent thereto.” 67 His new torment, then, is whether he has committed thereby the unpardonable sin and thus forfeited grace. Again he must struggle to understand himself, to fathom the nature of what he has, in his innermost heart, done. And again the answer to his question can only be found in scripture; it is God’s Word that will tell him who he finally is. Bunyan’s encounter with scripture is intensely physical. Verses of scripture come to his mind unbidden, and Bunyan struggles to determine whether they are sent there by God or Satan. In tormented despair, Bunyan recalls trying to flee from God: But blessed be his grace, that scripture in these flying fits would call, as running after me, I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins: return unto me, for I have redeemed thee (Isa. 44:22). . . . Indeed, this would make me a little stop, and, as it were, look over my shoulder behind me, to see if I could discern that the God of grace did follow me with a pardon in his hand, but I could no sooner do that, but all would be clouded and darkened again by that sentence, For you know how that afterwards, when he would have inherited the blessing, he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.

At another point, when a certain verse is comforting him, he says that “this good sentence stood like a mill-post at my back,” but then bemoans

Bunyan and Puritan Life-Writing: Self-Examination

217

the fact that “towards the evening of the next day, I felt this word begin to leave me.” Ultimately, Bunyan invites the verse of grace and the verse of wrath to meet in his heart for a duel: “I remember one day, as I was in diverse frames of spirit, and considering that these frames were still according to the nature of the several scriptures that came in upon my mind; if this of grace, then I was quiet; but if that of Esau [and his sold birthright], then tormented. Lord, thought I, if both these scriptures would meet in my heart at once, I wonder which of them would get the better of me.” The duel does in fact take place, and the words of wrath “began to wax weak, and withdraw, and vanish,” while those of grace “prevailed, with peace and joy.” 68 Bunyan marks this duel as a turning point in resolving his struggle to determine whether he had in fact committed the unforgivable sin. Only after this point does he begin to develop a less mechanistic mode of scriptural interpretation. This is only possible when the duel has been concluded, for it is not until this point that Bunyan’s fear subsides enough to allow him not merely to entertain snatches of scripture but to read these snatches within their broader context: “then methought I durst venture to come nigh unto those most fearful and terrible scriptures, with which all this while I had been so greatly affrighted, and on which indeed before I durst scarce cast mine eye, . . . but now, I say, I began to take some measure of encouragement, to come close to them, to read them and consider them, and to weigh their scope and tendency.” 69 Able to consider their “natural force and latitude,” he discovers a deeper peace, for he perceives that his was not a considered, willful sin, which he now sees to be requisite to the unforgivable sin of rejecting Christ after having once been accepted into the fold, but an unwilling, hasty impulse. So he comes, based on his capacity to consider scriptural verses within their proper context, to see intentionality as crucial to the determination of responsibility. He also claims to have found permanent resolution of his tormented search for self-knowledge through a reliance on the objective work of Christ. The righteousness of Christ, he argues, makes his own inner state irrelevant. I saw “that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse: for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself.” So Bunyan’s tormented inner search, to attempt to discern first whether he has faith and then whether he has rejected this faith in committing the unforgivable sin, concludes—or rather, his narrative concludes—with the ability

ch a p t er se v en

218

finally to “look from myself to him,” that is, to focus on Christ rather than himself. Christ, he comes to see, is “that common or public person, in whom all the whole body of his elect are always to be considered and reckoned.” 70 Bunyan depicts himself as having passed over from restless self-examination, a form of fruitless activity, to a passive—and peaceful—reliance on Christ. Yet Bunyan’s capacity to look to Christ rests on his confidence that he is indeed elect, part of the Body of Christ. And this confidence, again, as for Calvin himself, can only be found within his subjective awareness of that election. So there is an instability built into this apparent resolution; tormented self-examination and passive reliance are linked in a way that fosters a kind of oscillation from one to the other. Only within the narrative, we suspect, does Bunyan find the peace he is seeking. In fact, he concedes that even this “sweet and blessed comfort” remained with him only “about a twelvemonth.” 71 Only in Grace Abounding is his identity as elect fixed, as objective in its inscribed letters as the words of scripture on a page.72 But inasmuch as this fixedness has resulted from Bunyan’s own narrative act, his own interpretive agency, it can from his perspective only be suspect.

the a natom y of v irtue

iv

Jesuits and Jansenists

8

Gracián and Pascal Depictions of the study of human character and action as a form of anatomy reach at least back to La Rochefoucauld, who wrote in a letter of “a fear of [untoward] events to which one has preferred to assign the name of virtue than to perform the anatomy of all the layers of the heart.” 1 The term was embraced by Bernard Mandeville, who in the preface to Fable of the Bees compared his inquiries into human nature and society with the activities of those “that study the Anatomy of Dead Carcases.” 2 Just as what enables the motion of natural bodies is not beautiful organs like the skin or obvious features like bones but “small trifling Films and little Pipes that are either over-look’d, or else seem inconsiderable to Vulgar Eyes,” so what renders human persons sociable are their “vilest and most hateful Qualities” (I, 3–4). David Hume, drawing on Mandeville, suggested that moral philosophers may be either painters or anatomists; he declared himself, in the Treatise of Human Nature, to be an anatomist. Both emphasized that they were bringing hidden things to light and also that what they brought to light might be ugly, shocking, or in some other way apparently incapable of bringing about anything worthwhile in the moral or social realm. This enterprise of moral anatomy, which sought to unearth the processes of character formation that give rise to socially desirable character and behavior, is characteristic of seventeenth-century European moral thought.3 It can be variously rooted in Machiavelli’s hard-edged political realism, Montaigne’s project of sounding out his own idiosyncratic character, and Castiglione’s advice to aspiring courtiers.4 Some thinkers undertook this analytical project in order to facilitate a pursuit of worldly greatness that could be assimilated to the pursuit of heavenly

ch a p t er eigh t

222

greatness (Gracián), others in order to show how false worldly virtue providentially mimics true Christian virtue (Nicole), others yet in order to demonstrate the social utility of “false” worldly virtue (Mandeville). I characterize them as a group as “Anatomists.” Different as these thinkers were, they were united by their interest in the ways in which virtue (or at least apparent virtue) is socially constituted. What allowed such an enterprise to get off the ground was a growing perception of the social realm not simply as an arena of faithfulness and/or resistance to God but as a realm governed by empirical regularities that could be analyzed and perhaps even manipulated for conscious ends. The massive crossconfessional Reformation effort to Christianize society nourished growing confidence in the possibility and legitimacy of an activist, interventionist relationship to the social order, and the Anatomist enterprise is one expression of this impulse.5 Moral anatomy analyzed the way in which human desires for praise, honor, and respect lead persons to cultivate habits of action that show consideration and care for others. Human virtue, the Anatomists affirmed, as rooted in pride, is a product of the commerce of self-love. They were fascinated—some also horrified—with the “hypocrisy” of such virtue, which seemed deceptive to its core. How were the humanly acquired virtues so understood to be mapped onto inherited contrasts between true and apparent, worldly and heavenly, pagan and Christian virtue? Of the very many thinkers who could be considered Anatomists I have selected a decisive handful: Balthasar Gracián, Blaise Pascal, Pierre Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, and Bernard Mandeville. Gracián, whom I take up first, comes out of the Jesuit tradition and represents a characteristic deviance from what I have articulated as an Erasmian-humanist conception of Christian virtue. Pascal, Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, and, at greater remove, Mandeville, are rooted rather in the French Augustinian tradition. Gracián seeks to mediate between worldly virtue and Christian virtue, but does so in problematic ways. The Jansenists, on the other hand, distinguish sharply between false worldly virtue and true Christian virtue in a way that denaturalizes and mystifies Christian virtue while rendering worldly virtue an increasingly understandable, available, and useful social practice.6 A neatly linear narrative of transition over the course of the seventeenth century from an ethic of glory, which sought to exploit the hypocrisy of worldly virtue in order to advance personal greatness, to a disgusted rejection of the place of

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

223

deception and self-deception in worldly virtue, to the hope that through keen self-knowledge and honesty one can simultaneously rise above the hypocrisy of worldly virtue while applauding its value for the masses, would falsify the ongoing multiplicity of moral anatomies.7 Still, we can bring some intelligibility into this polyphonic discourse. Gracián and the Jansenists represent two distinct ways in which Christian thinkers engaged with an anatomizing discourse of courtly civility, which openly dismissed the relevance of Christian ideals and principles: the first, by seeking to appropriate it; the second, by condemning it. Both ended up assisting Anatomist discourse in transforming courtly civility from a conventional social code of the elite into a philosophical account of natural morality—despite the fact that there was nothing necessary or inevitable about this process of secularization. It has been suggested that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries virtue as “manners” displaced an older civic republican understanding of virtue as devotion to the common good, exercised through active participation in ruling and being ruled.8 “The social psychology of the age declared that encounters with things and persons evoked passions and refined them into manners; it was preeminently the function of commerce to refine the passions and polish the manners; and the social ethos of the age of enlightenment was built upon” these encounters.9 What the Anatomists scrutinize is this arena of social commerce, of multiplying relationships that developed along with the division of labor and increasing leisure.10 Virtue as manners was suspect from the point of view of the civic republican tradition because it centrally involved networks of dependency, whereas republican virtú prized independence. But we cannot fully understand virtue as manners, or the suspiciousness with which the accompanying social practices were often anatomized, unless we understand how bourgeois manners develop as an extension and democratization of the Renaissance practice of courtly civility.11 Nor did appeals to civic virtue simply die out; on the contrary, they formed the basis of ongoing critiques of mere exterior manners or politeness in the name of a true honor that expresses inner virtue and serves the commonweal.12 Not only the Third Earl of Shaftesbury but also John Locke and the Addison and Steele of Tatler fame offer arguments in this vein on behalf of true civility against courtly civility. The pithy expressions of both Gracián and La Rochefoucauld gain intelligibility when set against the backdrop of efforts to translate the nobility of active (military) virtú into the context of polite courtly society.

ch a p t er eigh t

224

How could one achieve greatness or nobility in this new social setting? 13 Effective action at court required not physical strength but social sensitivity. Instead of ethical reflection on true courage versus foolhardiness and on the justifiable use of force, what was now needed was ethical reflection on proper and improper ways to influence others, to negotiate, to offer counsel. Courtiers were often perceived as flatterers, and the court was understood as an arena in which hypocrisy flourished. (Erasmus devoted a major section of The Education of a Christian Prince to advice on how to avoid flattery, and this was a typical topic taken up within the mirror-for-princes genre.14) In such a context moral anatomy took root and began to flourish. We can understand why hypocrisy was such a central theme in Anatomist discourse. The courtier cultivated external appearances, seeking to please others in order to win their favor even if this required dissimulation; “the ultimate aim of civility and politeness was nothing less than winning a favourable response from other gentlemen.” 15 Isolated individuals would have no reason to be hypocritical; hypocrisy flourishes in contexts of close social interaction, and in particular where relations of dependency or interdependency exist and must be protected through the avoidance of open conflict.16 Even in our own social context, manners are certainly insincere, if not outright hypocritical. Manners facilitate social relationships by allowing persons to treat others according to fixed formulae, as opposed to interacting with them as particular individuals. By acting in a mannerly way, persons avoid arousing suspicion and resentment in others, but they also avoid revealing much about their own thoughts and genuine appraisals of others. So we routinely affirm that we are doing well and expect to hear the same from others (“Hi, how are you?” “I’m fine, how are you?”), thank others even when we are not fully satisfied with what they have done for us, give compliments that exaggerate our actual assessments (“You look great!”). Where courtesy or manners are understood as constituting an all-encompassing ethos, rather than simply as a code governing a limited aspect of social interactions, it is hardly surprising that human nature would be seen both as utterly self-serving and as thoroughly deceptive. It is not until we reach Mandeville that we really see courtly civility reduced to bourgeois manners, spilling over the boundaries of the court and governing the commercial life of the city.17 Against Shaftesbury and others who defended an honest civility expressive of inner virtue, Mandeville argued that hypocritical civility would better foster a flour-

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

225

ishing society. He thus undermined the civic republican critique of bourgeois manners. Alongside the discursive counterpoint of republican virtú, courtly civility, and bourgeois manners, the Augustinian critique of all of these as merely apparent virtue sounded a basso continuo. From the perspective of Augustinian critics, all of these ideals amounted to nothing more than the prideful pursuit of glory, honor, or self-esteem in some form or another, and thus none constituted true virtue.18 Advocates of republican virtú, sustaining the ambience of quattrocento Florence, were enthusiastic about the possibilities of motivating civic devotion by holding out the laurels of glory and honor. Gracián is representative of those who believed that the same pursuit of greatness could be translated into the arena of courtly civility and that true virtue could and indeed must now be secured through a virtuosity in self-presentation that required concealment and deception.19 Augustinian critics could make common cause with one of these ideals against another to some limited extent— that is, praising dedication to the common good over pursuit of private interest along with republican virtú, or praising peaceableness over warlikeness along with virtue as manners. But republican devotion to the common good and bourgeois manners nevertheless remained subject to anatomization as forms of false worldly virtue. As we shall discuss in further detail below, the Jansenists, however rightly they have been regarded as crypto-Protestant in their understandings of human nature, original sin, and predestination, preserved a more traditionally Catholic understanding of justification as a process of growth in charity rather than as a foundational moment underlying a distinct process of sanctification. Grace-enabled human agency can contribute to its own salvation. Despite their emphasis on sinful self-love, they did not emphasize recognition of the utter bankruptcy of human agency. We might, then, think that it makes little sense to term them hyper-Augustinian, and we might think, further, that their willingness to speak of human agency in the context of an affirmation of absolute divine sovereignty and their emphasis on gradual growth in charity might have fostered a recovery of an Erasmian-humanist reluctance to pass judgment on any virtue as merely civic virtue in confident contradistinction to true Christian virtue. This tendency is best captured by Pascal’s account of habituation in Christian practices as a path to faith. Pascal’s Wager implied that a transformation from outside in, of being through acting, could give rise to authentic faith, not, though, because this transformation takes place

ch a p t er eigh t

226

through human rather than divine agency, but because human agency in no way works to displace or exclude divine grace. Still, a bright line separates self-love from charity in Pascal’s thought; moral psychology remains on the shore with fallen human nature, unable to cross over to the mystery of true virtue, Christian charity. An affi rmation of the mystery of grace goes hand in hand here with the abandonment of the merely human to sinful self-love. Even if growth in the life of charity is gradual, it cannot be regarded as building on any development outside of the context of faith from self-love to pursuit of virtue for its own sake. Any such natural “development” is merely apparent, just a retrenchment of self-love. Love of God, in contrast, is understood as requiring dying to self, not just dying to sin and selfishness. The hyper-Augustinian tag remains apt, then, insofar as it marks, first, the Jansenists’ sharp suspicion of any hint of eudaimonism, any softening of an oppositional understanding of self-love and love of God, and, second, their conviction that fallen human nature in the absence of grace is capable only of more or less refined expressions of self-love. What is distinctive about the Anatomists is their increased fascination with and focus on the arena of merely worldly virtue. For Luther this virtue was only to be described in order to contrast it with true Christian righteousness. For the Anatomists it is a compelling object of attention and analysis in its own right. The Anatomists all accepted worldly virtue as emerging in predictable ways from the social interactions of human persons. They grappled with how to conceive of the scope of human agency on the one hand and grace on the other, in relation to these psychological and social mechanisms. Human virtue was no longer understood quite as Luther would have it, as a false assertion of human agency, since it seemed rather thrust upon human agency. Nor were these virtues understood, as later proponents of authenticity would have it, as alien impositions on an underlying true self—for was the true self underlying the worldly virtues of refined self-love composed simply of unrefined selflove? The ironic twist is the momentum this enterprise—even as carried out by Augustinian critics of worldly ways—lent to secular moral ideals. J. B. Schneewind finds it noteworthy that “the first modern thinkers to explore systematically the possibility that morality might or should be understood as having little or no connection with salvation were not unbelievers.” 20 The Anatomists represent one of the most important seeds of modern descriptive moral philosophy, of the attempt to understand

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

227

and describe how human character is formed through natural and social processes, as distinct from proclaiming an ideal for human behavior or seeking to articulate God’s role in bringing about that ideal. Whether intentionally or not, they made it possible to speak about (worldly) virtue quite apart from the question of what can bring us closer to God. We will see in chapter 9 how the balance tilts in the thought of Jansenist Pierre Nicole; the impenetrable realm of mysterious grace recedes in favor of a realm subject to human analysis and manipulation—the realm of merely human virtue. What the Anatomists lacked (whether Christian or secular, with the intriguing partial exception of Pascal) was Aristotle’s trust that ordinary processes of habituation move through, while transcending, the student’s focus on himself. Regrettably, the secular moral philosophy that exploited the Anatomist discourse of worldly virtue remained marked by its identification as an account of sinful self-love.

Gracián and the Pursuit of Grandeza Baltasar Gracián y Morales (1601–1658) was a Spanish Jesuit who served variously throughout his life as chaplain and confessor, professor, and rector of several Jesuit colleges. He was also a writer, who published a series of provocative treatises on worldly wisdom and political leadership, all without obtaining permission from the Jesuit order. Commanded repeatedly not to do so, Gracián continued to publish until, in the final year of his life, he was removed from his chair of Sacred Scripture at Zaragoza and placed under surveillance in a country town. Beginning with his first book, El héroe, Gracián continually sought to articulate a new heroic ideal for his era and concrete guidelines for achieving grandeza (greatness).21 While his writings are visibly rooted in the tradition of the speculum principis, the mirror of princes, he departs decisively from this model in offering advice meant not just for princes or nobility but for a broader array of self-cultivators.22 His model is more nearly that of Balthasar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, to which he makes frequent reference.23 After 1583, when Machiavelli’s works were placed on the Spanish Index, the genre of manual for politicians had taken on a distinctly antiMachiavellian profile.24 Gracián’s writings, too, are careful to hold Machiavelli at arms’ length; while his attention, like that of Machiavelli, is focused squarely on temporal existence, he argues that it is possible to

ch a p t er eigh t

228

be both great and good. And even if his works were published without permission, Gracián sought to assimilate worldly wisdom and Christian truth, rather than simply abandoning the latter. To call Gracián’s writings treatises is scarcely to do justice to the vast array of genres with which he experimented. Even within the single work El discreto, Gracián included allegories, letters, dialogues, satires, emblems, fables, allegories, and discourses. This play of genre, much like Kierkegaard’s much later use of multiple genres, layered narratives, and pseudonymous authorship, requires the reader to respond actively to situate herself in relation to the variety of perspectives she is offered. The reader is encouraged to cull the rules of the art of living as much from her own experience as from what she is reading and, as Aurora Egido claims, is required “not just to imitate, but to emulate models.” 25 If we earlier saw the Jesuit theatrical tradition intent on retaining control over the potential excess of example within its educational enterprise, here we see a Jesuit thinker embracing excess, seeking to unite the act of offering models for behavior with a demand for active reflection about and critical appropriation of those models. The Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (Manual Oracle of the Art of Prudence) is Gracián’s most widely dispersed and well-known work. It is a manual both in the sense of being a small handbook, the shortest of Gracián’s works, and a set of instructions for the reader. Consistent, though, with all of Gracián’s writings, the reader cannot simply follow the guidebook mechanically. The “oracle” requires interpretation before it can be put into application. The work is an oracle not in the sense of conveying esoteric wisdom but in that it consists solely in aphorisms, terse and varied, even at times apparently contradictory (and thus demanding further synthesis). There are many sources for the aphorisms Gracián offers, notably Seneca and neo-Stoicism on the one hand and skepticism on the other, but in bringing all of these together and elaborating them in his own distinctive way, Gracián creates something new: a science of shaping character for effective action in his own contemporary world.26 The work has been variously translated as The Oracle: A Manual of the Art of Discretion, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle, and Oracle: A Manual of the Art of Prudence.27 As these translations begin to indicate, Gracian’s prudencia, a habit of understanding that permits a person, through memory, intelligence, and planning, to discern between good and evil, is hardly St. Thomas’s virtue of prudence; it is more nearly taken from Cicero.28 Gracián’s earlier work, El discreto, had explored discretion as the

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

229

art of choosing well in life, so it is problematic to translate prudence here as discretion, but the two works do form a pair in concerning themselves with decidedly worldly (even if not anti-Christian) wisdom. Gracián’s Oracle is, then, a guide to achieving personal greatness. It is a lofty goal, but one Gracián believes is within reach. Even those who fail to achieve complete perfection, he suggests, will benefit from the tireless self-cultivation Gracián advocates. To be great is to be eminent, influential, and powerful. It is, thus, not just to be great but to be regarded as great. And the Oracle is permeated with concern for appearances and advice about how to cultivate appearances. So aphorism 67 advises, “Choose an occupation in which you can win praise. Most things depend upon the satisfaction of others. Esteem (la estimación) is to perfection what the zephyr is to flowers: breath and life.” 29 There is for Gracián no shame in seeking the praise of others. Indeed, he implies that esteem is somehow intrinsic to, or at least necessary to sustain, perfection; esteem is perfection’s “breath and life.” At times, it can seem as though Gracián cares only for appearances. Aphorism 99, on “Reality and Appearance,” notes that “things pass for what they seem, not for what they are. Only rarely do people look into them, and many are satisfied with appearances.” But Gracián is also concerned for substance; “It isn’t enough to be right if your face looks malicious and wrong” (99), but it also is not enough to have a face that looks benevolent and right. “Unhappy is the eminence that isn’t founded on substance,” he warns (175). And the substance of greatness requires virtue. In particular, excessive concern for appearances can backfire: “the more strenuously you seek esteem from others, the less of it you will have. It depends on respect. You can’t simply grab it, you have to deserve it and wait for it” (106). The great are cautious about displaying their merits: “Be excessive in your perfection but moderate about showing it. . . . To win true esteem, make yourself scarce” (85). The great take care not just to moderate their concern for appearances but even to hide that concern, so as to avoid affectation. “Even great gifts seem less valuable on account of affectation, for people attribute them to strain and artifice rather than to natural grace, and the natural is always more pleasant than the artificial. . . . The better you are at something, the more you should hide your efforts, so that perfection seems to occur naturally. Nor should you flee affectation by affecting not to have it” (123). There is, then, much artifice required for the achievement of greatness, and not the least of this artifice is devoted to the concealment of that very artifice.

ch a p t er eigh t

230

How does Gracián’s concern for eminence relate to his concern for virtue? In order to make sense of this relationship, it is important to understand Gracián’s thought in relationship to the cultural ideal of desengaño. Desengaño is usually rendered disillusionment or disenchantment, but a recent commentator on Gracián points out that the journey of life is for Gracián “not one in which a person loses his illusions, but his misconceptions of the world. Rather than lost, Gracián’s ‘illusions’ are reasserted.” 30 Desengaño, then, frees a person from false conceptions and expectations about the world, but it does not mean the destruction of one’s ideals, nor does it mean relinquishing the use of illusion. At the heart of desengaño lies the realization that much of what the world values is deceptive simply because it appears solid and lasting but is in fact impermanent and transitory. Having realized this, we turn from the pursuit of things that pass away and strive to grasp those that do not. It might seem as though the greatness that Gracián advises us to pursue is itself a fleeting thing. Gracián, though, often speaks of fame as though it were firm and lasting. In aphorism 10, for instance, he contrasts fame and fortune: “One is inconstant, the other firm. The latter helps us live, the former helps us later. Fortune against envy, fame against oblivion” (10). It becomes clear, though, that fame is lasting only when it is founded on virtue. So Gracián says that “virtue alone is for real; all else is sham” (300). Nevertheless, Gracián’s cultivation of virtue remains strategic. It is wise to pursue virtue rather than solely the appearance of virtue, not because it is really virtue rather than reputation that matters but because only the fame founded on substance is stable and lasting: “Only the truth can give you a true reputation, and only substance is profitable. One act of deceit calls for many others, and soon the whole ghastly construction, which is founded in the air, comes tumbling down. Unfounded things never reach old age” (175). The best way—the most reliable, lasting way—to appear virtuous is thus to be virtuous. Unlike Bidermann’s Cenodoxus, who acts virtuously only when others are watching, Gracián’s great man should “always behave as though others were watching” (297). He thus avoids the rank inconsistency that bedeviled Cenodoxus; he never slips out of character, for an imaginary audience serves him as well as a real one. Gracián himself, moreover, is content to call the habits of action formed by such a person true virtue, not hypocrisy. The grandeza at which Gracián’s art of self-cultivation aims cannot be reduced to moral goodness. Greatness requires power and influence,

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

231

and these are not themselves virtues, even if they can sometimes result from the exercise of virtuous character. Moreover, “virtue” for Gracián is a relatively broad category that encompasses any habit of character that contributes to greatness. In his lack of concern for distinguishing an arena of the “strictly moral,” Gracián is closer to Aristotle than to the Stoics, Augustine, or Aquinas. Gracián’s concern is not to identify a sphere of action that is peculiarly “ours,” for which we can be held responsible by God. Rather, his concern is to identify those aspects of our characters and persons—including notably the appearance of our character—that we can shape, so as to maximize the positive impression we make on others. Gracián is quite realistic about the limits that confront our efforts at self-shaping. Considerable luck is involved in the achievement of greatness. Not everyone can achieve the power and influence of a king; not everyone can make others dependent on her in the way a king can (5). But moral greatness is comparatively accessible: “You should resemble a king in merit, if not in reality, for true sovereignty lies in integrity. . . . Especially those who are near the throne should acquire something of true superiority. They should share the moral gifts of majesty rather than the pomp, and aspire to things lofty and substantial rather than to imperfect vanity” (103). Machiavelli also employed a conception of virtue that we would not consider moralized, but in contrast to Machiavelli, Gracián’s conception of virtue is closer to life at court than on the battlefield. Thus politeness, charm, and courtesy are central virtues; courage is not (260, 274). Greatness, then, encompasses more than virtue, even if virtue is an important component of greatness. And virtue encompasses more than what we would consider strictly moral traits. In fact, Gracián occasionally hints at some tension between the ends of greatness or eminence on the one hand and goodness on the other. The good are gullible and often foolish, and this precludes greatness: “No one is easier to fool than a good man; the person who never lies believes others easily, and the one who never deceives trusts others” (243). In a different context, he suggests, moral goodness might be perfectly assimilable to greatness. In his own times, though, characterized as they are by pervasive malice and deception, it is no longer enough just to be good. Strategy, calculation, and concealment are required in order to outwit the malicious, “man’s life on earth is a militia against malicia, or malice” (13).31 An extraordinary number of aphorisms elaborate on this theme. We

ch a p t er eigh t

232

are advised to “keep matters in suspense” rather than reveal ourselves and our intentions too quickly (3). We are told that beauty cannot be had without artifice; “Perfection turns into barbarism unless ennobled by artifice. Artifice rescues the bad and perfects the good. Nature often lets us down when we most need her; let us turn to art” (12). We are advised to conceal our intentions (179) and our feelings and to pretend to agree with the majority (43) as well as to adapt ourselves to the temperament of those we are with (77). We are told to learn how to be evasive and change the subject of a conversation (73), to tell partial truths (181), to hide our defects (126) as well as our talents (94), to conceal our knowledge (133) and affect foolishness (240). We are even advised to “sell air,” that is, to flatter others (267), and to let others take responsibility when things go awry (149). Gracián attempts to distinguish between the deceit of the malicious and the artifice and concealment employed by the virtuous. The obvious way to distinguish between the two is to appeal to the ends toward which they are directed; the virtuous employ artifice and concealment in order to defeat the malicious and promote the good, rather than in the service of evil, that is, selfish gain or harm to others. What complicates this distinction is of course the fact that Gracián’s virtuous man aims always at polishing his own image, and this can look like a matter of selfish gain. “Don’t be known for your artifice, though you can no longer live without it. . . . The best artifice is to conceal it, for artifice is taken as deceit. Plainness flourished in the age of gold, and malice in this age of iron” (219). Thus, while in this age the virtuous cannot live without artifice, they must conceal this artifice so that it will not appear as deceit; the virtuous pile deceit upon deceit in order to achieve the appearance of a sort of straightforward goodness that Gracián thinks is no longer possible. Key to the prudence Gracián advises his reader to cultivate is the ability to adapt to the particularities of a given situation. Gracián’s advice can appear self-contradictory at times, but this is because it seeks to be fine-tuned; a very different, even apparently opposite, response may be required in slightly different circumstances. This is true of the artifices Gracián discusses. The prudent person understands that virtue in Gracián’s age requires the use of artifice, despite the fact that it can appear opposed to the straightforward goodness of a simpler age. “Adapt yourself to circumstances,” urges Gracián. “Don’t live by generalities, unless it be to act virtuously. . . . The wise know that the polestar of prudence lies in adapting themselves to the occasion” (288).

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

233

The final aphorism in Gracián’s Oracle advises the reader, “In a word, be a saint; that says everything” (300). One might think that this is the final desengaño, which reveals the pursuit of fame and worldly greatness as a sham—after all, even if we are so great that we are remembered long after we die, surely a time will come when we are finally forgotten. Gracián can seem at times a modern pagan, devoid of transcendent reference points, so the robustly Christian “saint” startles. But sainthood as Gracián characterizes it ultimately builds on, rather than contrasts with, worldly wisdom. So the aphorism shifts immediately from advising the reader to be a saint to characterizing virtue as “a chain of all perfections, the center of all happiness. She makes you prudent, discreet, shrewd, sensible, wise, brave, cautious, honest, happy, praiseworthy, true . . . a universal hero.” Becoming a saint does require us to turn away from illusory worldly goods, but it does not require us to eschew the quest for fame and greatness. The quest for greatness can survive the process of desengaño most readily when it becomes a quest for winning fame with God. True greatness depends on virtue, and virtue alone is “for real” because virtue alone wins divine approval and praise. While virtue can render worldly fame somewhat more lasting, it is only in the eyes of God that fame can make us truly immortal. So Gracián’s final aphorism stresses that virtue is “so lovely that it wins God’s grace and that of others” (300). His attention is focused not on divine beauty but on the beauty of heroic human virtue. Like Lope de Vega’s Genesius, Gracián’s hero retains center stage even in heaven. This aphorism does stand apart in its reference to divine grace. Gracián confesses, then, at least obliquely, that we do stand in need of God’s grace. But that grace is something that we win through our own efforts, something subsequent to our own independent achievement of virtue. Gracián quotes as needing no comment the saying attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, “Use human means as though divine ones didn’t exist, and divine means as though there were no human ones” (251).32 The Oracle shows Gracián doing the former. Even here, it is not clear how he can leave room for the latter. And this emphasis on achieving a lasting reputation is carried through to the end of Gracián’s career; his final work, El criticón, o la búsqueda de la inmortalidad (The Critic, or the Search for Immortality), is not a pursuit of heaven as the fellowship of charity but pursuit of everlasting fame. What the references to “the divinity” scattered widely throughout the Oracle make clear is that Gracián’s art of self-cultivation allows us

ch a p t er eigh t

234

to achieve a certain likeness to divinity. Often we are told to “imitate the divinity [el proceder divino, literally, ‘the divine conduct’]”; we do so, interestingly enough, even when we conceal our intentions (3). “Even the first and highest Cause [la Primera y Suma Causa],” Gracián tells us, seeks to win the goodwill of others and thereby purchases reputation (112). If a person can learn to be independent of others, Gracián advises, “you will depend only on yourself; the greatest happiness is to resemble the Supreme Entity [la entidad suma]” (137). We should not be afraid to imitate even the infinity of God: “In God all is infinite, all immense; and thus in a hero all must be grand and majestic, so that all his actions and even his words can be dressed in transcendent majesty” (296). Heroic human virtue acquires a certain likeness to divine greatness, a likeness capable of winning God’s love and grace. In contrast to Erasmus, there is no sense here that we desire to become like God because of our love for God, nor that likeness to God is prized because it enables community with God. Moreover, there is no reference to Christ or imitation of Christ as the way in which human persons should imitate and draw near to God. One suspects that the humble, crucified Christ might appear to Gracián as the gullible, foolish good man, suitable perhaps for a simpler age but not for an age ruled by wily malice. We see here the same characteristic distortion of the Erasmian portrayal of our active, grace-inspired, and grace-sustained pursuit of virtue that we have encountered already in Lope de Vega’s Genesius, accompanied here by an additional dimension—a keen analysis and deployment of artifice, appearance, and deception in service of the pursuit of immortality. Here is a heroic ethic of glory, adapted to the intensely reflexive social life of the court, now offered for Everyman Christian. If in some ways Gracián can appear thoroughly pagan, in two key respects he is not. First, he has in some sense absorbed and even furthered the Augustinian critique; he is keenly self-conscious about how the psychology of desire for reputation permeates virtue, and he does not believe that the pursuit of virtue ever transcends—nor need it transcend—the desire for fame. Gracián is colorblind to the importance of pursuing virtue for its own sake. Second, this pursuit of fame is sustained by a transcendent reference point absent in pagan thought, God’s applause of heroic grandeza.33 Rather than relativizing or calling into question our pursuit of fame, the transcendent dimension so conceived only extends and sustains it. In these ways, Gracián’s héroe displays a sort of hyper-magnanimity.

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

235

Jesuit Virtue as Pagan Virtue: Pascal’s Critique As we have seen, Jesuit trust that development in worldly virtue could be gradually taken up into Christian charity could give rise, as in Gracián, to an anatomical project analyzing virtue in terms of reputation and embracing strategic deception as a constitutive element of such a project of self-cultivation. But the Anatomist project cut across party lines and is found in equally developed form among the Jansenists, the Jesuits’ keenest critics. Gracián’s moral anatomy was offered in direct service to those seeking greatness. Jansenist anatomy, which we will explore in Pierre Nicole and—in a truncated version—in La Rochefoucauld, was offered rather in warning, as a hardheaded analysis of fallen human nature. As we see in Pascal’s Provincial Letters, the critique of Jesuit laxity could make common cause with an anatomy of worldly morality. If Gracián sought to assimilate true Christian virtue with the pursuit of greatness, Pascal suggested rather that Jesuit virtue could be unveiled as merely “pagan.” Pascal’s critique, while hardly offering a reliable guide to Jesuit moral theology, does tell us a good deal about how Jansenist identity was defined over against certain conceptions of the Jesuits. It also offers a perceptive diagnosis of the pitfalls of an approach that seeks to be as encouraging as possible to everyone. Not only could the pursuit of reputation and fame all too easily displace the pursuit of Christlike (humble) charity, but any true sense of aspiration, of being only on the way, in need of further transformation, could fall by the wayside. Using Pascal’s critique as a window onto Jansenist self-understanding enables us to sketch the basic features of what I term Jansenist “activism,” which is better able than Luther to countenance human activity and moral aspiration, even while insisting on its utter dependency on divine grace.34 This, in turn, allows us to make sense of some otherwise puzzling features of Pascal’s famous Wager and to reflect further on the relation between habituation and conversion. Pascal’s anatomy of human virtue is strictly controlled by his apologetic enterprise. In Nicole and La Rochefoucauld, in contrast, the anatomical project acquires increasing autonomy. This increasing autonomy is then fully exploited by Bernard Mandeville. The heart of the Provincial Letters’ critique is the claim that the Jesuits, in caring only about attracting followers, have utterly eviscerated Christian morality. At worst, the Jesuits countenance open vice; at best, they advocate a merely pagan virtue that is devoid of supernatural grace and

ch a p t er eigh t

236

nothing more than glorified vice. To say that attrition (repentance that arises from fear of divine punishment) is sufficient for confession without contrition (repentance that arises out of love for God) amounts, Pascal argues, to saying that “in this way a sinner may render himself worthy of absolution without supernatural grace at all” (461). The Jansenists argued, in contrast, that contrition itself is necessary and must be a direct gift from God. On the one hand, contrition can appear to be a close structural parallel to justification in Luther’s thought. Unlike Luther, though, who had sharply separated justification from sanctification, being made right with God from growing in love for God, the Jansenists insisted that justification and sanctification are a unified process through which we grow in charity and are gradually reconciled with God. As one makes use of the grace one has already been given to perform a just or charitable act, God gives one additional graces that enable further growth in charity. Jansenists and Jesuits agreed about this against Luther, although they interpreted the process in sharply divergent ways. The Jesuits tended (increasingly) to say that sufficient grace has been offered to all and that it is therefore up to us whether we will avail ourselves of that sufficient grace and thereby become worthy of further graces, up to and including efficacious grace. The Jansenists, in contrast, argued that this infringed on divine sovereignty and placed too much initiative in human hands. Sufficient grace, they argued, works infallibly; if God gives us sufficient grace, we will irresistibly (though freely, i.e., voluntarily) accept that grace and thereby become capable of further grace. There is no absolute distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace; they simply represent earlier and later steps along a predestined journey to salvation. Given that not all will be saved, it follows that sufficient grace is not given to all, but only to the elect.35 Without sufficient grace, we are not capable of true contrition and therefore cannot make effective use of the sacrament of penance and Eucharist. There is, then, an all-or-nothing distinction between those who have been given sufficient grace and those who have not, but there is not the same emphasis we see in Luther on resignation of human agency.36 While Jansenism was not plagued by the same paradoxes of passivity that we encountered in Luther and Bunyan, it struggled with its own internal tensions, born of the attempt to hold together a wholly negative view of human self-love with a positive understanding of human agency. If Pascal’s Wager can still be seen as insisting implicitly that any positive construal of human agency demands that it be recognized as

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

237

graced agency, we will see in chapter 9 that for Nicole this is less clearly the case. If we attend to Jesuit confessional practice, argues Pascal, we see that the Jesuits not only tend to deny absolute human dependence on supernatural grace and exaggerate human moral capacities but also tend simply to excuse human sinfulness. Pascal’s deliberate wavering between the charge that the Jesuits encourage the cultivation of a merely pagan, apparent virtue and the charge that they simply countenance corruption further tarnishes pagan virtue, even if the dominant aim is rather to tarnish the Jesuits. The implication is that there really is no difference between (a) open crime; (b) Jesuit “finesse,” “artifice,” and “ingenuity” placed at the service of palliating these crimes; and (c) apparent virtue, in which one vice restrains the others (451). Here a lengthy passage is worth quoting: You will soon discover, in the laxity of their moral system, the explanation of their doctrine about grace. You will then see the Christian virtues stripped of the charity which is the life and soul of them— you will see so many crimes palliated and irregularities tolerated, that you will no longer be surprised at their maintaining that “all men have always enough of grace” to lead a pious life, in the sense in which they understand piety. Their morality being entirely Pagan, nature is quite competent to its observance. When we maintain the necessity of efficacious grace, we assign another sort of virtue for its object. Its office is not to cure one vice by means of another; it is not merely to induce men to practice the external duties of religion: it aims at a virtue higher than that propounded by the Pharisees, or the greatest sages of Heathenism. The law and reason are “sufficient grace” for these purposes. But to disenthrall the soul from the love of the world—to tear it from what it holds most dear—to make it die to itself—to lift it up and bind it wholly, only, and forever, to God—can be the work of none but an all-powerful hand. And it would be as absurd to affirm that we have the full power of achieving such objects, as it would be to allege that those virtues, devoid of the love of God, which these fathers confound with the virtues of Christianity, are beyond our power. (376–77)

Unless supernatural grace tears us from ourselves, any virtue we can cultivate will simply be disguised amour-propre, self-love, and thus essentially

ch a p t er eigh t

238

vice. This is all recognizably Augustinian, and yet, in its suspicion of any hint of eudaimonism, rather unfaithful to Augustine. Anthony Levi has shown how amour-propre acquires this specific meaning for French moralists around 1640. Even moralists such as J. F. Senault, who were hardly Jansenist, began to use amour-propre in a way deeply shaped by Jansenius’s Augustinus.37 The soul must die to itself in order to be bound to God—this is not the authentic Augustinian claim that the soul, while finding its true fulfillment in God, experiences its own transformation as a radical and often painful reshaping of previous habits. Both Augustine and the Jansenists insist that grace transforms the will in such a way that the Christian now loves God and freely, passionately seeks the object of that love. But the Jansenists are more insistent that this transformation of the will amounts to a death of the previous self. Even if there is not a separation between the life of faith and the life of charity, there is a radical disjunction between self-love and love of God. Christian virtue tears us away from love of the world and binds us to love of God alone, we are told. Pagan (Jesuit) virtue, in contrast, merely uses one vice to cure another and is content with external conformity to duty. The Jesuits teach, says Pascal, that we show sufficient love to God if we do God’s will “as if we loved him with affection, as if the motive in this case was real charity” (463). Pascal is savage in his attack on this doctrine of pretense. His critique seems to imply that there is no route from acting “as if” to conceiving a genuine love for God. But this, as we shall see shortly, is just what Pascal’s own Wager seems to envision. The Jansenists were as hostile as Erasmus to any tendency to rest content with outer conformity, to overlook the heart’s need for transformation if we are to be properly directed toward God. And with their insistence on justification as itself a process of sanctification, they were more capable than Luther of opposing Quietism. They situated themselves between the Jesuits on the one hand, with their false reliance on human agency, and the Quietists on the other hand, with their false abdication of human agency.38 While insisting that no true moral or spiritual progress is possible apart from divine grace, they insist at the same time that God’s grace is active within human agency. The Quietist error was to think that “all that is not the work of a perceptible motion divine is . . . purely natural and indeed tainted.” 39 Nicole, for instance, worried that much mystical prayer amounted to self-deception; a life of ordinary piety is safer. While he did, somewhat guardedly, accept the existence of infused contemplation, he was hostile to the notion of ac-

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

239

quired contemplation, the oraison de simple regard, which he regarded simply as a poor substitute for important active forms of spiritual cultivation.40 The paradox of Quietism was that its adherents wanted to claim both that contemplation is essentially passive and that it can be acquired by human means. They sought, therefore, much like Bunyan in his restless self-examination, an agency that annihilates agency. They could not succeed in such a self-canceling effort, so in fact all they do, charges Nicole, is substitute a self-deceptive passivity for acts of charity through which we grow in grace. Nicole is rather tone-deaf to the mystical life, and a much more sympathetic account of mystical prayer could certainly be given. For present purposes, though, it is more important to note how the Jansenists succeeded in marrying an insistence on the active cultivation of charity with an equally adamant insistence that no good acts are possible apart from the assistance of supernatural grace.41 Luther, too, could make room for the cultivation of Christian virtue, but only on the far side of the surd of justification. With their Catholic understanding of justification as process, the Jansenists did not need to insist on a foundational moment of pure passivity, did not need to demand as the precondition of any gradual progress in Christian virtue a perfect acceptance of human dependency on God, however much they agreed on the reality of this absolute dependency and the importance of a dawning acceptance of this ultimate passivity. Pascal’s famous Wager provides perhaps the most intriguing example of Jansenist “activism.” Indeed, the apologetic design of the Pensées as a whole makes sense only in light of an appreciation for the way in which God’s grace is given through and in ordinary human effort. Even though Pascal is as focused on the scrutiny of individual experience as is Bunyan, and even though at times Pascal does seem to insist on utter human passivity, this activism holds out a possible way of evading the pragmatic self-contradictions that pervade Grace Abounding. Like Bunyan, Pascal seeks to communicate the fruits of his own self-examination to others. Unlike Bunyan, who simply disowns his use of rhetoric, Pascal is conscious of his use of rhetoric and even makes this explicit: “I will write down my thoughts here as they come and in a perhaps not aimless confusion. This is the true order and it will always show my aim by its very disorder” (532).42 Pascal offers intentionally disordered thoughts, aimed at startling the reader into recognition of the disorder of her existence. And he speaks sometimes in the second or third, and (only) sometimes in the first, person, so that the honesty of the reader rather than that

ch a p t er eigh t

240

of the author can take center stage. He focuses not on self-representation of the self for others but on representation from the point of view of the self.43 But the Pensées not only illustrate Jansenist activism, they also demonstrate an apologetic deployment of the Anatomist enterprise. For Pascal, the condition of fallenness is fundamentally one of selfdeception and hypocrisy. There is, though, no neutral account available of this condition. We pierce this veil and arrive at self-knowledge finally only in Christ. Diagnosing our illness and being healed are inseparable. Later Anatomists, from Nicole to La Rochefoucauld and beyond, begin to detach analysis and explanation from solution in a way that lends autonomy to the “natural.”

Habituation and Pascal’s Wager Pascal’s diagnosis is that “we are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves” (655). This is the fallen human condition, but its deception and hypocrisy reside in the fact that we are blind—and willfully so—to our own fallenness. We cannot bear to be confronted by our own vices and imperfections, and so, says Pascal, the human self “conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults. It would like to do away with this truth, and not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it, as best it can, in the consciousness of itself and others” (978). And so to the evil of our moral failings is added the additional evil “of deliberate self-delusion” (978).44 We seek the esteem of others, even when we know that we are esteemed as other than, better than, we truly are.45 The first step toward self-knowledge is to recognize the paradoxes of our nature, that we are morally weak, fickle, deceptive, and selfish, yet also great, capable of self-sacrifice for the sake of the good, of selfcriticism, and of self-conscious reason. “We perceive an image of the truth and possess nothing but falsehood, being equally incapable of absolute ignorance and certain knowledge; so obvious is it that we once enjoyed a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen” (131). Having recognized this paradoxical duality, we are in a position to fathom the doctrine of original sin, which alone makes sense of this duality, this strange mixture of greatness and depravity. It is difficult, though, to accept that original sin, which seems so alien and distant, should be a prerequisite for self-knowledge: “it is . . . an astounding thing that the

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

241

mystery furthest from our ken, that of the transmission of sin, should be something without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves” (131). This truth about ourselves is “shocking to our reason”; self-knowledge is achieved not through “the proud activity of our reason but through its simple submission” (131). Again we encounter the paradox, seen first in Luther, that it is not through activity but through passivity, and thus through humility, through acceptance rather than achievement, that we will ultimately reach the end we seek. Human beings seek to conceal their nagging sense of wretchedness from themselves through constant diversion. But this process of concealment would be fruitless if persons were conscious of their own acts of self-deception. Indeed, they lack sufficient knowledge to recognize even this fact: “When men are reproached for pursuing so eagerly something that could never satisfy them, their proper answer, if they really thought about it, ought to be that they simply want a violent and vigorous occupation to take their minds off themselves, and that is why they choose some attractive object to entice them in ardent pursuit. Their opponents could find no answer to that, . . . but they do not answer like that because they do not know themselves. They do not know that all they want is the hunt and not the capture” (136). Instead, they think, because of a “secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature,” that they are in fact seeking rest, and thus happiness, through activity. So our restless activity arises out of our lack of self-knowledge and is itself a form of self-deception. What all of this should teach us, and what Pascal hopes it will teach us, with the help of his elucidation of our situation, is that “we are incapable of attaining the good by our own efforts” (148). Virtue, no more than happiness, is an object within our grasp, since without faith, we can “know neither true good nor justice” (148). Seneca’s advice, to be content with “the good things innate in you,” is treacherous, for Seneca’s endorsement of suicide undermines his insistence on the sufficiency of innate, immanent goodness. In truth, virtue is not detachable from God, for “God alone is man’s true good,” and God is clearly not a good we can secure through our own activity (148). “Christianity is strange,” remarks Pascal. “It bids man to recognize that he is vile, and even abominable, and bids him want to be like God. Without such a counterweight his exaltation would make him horribly vain or his abasement horribly abject” (351). What is crucial here is to recognize that our own efforts contribute nothing to making us like God; that to which we aspire can be ours only

ch a p t er eigh t

242

through our utter dependency on God’s grace. It is in this way that we can hold together, in a way impossible for the self-deceived student of virtue, knowledge of our own sinfulness and our desire to be like God. Pascal contrasts a soldier with a Carthusian; for both, obedience is of the utmost importance. “But the soldier,” Pascal points out, “always hopes to become his own master, and never does . . . whereas the Carthusian vows never to be anything but dependent” (356). What the Carthusian, and in an important sense any Christian, has realized and accepted is the fact that human effort cannot secure the happiness that human beings naturally desire. In order to attain this happiness, we must sacrifice something else we think we want—our self-sufficiency, our autonomous, independent agency. Closely related to this is Pascal’s insistence that we give up our will, our faculty of self-assertion: “The will itself will never bring satisfaction, even if it had power over everything it wanted, but we are satisfied the moment we give it up. Without it we can never be discontented, with it we can never be content” (362). To truly know ourselves is to know that as sinners we are separated members of a body, to recognize that alone we are not and can never be self-subsistent or whole. We come to accept our dependency on the body. “Eventually,” writes Pascal, “when [this separated member] comes to know itself, it has returned home, as it were, and only loves itself for the body’s sake” (372). Noteworthy in this passage is the fact that Pascal here suggests that self-knowledge is a sufficient condition for reintegration into the body. If this is so, then self-knowledge must itself be contingent on grace, and indeed, Pascal notes that “we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves” (417). To love oneself as a member of the Body of Christ is to love oneself in a dramatically different way, no longer in contrast to or in opposition to others. To know oneself is to know that the “self” is not autonomous, self-sufficient, independent, distinct. Along with this recognition comes recognition of the fact that virtue is also not something we can possess as our own achievement, as something properly our own. Rather, “without Christ man can only be vicious and wretched. With Christ man is free from vice and wretchedness. In him is all our virtue and all our happiness” (416). What we can cultivate on our own, as separated members, is only a semblance of virtue. Only through Christ are self-knowledge and virtue possible, which means that virtue is possible only insofar as we come to know ourselves as members of the Body of Christ. Given all this, Pascal’s

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

243

Wager might seem simply to encourage hypocrisy and self-deception.46 How can we make sense of his apparent embrace in the Wager of something like an Aristotelian model of habituation—and habituation not simply into natural virtue, but into Christian faith? If thus far in the Penseés we have seen primarily Pascal’s emphasis on the acceptance of absolute divine sovereignty and our utter dependence on grace, here we see how this does not after all exclude activity. Pascal’s Wager is directed toward those who recognize that reason cannot determine the truth of the Christian faith or even the existence of God. While such a person might be tempted to remain on the fence, Pascal points out that not to wager is in effect not an option, for one must carry on with one’s life either as if God does exist or as if God does not exist. Pascal’s aim is not the impossible one of asking the fence-sitter to decide to believe that God exists. Rather, he seeks to bring the doubter to the point of seeing that it is reasonable, given the laws of probability, to wager that God does exist, that is, to risk her life rather than hoarding it; “since you are obliged to play, you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing” (418). How can the doubter risk her life, wager that God exists, since, as she points out, “I am being held fast and I am so made that I cannot believe” (418)? Through habituation, that is, through acts, through what Erasmus and Luther would have condemned as merely external ritual: If you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God’s existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have. These are people who know the road you wish to follow, who have been cured of the affliction of which you wish to be cured: follow the way by which they began. They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile (abêtira). (418)

The fence-sitter, who by now is a would-be believer, is told to enact conventional Catholic spirituality, to behave “as if” she believes, and this

ch a p t er eigh t

244

is advocated as a reasonable strategy and, indeed, as a “natural” road to belief. Pascal’s justification for advocating acting “as if” lies in the fact that it is the doubter’s passions that are blocking the path to faith. Passions, then, are the sort of thing that can and may be habituated through repeated action. Kolakowski suggests that we translate the phrase including “vous abêtira” as “will make an automaton of you”; acting as-if will make you like a beast or an automaton, while Krailsheimer notes that “the unbeliever will act unthinkingly and mechanically, and in this become more like the beasts, from whom man was differentiated, according to contemporary philosophy, by his faculty of reason.” 47 It is the passions, traditionally the bestial aspect of human nature, that are holding the would-be believer back. But why should she seek to become more like the beasts, more mechanical? After all, reason is a God-given gift. It is key here to appreciate the way in which Pascal believes that both reason and the passions have been corrupted by sin. In fact, it is corrupt reason that has sanctioned the formation of habits that lead the passions astray. The would-be believer should seek to become more like the beasts because the passions of beasts, unlike the passions of fallen human nature, are not corrupted, not excessive, not misdirected; they are simply natural. We will become more like the beasts insofar as we respect the needs of our passional nature rather than trying to suppress it, and what this in part requires is that we correct the passional nature through habituation, a means appropriate to it: “Proofs only convince the mind,” notes Pascal; “habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed” (821). Having recognized the role of the passional nature in forming belief, “we must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us. . . . We must acquire an easier belief, which is that of habit. . . . We must therefore make both parts of us believe: the mind by reasons, which need to be seen only once in a lifetime, and the automaton by habit, and not allowing any inclination to the contrary: Incline my heart” (821). What is particularly striking here is the claim that there are two distinct sorts of belief, one associated with reasoning and the other associated with habituation, one residing in the mind and the other in the heart. Here Pascal, and seventeenth-century French Augustinian thought more generally, can be best understood, as Anthony Levi has argued, as a reaction against sixteenth-century neo-Stoicism (which they tended to associate in their own day with Jesuit moral thought).48 In contrast

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

245

to the refusal of Erasmian humanism and more generally of Renaissance Christian Neoplatonism to claim to be able to distinguish sharply between natural and supernatural operations in the soul, later moralists, both neo-Stoic and Augustinian, sought a clear distinction between natural and supernatural, nature and grace. For Augustinian thinkers, it was the heart that was regarded as the site of the action of grace, and thus of both charity and faith. Neo-Stoic thinkers regarded the will as free to determine itself in independence from reason, arguing that an act was morally good if it proceeded from the will in accordance with the prior judgment of reason. The Augustinian reaction against this view generally shared with neoStoicism this faculty psychology and its separation of will and reason, but it rejected judgments of reason as the criterion of the will’s goodness. Regarding the will as essentially appetitive, led by desire, Jansenius denied that the will is free to determine itself spontaneously. Lost was Aquinas’s understanding of the way in which the will is responsive through final causality to goods grasped by the intellect. Neither the neo-Stoic nor the Augustinian alternative, argues Levi, made it possible to speak in a satisfactory way of love, at once passion and virtue. Augustinian talk of the “heart” can be understood as an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between reason and will and make possible a more adequate understanding of love, although most often the heart continued to be associated primarily with the will. The Abbé de Saint-Cyran, arguing that faith is infused by grace into the heart, from which it passes into the understanding, clearly associates heart with will and is left with a fideist account. As Levi writes, “if the naturalism of the neostoics seemed to make faith an act of rational assent with little room for the workings of grace, the Augustinian reaction to neostoicism soon resulted in a concept of faith which, maintaining the primacy of grace, divorced faith from reason.” 49 Pascal comes closest to rendering the heart truly cognitive and thus healing the division between reason and will; “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (423). In the Wager, as we have just seen, the heart begins to be associated with rationality. Habituation is seen as the route to the strongest form of conviction. If the would-be believer follows Pascal’s advice and puts on an act of Catholic spirituality, will she arrive at true faith and piety? Can one really arrive at faith through habituation, through the aping of external actions? We might hope that the would-be believer would become accustomed to these repeated actions, would begin to feel them as natural

ch a p t er eigh t

246

rather than resisting them at every turn, would slowly come to take pleasure in these actions, rather than her former search for endless distraction. If she does come to take pleasure in the life of piety, this is indeed a sign of a certain sort of “inner” transformation, not simply of external show. And elsewhere Pascal claims that “one accustoms oneself to inward virtues by outward habits” (912) and that “outward penance creates a disposition to inward penance, and humiliations dispose us to be humble” (936). What Pascal envisions here would appear to be a classic case of Aristotelian habituation were it not for the fact that Pascal’s focus is ultimately not simply on the life of piety but on Christian faith. This means, first, that it involves coming to hold beliefs that one did not formerly accept. Pascal’s novel insight is to see belief as a habit. Second, though, no one as deeply influenced by Jansenism as Pascal could equate “belief” with “true faith,” that is, accept that divine grace could be made a necessary concomitant of human activity. Certainly one does not gain divine grace by acting as though one had faith, or by complying with the external requirements of the church. Neither does God necessarily reward the effort involved in acting as-if by bestowing the desired inner faith. As Kolakowski notes, “there is an ambiguity in Pascal to the extent that he does not mention what is so fundamental in Augustinian theology and relevant to his exhortation: the unmerited distribution of grace. But he never forgot the distinction between mechanical obedience and faith. Indeed, the belief that one can smoothly pass from nature to the realm of grace—intellectually or morally—is the chief target of the Pensées.” 50 To acquire belief through habit still, at least potentially, leaves one in the realm of nature. Perhaps we might say that for Pascal, the lacuna that exists within Aristotelian ethics itself, the lack of any guarantee that repeated emulation of virtuous actions will actually create a virtuous habit, is aligned with, while also being deepened by, the lacuna between nature and grace, human effort and divine bestowal. The transformation of heart that constitutes true faith is a gift from God and not something human beings can achieve either through reason or through habituation. On the other hand, Pascal suggests, Christians do find God at work in natural processes of habituation. The habituation that disposes us to faith is itself made possible by grace. Habituation disposes us to faith by making us more receptive, by humbling our sense of what we can achieve through our own active capacities, by encouraging us to accept a passive stance toward our own transformation. This sheds further light on why Pascal sees it as

Jesuits and Jansenists: Gracián and Pascal

247

a good thing that we should become more beastlike, more mechanical; it disposes us to receiving God’s grace, to accepting that it is only through God’s action that we can reach true faith, virtue, and the glorious end for which we were created. For Pascal as for Luther, then, it is crucial that we give up the illusion that Christian faith and virtue are something we can achieve. Pascal, though, is much more willing to entertain a role for habituation even at the outset of the process. We need not begin with pure passivity and recognition of utter dependency, and human activity and human receptivity need not exclude one another. Since the Aristotelian model of habituation itself offers no guarantee that virtuous habits will actually be formed by the student of virtue, Pascal can employ this model without suggesting that it preempts divine grace. The would-be Christian is encouraged actively to pursue a more beastlike, passive state; he intentionally seeks to form in himself habits of piety. In the Wager, then, we see how close Jansenist activism could come to the Erasmian-humanist model of mimetic virtue. The virtue of faith is both acquired through habituation and given wholly by divine grace. Human persons are both active and passive; they may intentionally seek faith, but their activity serves to make them more capable of receiving rather than achieving. The Christian then becomes increasingly aware of the dependency of his or her agency, rather than becoming increasingly autonomous.51 In the Wager Pascal ventures to offer a kind of anatomy of coming to faith. This enterprise suggests that the project of moral psychology need not cease where grace is active; it is not the possibility of moral anatomy that marks the boundary between natural and supernatural. As we shall see in chapter 9, though, by and large the tendency among both Jansenists and other Anatomists was to regard moral anatomy as limited to fallen human nature, a realm of the natural in which grace is not active. Moral anatomy thus served as an instrument for human control and manipulation of self and society, rather than as training in receptivity and the discernment of grace.

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

9

Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, and Mandeville Paradoxically, the Jansenist critique of false worldly virtue could contribute to the marginalization of Christian charity and to a forthright concentration on human nature and its social expression. We see this progression in the thought of the Jansenist Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) and in two moralists who borrow from Jansenist thought but for whom charity is nothing more than rhetorical flourish. Nicole’s contribution, which echoes Calvinist accounts of natural law, was a Providentialist account of honnêteté, false worldly virtue. Although few are among the elect and therefore few display true, grace-enabled charity, the natural passions of fallen humanity work together in concert to create a semblance of virtue that produces actions indistinguishable from those arising from charity. The fact that this is so demonstrates God’s providential care for the fallen world. Unlike Pascal, Nicole implies that the analysis of worldly virtue can be performed from the neutral standpoint of reason, which has survived the Fall largely intact. The anatomical delineation of worldly virtue acquires a certain autonomy from the life of faith, which it lacked in Pascal. Despite his condemnations of worldly virtue as false and as lacking in saving grace, Nicole lends the practice of worldly virtue itself a semirespectable independence by conceiving it in Providentialist terms. As Keohane notes, Nicole “took pleasure in portraying the intricate details of human social interaction, and envisioned a rich and teeming polity, where individuals pursued the commodious life under the protection, and restraint, of an absolute monarch. At times, Nicole’s delight in this complex game becomes so great that he forgets to express disapproval of it, and celebrates it with enthusiasm quite unexpected in a Jansenist.” 1 The diagnosis has begun to drift free from the apologetic

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

249

enterprise in which it is for Pascal so integrally moored. Worldly virtue gains a degree of autonomy, while the workings of grace in instilling charity are deprived of any natural means or secondary causes. Later in the chapter, turning to La Rochefoucauld and Mandeville, we will see how the Jansenist anatomy of self-love could be put to work in articulating increasingly unapologetic accounts of “purely” worldly virtue. There is no inevitable progression toward secularization here, even if hyperAugustinian thinkers did help to prepare the ground for secular forms of moral reflection. It was certainly possible to sustain a theological stance that insisted on the depths of sinful self-love, the necessity for purely selfless love of God, and the disruptive character of the grace that makes this love of God possible. It was difficult, though, to coherently marry the insistence that sinful self-love be eradicated with the confidence that it could be used as a means to foster the growth of Christian charity. That Nicole embraced the latter enterprise indicates how seductive the Providentialist picture could be, simultaneously promising to justify the ways of God and to reveal them as open to human comprehension and assistance. Religious skeptics like Mandeville, meanwhile, conveniently took up the discourse of worldly virtue that was already at hand.

Nicole’s grâce générale Nicole was a Jansenist apologist who coauthored the Port-Royal Logic with Antoine Arnauld, consulted in the composition of the Provincial Letters, produced a Latin translation of the Letters, and devoted considerable effort in the later years of his life to a critique of Quietism. In the 1660s he was forced to spend several years hiding under an assumed name in and around Paris. He took advantage of the temporary cessation of hostilities known as the Peace of the Church (1668) to write the first volume of the Essais de morale, which grew to fill six volumes and were to earn him a broad readership throughout the eighteenth century (including, notably, John Locke, who translated three of the essays).2 At least twelve editions of the first four volumes of the Essais were published by the time of Nicole’s death.3 Although Nicole devoted considerable energy to defending the Jansenist cause, as the controversies wore on he increasingly sought to withdraw from the fray. Moreover, he developed a conception of the universality of divine grace that earned him the criticism of fellow Jansenists. This conception, which Nicole termed grâce générale, general

ch a p t er nine

250

grace, reflects Nicole’s sensitivity to theodicy concerns being raised by Jesuits. As we shall see, the notion of general grace went against the grain of Jansenist thought in separating morality from salvation, if only at the level of capacity. Following our discussion of general grace, we shall turn to Nicole’s account of the near indistinguishability of worldly virtue and true Christian charity. Here he comes even closer to separating morality from salvation, virtue from love of God, not only with respect to capacity but also with respect to action. Nicole’s account of general grace must be understood against the backdrop of the first of five propositions distilled by Jesuits from Jansen’s Augustinus and condemned by Pope Innocent X in the 1653 encyclical Cum occasione: “Some commandments of God are impossible to the just who wish to perform them and who exert themselves according to the forces which they posses; the grace by which these would be possible for them is lacking to them.” 4 Jansen insisted that God often commands something and then deprives persons of his assistance, not to torment them but to teach them that they are indeed utterly reliant on God’s supernatural actual grace, on divine assistance, in order to perform any particular good act or avoid particular sins in particular moments.5 Jansen claimed that God at times deprives even the elect of the grace necessary to fulfill the law. Interestingly, while Jansen’s focus was on the “just” as the “justified” or “elect,” subsequent discussion of the issue, and certainly Nicole’s concern, shifted attention to the rather different question of what makes possible the appearance of “just” persons, that is, morally upright or apparently morally upright persons, among those deprived of efficacious grace, rather than among the elect. Nicole became fascinated with the issue of the moral capacities of those deprived of saving (efficacious) grace. He did not want, like the Jesuits, to say that sufficient grace is offered to all. Whether or not we are given efficacious grace and saved is not up to us. But the Jesuit defense of human initiative and responsibility was not simply an exaggeration of human autonomy; it was ultimately in the service of a defense of divine goodness. How can God command the impossible and hold us responsible for failing to do what we cannot possibly do? What is fascinating in Nicole’s account of general grace is the sensitivity it displays to this theodicy concern, and the effort he makes to respond to it while remaining true to core Jansenist insights concerning divine sovereignty and the dependence of human freedom on divine grace. He seeks to show that God does care for the reprobate as well as for the elect, and in particular that

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

251

the reprobate are given, in addition to the divine concursus that enables all movement and the habitual graces given to all persons, a grace that is properly supernatural.6 This grace enables us to say that the reprobate are capable of acting justly, capable of morally good acts (although, as we shall see, this statement must be carefully qualified). God does not, then, command either the elect or the reprobate to do the impossible, and so God is justified in holding persons responsible for failing to do what is right; God’s goodness is thereby vindicated. While the presence of general grace makes it possible to say that persons have the power to perform good acts even if they lack efficacious grace, the very restricted scope of this claim becomes evident in its further specification—this power is not in fact reduced to act in the absence of efficacious grace.7 General grace confers a power on the human will that is complete qua power, but this power is not in itself sufficient to enable good action. Even prior to the Fall, Adam, in order to act well, needed (1) the divine concursus, (2) divine illumination to lend knowledge of the eternal law, of God as goodness and truth, and (3) a sound faculty of will.8 Nicole identified general grace with this necessary divine illumination. Thus, this concept is closely akin to scholastic notions of natural law and in particular the concept of synderesis, except for Nicole’s insistence that divine illumination be understood as a form of supernatural grace.9 The divine concursus together with general grace confer on the will a complete power to perform good acts. Even after the Fall, this power remains intact—fallen human beings are said to be “blind” not because divine illumination has been lost but because it is now diminished. Why, then, are fallen human beings unable to perform any good acts in the absence of efficacious grace? Because the will, too, is fallen and stubbornly loves evil; it does not wish to use the power it has been given. Just as the justified act freely though infallibly, in that their wills have been transformed by God and now freely pursue the good, so fallen human beings infallibly though freely will evil. They pursue what they want to pursue, and insofar as they do so they are free and not constrained, but they do not possess liberty of indifference (the capacity for undetermined choice); they cannot begin to pursue the good unless transformed by grace. It is important to Nicole both that general grace be understood as a supernatural grace, not simply a habitual grace, and that it nevertheless be something other than an immediate influx of divine causality into the human person. E. D. James notes that Nicole’s general grace is “natural

ch a p t er nine

252

in its manifestations but supernatural in essence” and argues that such a conception is most plausible if understood as the claim that “our particular moral judgments presuppose a knowledge of general principles of which we may be unaware. . . . It might be reformulated thus: the fact that men make moral judgments—true or false—presupposes at least indirect knowledge of general moral principles, and it is knowledge of these principles, (which must be considered a grace), that gives the power to make true moral judgments.” That it is a supernatural grace underscores God’s salvific will; God does indeed will the salvation of all; that the supernatural grace given to Adam does not suffice for fallen humanity is due to humanity’s evil, not to God. That it is given to all, and is present in all prior to specific actions, differentiates it decisively from efficacious grace. Nicole worried that neo-Thomists’ physical promotion, in contrast, could not be adequately distinguished from efficacious grace.10 So Nicole’s notion of general grace makes it possible to say that pagans, unbelievers, and the reprobate in general have the power to perform virtuous acts in the absence of efficacious grace, although they never do in fact perform them. This obviously falls short, though, of an affirmation of the possibility of pagan virtue. When Nicole specifically addresses the topic of pagan philosophy and virtue, he attempts to strike a corresponding balance. Pagan philosophers can be credited with actually seeking the truth, of teaching persons to turn away from a life of mere passion and familiarizing them with the language of good and evil, virtue and vice.11 But pagan philosophy teaches errors of both spirit and heart. It can serve as no more than a propadeutic to true wisdom, which depends on a gracetransformed heart. In the hands of a Christian teacher, who can interpret and correct them properly, pagan books can be used with some caution for moral instruction.12 Since true virtue and the performance of good acts remain dependent on the infusion of efficacious grace, there is here no suggestion that pagan philosophers could be thought to have sought their true end in some inchoate fashion or under some veiled guise, gradually growing in grace, understanding, and charity. For general grace is sterile. Only efficacious graces allow such gradual growth and transformation. An Erasmian understanding of the development of virtue may possibly describe the path of the elect (here the contrast between Luther and the Jansenists is evident), but of no one else. Pagan virtue is not just utterly sinful but is also, quite simply, vicious. Because the Jansenists did not sharply distinguish morality from salvation, as Luther did, because for them the category of charity rather than faith was central, they seemed

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

253

even less capable than he of admitting even an apparent pagan “virtue.” For to call it virtue would at once be wrongly to imply that it was enabled by efficacious grace. Nicole’s account of general grace seeks to show that all persons have the capacity to act well, although they do not in fact act well. But Nicole goes further than this. He offers an account of how the passion of self-love generates in society an imitation of charity. Unlike Pascal, who discusses the ways that persons disguise themselves from themselves and others but concludes that they remain in all of this restless and miserable, Nicole argues that disguised self-love enables persons to live in peace, safety, and comfort and gives rise to a genuine, if worldly, happiness.13 Nicole’s anatomy of self-love and its disguises is not in the service of the same apologetic strategy as that of Pascal, who seeks to expose our utter wretchedness in order to drive us into the arms of the church. Nor is it like that of La Rochefoucauld, whose hard-headed exposé offers no clear indication of where we may go in order to escape the falsity of worldly virtue. Nicole clearly believes in the authentic life of charity and notes its radical contrast with worldly virtue. But his account of worldly virtue remains considerably more optimistic and generous than that of his fellows; like general grace, its presence justifies the ways of God to man. Given its Providentialist function, worldly virtue appears in an increasingly generous light.14

The Perfect Imitation of Charity Nicole argued, in concert with Jansenism at large, that human beings have since the Fall been driven solely by self-interested passions. Without supernatural grace, human beings are incapable of charity and thus of virtue. But Nicole added that enlightened self-love (amour-propre) can perfectly mimic the effects of charity. “Although there is nothing so opposed to charity, which refers everything to God, as self-love, which refers everything to itself, nevertheless,” wrote Nicole, “there is nothing so similar to the effects of charity as those of self love.” 15 This seems impossible at first blush, since open self-love offers a stark contrast to the conduct of charity. As far as this goes, Nicole accepts Hobbes’s account of the basic desire of (fallen) human beings to tyrannize over others, as well as his argument that our fear of others’ tyranny is what initially drives persons into society (2:180–81). But he argues that among the various

ch a p t er nine

254

passions springing from the root passion of self-love, the desire to be loved is the most general, if not the strongest (3:184). Or, as he sometimes puts it, “there is nothing so natural to man than the desire to be loved by others, because there is nothing so natural as to love oneself. For one always desires that that which one loves be loved” (1:267). It is this desire to be loved that drives us to conceal and disguise our self-love and to imitate the truly charitable, since true charity is loved by all, while others’ self-love excites universal hatred (4:185). At work here is a negative understanding of imitation, where imitation is closely linked with disguising the truth and removing (soustraire) it from view. Imitating charity, then, is not a path by which self-love might be transformed, but only by which it is concealed. Nicole stresses repeatedly how perfect self-love’s disguise is. While occasionally he notes that self-love does not act with the same uniformity as charity, curbing itself on one side only to show itself on another side (6:190), more often he stresses that there is nothing in the exterior actions of charity that enlightened or rational self-love does not imitate perfectly (7:190). In fact, so perfect is self-love’s imitation that Nicole even suggests that charity itself would do well to use enlightened self-love as a guide for its own actions; “for it proceeds by the same ways to such an extent, that one hardly knows better how to mark out those where charity should carry us, than by discovering those which an enlightened selflove takes, which knows its true interest, and which tends by reason to the end which it proposes to itself” (1:179). So charity imitates self-love, which itself imitates charity—though presumably there is no disguise involved in charity’s imitation. Charity needs at times to imitate the ways of enlightened self-love, Nicole explains, because self-love follows these paths with a greater exactitude than does charity. This in turn is due to the fact that charity remains imperfect in this life, less effective (agissant) than self-love and insufficiently lively (vive; 12:192). Nicole strives to offer a detailed account of how self-love manages to disguise itself so perfectly. For instance, he notes that self-love succeeds in imitating even humility perfectly, although it is in fact nothing more than a “finer and more delicate sentiment of that pride which is born with man and which does not forsake him at all” (5:187–88). One possessed of enlightened self-love, rather than seeking always to hide her faults, knows that she gains a reputation for equity and is therefore more likely to be loved by all if she admits her own faults. This shows how refined this self-love can be, since its immediate impulse in seeking to be

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

255

loved is to attempt to conceal all of its faults. Truly enlightened self-love, though, recognizes that we love others more when they seem humanly fallible, particularly if at the same time they openly confess their faults and failings. Similarly, just as the charitable person bears patiently with the unjust suspicions of his enemies, enlightened self-love, rather than giving in to the immediate impulses of resentment and anger, does the same, since fits of passion will only inflame others’ bad impressions of us (8:193). While Nicole stresses the “enlightened” and “rational” character of the self-love that imitates charity, its deceitful words (paroles trompeuses) and false obligingness ( fausses complaisances), he also makes the intriguing claim that at its height, enlightened self-love becomes second nature and no longer involves any intentional deception.16 Only when it is imperfect need it involve skill and policy (politique); perfected, in the form of human virtue (honnêteté humaine), it need not think expressly about its imitative act (5:188). Thus, persons can be truly habituated into the human virtue of enlightened self-love, acting in stable and reliable ways that are perfectly aligned with those of charity. The habit of human virtue is nevertheless only false virtue, honnêteté humaine, but not perfect virtue, honnêteté parfaite.17 Nicole here appropriates and redefines that key French term honnêteté, so evocative of the tradition of courtly civility, of outward courtesy with its preoccupation with form.18 The perfection of the imitative act is solely “exterior”; it does not touch the “heart,” the seat of a person’s loves, the ends for which she acts. When we attend to the heart, the contrast between charity and selflove is stark. Self-love loves only itself; charity does not love itself at all (6:189). Fallen human persons love themselves without limit or measure, desiring all goods, honors, and powers for themselves, and no one but themselves (1:179). Charity, in contrast, loves God and hates all that is contrary to God. The charitable person regards herself as full of sins and faults, utterly undeserving of any honor or praise (5:186). The charitable regard only the good of others and never their own interests (10:196). The charitable person thus possesses true humility; he condemns himself for his faults, openly confessing them and making a habit of reflecting on them in order to weaken self-love (4–5:184–86). We see here the characteristic emphases of Jansenist Augustinianism, in contrast to Augustine himself. Humility here consists properly of selfdenigration. The focus is not so much on ascribing all the good one does to God as it is on denying that one has done any good. Likewise, we

ch a p t er nine

256

find here the insistence that the charitable do not love themselves at all, rather that their self-love must first be transformed in order to be fulfilled in community with God. This is a shift in center of gravity; the latter, more properly Augustinian themes can still be found at the margins, but the eudaimonistic aspects of Augustine’s thought are now suspect. The life of charity is depicted in primarily negative terms; rather than emphasizing how the charitable aspire to be Christlike, Nicole stresses how they denigrate themselves. There is little sense of the Christian as loved by God and summoned by God into the fellowship of the divine life. Where the capacity for true virtue is understood as contingent on the reception of supernatural grace and where ordinary participation in the sacramental means of grace does not lend assurance that this grace has been given, the stage has been set for anxiety and suspicion directed at the apparently graced and apparently virtuous. And when, added to this, true virtue is understood as requiring not a properly directed self-love but a destruction of self-love, the stage has been set for outright denial of the existence of true virtue. For in such a context, a hermeneutics of suspicion that regards all human agency as reducible to exclusive concern for self will seem highly persuasive. True virtue, ironically, becomes the new false virtue, a hypocritical shell, an empty point of contrast. After having set up the strongest possible contrast between self-love and charity, Nicole concedes that these two principles are not only confused with one another in the arena of action but that within the heart itself, we do not know how to determine whether we are animated by charity or self-love, directed toward God or ourselves (12:200). This rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of perseverance of the saints is, of course, a characteristic Jansenist stance. But in the context of Nicole’s thought, it marks a shift from one framework of reference to another—from a comfortably distanced discussion of “them,” those latter-day pagans, to a discussion that is squarely self-directed, of “we Christians” caught between false and true virtue, self-love and charity.

The Social Utility of Self-Love If it is true that self-love can so perfectly mimic charity, what are we to make of this fact? How are we to respond? In part, argues Nicole, our response should be one of thanksgiving for God’s providential care of the world in general and the elect in particular. Enabling this grateful

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

257

acknowledgment by tracing the logic of God’s design of the world is an extension of the apologetic project already discussed in connection with Nicole’s doctrine of general grace. If the good, in whom the Holy Spirit resides as in a temple, could be reliably distinguished from the wicked, this would be a continual public miracle and would destroy the state of faith by which God has willed to save humanity (13:202). Here we see a line of argument akin to that taken by Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, who argues in the Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736) that if God’s governance of the world were more obvious it would render any test of faith impossible. God’s action in the world is largely hidden within natural causes.19 Even the elect cannot themselves know if they are acting from self-love or from charity. This serves, argues Nicole, to preserve them alike from despair and pride, which would loom large if they knew themselves to be among either the damned or the saved (13:203). Society would be gravely undermined, moreover, were it not for the fact that vicious self-love assumes the mask of truth and virtue. The existence of so much hypocritical vice is a sign of divine providence in a world where few are granted saving grace and thus made capable of true charity. Charity’s imitation makes possible peace and human happiness. But Nicole moves beyond justifying God’s ways to humanity, beyond articulating the reasons we have to be thankful for divine Providence. He believes his understanding of charity’s imitation—of social psychology, in effect—can and should be put to work. I have argued in a different context about the dangers of appeals to Providence that are used to relieve human persons of any responsibility and justify passive acquiescence to the status quo.20 Nicole’s providential discourse does not function in this way, but it is bedeviled by its own problems, as we shall see. While divine grace is beyond our control, the ways of self-love are open to human analysis and influence. And even if enlightened self-love remains sinful in the eyes of God, it is nevertheless of great social utility. So, for instance, Nicole suggests that knowledge of the ways of self-love could be used by educators of the ruling classes. If they cannot inspire the great with charity, they could at least attempt to enlighten their self-love. This would not render the great in the last analysis useful to themselves, but it would render them useful to others. A worldly wise prince, moreover, would be in a position to spread the same enlightened self-love to his subjects. Nicole waxes enthusiastic over this possibility; “in order to reform the world entirely, that is to say to ban all vices and all vulgar disorders and to render humanity happy in this life, it is necessary only, in place of

ch a p t er nine

258

charity, to give all of them an enlightened self-love” (11:199). He hastens to add that this “entire reformation” would remain in God’s eyes utter corruption, but still that there would be nothing “better regulated, more civil, more just, more peaceful, more civil, more generous” (11:200). It cannot but appear that worldly peace and happiness is acquiring in this account its own independent value. Nicole fluctuates between two quite different justifications for employing our knowledge of the ways of human honnêteté. On the one hand, he does seem, as we have just seen, to think that fostering this ersatz virtue has its own real social value, despite the fact that it remains diametrically opposed to true virtue, directed toward self rather than God. On the other hand, though, he tries to argue that in fostering human honnêteté we can somehow foster the emergence of true charity. So, for instance, he suggests that those who seek to cultivate in the great an enlightened self-love place them on a road that is at least less distant from the way to heaven than the one on which they are now, since they would only need to change their end and intention in order to render themselves pleasing to God by a truly Christian virtue (“n’auraient presque qu’à changer de fin et d’intention”; 11:200). This is an astonishing move—for how can something that merely refines self-love, enthroning a more subtle and so more powerful pride, bring a person in any way closer to charity? What should, from Nicole’s Jansenist perspective, be the most fundamental transformation, that of end, of referring all things to God rather than to self, is here radically minimized. This move cuts against the grain of Jansenist thought and of Nicole’s own insistence that enlightened self-love remains, nevertheless, utterly opposed to charity. A move that makes sense if those who lack charity are understood as pursuing true if proximate ends is unintelligible on a hyper-Augustinian account of self-love. Nicole makes a very similar move with respect to those who do possess true charity. Since charity in such persons is often weak, it might easily be destroyed by violent temptations were it not supported by human motives that at least move in the same direction. Motives such as fear of public opinion can serve as counterweights (contrepesées) to the violent passions that allow charity to survive and slowly grow in strength (13:203). On this mechanical picture of the passions of the soul, enlightened selflove provides an indirect form of assistance to human charity, serving at least to distance those of weak charity from vice. Again, there is an initial plausibility to this picture, until one is reminded that on Nicole’s

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

259

own account, enlightened self-love is simply more refined and entrenched self-love, all the more difficult to combat because it is masked. If this is so, why might one not be more likely to extinguish charity by fostering enlightened self-love than by giving way to violent self-indulgence? We have already seen that the Jansenist understanding of justification as a gradual process of growth in charity made it easier for Jansenists, in contrast to Luther, to articulate how God’s grace works through and in human effort. It made sense in general, then, for Jansenists to talk of making use of natural means without this implying a displacement of sovereign grace. We have already seen how this can make sense of Pascal’s Wager, which can otherwise so easily appear both as a crass attempt at self-deception and self-manipulation and as contradicting Jansenist claims about utter human dependence on divine grace. What Pascal counsels is that we may employ our knowledge of the natural processes of habit formation in approaching divinely ordained means of grace—the sacraments of the church. As these habits are formed in us, our disordered passions may be healed (if they truly are, then grace is at work). But Nicole is doing something different here, for he is advocating recourse not to the sacraments but to natural means, and he cannot even regard these natural means as a neutral instrument, for he himself diagnoses them as purely sinful, merely a refinement of the self-love that constitutes the core sin of fallen humanity, not in any sense an amelioration of this sin, despite its social utility. Only if he gives up his insistence that human virtue is utterly self-directed, arguing instead that it is capable (through grace) of transcending itself and, unbeknownst to itself, of being gradually redirected, can Nicole’s counsel to make use of enlightened self-love really begin to make sense. As it is, Nicole verges on incoherence in his enthusiasm for showing how charity can use enlightened self-love as guide and instrument.21 So, for instance, he argues that both faith and worldly reason agree in seeking the end of peace. We might think, though—certainly this would have a claim to being authentically Augustinian—that the peace sought by faith and that sought by worldly reason diverge, that one is a positive fellowship of charity, the other a mere lack of open disturbance. But in arguing for a shared end of peace, Nicole is clearly focused on the latter rather than the former. He justifies the obligation to seek earthly peace through a reconstruction of the origins of society. An infinity of needs that we are incapable of satisfying on our own drives us into society, which clearly shows, argues Nicole, that it is God’s will that we live in

ch a p t er nine

260

society. Therefore, anything that can be shown to be necessary to the subsistence of society can be taken to be a natural law and God’s will. We have a duty to content the self-love of others, since to fail to do so would instigate social discontent and unrest.22 This line of argument allows Nicole to say that charity and enlightened self-love both counsel the same course of action: avoid offending others and refrain from taking offense at others. This is a very cautious, far from heroic, ethic, in which the Christian obligation to draw others away from vice and promote a fellowship of charity seems to have little place. Nicole does not lose sight of this altogether, but he does not permit the pursuit of charity to pose any threat to the preservation of earthly peace, which thus appears to take precedence. He argues, for instance, that we have a greater chance of influencing those whose self-love we have stroked than those we have offended through our reforming zeal.23 He also warns that while we ought never to satisfy the unjust inclinations of others, we need not always oppose them.24 Since self-love, however enlightened, is from his standpoint itself unjust, the whole enterprise of soothing others’ egos seems problematic from the outset. Once again, enlightened self-love seems to be neutralized, all Jansenist attacks on it as refined vice notwithstanding.25 Nicole finds support for his claim that charity has a duty to flatter the self-love of others in the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, in the sage’s counsel that “sweet words multiply friends and appease enemies” and that “a soft answer turns away wrath.”26 The advice of the sage seems to be simply that of worldly wisdom. But the fact that it carries scriptural authority lends support to Nicole’s effort to assimilate charity’s course of action with that of enlightened self-love. Nicole does caution that the approval of others is a snare, not something that a Christian should seek. It tends to confuse us about where our happiness truly lies. Enlightened self-love believes that our happiness is constituted largely by the love we receive from others. But human opinion cannot alter our eternal destiny.27 So we are obligated to seek earthly peace with others, but the means we must employ to do so—flattering others’ self-love—are dangerous to our souls, because they are very effective in winning the love of others, something we ought not seek. Christians are placed in an oddly difficult situation through Nicole’s efforts to demonstrate how charity and self-love converge. Both seek the proximate end of earthly peace, but the pursuit of that end stands in tension with the pursuit of charity’s ultimate end, while no such disharmony appears

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

261

between enlightened self-love’s proximate end, avoiding disturbances, and its ultimate end, winning the love of others. Nicole verges on an important realization—that his analysis of the social formation of human virtue, the way in which our patterns of behavior, and ultimately our habits, take shape through our interaction with others, our concern for how we are perceived by others, and our desire to be loved by others, can be understood as directly applicable to Christian virtue, as the natural means through which grace works to call us into the fellowship of charity. This would have been a fruitful form of Christian “moral anatomy.” But in the final analysis Nicole has no trust (despite his insistence that God normally works through apparently human actions) that the process through which human honnêteté is formed involves a gradual transformation of ends, such that one might start out seeking only a good for oneself but come to pursue ends as good in themselves, not simply in relation to the self. Instead we are confronted by two absolutely opposed principles: self-love and love of God. Human virtue is always for Nicole utterly self-directed, while charity does not permit us to understand ourselves as beloved creations of God and thus worthy recipients (despite our sinfulness) of love and care. General grace, too, offers no genuine opportunity for salvation. Thus, despite Nicole’s efforts to show that charity and enlightened self-love prescribe identical courses of action, and that charity has an obligation to promote enlightened self-love and thereby worldly peace, he creates conceptual space for a naturalistic morality independent of divine grace rather than always potentially permeated by grace. In his optimistic account of the possibility of achieving earthly peace through enlightened self-love, he saw himself as defending divine Providence and as maintaining a rigorous Jansenist denunciation of this-worldly morality. He left it to others to conclude that if grace is so rare and true virtue without grace utterly impossible, perhaps we would do well to focus our attention and effort on the realm of the possible, the arena that can be shaped by human action. Perhaps merely human virtue is the only virtue worth talking about.

La Rochefoucauld and the Abyss of Self-Love François VI de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), famous as the author of the Maximes, was one of those who did focus exclusively on the arena of human action.28 His anatomy of that realm, though, was rather bleaker

ch a p t er nine

262

than that of Nicole. The two habituated the same salons, notably the Hôtel Liancourt, residence of La Rochefoucauld’s uncle, and the salon of Mme de Sablé, which was frequented by all the leading Jansenists, including Pascal and Arnauld as well as Nicole. After his participation in the ill-fated Fronde uprising, La Rochefoucauld, like many French nobles, threw his energies into court intrigues and salon society instead of military valor.29 Growing increasingly disillusioned with the machinations of courtly civility, though, La Rochefoucauld found in Jansenist circles a moral seriousness he deemed attractive. As he wrote in his 1659 self-portrait, “The conversation of honest people is one of the pleasures which touches me most. I like it when it is serious and its greatest part is about morality.” 30 La Rochefoucauld has sometimes been regarded by scholars, notably by Jean Lafond, as himself a Jansenist, whose bleak account of the falsity of human virtue and the chaos of human nature was intended, like that of Pascal, to impel readers to seek grace.31 This is only one of very many points on which interpreters of La Rochefoucauld have sharply disagreed: “his work has been called Stoic and Epicurean, atheistic and aesthetic, Jansenist and anti-Jansenist, ‘pre-Enlightenment’ and Augustinian, a secret valorization of the Cornelian ethic and a ‘démolition du héros,’ a misanthropic condemnation of human nature and a social code for an ‘élite de civilisés.’ ” 32 There is, then, no “accepted interpretation” of La Rochefoucauld. Still, the evidence for the Jansenist interpretation is objectively rather slim: La Rochefoucauld’s social circle, some of the withdrawn and posthumously published maxims, and the preface to the fifth edition of the Maxims, which warned the reader that “he who has made these reflections has only considered men in that deplorable state of nature corrupted by sin; and, thus, the manner in which he speaks of this infinite number of shortcomings which are found in their apparent virtues, does not pertain to those men God shields from these shortcomings by a particular grace.” 33 All of these may be plausibly explained without making La Rochefoucauld out to be a Jansenist: he was drawn to the Jansenists’ anatomy of worldly virtue, not to their refuge in grace; La Rochefoucauld’s terms of reference were shaped by Jansenist thought, but the fact that he withdrew certain maxims and did not publish others indicates a growing sense of the divergence of his own project from Jansenist moral anatomy; the preface may dissimulate in omitting to add that La Rochefoucauld does not believe that any are in fact shielded by a particular grace. Most importantly, though, the Maxims themselves,

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

263

however severe in their account of the hypocrisy of worldly virtue, do at multiple points affirm the possibility of a true virtue or honnêteté, which, however, is purely natural. Nicole had distinguished, it is true, not solely between self-love and true Christian virtue but also between unenlightened self-love and enlightened self-love. But Nicole’s enlightened self-love remains essentially vice and in any case is despised by La Rochefoucauld for its machinations. His true honnêteté is something distinctively new. Much of La Rochefoucauld’s moral anatomy is strongly reminiscent of elements from both Gracián and Nicole.34 The opening epigraph proclaims that “our virtues are, most often, only vices disguised.” What goes by the name of virtue is usually simply disguised self-interest, passion, or weakness. So, for instance, “self-interest [l’intérêt] speaks all manner of tongues and plays all manner of roles, even that of the disinterested [désintéressé]” (M 39). Gratitude is a form of commerce, given in order to render others more likely to give to us in the future (M 223); humility is often “an artifice of pride which debases itself in order to elevate itself” (M 254). Persons devote themselves to cultivating appearances in order to make certain impressions on others; “thus one can say that the world is composed only of countenances” (M 256). Nicole had noted that for those most proficient at assuming the mask of virtue, the mask becomes second nature and need no longer be cultivated intentionally. For La Rochefoucauld, this is not habituation but self-deception: “we are so accustomed to disguise ourselves from others that we end up disguising ourselves from ourselves” (M 119). Whereas Gracián advised the person seeking greatness to exceed all others in the use of deception, La Rochefoucauld suggests that such an attempt will backfire. Our attempts to master ourselves and others fail because of the complex ambiguity of human nature. We are ruled by passions, not by reason: “There is in the human heart a perpetual generation of passions, such that the downfall of one is almost always the establishment of another” (M 10), and “passions often engender passions which are contrary to them” (M 11). Nor is it the case that the soul is governed by a unified will. La Rochefoucauld even transforms the Jansenist reduction of all passions to self-love. The long maxim on self-love with which the first edition of the Maximes began was withdrawn in later editions, and a close look at it suggests that La Rochefoucauld’s understanding of self-love differed substantially from that of the Jansenists all along.35 The maxim begins with a statement that could have come straight from Nicole and that does

ch a p t er nine

264

suggest that all the passions may indeed be reduced to self-love: “selflove (l’amour-propre) is the love of oneself, and of all things for oneself” (MS 1). But whereas Nicole had argued that self-love can become enlightened and give rise to a real, if earthly, peace and order, La Rochefoucauld emphasizes the impenetrable depths and imperceptible transformations of self-love; “its suppleness cannot be represented, its transformations surpass those of metamorphosis . . . one cannot probe its depth, nor pierce the darkness of its abyss” (MS 1). He stresses precisely self-love’s lack of enlightenment and lack of order; “it is capricious, and one sees it sometimes work with the greatest alacrity, and with incredible labor to obtain things that are not advantageous to it, and that are even harmful to it, but which it pursues because it wants them” (MS 1). As if to unmask Jansenism itself, La Rochefoucauld writes of self-love that “it enlists even in the party of those who wage war against it; it enters into their designs; and, what is admirable, it hates itself with them; it plots its own fall; it even works toward its own ruin. Finally, it concerns itself only about being, and as long as it is, it consents to being its own enemy” (MS 1). Thus, even if a person’s variable passions may be reduced to self-love, this does not grant any real unity or stability to the soul. As Krailsheimer notes, “the amour-propre to which the first maxims introduce us, so far from being a singleminded, and, if necessary, immoral quest for personal advancement is shown to be a hesitant, fumbling compromise.” 36 We are driven hither and thither by our passions and rarely understand why we are so impelled. In stark contrast to Pascal’s Augustinian diagnosis, that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God, La Rochefoucauld tells us that “we would hardly desire anything with ardor if we knew perfectly what we desire” (M 80). Our restless activity is sustained simply by the mysteriousness of our psychic life; it does not inform us that we are directed to God. While deception is a central theme in La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, it is significant that his claim that our virtues are vices in disguise is qualified; “most often” (le plus souvent), they are vices disguised, but not always. Such qualifications are a constant presence throughout the Maximes.37 To some extent, this is simply another reflection of La Rochefoucauld’s resistance to overly unifying, homogenizing explanations. If virtues are most often vices in disguise, they are sometimes, as are vices, merely natural traits, a sort of spiritual health or illness that results from chance and physical humors: “the health of the soul is no more assured than that of the body” (M 188); “The shortcomings of the soul are like the wounds of the body”

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

265

(M 194); “The humors of the body have an ordinary and regulated course, which imperceptibly move and turn our will” (M 297).38 Unlike the Jansenists, La Rochefoucauld has no concern for holding human beings responsible for their vices, since he need not justify God’s punishment of these vices. So both vices and virtues may be traced to weakness (paresse) and ennui as much as to self-interest: “if one examines well the various effects of ennui, one will find that it makes one neglect more duties than self-interest does” (M 172).

“Les vrais honnêtes gens” But there is another reason that La Rochefoucauld refrains from unconditional claims about the falsity of human virtue; he affirms, though often in a backhanded way, the existence of true virtues: “Nothing is rarer than true goodness [véritable bonté]” (M 481); or “hypocrisy is an homage vice pays to virtue” (M 218). It is these scattered affirmations of virtue that have encouraged some interpreters to conclude that La Rochefoucauld was, in fact, a Jansenist, inviting his readers to turn to the grace that alone could grant them true virtue. There is, though, no indication that these virtues derive from grace; they seem rather to be a purely natural virtue. In what could this virtue consist, given La Rochefoucauld’s destructive analysis of human nature and character? Some commentators have suggested that La Rochefoucauld’s true virtue might be read as nothing other than power or strength, contrasted with the theme of weakness woven throughout the Maximes.39 This interpretation, which makes La Rochefoucauld out to be a proto-Nietzschean, or at least assimilates him quite closely to Hobbes, rests heavily on maxims such as 479: “Only the people with strength can have true kindness; those who appear kind ordinarily only have weakness, which easily turns into bitterness.” If La Rochefoucauld’s true virtue is power or strength of character, it is beyond good and evil, no longer an ethical category in any recognizable sense; “the world turns out to be divided not into the virtuous and vicious, but in Hobbesian fashion into those who are clever and strong enough to be whole and to get what they want, and those who are not.” But Clark argues, I think rightly, that this interpretation, while it captures the sense in which La Rochefoucauld’s ethic always remains a noble or elite ethic, does not do justice to La Rochefoucauld’s moral earnestness.40 A cluster of maxims on “les vrais honnêtes gens,” the true honor-

ch a p t er nine

266

able people, provides the key to understanding the nature of La Rochefoucauld’s true virtue. Nicole, as we have seen, spoke of an honnêteté humaine, which could be perfected through the perfect enlightenment of self-love while remaining sinful. The characteristic of La Rochefoucauld’s true honnêteté is not enlightenment in the sense of the most clear-sighted, far-seeing pursuit of self-interest. Rather, true honnêteté is characterized by utter honesty with oneself and others, where clearsightedness has become an end in itself. “The false honorable people are those who disguise their shortcomings to others and to themselves. The true honorable people are those who know them perfectly and confess them” (M 202). Or again, “he is truly an honorable man who wants to be always exposed to the sight of honorable people” (M 206). True honnêteté consists in facing up to the bleakest truths about human nature and about oneself in particular. In this way, one gains a certain power over and transcendence of those truths. This is a very limited power—not a power to become, as Gracián would suggest, the most adroit user of deception, nor the power to act from charity rather than self-love. This honesty simply enables one to avoid being a blind puppet of one’s drives and passions. In this restricted sense it allows one to become for the first time a responsible moral agent.41 La Rochefoucauld’s self-portrait further reinforces this ideal of honnêteté as absolute honesty. La Rochefoucauld clearly prides himself on not lacking “the sincerity to confess frankly what my shortcomings are” (134). He insists that “I am content that people believe me to be neither more beautiful than I claim to be, nor of a better temperament than the one I depict, nor more witty and more reasonable than I will say I am” (134). He confesses his own “strong desire to be completely an honorable man” and claims that because of this desire, “my friends cannot please me more than when they sincerely warn me about my shortcomings” (135). However accurate this is as a self-portrayal, it clearly signals La Rochefoucauld’s conviction that the anatomical, unmasking enterprise of the Maximes is the enterprise par excellence of the truly honorable person. Moreover, La Rochefoucauld is willing to subject himself to his own unmasking enterprise because it is precisely in doing so that he can claim for himself a sort of moral nobility, a new sort of heroism, characterized not by military valor but by perceiving and proclaiming hard truths. La Rochefoucauld does not, after all, as is sometimes claimed, exempt “himself from the global reach of his conceptual scythe.” 42

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

267

La Rochefoucauld shares with the Jansenists a suspicion of the social processes by which ordinary human virtue is cultivated, a disgust for the deception involved in assuming a persona that does not match one’s character, in acting more virtuous than one actually is, acting as if one’s reasons for acting are less self-absorbed than in fact they are. Maxim 261 tells us that “the education one ordinarily gives to young people is a second self-love with which one inspires them.” Far from trusting that this inspiration can allow self-love to transcend and overcome itself, La Rochefoucauld, like the Jansenists, believes that it simply entrenches self-love while rendering it more subtle and hidden to both agents and spectators. Both seek to escape from this suspect social formation. The Jansenists hope through grace to arrive at true charity, directed at God and neighbor. La Rochefoucauld aims simply to arrive at the truth about himself and others, to escape all falsity and deception. Beyond that he has no substantive goal, no high aspirations for a transformed character. In this sense he remains deeply shaped by the Augustinian tradition’s denial of human agency apart from grace. Self-knowledge and knowledge of human nature become ends in themselves, rather than, as in Pascal, preparation for grace. For Pascal, moreover, even self-knowledge is finally impossible apart from Christ and thus from grace. For La Rochefoucauld, as for Nicole, moral anatomy is a natural human achievement, even if a rare one. La Rochefoucauld has only contempt for the enlightened self-love for which Nicole praises divine providence, and for the peaceful society to which it appears to give rise. La Rochefoucauld’s true honnêteté abjures the machinations of enlightened self-love, retreating from action into the detached, superior stance of the analyst. He offers perhaps the purest example of the anatomist, where the project of anatomy becomes its own end; unmasking false virtue in order itself to constitute true virtue. Later Anatomists would, like La Rochefoucauld, prize anatomy for its own sake, while also, like Nicole, seeking to show how the knowledge derived from moral anatomy can be put to social purposes.43 If cold knowledge of human nature serves as the first displacement of fallen nature’s hope for transformation through grace, aspiration and activity soon enter back in. If Mandeville continues to name natural virtue false and deceptive, and to pride himself on having unmasked and dissected it, he is not finally disgusted by it. Rather, he is gleeful about the ways in which it, in contrast to muchlauded Christian charity, fosters social flourishing.

ch a p t er nine

268

Mandeville’s Grumbling Hive Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733), best known for his Fable of the Bees and for the phrase that encapsulated his thought: “private vices, public benefits,” was a Dutch physician who lived his adult life in England. He began his career in the world of letters by writing fables in the style of La Fontaine. At one level, Mandeville’s thought affirms the ineradicability of hypocrisy from human society (and grace is not seriously entertained as a response to this). At another level, by unveiling this hypocrisy, it aims, as did La Rochefoucauld’s anatomy, at achieving a superior position of honesty. The moral Anatomist is superior not in that he achieves true virtue rather than the mere semblance of virtue but in that he reveals the true character of hypocritical virtue. The superiority achieved by the honest Anatomist cannot, though, eradicate hypocrisy from society. The most it can hope for is to bring about greater acceptance of hypocrisy, and to this end Mandeville employed satire. Even if Mandeville prided himself on his keen anatomy, his ethic, unlike La Rochefoucauld’s, is not in the end an ethic of exceptional heroism but a bourgeois ethic; participating in a flourishing capitalist society takes precedence over securing one’s nobility. Mandeville’s thought shows clearly how the “moralist” tradition of anatomy feeds into the emerging descriptive discourse of modern moral philosophy.44 But he is also significant more generally because of the way he puts moral anatomy at the service of emerging capitalism. If there is no real distinction between open greed and apparent benevolence or generosity, and both are socially beneficial, there appear to be no real ethical constraints on pursuit of personal gain. It is not, then, simply the case that worldly virtue is now regarded as a free-standing entity bearing no living relationship with grace, but that the hyper-Augustinian refusal to allow any final distinction between worldly “virtue” and worldly “vice” has borne fruit in an active legitimation of the latter—at least in those forms in which it stimulates the economy. La Rochefoucauld’s dark view of human nature was not uncontroversial. But Mandeville was positively despised by his contemporaries and regarded as an outright advocate of vice and wickedness. He was compared not only to Hobbes and Machiavelli but also to the AntiChrist himself. One anonymous eighteenth-century poet punned on Mandeville’s name: “If GOD-MAN Vice to abolish came,/ Who Vice commends, MAN-DEVIL be his name.” 45 Mandeville was accused of advocating everything from prostitution to alcoholism and duels and

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

269

was himself rumored, apparently groundlessly, to be both an alcoholic and “an indulger in gross sensuality.” 46 Even those, like David Hume, who were positively indebted to Mandeville’s thought, felt it necessary to denounce him.47 More recently, and up until the mid-1970s or so, it was sometimes argued that Mandeville was a sincere adherent of the austere Augustinianism associated with Jansenism, unearthing the viciousness and hypocrisy of most apparent virtue in order to provoke a heartfelt reliance on supernatural grace.48 Mandeville’s tone of detached amusement tells against this, though. Ordinarily, satire ridicules vice and folly in order to stimulate moral reform. Mandeville’s satire does not fit into this mold.49 It is not vice that is the target of Mandeville’s wit but rather the hypocrisy of those who call loudly for an impossible virtue that they would not welcome if it actually came knocking. The work that was to make Mandeville infamous began as “The Grumbling Hive,” which Mandeville described as a “Story told in Dogrel” that was “rather too long for a Fable.” 50 First published in 1705, it attracted little attention until it appeared again in 1714 as The Fable of the Bees, along with a series of twenty prose remarks. Mandeville continued to expand The Fable of the Bees, adding a second volume, which included independent essays, verse, parables, dialogues, and fables. The Fable of the Bees reached its final form in 1724, when it became the target of a slew of furious attacks and was even presented as a public nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex.51 The fundamental charge against Mandeville was that he openly promoted vice by proclaiming private vices to be socially beneficial. Mandeville denied this, insisting that he was only saying a choice had to be made between virtuous poverty and vicious prosperity. The intensity of the outcry against Mandeville suggests that he had hit a nerve: his readers feared he might be right. “The Grumbling Hive,” subtitled “Knaves turn’d Honest,” tells the story of a bustling, successful hive of bees. Every sort of craft and trade, reputable and disreputable, existed in the hive and contributed to its general flourishing. Some bees spent their time in physical labour, while others lived off the labour of others. The latter, including “Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players,/ Pick-pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Southsayers,” were called “knaves,” but those deemed “grave” and “industrious” deserved the same title (I, 19). Lawyers, physicians, and clerics, while apparently solicitous of the needs of others, in fact pursued their own self-interest and sought to increase their own business. Thus lawyers “Oppos’d all Registers, that Cheats/ Might make more Work with

ch a p t er nine

270

dipt Estates” (I, 20), while clerics used their social position to feed, while concealing, their “Sloth, Lust, Avarice and Pride” (I, 21). What allowed the hive to flourish was the fact that the various vices were complementary to one another and together stimulated economic activity. Criminals sought their own benefit, but they also made work for locksmiths and lawyers. The desire of the rich for luxury goods kept many, themselves desirous of income, employed in producing these goods:

Thus every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise; .... ... ... ... ... ... ... .... Such were the Blessings of that State; Their Crimes conspir’d to make them Great: And Virtue, who from Politiks Had learn’d a Thousand Cunning Tricks, Was, by their happy Influence, Made Friends with Vice: And ever since, The worst of all the Multitude Did something for the Common Good. (I, 24)52 Had the bees recognized the positive contribution made to society by all of these forms of vice, they might have been content. Instead, the bees denounced the vices they saw around them, all the while hypocritically overlooking their own. They cried to the gods to give them honesty, and Jove decided to teach them a lesson by ridding the hive of fraud (I, 27). Once “the Mask Hypocrisy’s flung down” and “Honesty fills all their Hearts,” the hive quickly loses its former prosperity (I, 27). All those trades that are kept busy by crime, lust, greed, and luxury declined rapidly; lawyers had little work, doctors only accepted cases they really knew how to treat, all were content to live modestly and thus had no need for surplus wealth or luxury goods. The honest bees eked out an existence of Spartan poverty; decimated by aggressive outsiders, the few who survived ended up living in a hollow tree. “Fools only strive,” pointed out the moral of “The Grumbling Hive,” “To make a Great an Honest Hive” (I, 36). Prior to the divine gift of honest virtue, individuals in “The Grumbling Hive” pursued their own private interests, but these self-interested pursuits proved to be complementary and resulted in general flourish-

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

271

ing. Thus individuals (as according to Adam Smith’s later concept of the invisible hand) benefit the public interest without any intention of doing so, and without even reflecting on what might constitute the public good. M. M. Goldsmith has shown in detail how Mandeville’s thought takes shape as a satire and critique of the campaign against vice typical of Augustan civic republicanism.53 The civic republican assumption was that private virtue and public benefit went hand in hand. Luxury was a vice because it was a form of self-indulgence, but it was also problematic, according to mercantilist doctrine, because it encouraged a reliance on exotic goods from abroad and thus sapped the nation of gold and silver. Mandeville perceived the economic errors of this doctrine and hoped to puncture the complacency of those campaigning for the “Reformation of Manners.” What these social critics really cared about, thought Mandeville, was economic greatness, not moral virtue, and an accurate analysis of the economy revealed that they had to choose between the two: “all the Cardinal Virtues together won’t so much as procure a tolerable Coat or a Porridge-Pot among them” (I, 184). While Mandeville was careful to note in his preface that he had never argued against punishing individual practitioners of vice, it was evident that he took for granted—as, apparently, did his readers—that a wealthy, powerful state was to be preferred to a poor, weak one. To those who asked why he had published “The Grumbling Hive” and its accompanying moral anatomy, Mandeville suggested that if it were reasonable to expect persons to be changed by what they read (and he was doubtful on this point), one might hope, first, that people who tended to find fault with others would recognize that they were guilty of similar vices and, second, that “those who are so fond of the Ease and Comforts, and reap all the Benefits that are the Consequence of a great and flourishing Nation, would learn more patiently to submit to those Inconveniences, which no Government upon Earth can remedy” (I, 8). Ultimately, then, Mandeville counseled a realistic acceptance of the vices that make for a prosperous society. “The Grumbling Hive” suggested that open self-seeking, the vices of luxury and avarice, could be socially beneficial. Much of The Fable of the Bees, though, was devoted not to the social consequences of admitted vices but to the dissection of phenomena that go by the name of virtue but that Mandeville, following the earlier Anatomist tradition, analyzed as concealed vice. Hume attacked Mandeville as inconsistent on just this point: “Is it not very inconsistent for an author to assert in one page, that

ch a p t er nine

272

moral distinctions are inventions of politicians for public interest; and in the next page maintain, that vice is advantageous to the public?” 54 Of course for Mandeville both open vice and so-called virtue consist in purely self-interested actions. To render his project consistent one must simply add that sometimes it is more publicly advantageous for vice to be concealed rather than open. The vices that benefit the public even in open form are those contributing to economic consumption and thus to growth of the economy—notably luxury.55 Other vices must be concealed.

“Political Offspring” Earlier Anatomists had argued that the vicious could reliably impersonate true virtue because virtue is honored and our longing for honor leads us to act as the virtuous do. But how is it that certain actions and characters come to be considered virtuous and others vicious, and why is virtue praised and vice condemned? These were the etiological questions Mandeville sought to answer in “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” (1714). Here Mandeville suggested that the category of virtue was a human invention, dreamed up by those who created human society. “Lawgivers and other wise Men, that have laboured for the Establishment of Society” devised a way to make people subdue rather than indulge their appetites, and to pursue the public good rather than their own private interests. Knowing that human beings are governed purely by their passions, they recognized that persons would need to be compensated for their self-denial; “but being unable to give so many real Rewards as would satisfy all Persons for every individual Action, they were forc’d to contrive an imaginary one” (I, 42). The imaginary reward they concocted was praise for those who subordinated their inclinations to the public welfare, joined with an equally imaginary punishment of blame directed at those who indulged their appetites.56 Why does Mandeville consider “the Good and Evil of Honour and Dishonour” to be imaginary? (I, 64). By this he means, first, that honor does not offer its recipients a tangible benefit. Second, honor and dishonor are conventional, or what Mandeville and his contemporaries would call “artificial,” rather than natural. Different actions and characters receive honor in different societies, even if Mandeville believes he has discerned the characteristic shared by anything that is so honored—it must be beneficial to society. Mandeville concludes that “the Moral Virtues are the Political Off-

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

273

spring which Flattery begot upon Pride” (I, 51). The ancient Greeks and Romans, on his account, were masters of the art of using flattery to inspire great acts of public service and self-denial, and the fact that this is so shows that even a pagan society, without benefit of divine revelation of the moral law, can give rise to the moral virtues (I, 50–51). Mandeville’s account of the transition from the state of nature into political society was not, though, intended to be taken literally, as is shown by the fact that the latter portions of Fable of the Bees give accounts of the very gradual development, over vast epochs and without conscious invention, of a wide variety of social norms and institutions (including both law and morality).57 His account, like those of many in the modern natural law tradition, was intended to show counterfactually what human beings would be like apart from socially acquired characteristics. For Mandeville, this was instrumental to the further aim of suggesting how, without benefit of divinely revealed law or divine assistance in keeping that law, human beings could evolve controls on their own behavior. Hugo Grotius, often termed the founder of modern natural law, had noted in the Prolegomena to the Law of War and Peace that the natural law would be binding even if God did not exist. In fact, though, similar comments had been made in scholastic discussions of natural law, and Grotius’s approach, and that of other modern natural law thinkers from Pufendorf to Locke, was nonsectarian rather than secular; he assumed that creation is examined for signs of God’s will.58 Mandeville, in contrast, sought an account of morality that required not only no recourse to revelation but no recourse even to the concept of Providence. Pierre Bayle, meanwhile, had shocked his readers by suggesting that a society of atheists might be more virtuous than a society of Christians.59 But Bayle’s argument sought to shame warring Christian factions, and in particular Catholics who persecuted Bayle’s fellow Huguenots. “In the Thoughts on the Comet he is arguing that atheists are not nearly as bad as believers in corrupt religion. Crusaders are worse than atheists, precisely because they use their religion as an excuse for their worst crimes.” 60 Mandeville sought to deflate hypocritical moralizing rather than to attack idolatry, and he ridiculed as unsustainable a society of true Christian charity. If Luther’s attack on virtue left no scope for human agency, counseling total reliance on divine grace and insisting that human moral striving would simply mire us further in sin, Mandeville, drawing on Nicole’s paradoxical legitimation of natural moral striving, empowered human agency. We have no control over “true virtue,” since that is up to God (Mandeville adds a

ch a p t er nine

274

broad wink), but we have “maker’s knowledge” of human conventions. We are capable of living up to the social norms that we, rather than God, have created. In invoking the mythical device of the “skillful politician,” moreover, Mandeville wanted to poke fun at competing narratives that praised the public-spiritedness of those who invented society; Mandeville’s skillful politicians invent virtue not in order to promote the common good but in order to make the people easier to rule and thus serve their lust for domination.61 Mandeville’s many observations on the moral education of children show that he thought his hypothetical account shed light on the actual processes by which individuals in each generation are induced to transform self-seeking from its open into its concealed forms. Parents and teachers, like the mythical skillful politicians, find it easier to flatter their children into conformity with their wishes than to rule them with brute force.62 Thus a tiny child is extravagantly praised for making something vaguely resembling a curtsey: “These extravagant Praises would by any one, above the Capacity of an Infant, be call’d fulsome Flatteries, and, if you will, abominable Lies, yet Experience teaches us, that by the help of such gross Encomiums, young Misses will be brought to make pretty Curt’sies, and behave themselves womanly much sooner, and with less trouble, than they would without them” (I, 54). Although honor and dishonor are “imaginary,” Mandeville recognizes that they have very real effects, insofar as they produce pride on the one hand and shame on the other. These passions are powerful enough to restrain our other passions. Thus, by assigning honor to certain things and dishonor to others, politicians teach us to avoid shame by observing certain rules that “consist in a dextrous Management of our selves, a stifling of our Appetites, and hiding the real Sentiments of our Hearts before others” (I, 68). In order to develop “virtue,” we must therefore acquire a habit of hypocrisy, of hiding our true passions. Education in manners must begin early in life in order to ensure that the habit of hypocrisy will be deeply embedded. “If People had been used to speak from the Sincerity of their Hearts, and act according to the natural Sentiments they felt within, ‘till they were Three or Four and Twenty, it would be impossible for them to assist at this Comedy of Manners, without either loud Laughter or Indignation; and yet it is certain, that such Behaviour makes us more tolerable to one another than we could be otherwise” (I, 79). Moral education allows us to play our part in the “Comedy of Man-

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

275

ners,” that is, to take on a role that is false and deceptive but that allows society to function harmoniously. On the one hand, we hide the passions in which we continue to indulge, knowing that others would disapprove if they knew of them. But there is dissimulation at work even in our acts of public service, for here too our true concern is with ourselves and not with others. Our acts of self-sacrifice are only apparently self-sacrificial; in fact, in all our virtuous actions, we feed the passion of pride. Of course, in order to win the approval of others, we must conceal our pride, but Mandeville argues that pride that is hidden is perhaps the greatest pride of all; “The humblest Man alive must confess, that the Reward of a Virtuous Action, which is the Satisfaction that ensues upon it, consists in a certain Pleasure he procures to himself by Contemplating on his own Worth: Which Pleasure, together with the Occasion of it, are as certain Signs of Pride, as looking Pale and Trembling at any imminent Danger, are the symptoms of Fear” (I, 57; see also I, 79). Mandeville plays with a double definition of virtue. On the one hand, he equates virtue with “politeness,” “good qualities,” “good breeding,” and “good manners.” This virtue is inherently hypocritical, though socially beneficial. True virtue, on the other hand, would have to extinguish rather than inflame the passions; “Passions may do Good by chance, but there can be no Merit but in the Conquest of them” (I, 74). Mandeville apes here a hyper-Augustinian moral psychology and the Jansenist tactic of demonstrating the reign of self-interested passion and the powerlessness of reason in order to prepare the ground for an appeal to grace—but the appeal to grace never comes. Instead, “apparent” virtue, courtly civility now understood as the sole ethic really governing society, is left as the only live option. Human beings cannot overcome or radically redirect their passions; instead, they have harnessed their self-interested passions in such a way that these serve society as a whole.63 At the individual level, this harnessing takes place through a process of habituation and social formation. Yet human beings never genuinely seek the common good as an end in itself. We are always merely acting the part of virtue. If the Jansenist understanding of true charity was problematic in its insistence that love of God required the destruction of self-love, Mandeville’s reductio ad absurdum of this position freed self-interest from any restraints and sanctioned its open display within the realm of economic activity. I need not deliberate about how my economic activity serves the community if I am assured that it automatically does so.64

ch a p t er nine

276

Honesty and Hypocrisy The hyper-Augustinian anthropology of the Jansenists played directly into Mandeville’s hand. But Mandeville also had to come to terms with a more optimistic anthropology championed by Dutch Arminians and English Latitudinarians, and indebted in the latter case to the Cambridge Platonists and the broader tradition of Christian Platonism. Mandeville focused his critical attention on his close contemporary Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), who placed this optimistic anthropology at the service of a republican project.65 Arguing against both Calvinist views of fallen human nature and Hobbes’s equally pessimistic view of natural human egoism, Shaftesbury insisted that human beings are naturally sociable and animated by passions (the “natural affections”) that lead directly to the good of the public, as well as others (the “self-affections”) leading to the good of the individual. These can be brought into harmony with one another; only the “unnatural affections” lead directly to injury either of the public or of the individual. The natural affections cannot be reduced to the self-affections and do not derive from these. We approve of them through a moral sense, which appreciates their intrinsic moral beauty, not the fact that they are ultimately useful to ourselves. Moreover, the self-affections are not vicious.66 Shaftesbury, then, did not appeal to grace to instill true virtue; human nature is naturally good, and this natural goodness can become genuine virtue without divine assistance if this natural goodness is consciously approved of and pursued as such.67 Against Shaftesbury, Mandeville insisted that human beings are not in fact naturally sociable and that the natural affections can indeed be reduced to the self-affections; “does not Man love Company, as he does every thing else, for his own sake?” (I, 341). One of the central debates among the British moralists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was over this issue raised so pointedly by Hobbes and again (with a Jansenist twist) by Mandeville.68 Were human beings fundamentally egoistic? Given how deeply established the enterprise of Anatomist unmasking had become, it was easy to read the optimists as shallow Pollyannas. Their naïve reading of human nature seemed always open to critical deconstruction. Insofar as it insisted that human beings were naturally good, it seemed simply to deny the processes of social formation that the Anatomists had brought to light. The keenest contemporary response to the egoistic hypothesis was that

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

277

developed by Bishop Joseph Butler in the course of sermons delivered at the Rolls Chapel and published in 1726. Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and others, Butler argued that human beings are naturally sociable and that human nature includes a natural principle of benevolence. He admitted that it was certainly possible to apply the term self-love in an expanionist fashion: “if, because every particular affection is a man’s own, and the pleasure arising from its gratification his own pleasure, or pleasure to himself, such particular affection must be called self-love; according to this way of speaking, no creature whatever can possibly act but merely from self-love; and every action and every affection whatever is to be resolved up into this one principle.” 69 But speaking in this way does not allow us to make distinctions that we find ourselves needing to make all the time; if we reduced all motives to self-love, “we should want words to express the difference, between the principle of an action, proceeding from cool consideration that it will be to my own advantage; and an action, suppose of revenge, or of friendship, by which a man runs upon certain ruin, to do evil or good to another.” Particular passions are directed to particular external objects, not to the self: “one man rushes upon certain ruin for the gratification of a present desire: nobody will call the principle of this action self-love.” 70 Were we actuated only by self-love, happiness would be impossible, since happiness consists in the satisfaction of particular inclinations and passions, which we could not satisfy if we did not have them. To say that all actions are done in order to satisfy some inclination of the self is to say very little; we must attend to the particular inclinations and their distinct objects. Just as particular passions are distinct from self-love, so benevolence is also distinct from self-love and irreducible to it. “Is desire of and delight in the happiness of another any more a diminution of self-love, than desire of and delight in the esteem of another? They are both equally desire of and delight in somewhat external to ourselves.” 71 It simply is the case that persons do take delight in and pursue a wide variety of objects, and while there may be situations in which these come into conflict with one another, they do so accidentally. There is no necessary opposition between self-love and benevolence; the presence of the one does not exclude the other. Although Butler’s arguments were and are often taken to be decisive, Mandeville refused to back down.72 He accepted Butler’s distinction between self-love and the particular passions. This, though, was a point made also by La Rochefoucauld. Mandeville rejected the next step of the argument: he did not grant that the public affections or benevolence are (any more than

ch a p t er nine

278

the moral sense) original principles in human nature. If they do exist, they are secondary byproducts of the self-affections. Granting the distinction between self-love and the particular passions does make evident the need for some regulative power if human agency is to achieve any kind of unity and direction. Here Mandeville argued that the principle of pride, one of the self-affections, serves very effectively to regulate conflict among the various affections or particular passions—an idea that Hume was to more fully develop, as we shall see. Neither the moral sense, to which Shaftesbury appealed, nor conscience, to which Butler appealed, is necessary in order to make unified agency possible.73 Mandeville continued to take a certain glee in his role as Anatomist, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Only the Anatomist can be honest, in contrast to “Sagacious Moralists,” whose true business is flattery (I, 52). In daring to reveal the truth about human nature and society, the Anatomist risks becoming the target of the blame reserved for the shameless, for “it is Shame and Education that contains the Seeds of all Politeness, and he that has neither, and offers to speak the Truth of his Heart, and what he feels within, is the most contemptible Creature upon Earth, tho’ he committed no other Fault” (I, 72). The anatomist, then, not only exposes the emptiness of others’ aspirations to “true” virtue but also refuses to adhere to the hypocritical rules of politeness, natural human virtue. If he is willing to bear this ignominy, the Anatomist can hope to bring others to greater self-knowledge. Most moralists only deepen social hypocrisy; “one of the greatest Reasons why so few People understand themselves, is, that most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads with telling them what they really are” (I, 39). As Hector Monro writes, Mandeville “does take ‘Know thyself’ seriously; and he sees . . . that moralizing about the passions can get in the way of understanding them.” 74 Mandeville in “The Grumbling Hive” had equated honesty with virtue and hypocrisy with vice. It is noteworthy that honesty here appears as the trait to which he himself aspires, the only true virtue left, it seems, in a hypocritical world—just as for Luther, honest confession displaces moral striving. The science of moral philosophy is not to be confused with edifying moralism; the former seeks truth, while the latter fosters hypocrisy. Mandeville’s commitment to self-knowledge goes hand in hand with a splitting off of the analyst’s perspective from that of the agent, a split typical of modern moral thought. The possibility of this split can be traced back to the Jansenist tradition of moral anatomy, within which

Emancipating Worldly Virtue

279

the graced agent anatomized the state of fallen nature without needing to live by the moral psychology that has been thus dissected and deflated. Since for Mandeville graced nature was no more than a theoretical foil, he had nothing to live by but the hypocritical manners he had subjected to analysis, despite the fact that his deflationary critique created a sense of ironic detachment from lived reality. Unlike Luther, whose honesty is a sacrifice of agency enabling the reception of divine justifying agency, and unlike La Rochefoucauld, for whom honesty is a new assertion of human agency and a new noble ethic, Mandeville’s honesty is no more than a momentary, gleeful unmasking. There are, moreover, significant limits to Mandeville’s own honesty. After all, he preserves the appearance of religious orthodoxy through his gestures to true virtue. Monro accounts for this by noting that “Mandeville may have been disingenuous at times; but disingenuousness and selfdeception are not the same thing.” 75 Mandeville, suggests Monro, was less concerned with achieving transparency in his relationships with others than with self-knowledge. Monro’s analysis thus suggests that Mandeville embodies the shift Trilling traced from the ideal of sincerity to that of authenticity. Trilling wrote, “If sincerity has lost its former status, if the word itself has for us a hollow sound and seems almost to negate its meaning, that is because it does not propose being true to one’s self as an end but only as a means. If one is true to one’s self for the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others, is one being truly true to one’s own self? The moral end in view implies a public end in view, with all this suggests of the esteem and fair repute that follow upon the correct fulfillment of a public role.” 76 Mandeville, on Monro’s account, has taken this modern step away from the ideal of sincerity and toward the ideal of authenticity: he urges his readers to know themselves, not ultimately because of any good that derives to particular others or to society at large, but for their own sake. The truth about ourselves, about how we have been socially formed and about who we are beneath or behind that formation (for Mandeville is not yet postmodern), may or may not be flattering and may or may not be of social value, but in any case it is genuine, the “truth of one’s heart.” Yet this does not quite ring true as an account of Mandeville’s purposes. For while Mandeville clearly revels in his clear-sighted anatomy, it is not for him simply an end in itself. Joined to his personal aspiration, that of showing that the emperor has no clothes (and he must show this to others in order to enjoy the shocking impact), is a bourgeois social

ch a p t er nine

280

aspiration rather than a heroic exceptionalism. Society cannot survive and flourish without the apparent virtue of good manners, so teaching self-knowledge to others cannot eliminate hypocrisy wholesale. It can, though, hope to chasten a particular form of moralizing, which attacks pride and hypocrisy without realizing that they cannot be eliminated from society, and which moreover fails to see that it is itself a manifestation of pride and hypocrisy. So Mandeville turns the accusations of both Augustan civic republicans and Jansenists back against themselves. He does so in the name of an emancipated worldly pursuit of prosperity to which neither the term virtue nor vice any longer seems apt.

paga n v irtue a nd moder n mor a l philosoph y

v

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

10

If early modern Augustinsian thinkers were often worried about social formation as fostering hypocrisy and molding characters into false virtue, from Luther to Pascal this anxiety was set in the context of an understanding of human nature—and therefore also social relationships—as already decisively fallen. In Rousseau the anxiety about social formation is in some respects exacerbated, since “the Fall,” for Rousseau takes place precisely in the passage from nature to society, from independence to a state of dependency that fosters hypocrisy.1 As Ernst Cassirer argued, Rousseau locates responsibility for the presence of evil in the world “at a point where no one before him had looked for it.” 2 For Rousseau the hypocrisy of socially acquired virtue is not a reflection of original sin but a social corruption of natural goodness. Society is for Rousseau a kind of theater, in which watching and being watched constitute false identities that betray authentic nature. (If society is thus condemned as theatrical, Rousseau at the same time issues a neo-Puritan attack on the particular social institution of theater.) On the other hand, if Rousseau’s anxiety about society is heightened, at the same time he assumes that these issues of dependency and hypocrisy are to be resolved through human effort, rather than supernatural intervention or assistance. Hume denies any fall and consequently any need for redemption; Kant renders both the Fall and redemption noumenal. For Rousseau, the fall into society must be addressed, if not by a simple return to the state of nature, then by connecting back in some vital way with a human nature originally good, and with a natural self-love rehabilitated in the face of Augustinian suspicion. Rousseau does not stop at a condemnation of false worldly virtue. Neither does he, following Hume, reject the ideal of Christian

ch a p t er t en

284

charity and valorize worldly virtue. Rather, he attempts to develop an account of an alternative virtue that is natural but not worldly. In doing so, Rousseau offers a paradigmatic articulation of the modern ideal of authenticity, although he does so, ironically, in service of a trenchant critique of modernity. Examining Rousseau’s conception of authenticity allows us to grasp better the tension, introduced at the outset of this study, that often emerges between an aspiration to authenticity and the acceptance of dependency on moral exemplars. Rousseau offers two distinct paths of redemption: one for the individual (who can then contribute to the creation of the ideal society) and another for society (which can then form individuals adequate to itself).3 Individuals may be able to escape the corrupting influence of society and preserve individual independence by achieving authenticity. They abjure external models and ideals and draw instead on their own resources. True virtue is to be true to oneself. Rousseau’s Émile represents an attempt to sketch a form of education that would make this possible. The Confessions, in which Rousseau prides himself above all on his painstaking sincerity, amounts to the claim that even in the absence of this utopian education this ideal is available to an elite few, like himself. There is much here to remind us of La Rochefoucauld. Here, too, is an ethic for the elite, which displaces the aspiration to pure charity with a truncated virtue of honesty. Ironically, though, while the Confessions presents itself as a declaration of independence, it is manifest that Rousseau writes out of a desire to vindicate himself in the eyes of others. He fails to achieve the freedom from comparison, the independence of others’ opinion, which he idealizes. There is an alternative to the ideal of individual independence, in which freedom is preserved insofar as each member freely subjects himself or herself to the law of the general will. Rousseau’s account of how freedom is maintained through self-imposed law, most familiar in the Social Contract, must also be interpreted in the light of Rousseau’s idealized portrait of the citizens of Geneva in the Letter to D’Alembert. Here individuality is set aside and equality reigns; there is no distinction between actors and passive spectators, no false identities, and no hypocrisy. Rousseau offers different kinds of solutions for different social contexts as well as for different types of persons, and in this sense his moral thought makes room for an intelligible range of diversity.4 However, while it is possible to show how for Rousseau the ideal of independence is retained even under the absolute sway of the general will, it is less clear how the

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

285

ideal of freedom as self-imposed law is to be reconciled with the ideal of individual authenticity also undeniably present in his thought. Rousseau is shaped in complex ways by the legacy of the splendid vices. He does not, like Hume, simply dismiss concerns about hypocrisy and semblances of virtue, even if, like Hume, he rehabilitates a certain form of self-love. Rousseau’s anxieties about social formation and its ill effects have clear positive debts to early modern hyper-Augustinianism. On the other hand, his thought is in another key respect just as antiAugustinian as Hume’s.5 For Augustine, honesty about the human condition requires recognition of dependency, the recognition finally that our very activity is God’s gift (from which perspective Rousseau’s ideal of independence will thus itself appear as hypocritical or self-deceptive). In Luther, honesty is still a governing ideal, but it is no longer a confession of the dependent character of human activity and aspiration, but rather a confession of the utter bankruptcy of human activity and an evacuation of human agency. In Rousseau, the ideal of honesty shifts yet again toward the ideal of authenticity—to be true to oneself, good or bad. This allows for the reassertion of human agency, now not as fundamentally dependent, as in Augustine, but as independent, arising out of an account of the human self as fundamentally solitary. In this sense, Rousseau’s ideal is indeed made in the image of the very splendid vices attacked by Augustine. He hardly succeeds, then, in arriving at a purely “pagan” ethic, cleansed of what he takes to be Christian deformities. The point is not to bemoan the emergence of secular moral thought within European culture. Nor am I claiming that there is nowhere to go in modern theological ethics to find elements of a Christian account of mimetic virtue sustained—one might look, for instance, to French devout humanism, the Cambridge Platonists, and John Wesley. But the emergence of forms of moral thought seeking explicitly to detach themselves from Christian tradition as authoritative raises questions in turn for a Christian ethic seeking to free itself from a paralyzing horror of the splendid vices and reroot Christian virtue in ordinary social formation. How is such a form of Christian ethics to situate itself in relation to these important strands of modern moral discourse? What kind of generosity is possible and appropriate with respect to these forms of “pagan” virtue? Can a Christian ethic that accepts acquired virtues as true virtues and that refuses to appropriate to itself the right to distinguish acquired from infused virtue make common cause with modern secular accounts of human virtue? Many contemporary Christian revivers of the

ch a p t er t en

286

language of the virtues continue to be concerned to mark Christian virtues sharply off from “the world.” Meanwhile, some moral philosophers insist on the secular credentials of virtue ethics and deny that Christian ethics can coherently be understood as an ethic of virtue.6 If I am right about the significant and problematic ways in which the defining figures of the tradition of modern moral philosophy, no less than hyperAugustinian theological traditions, were shaped by inherited anxieties over social formation, purity of will, and independence of agency, it is in this vicinity—and not in the naturalism of secular accounts nor the openness to transcendence of Christian accounts—that the most significant barriers to fruitful engagement reside. It is this legacy that leads each to form itself as an opposed and inverted image of the other.

The Fall into Society Rousseau’s account of natural goodness and the social Fall is presented most fully in the Second Discourse, On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755). Human beings, argues Rousseau, are naturally good, though not naturally virtuous. With civilization come both virtue and vice, but more of the latter than the former, suggests Rousseau.7 In the mythical state of nature, human beings have little need of one another. Infants are of course dependent on their mothers, but Rousseau insists that once children achieve self-sufficiency, it is reasonable to think that mother and child would simply go their separate ways. Within this natural state, human beings are actuated by two principles: self-preservation (or love of oneself) and pity. Pity, an immediate response to the suffering of others that precedes all reflection, Rousseau is sometimes willing to call the sole natural virtue (III 154, 130). Elsewhere, he says it “takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue” in the state of nature (III 156, 133). It serves to curb love of self, which itself is not excessive within the state of nature, but serves only to secure enough to meet one’s immediate needs. This innocent and natural love of oneself (l’amour de soi-même) must be sharply distinguished from vanity or self-love (amour-propre), which is a creation of society and the source of all the vices; amour-propre “is only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else” (III 219, 222). It “inspires in men all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honor.” 8

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

287

The story of the genesis of amour-propre is thus the story of the genesis of society. Amour-propre is based on comparisons with others, but in the state of nature such comparisons do not take place, “each particular man regarding himself as the sole spectator to observe him, as the sole being in the universe to take an interest in him, and as the sole judge of his merit” (III 219, 222). The state of nature is thus the absence of theater, the absence of acting and of pretense. For Rousseau, reflection at its most basic is a matter of comparison, and as human beings began to make comparisons (“large, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, fearful, bold”; III 165, 143), they became self-conscious of themselves as superior to other animals: “Thus the first glance he directed upon himself produced in him the first stirring of pride” (III 166, 144). As families and then primitive societies form, this capacity for reflective comparison is extended from the species to the individual: “Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value” (III 169, 149). To make comparisons at all, suggests Rousseau, is to make judgments of relative value, and he takes for granted that once such value distinctions are conceived of, we will want to claim for ourselves the more valued pole of any binary contrast. It is this that engenders social inequality and vice; we are in constant conflict and competition with others, for each one thinks more highly of himself than anyone else and wants the esteem of others to match this amour-propre. Most of the care and esteem we show to others is false, born of our desire to win their help or esteem: “Let us therefore perceive, through our frivolous demonstrations of good will, what goes on at the bottom of our hearts, and let us reflect on what the state of things must be where all men are forced to flatter and destroy one another” (III 203, 194). If we are sincere, if we know our own hearts, we must grant that much of our apparent virtue is motivated by amourpropre and the insatiable desire for honor. What are we to do with this appalling self-knowledge? Some few, Rousseau suggests, may be able to reclaim their “ancient and first innocence.” These he advises to “go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and have no fear of debasing your species in renouncing its enlightenment in order to renounce its vices” (III 207, 202). Like Bidermann, then, Rousseau does occasionally suggest that one solution is to exit the stage of corrupting society and flee into the wilderness. For the most part, though, Rousseau treats this as a naïve wish; realistically, we must go forward rather than back, seeking to develop more fully the virtues that compensate for the vices induced by

ch a p t er t en

288

society, in particular the love of humanity that builds reflectively on the immediate response of natural pity. Pity involves a strong identification of self with others; it is because I put myself in the place of the one who suffers that I respond so quickly. This does not mean, argues Rousseau, that it involves any vanity or amour-propre. I do not help the other because I calculate that this will benefit me; I simply respond because I identify with, in some sense feel with, the other’s suffering. Ironically, it is in the state of nature that we are both most independent of others and at the same time most connected to others. In contrast, “reason engenders vanity and reflection fortifies it; reason turns man back on ourselves and separates us from all that bothers and afflicts him” (III 155, 132). Reflection and comparison make us aware of ourselves as separate from others, and this sense of separation is reinforced by amour-propre, even as one might think that isolation is being overcome by the formation of society.

The Critique of Theater The dangers of society are represented quintessentially by theater.9 In Rousseau’s critique of theater, developed most fully in the Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, we gain greater insight into his suspicion that ordinary social formation is malformation. He is simultaneously troubled by the way in which theater takes people out of themselves and how it separates persons from one another. Like Pascal, he suggests that people seek entertainment, “spectacles,” because they are discontented with themselves and seek distraction.10 For Pascal, we find peace from this endless search for distraction when we accept our true identity as members of a body, that is, when we recognize that we are not, after all, independent selves. Despite his worry that theater separates persons while apparently drawing them together, Rousseau’s vision of the healed self is not one of membership in the Body of Christ. There are for Rousseau many dangers posed by the theater, but one of the most significant, which links the threat it poses for self with the threat it poses for community, lies in the fact that the theater allows spectators to be passive. We are separated from one another inasmuch as we are not inter-acting with one another but simply re-acting in concert with others. Rousseau’s conviction of theater is here also in one sense a conviction of the sentimentalist movement; in focusing on the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval, sentimentalism gave the impres-

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

289

sion that the moral life consisted in having proper moral reactions, in feeling the proper sentiments, in arriving at properly sensitive moral judgments, rather than in a life of active virtue, of charity and justice. Spectators, suggests Rousseau, develop habits of passivity rather than of virtue, while approving of themselves for their sensitive emotional responses.11 In a passage dripping with irony, Rousseau asks: “In the final accounting, when a man has gone to admire fine actions in stories and to cry for imaginary miseries, what more can be asked of him? Is he not satisfied with himself? Does he not applaud his fine soul? Has he not acquitted himself of all that he owes to virtue by the homage which he has just rendered it? What more could one want of him? That he practice it himself? He has no role to play; he is no actor” (V 24, 25). How, then, does this passivity relate to the passivity encouraged by Luther, by Bunyan, by Pascal? They wanted us to see our own moral transformation as something we receive as a gift, and thus something that we receive rather than achieve. It is a gift we need because of the fallen character of human nature. But Rousseau does not think that a fundamental moral transformation of this kind is called for. In accepting the existence of the moral sense, Rousseau holds that we naturally love virtue; our hearts are fundamentally rightly disposed, are rightly oriented, and need no fundamental transformation.12 We love virtue because it is beautiful, and “the love of the beautiful is a sentiment as natural to the human heart as the love of self; it is not born out of an arrangement of scenes; the author does not bring it; he finds it there; and out of this pure sentiment, to which he appeals, are born the sweet tears that he causes to flow” (V 22, 23). Those who claim that theatrical representations have the power to make us love virtue and hate vice are thus without a leg to stand on; theater could not make us love virtue if we did not do so already (V 21, 22). The construct of the moral sense thus allows Rousseau simultaneously to dismiss original sin and admit the pervasiveness of moral viciousness. The danger of even the best, most morally upright theater is that it tempts us into thinking that possession of the moral sense in itself amounts to possession of virtue, that rightly responding to, rightly evaluating, good and evil as we observe it guarantees that we will act in accordance with these responses and evaluations. “What is important,” Rousseau argues, “is to act consistently with one’s principles and to imitate the people whom one esteems. The heart of man is always right concerning that which has no personal relation to himself” (V 22, 24). Being a spectator does make it more likely that our moral judgments will be impartial,

ch a p t er t en

290

but habitual occupation of the spectator’s position tempts us into thinking that we possess the virtue of impartiality rather than simply the appearance of it, rigged, in a sense, by our situation. “When our interest is involved, our sentiments are soon corrupted. And it is only then that we prefer the evil which is useful to us to the good that nature makes us love” (V 22, 24). Likewise, the pity we experience for characters in a tragedy is “a fleeting and vain emotion which lasts no longer than the illusion which produced it” (V 23, 24). Emotion is often taken as a sign of inwardness, a sign that someone is acting from the heart and not simply “acting out,” “miming” virtuous actions. Rousseau’s charge is that these signs of inwardness can themselves be deceptive in an inverted way. Here it is the virtuous actions that are missing, although the evidence of a virtuous heart is apparently present: “In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence, from all of which we are quite content to be exempt” (V 23, 25). In reality, then, “our heart closes itself,” though our tears of pity assert otherwise. Theater, then, rather than fostering the development of virtue by allowing us to practice virtuous responses, tempts us to allow emotional responses to take the place of the virtues themselves, as dispositions to act and not simply to feel. Theater does not possess the power to make us love virtue, since we already love it, but it does make it easier for that love of virtue to remain barren. But this is not all. Theater is doubly problematic because in fact it upholds what is socially respectable rather than what is morally upright; “since the intention of the author is to please corrupt minds, either his morality leads to evil, or the false good that he preaches is more dangerous than the evil itself: in that it seduces by an appearance of reason; in that it causes the practice and the principles of society to be preferred to exact probity; in that it makes wisdom consist in a certain mean between vice and virtue; in that, to the great relief of the audience, it persuades them that to be a decent man it suffices not to be a complete villain” (V 41, 45). Theater must please in order to succeed as theater, but in order to please it must, argues Rousseau, mirror rather than critique social values. And since society is for him the primary source of corruption, anything that reinforces the influence of society is itself vicious. When we watch a play, we root for the protagonist and against his or

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

291

her enemies, even if the protagonist is not someone we think we should admire. To root for a character in this way is, Rousseau thinks, to lose if only for a moment our own moral identity and take on a foreign moral identity, in this case a vicious one. Thus, discussing a comedy about a counterfeit operation, Rousseau asks: “Which of us is sure enough of himself to bear the performance of such a comedy without halfway taking part in the deeds which are played in it? Who would not be distressed if the thief were to be taken by surprise or fail in his attempt? Who does not himself become a thief for a minute in being concerned about him? For is being concerned about someone anything other than putting oneself in his place?” (V 43, 46). This issue of loss of identity is exacerbated for actors in a play. On the one hand, one might think that Rousseau would be less critical of actors than of spectators, since the former, after all, do act; they have a part to play; they are not simply passive. But the problem is that the part they play is not their own; they do not play themselves. The talent of the actor “is the art of counterfeiting himself, of putting on another character than his own, of appearing different than he is, of becoming passionate in cold blood, of saying what he does not think as naturally as if he really did think it, and, finally, of forgetting his own place by dint of taking another’s” (V 72–73, 79). Whether a rascal plays a decent man or a decent man plays a rascal, we should find this counterfeiting troubling, for in either case appearance and reality fail to cohere. There is no hope that a rascal who plays a decent man would actually become a decent man, since an absolutely necessary ingredient of true virtue is missing—that what one seems to be is what one is. The character formed by acting is that of an actor, not that of the virtuous characters played by the actor—“What, then, is the spirit that the actor receives from his estate? A mixture of abjectness, duplicity, ridiculous conceit, and disgraceful abasement which renders him fit for all sorts of roles except for the most noble of all, that of man, which he abandons” (V 73, 80). Sincerity, being what one seems to be, is inherent in the noble role of “man.” To act is to become habituated in acting, that is, in the art of deceiving.

The Authentic Individual Rousseau thus advances the bold claim that we were made evil as we were made sociable. Inherent to society, to manners, and to commerce (both

ch a p t er t en

292

in the sense of social interaction and in the sense of exchange of physical goods) is loss of self and the construction of a false self, a persona who postures, acts, and displays himself for others.13 While Rousseau claims that society is to blame for the creation of vice, he does not go so far as to insist that all apparent virtues are really vices. It is possible, though difficult, to achieve true virtue. For this, the proper education is crucial (although we will also see an alternative path to “virtue,” available in the absence of such an education, traced out in the Confessions). If both fall and remedy are social in character, we might expect to find in Rousseau a highly developed account of habituation. In fact, though, while Rousseau in Émile (1762) and The New Héloise (1761) devotes himself wholly to reflection on what sort of education might preserve persons from the evils of society, he remains hostile to habituation. “The only habit the child should be allowed to acquire is to contract none,” Rousseau tells us.14 Habituation is associated with loss of freedom and autonomy, obedience to rules, conformity to example, and bending to authority, all of which are anathematized in Émile (IV 421, 160).15 What will education look like if it eschews habituation, rules, examples, and authority? And what will constitute true virtue if, as arising in society, it is necessarily removed from the natural independence Rousseau so valorizes? Education is not understood as shaping the inclinations to conform with reason, nor as enabling students to move from imitating the virtuous for the sake of praise and love to grasping the good of virtuous action for its own sake. It is not understood as allowing persons to successively transcend inadequate conceptions of the final good. Rousseau’s educational ideal departs quite radically from these inherited understandings of moral development. While he acknowledges that Émile, his imaginary pupil, is destined to live in society, his goal is that Émile remain always a “natural man” (l’homme naturel), though “a natural man living in the state of society” rather than “a natural man living in the state of nature” (IV 483–84, 205). Rousseau’s educational philosophy is fundamentally negative; it seeks to protect the pupil from social influence, to postpone contact with and understanding of social relations, until the child has reached adulthood. This is the only way to keep the child true to his original good nature.16 Ironically, this means that in order to be preserved from the “artificial life” of society, in order to maintain independence from social influence, the child must be subject to the total control of his tutor, living in another sort of artificial environment.17 Rousseau’s hope is that this postponement of a fully

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

293

social existence will allow the child to achieve an independent sense of self, arising not out of comparison with others, not out of sensitivity to others’ opinions and attitudes, but wholly out of his own desires, experiences, and achievements in relation to the physical world (IV 323–24, 92–93). If this independent identity is fully established, one can have some confidence that it will not be undermined by the eventual entrance into society (IV 668–69, 338). Yet Rousseau remains fundamentally ambivalent about the possibility of remaining a natural man living in the social state. Persons cannot after all remain independent of one another. For Rousseau it is the need for a mate that brings with it unavoidable social dependency, even if the adolescent is at first unaware of the cause of his new interest in social contact (IV 493, 502; 214, 220). This dependency in turn reveals that it is impossible to prevent natural love of self from being transformed into amour-propre. “As he extends his relations, his needs, and his active or passive dependencies, the sentiment of his connections with others is awakened and produces the sentiment of duties and preferences” (IV 492, 213). The adolescent begins to compare himself with others, and out of this comparison, as we have seen, springs self-esteem. He does now care keenly about how others regard him, and this now shapes his self-perception in fundamental ways. The emergence of amour-propre in Émile has been delayed, but now it emerges. “Since my Emile has until now looked only at himself, the first glance he casts on his fellows leads him to compare himself with them. And the first sentiment aroused in him by this comparison is the desire to be in the first position. This is the point where love of self turns into amour-propre” (IV 523, 235). On the one hand, then, Rousseau insists that Émile cannot be truly a man and an “integral part of his species” without a moral awareness that is impossible apart from society (IV 502, 220). On the other hand, though, virtue remains always under a cloud of suspicion insofar as it involves dependency and dependency generates vice. It is not clear that Émile’s education has succeeded or can have any real hope of succeeding. Once Émile enters into society, he is subject to the same dependency, proclivity to comparison, and insatiable self-esteem to which those not provided with his peculiar education have always been exposed. He has not, after all, been inoculated against them. So far from thinking that Émile is more capable of retaining an independent sense of self, we might think him less able to resist the dangerous novel influences of society. Rousseau’s key strategy at this point is, granting the inevitability of

ch a p t er t en

294

comparison in society, to foster one sort of comparison rather than another. Instead of introducing Émile to society by bringing him to court, introducing him to differences of status, wealth, and power, Émile is to be exposed first to suffering humanity. To be needy, prone to suffer, and destined to die—this, argues Rousseau, is what characterizes humanity as such (IV 504, 222). In these respects all persons are equal, and Émile is to be made conscious of human equality before he becomes aware of human inequality. As a result, he will feel pity rather than envy.18 He will compare himself with the unfortunate, but this comparison will make him aware of his own good fortune (IV 514, 229). This sort of comparison elicits gratitude, along with generosity, rather than pride or envy, accompanied by competition.19 Only after the capacity for pity and benevolence has fully developed will Rousseau expose Émile to the theater of polite society with all of its status inequality, invidious comparison, and competition. Moreover, at first this exposure will be indirect, through the study of history, so that Émile will feel a certain detachment from the social commerce he observes. “Let him know,” urges Rousseau, “that man is naturally good; let him feel it . . . but let him see that society depraves and perverts men; let him find in their prejudices the source of all their vices; let him be inclined to esteem each individual but despise the multitude” (IV 525, 237). Émile will be in a position to despise, or, better, to pity, those who hinge their happiness on reputation rather than getting caught up in the general competition for attention and honor. It is crucial that Émile feel himself to be more fortunate than others but not more meritorious, more worthy of esteem (IV 537, 245).20 There are important insights here that can contribute to a constructive account of moral formation. If it is possible to avoid a stage in which the student of virtue imitates the virtuous solely in order to win love, praise, honor, and/or respect, there is good reason to hope that it will be easier for the student to begin to act virtuously for its own sake. If a person’s sense of self is not dependent on comparison with the achievements and accomplishments of others, there will be less reason to use virtuous action as a means to shoring up a positive sense of self. And if one’s virtue is seen not as meritorious achievement but as good fortune, as something for which one is grateful rather than of which one is proud, the virtue of humility is fostered, and the door is opened to understanding virtue as gift. Ironically, then, while Rousseau as at most a sort of deist does not conceive of God as active within human moral activity, he may have more to contribute to a positive Christian account of habituation than

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

295

someone like Nicole, whose appeal to enlightened self-love as strengthening grace-given charity is finally incoherent. At the same time, these insights are entangled with other, deeply problematic assumptions and ideas. Most central of these is Rousseau’s conviction that personal integrity is best developed in isolation from society, by postponing social contact for as long as possible.21 Of course, to some extent he takes this social isolation to be necessary because society is in a corrupt state. But this is not a full explanation, since this nonsocial view of personal development is also rooted in his understanding of human nature as such, as this is revealed by his account of the state of nature, by his insistence that savage man was fundamentally independent in the sense of having no need of fellow human beings. Rousseau perceives that persons do not flourish when love and respect are given to them only contingent on pleasing others or conforming to the will of others. But he fails to see that we are nevertheless always dependent on others’ love, that this cannot be a dependency we acquire only after having already arrived at a fully formed selfhood.22 Rousseau thinks he can preserve integrity and independence by postponing social dependency, and he thinks this is possible because it is only sexuality that makes us truly dependent on others. It is telling that he claims “a truly happy being is a solitary being. God alone enjoys an absolute happiness” (IV 503, 221). Lacking any trinitarian sensibility, Rousseau perceives God as solitary and idealizes the solitary state. Unable to conceive of any society not dependent on weakness, Rousseau thinks integrity can be maintained only by postponing as long as possible contact with a human society predicated on weakness. It is not surprising, then, that “habit” is anathema to him. We might begin to disentangle Rousseau’s insights from his blind spots by affirming that persons flourish only in a context of love, but love that is unconditional rather than contingent on conformity. In such a context, emulation of the virtuous does not occur for the sake of reward, since love is not dispensed as reward but given freely. Rather, the child, already embedded in a richly social world, emulates the virtuous out of attraction to the life of harmonious social interaction and common effort in which she finds herself. Returning the love she has received, she desires to make a contribution to the whole and feels herself capable of doing so because of the constant love and affirmation she receives.23 She knows herself fundamentally as loved, and in this sense her identity is dependent on others. But in another sense we might call her independent, in that her self-esteem does not rest on constant comparison with others, on feeling

ch a p t er t en

296

that she possesses more love, is worthy of more love, than others. Insofar as she is independent, it is the unconditional love she has received from others that has fostered this independence. It is thus constituted through her social embeddedness and dependency. We can at least begin to see how Rousseau’s insights might be captured within a view of personhood as fundamentally social, in which recognition of dependency might be joyful rather than a reluctant confession of weakness.

The Confessions Émile represents a counterfactual ideal, if one that Rousseau believes could be realized within the context of existing societies. But there is for Rousseau another path to individual independence and authenticity. This is the one he claims for himself in the Confessions. It proceeds not through an education that preserves natural man but through a hard-won self-knowledge and painful honesty that purify from social corruption. Here we encounter an ideal akin to that of La Rochefoucauld—nobility via honesty, which claims for itself a new form of virtue in the course of acknowledging the lack of what is usually understood as virtue. And we have already seen how deeply reminiscent that ideal of honest selfappraisal is of Luther’s insistence that active moral aspiration be displaced by honest confession of sinfulness and incapacity. In La Rochefoucauld we already witness the ideal of honesty transformed from acknowledgment of dependency on divine grace to assertion of human independence. Rousseau’s Confessions, though, are personal in a way that La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims are not. Rousseau moves beyond displaying his faults and weaknesses in the hope of inducing others to recognize their own. He displays his faults and weaknesses for the sake of being able to claim for himself an unparalleled veracity, but he also does more. He begins positively to glory in his own peculiarity, in being himself, whether good or bad. Rousseau’s ideal is one of transparency, that one truly be what one’s appearances claim one to be.24 But he also moves beyond this to sound a new note—that one reveal what one is, that one’s value lies in one’s own distinctive individuality. We encounter all three of these aspects of the Confessions on the very first page. First, Rousseau issues a challenge to those who have heard his confessions: “then let each of them in turn reveal, with the same frankness, the secrets of his heart at the foot of the Throne, and say, if he

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

297

dare, ‘I was better than that man!’ ” 25 His frank self-revelation will pierce through others’ masks, through their insatiable amour-propre, leading them to recognize a universal human imperfection.26 Instead of the usual comparison that claims the higher place for the self, Rousseau’s confession will elicit an acknowledgment of human equality in weakness. Second, though, Rousseau claims that his honesty is unparalleled and inimitable: “I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.” So Rousseau is ambivalent—will his honesty elicit a like honesty in others? Or will it forever render Rousseau exceptional, brand him as capable of a new elite virtú? Third, Rousseau prides himself not just on his honesty, where honesty is objectively recognized as a virtue, but also simply on being himself, right or wrong, good or bad. “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.” Ruth Grant is critical of those who use the term authenticity in connection with Rousseau, noting that “one can be authentically many things, including authentically dishonest. Authenticity’s only command is ‘be yourself.’ But Rousseau seeks goodness. His terminology is precisely one of honesty, uprightness, and faithful performance of duty.” 27 There is some truth here; Rousseau clearly claims honesty for himself as a recognized virtue. But he also prides himself on something other than honesty—on recognizing his distinctiveness, good and bad, and on being faithful to that very distinctiveness.28 Rousseau’s demand, then, is not just that one actually embody the virtuous ideals one espouses and displays but that the only ideals one should espouse are those that come from within, that may in fact be peculiar to the self. So it is not just that we should really live up to, conform ourselves from within to, models of virtue but that the notion of models of virtue is itself subject to critique, inasmuch as a model is external and insofar alien to us. “The true self is the spontaneous self, not this invented and forcibly imposed moral character.” 29 It is in this spirit that Rousseau praises small town life, arguing that “more really new things are found there because the people are less imitative; having few models, each draws more from himself and puts more of his own in everything he does” (V 55, 60). To draw from oneself rather than aping a model, no matter how virtuous; this is emerging as a new ideal. Even here, though, Rousseau attempts to finesse the divide between external

ch a p t er t en

298

ethical ideals and inner peculiarity with his appeal to conscience, which emerges as a central theme in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. Claiming conscience as infallible, Rousseau further insists that “the acts of the conscience are not judgments but sentiments. Although all our ideas come to us from outside, the sentiments evaluating them are within us” (IV 599, 290). As a source of sentiments, conscience leads us to love the good as soon as we know it.30 If we can only succeed, then, in ignoring the prejudices implanted in us by a corrupt society, we can be both authentic and good.31 The irony of the Confessions, though, is that Rousseau never does move beyond concern for others’ opinion of himself. If he cannot impress them with his virtue, he will impress them with his veracity, and if he cannot impress them with that, he will impress them by shocking them. In his very concern for independence, he entrenches his own negative dependency. From the start, the Confessions was conceived as an act of self-justification, particularly in light of public discovery of the fact that Rousseau had abandoned all of his children at an orphanage, as well as in view of Rousseau’s growing suspicion that his friends had formed a conspiracy against him.32 The concluding paragraphs of the Confessions are telling: after having apparently defied public opinion in revealing all, even the most sordid details of his sexual proclivities, Rousseau falls back into the language of honor: “Whosoever, even without having read my writings, after examining with his own eyes my disposition, my character, my manners, my inclinations, my pleasures, and my habits, can believe me to be a dishonourable man, is himself a man who deserves to be choked” (I 656, 294). His demand, then, is for honor, not simply, as indicated at the outset, for acknowledgment of a common fallible humanity. And there is a striking aggressiveness to his claim—those who deny him honor deserve to be choked. The reader senses a certain desperation, which flares out in anger. This is not the equanimity of a person whose self-esteem is independent of the opinions of others. Of course, the tensions and blind spots internal to the Confessions might tell us more about Rousseau than about his thought and ideals. But in fact they do both at once, for they also underscore the problematic idealization of the solitary state and suspicion of relationship that we have already seen in Émile. In light of this, it is not surprising that the insights won in Rousseau’s search for a mode of social formation not based on competition and invidious comparison are traded away in his appeal to an account of conscience as wholly nonsocial.33 Conscience is in Rousseau’s

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

299

thought as miraculous, inexplicable, and deracinated a feature as a grace acting apart from human agency is for some earlier Augustinian thinkers. For all his insights into the problematic features of a theatrical society and indeed of inherited accounts of habituation in virtue, Rousseau fails to offer an intelligible and sustainable account of individual independence and authenticity.34

Collective Independence Of course, Rousseau offers a collective as well as an individual solution to the social cum ethical problems he diagnoses. These can be seen as complementary rather than conflicting. As one commentator has put it, “on the one hand, the competitive way of distributing rewards should be overcome, or at least the process of legislation should be protected from the distorting influence of social inequality. . . . On the other hand, the individual must be strengthened and made more impervious to the pressure coming from a civil society marked by inequality and the competition for zero-sum goods.” 35 And yet, as we examine Rousseau’s vision of collective independence as he develops it both in his idealized portrait of Geneva and in the Social Contract, it remains unclear how the ideal of authenticity is preserved. While Rousseau claims at the outset of Émile that neither fatherland nor citizens exist any longer and that these words should be “effaced from modern languages,” (IV 250, 40), he nevertheless bestows the laudatory term citizen on the Genevans.36 In his idealized portraits of Geneva, Rousseau is trying to articulate a mode of public self-presentation, of placing oneself before the eyes of others, which will preserve authenticity. If drawing from oneself is ideal, remaining within oneself, remaining isolated from others, is not: “the most vicious of men is he who isolates himself the most, who most concentrates his heart in himself; the best is he who shares his affections equally with all his kind” (V 107, 117). To “share his affections”—what is crucial here is to share in the sense of both revealing oneself to others and having in common with others. It is unavoidable that we will be shaped by society (“if our habits in retirement are born of our own sentiments, in society they are born of others’ opinions”); the challenge is to prevent this shaping from being a form of falsification of the self (V 61–62, 67).37 A big city is particularly likely to corrupt morals “because each, easily hiding his conduct from the public

ch a p t er t en

300

eye, shows himself only by his reputation and is esteemed only for his riches” (V 54, 58–59). That is, in a big city we may achieve an appearance (“reputation”) that is not even in line with our actual conduct, which might itself be seen as only an external appearance, not fully revealing of our “inner” character. But even in a small town our habits are socially shaped; we are a “citizen,” as Rousseau is fond of calling the ideal member of society, not simply an individual. In the Letter to D’Alembert, Rousseau offers several glimpses of this ideal form of self-presentation. It is one in which there is no separation between the self and the role filled by the self. So, for instance, Rousseau contrasts the orator with the actor. Both “make use of their persons” and place themselves before the public eye, but “when the orator appears in public, it is to speak and not to show himself off; he represents only himself; he fills only his own role, speaks only in his own name, says, or ought to say, only what he thinks; the man and the role being the same, he is in his place; he is in the situation of any citizen who fulfils the functions of his estate” (V 74, 80). Rousseau gives three additional positive examples of social entertainment: the Genevan circles, public festivals, and ballroom dances. All are united by common activity rather than passive observation; “what ought first to strike every foreigner coming to Geneva,” remarks Rousseau, “is the air of life and activity which prevails there” (V 85, 93). The people participate rather than spectate. They thus avoid cultivating passivity. These social practices also, argues Rousseau, combat deception, insincerity, and inauthenticity. The circles are intimate social societies of a dozen or so individuals who meet to talk, read, play games, and otherwise amuse themselves. Rousseau concedes that the circles foster certain vices, such as gambling and gossiping, but he nevertheless defends them as the best possible form of social life rather than as a “chimaera of perfection” (V 101, 110). Because these societies are separated by sex, members of a circle need not uphold the various pretences and forms of display called for by gallantry; the men “can devote themselves to grave and serious discourse without fear of ridicule. They dare to speak of country and virtue without passing for windbags; they even dare to be themselves without being enslaved to the maxims of a magpie” (V 96, 105). Good reasons rather than fine phrases and polished delivery can come to the foreground. Women, for their part, do not simply engage in idle gossip within their circles; they serve as censors, whom Rousseau compares to the guardians of virtue in ancient Rome; “It is thus that in the great days of Rome, the citizens, watching

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

301

one another, publicly accused one another out of zeal for justice” (V 97, 106). This form of “watching” one another differs fundamentally from the way that spectators watch a theatrical performance, for the Genevan women watch one another in order to uphold common, shared standards of virtue. Their watching is at the same time an activity, an active defense of the common good. Thus, although the circles meet in private homes, Rousseau regards them as “the most reasonable, the most decent, and the least dangerous” forum in which individuals can come together, “because they neither wish nor are able to be hidden, because they are public and permitted, because order and rule prevail in them” (V 99, 108). They are public, not hidden, not deceptive, despite the fact that they are of course social, they do place persons before one another’s eyes, in a situation in which our habits are likely to be formed by the opinions of others. Public festivals, argues Rousseau, are a second form of entertainment suitable to maintaining virtue, specifically that of a republic. “To what peoples is it more fitting to assemble often and form among themselves sweet bonds of pleasure and joy than to those who have so many reasons to like one another and remain forever united?” (V 114, 125). Public festivals of this kind should be “in the open air, under the sky,” that is, close to nature and eschewing anything hidden, anything concealed. Nothing is “shown” in these festivals, because there are no spectators; no one is passive. “Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united” (V 115, 126). Here, as in the circles, the people do watch one another, but the watchers and the watched are one and the same. This sort of public “performance” shores up rather than undermines public virtue. And in these public festivals all the various circles merge into one, revealing their full identity as public rather than hidden. Ballroom dances are a third form of entertainment endorsed by Rousseau. These dances are of course fundamentally a forum for watching and being watched. And unlike the circles, the two genders come together here. What, then, preserves these from being a breeding ground for insincere gallantry? The publicity of the events is key—the presence of multiple layers of watched watchers—young men and women watching one another, but also watching and being watched by parents as well as grandparents. “Let me be instructed as to where young marriageable persons will have occasion to get a taste for one another and to see one another with more propriety and circumspection than in a gathering

ch a p t er t en

302

where the eyes of the public are constantly open and upon them, forcing them to be reserved, modest, and to watch themselves most carefully?” (V 117, 128). In this context young people present themselves to one another, even show themselves off, but do so in a graceful, seemly way that is open and sincere rather than deceptive. If Geneva is Rousseau’s immediate model for innocent spectacles, Sparta is a more distant but palpable ideal—and a most revealing one. When Rousseau speaks of “citizens” and their “virtue,” Sparta is never far from his mind. Rousseau sees the ascetic moralism—and militarism— of Sparta as the guarantee of a free and egalitarian society. He worries that polite civility makes men weak and unable to defend their liberty (V 103, 112–13). Athletic competitions are the antithesis to theater— athletes are active, they become through their activity stronger and more able to defend their liberty, and they act their own part as citizens, so nothing is other than it seems to be, concealed, or in the dark: “without pomp, without luxury, without display, everything in them breathes, along with a certain patriotic charm which makes them attractive, a certain martial spirit befitting free men” (V 123, 135). It is on this note that Rousseau’s letter to D’Alembert ends—the danger that a theater poses to Geneva is ultimately the danger of undermining the athletic and military virtues that preserve Geneva’s liberty. There is a certain attractiveness in these portraits of common activity and shared values, in which individual differences are put to the service of the common good rather than made the basis for competition.38 What is unclear, though, is how, given all that Rousseau says in the works we have already examined, person and role can match so perfectly, how public models can be other than external and, as such, false. Only by appeal to the infallible conscience can this begin to seem plausible, and even here, if conscience is taken as uniform in all, this form of reliance on what lies within is not at all identifiable with an ideal of honest selfappraisal that emphasizes one’s distinctive faults and foibles rather than a universal and infallible inner light. One cannot both be true to one’s idiosyncratic self and lose one’s idiosyncrasies in perfect identity with the social whole. Rousseau’s Social Contract represents a more formal effort to define the conditions for citizenship and collective independence. Older readings of the Social Contract as totalitarian relied too heavily on the impression created by the initial discussion of the social compact, in which Rousseau speaks of it as “the total alienation to the whole community of each

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

303

associate with all his rights,” noting that “each gives himself up entirely” and that “in place of the particular individuality of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body.” 39 Despite these opening assertions, Rousseau does qualify the limits of the sovereign power created by the social contract; individuals do not give up all of their power, property, and liberty, but only what is “useful and important to the community,” and “the sovereign cannot impose on its subjects any burden which is useless to the community,” nor may it rule on any particular matter relating to particular persons (III 373, 174–75).40 These limits might seem to ensure that whatever alienation of rights is involved in the social contract, this does not involve an alienation from the self or loss of individuality. And certainly Rousseau’s understanding of the social contract is that persons entering it give up the kind of independence characteristic of the state of nature, but in accepting only a law that they impose on themselves because they recognize its accord with their own conscience, they remain free in a deeper sense. A number of troubling features nevertheless remain. First is the odd notion that the citizens must deliberate “without any communication among themselves,” which reminds us of Rousseau’s fundamental distrust of social interaction (III 371, 173). Even as Rousseau attempts to distinguish the general will from a mere coincidence of private interests, he continues—in a rather opaque passage—to define it in terms of the mechanical application of an arithmetic procedure: “the latter [general will] regards only the common interest, while the former [will of all] has regard to private interests, and is merely a sum of particular wills; but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses which cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences” (III 371, 172). If the general will is so understood, communication among the citizens becomes only a potential threat. So it is not surprising that mediating associations, of which Rousseau approved in the form of the Genevan circles, are here seen only as the source of factions that undermine the general will. A second troubling feature is the centrality assumed in Rousseau’s account by the legislator. Given the gap that may arise between the general will and the will of all, and the fact that the people desire what is good but do not always rightly discern the good, Rousseau concludes that the people require guidance: “the general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. . . . Hence arises the need of a legislator” (III 380, 180). Although the legislator frames laws without

ch a p t er t en

304

possessing any legislative right, and in this sense is “an authority that is a mere nothing” (III 383, 182), in other respects the legislator is seen as possessing divine powers: He who dares undertake to give institutions to a nation ought to feel himself capable, as it were, of changing human nature; of transforming every individual, who in himself is a complete and independent whole, into part of a greater whole, from which he receives in some manner his life and his being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a social and moral existence for the independent and physical existence which we have all received from nature. . . . The more thoroughly those natural powers are deadened and destroyed, the greater and more durable are the acquired powers. (III 381, 181)

In this remarkable passage, Rousseau attributes to the legislator powers analogous to the divine grace, which brings persons into the Body of Christ and which in order to do so must restore and elevate—or even, in some Augustinian theologies, destroy—fallen human nature. This is not simply the creation of a society purified of inequality and competition and thus capable of preserving rather than undermining natural goodness. It is the creation of human persons as moral and social beings rather than simply as isolated natural individuals.41 In this context, the functionalist appeal to civil religion makes a certain sort of sense. “Since, then, the legislator cannot employ either force or reasoning, he must have recourse to an authority of a different order, which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing” (III 383, 182). The legislator lacks any sort of coercive power, and in order to be moved by reasons, the people would need already to be what they need to become. So religious myths and symbols, with a power Rousseau understands as neither coercive nor rational, must be brought into play.42 In fact, though, Rousseau does sanction the use of coercive power to shore up civil religion—the republic may banish, as antisocial, rather than as impious, those who do not accept its articles of faith, and should execute anyone who apostatizes from them (III 468, 253).43 The destruction and remaking of human nature may, then, meet with resistance, to which the legislator’s pseudo-divine powers are unequal. It is nothing new to point out internal tensions or even contradictions within Rousseau’s thought, to claim that he does not in the end show how

Rousseau and the Virtue of Authenticity

305

authenticity as submission to universal laws of reason and authenticity as honoring the idiosyncrasies of individuality can intelligibly be held together, how one can truly be oneself and also live in society. What is important here is that the specific tensions that emerge are telling, reflecting the long reach of the legacy of the splendid vices. Rousseau’s appeal to an infallible conscience on the one hand and the pseudo-divine powers of the legislator on the other (both attempts to ensure that apparently external, alien models are in fact internal and authentic) reflect the ongoing uneasiness about social formation characteristic of the hyperAugustinian tradition and its tendency to appeal to external accounts of grace. Rousseau’s conscience is internal, but not clearly integrated with ordinary fallible processes of human—and always socially shaped— reflection and discernment. Moreover, Rousseau’s underlying ideal of independent solitude gives the lie to his efforts to forge a purified social vision, free of invidious comparison and competition for external goods. His emphasis on the importance of activity over passivity, on being a participant in shared enterprises rather than an observer of clashing projects and purposes, are among his most important insights. But he fails to see that Émile could develop a healthy self-esteem and capacity for moral agency only in a richly social environment of unconditional love. He was unable to accept that human activity and independence are rooted in a prior, more fundamental receptivity, dependency, and relationality. “Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence,” he wrote disparagingly in the Social Contract. Hence the painful baring of the soul, which in Luther was a confession of dependency, becomes in Rousseau’s Confessions a defiant assertion of independence. In declaring independence from a Christianity of servitude and dependence, in trying to rehabilitate a form of self-love, in insisting on natural human goodness, Rousseau was nevertheless preserving some of the most problematic features of modern hyper-Augustinianism: its anxiety about social formation, its tendency to allow the ideal of honesty to displace moral aspiration, and its recourse to moral resources not intelligibly integrated with, or even running counter to, intentional human agency.

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

11

If there is a single figure within modern moral philosophy who is pivotal to contemporary debates between Christian and secular retrievers of the virtues, it is David Hume (1711–1776). On the one hand, Hume is a central villain in Alasdair MacIntyre’s narrative of the modern loss of intelligible moral discourse in After Virtue (and the more detailed defense of a Thomistic account of practical rationality in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?). On the other hand, Hume has been seized on by contemporary moral philosophers eager for an alternative to Kant and utilitarianism that is at the same time indisputably modern and secular. Hume’s thought is indeed promising in its positive account of social formation, its acceptance of human dependency and interdependency, and its lack of anxiety over achieving absolute purity of will and intention. Nevertheless, Hume’s very eagerness to overcome the errors of hyperAugustinianism, I will argue, leaves a negative trace on his efforts to develop a modern “pagan” ethic. Hume is key to MacIntyre’s narrative precisely because his moral thought is framed explicitly as an ethic of virtue. Nevertheless, argues MacIntyre, Hume’s thought in no way represents the survival or retrieval of the ethic of virtue MacIntyre champions. Once the virtues are no longer understood as habits that equip persons to achieve their proper telos, it is a short step to the conclusion that “there is nothing to judgments of virtue and vice except the expression of feelings of approval and disapproval. Thus there can be no criteria external to those feelings by appeal to which we may pass judgment upon them.” 1 MacIntyre thus assimilates Hume to emotivism. Defenders of Hume have questioned this judgment; among them, Annette Baier stands out due to her eagerness to engage

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

307

directly with MacIntyre’s critique.2 Baier argues that while there are no teleological criteria of assessment for Hume, true practical rationality is achieved in Hume’s thought through reflexive self-assessment: Hume employs reflection “to establish the sort of customs, habits, abilities and passions that can bear their own moral survey.” 3 Against MacIntyre, Baier insists that Hume has every claim to be furthering an Aristotelian form of reflection on the virtues, albeit one free of teleological assumptions concerning human nature.4 MacIntyre’s hostility, she claims, reveals that the bone of contention is actually Christianity and the fact that Hume reclaims a pagan ethic of virtue that explicitly rejects both a divine lawgiver and the doctrine of original sin. “MacIntyre’s whole diagnosis,” she writes, “seems informed at the deepest level by a distrust of human will, by a demand that human feelings be disciplined, overruled by some ‘reason’ or some ‘nonself.’ Other selves like our own are not enough—that merely makes the arbitrary will an equally arbitrary collective will. Some discipliner or denier of human feeling-guided will is what seems required to save us from what MacIntyre calls arbitrary self-will.” From Baier’s perspective, though, what MacIntyre seeks is no more than a mirage. In fact, what usually disciplines human wills is simply some more powerful human will, concealed as the voice of reason or as the voice of God. Hume set himself the task of “ ‘unmasking’ both reason and revelation, to show what passions were served by their spokesmen.” But Hume’s project was not solely the negative one of unmasking: “he saw his own positive task to be that of showing how violent passions could be calmed, how contradictory passions could correct themselves, with the help of some cooperative practices, to arrive at a stable shared point of view from which moral agreement might be reached among men and women of sense.” 5 If raw will and passion are often destructive, the solution lies simply with collective self-survey and self-correction, not with any “nonself.” Hume’s naturalized account of the virtues is heavily indebted to earlier Anatomist undertakings, notably that of Mandeville. But unlike Mandeville and the hyper-Augustinian tradition that informed Mandeville’s thought, Hume does not view natural virtue as hypocritical in any significant way. Therefore, as we shall see, his account does not betray any urge to escape or transcend the dynamics of social formation, any need to achieve an exceptional honesty that might then become the only true virtue amidst the ordinary hypocritical virtues.6 (Instead, the charge of hypocrisy is lodged against Christian faith and the badge of

ch a p t er el e v en

308

honesty claimed for the religious skeptic.) This matter-of-fact acceptance of the dynamics of moral development is a genuine advance over earlier Anatomist enterprises. Still, the legacy of the splendid vices marks Hume’s decidedly anti-Augustinian rehabilitation of pride as a virtue. Ironically, Hume’s very effort to throw off the Augustinian inheritance reinscribes its inversion—even if Hume’s moral thought, through its deflation of the charge of hypocrisy, is more decisively neopagan than that of Mandeville, Hume elevates pride, the arch-vice of the Augustinian tradition. Does Hume further an Aristotelian tradition of the virtues? Only in the sense that his account replicates problems akin to those that vex Aristotelian magnanimity; it is not simply the case that pleasure supervenes on a virtuous character, but the reflective Humean is sustained in her pursuit of virtue by the pleasure she takes in her own character. It is finally not clear that Hume is able to differentiate goods internal to the virtuous life from those external to such a life, and it thus becomes difficult for Christians to consider the virtuous Humean to be pursuing proximate goods capable of being directed beyond themselves to our true final good. Or if she is, it is more despite than because of her own self-understanding.

Hume’s Moral Anatomy At the outset of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume explicitly embraces the enterprise of moral anatomy, of seeking “an accurate knowledge of the internal fabric, the operations of the understanding, the workings of the passions, and the various species of sentiment which discriminate vice and virtue.” 7 He indicates that he does so, though, not to gain a gleeful superiority of insight but to be of service to the task of practical ethics: “the anatomist presents to the eye the most hideous and disagreeable objects; but his science is useful to the painter in delineating even a Venus or an Helen” (E 10). The best artists are also Anatomists, or at least rely on the skill of Anatomists in order to carry out their own work. What are the “hideous and disagreeable objects” with which Hume will present his readers? Unlike Mandeville, and unlike the austere Augustinian tradition that formed the backdrop of Mandeville’s thought, Hume, despite his emphasis on passions and sentiments as the active forces within the human mind, refused to reduce the passions to self-love. Previous moralists, he says, “have sometimes carried the matter too far,

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

309

by their passion for some one general principle” even if “it must . . . be confessed, that they are excusable in expecting to find some general principles, into which all the vices and virtues were justly to be resolved” (E 15). More specifically, Hume distances himself from Mandeville and Hobbes, insisting that the descriptions of human selfishness, “which certain philosophers delight so much to form of mankind in this particular, are as wide of nature as any accounts of monsters, which we meet with in fables and romances. So far from thinking, that men have no affection for any thing beyond themselves, I am of opinion, that tho’ it be rare to meet with one, who loves any single person better than himself; yet ’tis as rare to meet with one, in whom all the kind affections, taken together, do not over-balance the selfish.” 8 He points in particular to familial love, to the generosity with which parents care for spouses and children. In refusing to reduce human nature to the principle of self-love, Hume thus makes common cause with those, like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, who opposed the Hobbesian thesis of essential selfishness by pointing to a natural principle of benevolence within human nature.9 This line of argument can be traced back to the Latitudinarians and beyond them to the Cambridge Platonists, for whom it was key to a defense of divine goodness and reasonableness against both Calvinist understandings of fallen human nature and Hobbesian notions of natural selfishness. Fear of a God who demands the impossible from human beings, and then arbitrarily saves a few from damnation, was seen as the root cause of atheist rejections of God in general and of Hobbesian atheism in particular.10 Building on the assertion that human nature (still) contains a principle of benevolence, Hutcheson argued as well for the existence of a moral sense that approves specifically of benevolent intentions.11 For Hutcheson, the moral sense offers further evidence of the goodness of God, who has so designed human nature that the moral sense approves of those affections that best enhance the general good.12 Our approval of actions exhibiting benevolence does not derive from the devices of “skillful politicians”; it is not the artificial reward of honor. We spontaneously display benevolence and approve of benevolence. Like Hutcheson, Hume insists on the existence of unselfish passions within human nature, and like Hutcheson, Hume invokes a moral sense in order to better understand moral approval and disapproval.13 Yet there are significant differences. For Hume, these kind affections, while real, are rather limited; our generosity does not naturally extend to whole societies: “there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind,

ch a p t er el e v en

310

merely as such” (T 481).14 So even while Hume insists that human nature is not essentially selfish, he argues that “uncultivated nature” does not fit us for life in a society broader than that of the family. A consideration of natural human sentiments does not, then, lead us to conclude the existence of a benevolent Creator. Instead, much like Mandeville, Hume is eager to show that the virtues required for life in society, notably justice, are artificial—not in the sense of having been devised by scheming politicians, but in the sense of evolving gradually in the course of social interaction, without any design. Even more dramatically, Hume argues that the moral sense is no simple instinct to approve disinterestedly of benevolent affections. While he does say that nature gives us some sense of moral distinctions and that were this not the case honor and blame would have no purchase on us, these first natural “moral” distinctions turn out to derive from our tendency to love those who benefit ourselves and those we care about, though only as mediated by sympathy. “Our first and most natural sentiment of morals is founded on the nature of our passions, and gives the preference to ourselves and friends, above strangers” (T 491). Significantly, this implies that the impartiality that characterizes mature moral judgment is not natural but artificial, even if Hume invokes a “moral sense.” 15 This must be unpacked a bit more fully. Approbation is a sort of love, and love is a response to pleasure (T 337). In particular, approbation is a kind of love (or pride, if directed toward ourselves) arising from pleasure felt upon taking a general view or survey of an action or character. Why would we feel pleasure and come to love actions and characters surveyed in this way? Gratitude for benefits received is for Hume the paradigm case of love (T 348). But pleasure we feel “upon the general view or survey” or “by the mere view and contemplation of character and action” cannot be understood simply in terms of gratitude, since to consider character in this way is explicitly to consider it “without reference to our particular interest” (T 472). It can be explained, Hume concludes, only through the principle of sympathy. Through sympathy with the ways in which others are pleased and benefited by characters and actions, we feel toward them something like the grateful love we feel toward those who please and benefit us, and this sympathetic gratitude constitutes approval (T 591). What appears at times as a general benevolence, too, “proceeds merely from sympathy, and is no proof of such an universal affection to mankind” (T 481). Hume concludes, then, that “sympathy is the chief source of moral distinctions” (T 618).

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

311

Hume closes the Treatise of Human Nature by returning to the contrast between moral exhortation and moral anatomy. Without invoking either by name, Hume delicately positions himself between Mandeville and Hutcheson, asserting the superiority of his account over both alternatives: All lovers of virtue (and such we all are in speculation, however we may degenerate in practice) must certainly be pleas’d to see moral distinctions deriv’d from so noble a source, which gives us a just notion both of the generosity and capacity of our nature. It requires but very little knowledge of human affairs to perceive, that a sense of morals is a principle inherent in the soul, and one of the most powerful that enters into the composition. But this sense must certainly acquire new force, when reflecting on itself, it approves of those principles, from whence it is deriv’d, and finds nothing but what is great and good in its rise and origin. Those who resolve the sense of morals into original instincts of the human mind, may defend the cause of virtue with sufficient authority; but want the advantage, which those possess, who account for that sense by an extensive sympathy with mankind. According to the latter system, not only virtue must be approv’d of, but also the sense of virtue: And not only that sense, but also the principles, from whence it is deriv’d. So that nothing is presented on any side, but what is laudable and good. (T 619)

Unlike Mandeville, Hume has succeeded in performing a moral anatomy that reveals nothing “hideous and disagreeable.” If in some indirect sense moral approval is derived from our interested passions, specifically gratitude toward those who please or benefit us, moral approval as felt “upon the general view or survey” and mediated by sympathy is not itself interested. Moral approval and disapproval cannot be reduced to self-love any more than our varied passions can be reduced to self-love. With Hutcheson, Hume insists that the moral sense “is a principle inherent in the soul.” In distinction from Hutcheson, though, Hume believes he has uncovered “those principles, from whence it is deriv’d.” The moral sense is not simply an “original instinct” of the human mind. Hume’s account of moral judgments as derived from the principle of sympathy does not lead to the hypothesis of divine design to explain the otherwise arbitrary and inexplicable. It is not in service of a theodicy, not an account that evokes praise and gratitude toward God (nor one that drives

ch a p t er el e v en

312

us into the arms of grace). Instead, it is an account that renders moral distinctions transparent and invites reflexive self-approval. This is an unmasked human nature we can be comfortable with, he suggests, rather than horrified at.

Pride and Reflexive Self-Survey The place of reflexive self-survey is even more central than suggested thus far. For Hume is forced to wrestle with the fact that sympathy as we initially experience it is rather limited and variable; we sympathize more fully with those to whom we feel some sort of prior connection and, where this is lacking, tend to flee from sources of sympathetic distress (T 580–81). In order to serve as the “chief source of moral distinctions,” which are not variable in this way, sympathy must be corrected and extended. In trying to show how this takes place, Hume develops more fully the notion of the “steady and general” point of view from which moral approval and disapproval are properly felt (T 581–82). This point of view is reflexively corrected in the course of social interaction; “’twere impossible we cou’d ever make use of language, or communicate our sentiments to one another, did we not correct the momentary appearances of things, and overlook our present situation” (T 582; 603). Baier argues that “the whole of the Treatise searches for mental operations that can bear their own survey, sorting out those that can (causal reasoning in its naturalistic and non-metaphysical employment, virtues and the moral sentiment which discerns them) from those that get into ‘manifest contradictions’ or self-destructive conflict when turned on themselves.” 16 Given the importance of reflexivity to Hume’s thought, the centrality of pride, a form of reflexive self-assessment, should come as no surprise.17 Pride is for Hume indispensable for making sense of how morality provides motives sufficiently strong so as to influence our actions, as opposed to merely rendering us accurate moral spectators.18 Pride is for Hume a pleasurable impression that arises when an object that is related to oneself has a quality that itself gives one pleasure. On Hume’s associationist psychology, pride serves to reinforce the idea of the self, giving its possessor a more secure (and positive) sense of identity (T 287). We take pride in all sorts of personal traits and possessions, but particularly in our virtues, and Hume points out that “the most rigid morality allows us to receive a pleasure from reflecting on a generous action” (T 298). Social creatures

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

313

that we are, though, “our reputation, our character, our name are considerations of vast weight and importance; and even the other causes of pride; virtue, beauty and riches; have little influence, when not seconded by the opinions and sentiments of others” (T 316). Our sympathy with others’ opinions of us feeds into our own reflexive survey in a powerful way, particularly when we receive esteem and approbation from those we ourselves esteem and when their judgments reinforce our own (T 321–22). The conclusion of the Treatise asks: Who indeed does not feel an accession of alacrity in his pursuits of knowledge and ability of every kind, when he considers, that besides the advantage, which immediately result from these acquisitions, they also give him a new lustre in the eyes of mankind, and are universally attended with esteem and approbation? And who can think any advantages of fortune a sufficient compensation for the least breach of the social virtues, when he considers, that not only his character with regard to others, but also his peace and inward satisfaction entirely depend upon his strict observance of them; and that a mind will never be able to bear its own survey, that has been wanting in its part to mankind and society? (T 620)

Pride makes it possible for morally endorsed desires to win out over desires that do not survive reflexive survey: “the clever governor of self or of others, then, presumably will draw a veil of ignorance or attempted forgetting over what, for example, the sensible knave gains and the just person sacrifices, but will encourage her imagination to dwell on the less feverish satisfactions of ‘inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of our own conduct’ [E 283], and any other mild but lasting pleasures that virtue may bring.” 19 Were we not capable of pride, and through sympathy capable of having our pride damaged or reinforced by the ways others assess us, we would not be able to act in accordance with moral judgments that strain against our own self-interest or limited generosity. We would not, in short, be able to sustain the practice of morality, although we would still display natural virtues in some limited contexts, showing generosity toward friends and care for our dependent children (T 316–24).20 Pride thus emerges as a kind of meta- or regulative virtue for Hume. While granting that “an excessive pride or over-weaning conceit of ourselves is always esteem’d vicious, and is universally hated; as modesty,

ch a p t er el e v en

314

or a just sense of our weakness, is esteem’d virtuous, and procures the good-will of every-one” (T 592), Hume insists at the same time that “nothing can be more laudable, than to have a value for ourselves, where we really have qualities that are valuable” (T 596). A proper estimation of our capacities is absolutely necessary for effective action, and thus for the exercise of virtue (T 597). A just pride is a good thing, and not in itself problematic. Pride that we detect in others tends to be regarded as vicious for two reasons: because it is often overblown and because it encourages uncomfortable comparisons with ourselves and our own virtues and capacities. For this reason, Hume suggests, “we establish the rules of good-breeding, in order to prevent the opposition of men’s pride, and render conversation agreeable and inoffensive” (T 597). According to these rules, we must conceal our pride from others. There is insincerity here, Hume concedes, but it is innocent: “I believe no one, who has any practice of the world, and can penetrate into the inward sentiments of men, will assert, that the humility, which good-breeding and decency require of us, goes beyond the outside, or that a thorough sincerity in this particular is esteem’d a real part of our duty” (T 598). Hume is explicit about the fact that in reclaiming pride he is promoting a pagan ethic and attacking a Christian ethic. To rehabilitate pride is to rehabilitate heroic greatness: “whatever we call heroic virtue, and admire under the character of greatness and elevation of mind, is either nothing but a steady and well-establish’d pride and self-esteem, or partakes largely of that passion” (T 599).21 “Love of glory” and “magnanimity” reemerge as “shining virtues,” even if “many religious declaimers decry those virtues as purely pagan and natural” while placing “humility in the rank of virtues” (T 600). While Hume says here that he “shall not pretend to determine” whether this is just or not, in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he famously includes humility in his indictment of the monkish virtues, which “cross all . . . desirable ends” and which he therefore transfers to the column of the vices (E 270).

Hypocrisy: Shifting the Blame Hume’s moral philosophy, then, is an explicit attempt to restore a fully pagan ethic, one that does not pay even lip service to Christianity.22 A character driven by pride and love of glory is frankly virtuous in Hume’s eyes. He utterly rejects an Augustinian moral psychology, no longer em-

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

315

ploying it even for satirical effect. There is no contrast between true virtue and apparently virtuous actions produced out of the desire to be loved and respected. The place of pride and reputation in assisting our natural motives to virtue can be, Hume claims, approved upon selfsurvey; in this most important sense it need not be hidden away. If some concealment of pride is integral to good manners, everybody knows it; it is a transparent deception, an insignificant white lie, like the routine “I’m fine, how are you?” exchanged with a store clerk. In contrast to La Rochefoucauld, who seeks a noble ethic of honesty amidst the revolting deceptions of polite honnêteté, and unlike Mandeville, who gleefully proclaims his shocking insight into the ineradicability of hypocrisy within a flourishing society, Hume denies that natural human virtue rests in any significant way on deception or hypocrisy, while also refusing to bend to any stringent ethic of honesty. What is pervasively and problematically hypocritical is for Hume not natural virtue but Christian faith and the artificial morality it seeks to impose.23 In the Natural History of Religion, Hume argues that theistic beliefs emerge out of fear and anxiety concerning future events. Not understanding the natural causes of these events, people attribute them to an anthropomorphic but invisible entity or entities. In hopes of influencing the course of events, they seek to flatter the deity and, “rather than relinquish this propensity to adulation, religionists, in all ages, have involved themselves in the greatest absurdities and contradictions.” 24 On the one hand, they praise the deity as transcendent, infinite, and powerful, but on the other hand, they continue to think of the deity in anthropomorphic terms, which make sense only for the limited human realm of existence. As a result of these internal contradictions, “the conviction of religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real, and scarcely ever approaches, in any degree, to that solid belief and persuasion, which governs us in the common affairs of life. Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects: They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and most positive bigotry” (NHR 60). Most significantly for ethics, believers fear the deity and his imponderable, terrifying actions, yet praise the deity in their hopes of appeasing him: “in proportion to the supposed extent of his science and authority, their terrors naturally augment; while they believe, that no secrecy can conceal them from his scrutiny, and that even the inmost recesses of their breast lie open before him. They must then be careful not to

ch a p t er el e v en

316

form expressly any sentiment of blame and disapprobation. All must be applause, ravishment, extasy” (NHR 67). This results in self-deception or, in Hume’s terms, “hypocrisy.” It also corrupts natural human morality. “The preposterous distribution of praise and blame, must have the most pernicious consequences, and weaken extremely men’s attachment to the natural motives of justice and humanity.” 25 Believers praise God despite the fact that the deity acts in ways (arbitrarily saving some and condemning the rest) that in humans would be condemned. And they become hesitant to praise human virtues, since to do so seems to call God’s superiority into question. They end up denigrating finite, this-worldly human existence and the virtues that contribute to natural human flourishing. Instead, they attempt to sustain “artificial lives and manners” (E 341) constituted by virtues and practices that are either frivolous or outright harmful and that therefore have a claim to be performed solely for the sake of pleasing the deity, out of an absolutely pure intention (NHR 71–72). Hume has turned the tables on earlier Augustinian critiques of pagan virtue. It is Christian artificial lives, not the cultivation of the natural virtues, that are characterized by hypocrisy.

Modernizing Aristotle? Hume restores a pagan ethic of virtue, but is this an Aristotelian ethic? Is Hume, as Baier claims, simply “restoring the Aristotelian tradition to its original this-worldly values”? Baier is happy to admit some of Hume’s departures from Aristotle, notably his interest in “the epistemological question of how we recognize moral virtues,” which she terms a “typically modern question.” This epistemological interest she regards as an advance on Aristotle because it unmasks inherited claimants to moral authority and renders human practices of self-regulation transparent.26 Hume’s shift from agent’s point of view to spectator’s point of view enabled him to shed more light on the processes of reflection and self-correction that make moral practices possible. There is on his account no need for a teleological conception of human nature; human moral development is not like the growth of acorn into oak tree but is an open-ended process of reflective survey and self-correcting sentiment. Hume trusts that moral practices will survive unmasking because, says Baier, of “his trust that the human good sense a decent culture will nourish will see that ‘inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity,

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

317

a satisfactory review of one’s own conduct’ are more important than ‘profit or pecuniary advantage’; that compared to ‘the invaluable enjoyment of a character,’ superior power and wealth are ‘worthless toys and gewgaws.’ The goods internal to the practice of the moral life become more important than any external goods.” 27 In this last sentence, seeking to show why MacIntyre ought to be open to Hume’s perspective, Baier shifts from a Humean vocabulary into a MacIntyrean vocabulary.28 But is Humean “inward peace of mind” really a good internal to the practice of the moral life? Does the virtuous Humean choose virtuous actions for their own sake? This becomes the key question to adjudicate, in order to determine whether Hume’s neopagan ethic is recognizably Aristotelian or even broadly eudaimonist in character. One way to approach this question is to compare “inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of one’s conduct” with the end of Aristotelian eudaimonia. We can grant that, like eudaimonia, peace of mind is ordinarily secured only through virtuous activity and that no conflict is possible between the character constituting virtue and the character accompanied by inward peace of mind. The agent is never confronted with a situation in which one course of action would be virtuous while another would secure inward peace of mind. But this parallel does not go far enough: as we have seen, the virtuous Aristotelian does not act virtuously in order to secure happiness, but rather does, for their own sake, the various things that constitute happiness. Peace of mind, though, unlike pagan eudaimonia, is a subjective state, which might be artificially induced by some brain-altering drug. It is clearly closer to the magnanimous person’s consciousness of her own moral worth than to eudaimonia. Still, why think that peace of mind here becomes an external good to which virtuous activity is instrumentalized, rather than simply supervening on virtuous activity? If in the case of magnanimity our suspicions were reinforced by specific things Aristotle has to say about the magnanimous person’s reluctance to concede dependency, here the problem rests in a more general feature of Hume’s thought. Hume never fully distinguishes between goods internal to the practice of virtue, that is, goods that constitute the virtuous life, and external goods. He never transcends the register of subjective fulfillment, even if he elevates calm passions over more tempestuous passions. As Sharon Krause points out, Hume’s argument for the importance of integrity as a motivating factor rests on its agreeableness. But “since there is no basis for ordering the agreeable and the useful relative to one

ch a p t er el e v en

318

another, there is no cause for the luster that integrity gives to justice to win out in competition with the advantages of injustice. To establish this priority, some more capacious conception of the person would be necessary, one that contains an ordering of desires and their ends.” 29 Yet this is just what Hume intentionally eschews. The virtuous life, for Hume, is one in which the fulfillment of one’s subjective desires meets with as little internal and external resistance or conflict as possible. Consistency and stability offer his only means for ordering desires. Therefore, the goods he acknowledges are all external, natural goods, in the sense that they are goods for everyone whose desires thereby happen to be satisfied, rather than good only for the good, only within the context of a good life. We might still think that the virtuous Humean is innocent of instrumentalizing virtuous activity to the desire for pleasure. However, Hume makes the mistake of thinking that he can reinforce the pursuit of virtue by pointing to the pleasure derived from peace of mind. Ironically, then, the reflective Humean is closer to Aristotle’s merely good (and unreflective) person than to the nobly good person, in that the virtuous Humean who reflects comes to conceive of virtuous action as performed for the sake of securing certain natural goods (peace of mind and so forth), rather than pursuing virtuous activity for its own sake, simply as the appropriate way to act in those given circumstances. More forcefully, we might argue that the reflective Humean is corrupted in the way characteristic of Aristotle’s magnanimous person.30 The reflective Humean acts for the sake of her own self-conception as virtuous, her own awareness of her worth. Consciousness of integrity is not simply something that supervenes on her virtuous activity; rather, the pursuit of virtue is possible only because of the subjective state to which it gives rise. “I am pursuing virtue,” she reflects, “because after all it gives rise to the most sustainable pleasure, that of self-approbation.” Of course, in some respects the reflective Humean is quite different from the magnanimous Aristotelian; Hume does not think the summit of virtue requires great deeds performed on a grand scale. Hume’s is a bourgeois, egalitarian ethic accessible to all, not a noble ethic.31 But the reflective Humean, like the magnanimous Aristotelian, fails to pursue virtue for its own sake. Hume rightly acknowledges the place played within moral development by pride and by our desire to be loved, by our desire for a positive self-perception, and by our concern for others’ perceptions of ourselves. He rightly sees that a virtuous character can become over time capable of sustaining itself without positive reinforcement from others (T 322).

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

319

But he regards persons as capable of acting in a consistently virtuous way only insofar as motivated by pride, that is, by the desire for a positive self-survey.32 He does not see how pride could ever be transcended, how the virtuous person could come to choose virtuous activity for its own sake, simply as appropriate to the occasion, rather than as a route to the fulfillment of subjective desire. He does not have the resources to argue that nothing but the virtuous life is a truly flourishing life; he can argue only that the virtuous life satisfies desires (is pleasurable) in a calmer, more stable way, less liable to disruption.33 This is the crucial sense in which a Humean ethic is not Aristotelian, even if it is “pagan” (and even if it captures the corrupted perspective of Aristotle’s magnanimous man).34 It is also the most crucial sense in which Hume’s moral philosophy, seen from a Christian perspective, fails to capture “natural” virtue. This is not to say, though, that all aspects of Hume’s ethic are as stark a repudiation of Christianity as he seems to imagine. Aquinas, for instance, while disagreeing with the notion that pride plays a permanent motivational role in virtuous action, would agree with much of Hume’s critique of humility, even if he would term it pusillanimity. And he would agree with much of Hume’s rehabilitation of pride as a virtue, even if he would term it (non-Aristotelian) magnanimity. Aquinas agrees that a proper assessment of our own capacities is essential for effective action: “whatever capacity any one may be endow’d with, ’tis entirely useless to him, if he be not acquainted with it, and form not designs suitable to it” (T 597). Aquinas tells us, “in so far as his own ability goes, it belongs to a magnanimous man to be confident in himself” (Summa Theologiae II-II 129.6 ad 1). And Aquinas agrees that habitual self-depreciation is vicious rather than virtuous: pusillanimity causes persons to fall short of what they are capable of doing; “the pusillanimous man shrinks from great things out of littleness of soul” (Summa Theologiae II-II 133.2). So while Aquinas insists that humility is indeed a virtue, it must be distinguished from the vice of pusillanimity and comes closer to Hume’s virtue of modesty, “a just sense of our weakness” (T 592). Aquinas and Hume would agree, then, that virtue requires a just sense of our capacities and of our weaknesses. They do differ radically in how they understand these, since for Aquinas any greatness that we possess we have as a gift from God, to be acknowledged as such (Summa Theologiae II-II 129.3 ad 4). Insofar as we are sinful human beings, a proper assessment of our capacities reveals our utter weakness. Insofar as we are graced by God, a proper assessment of our capacities reveals that we can do great things. This difference is

ch a p t er el e v en

320

rooted, of course, in fundamental theological disagreements: for Aquinas, praise of God is true worship, not fear-induced flattery; God is truly good and the source of all good; and faith is not a self-deceived attempt to embrace contradictories. Aquinas was able to make sense of pagan virtue as true if imperfect virtue, directed toward proximate ends capable of being directed beyond themselves to our true final end. Erasmus, too, was generous toward pagan virtue, able to see it as already on the way, even if with a heavily veiled self-understanding. I have sought to show the pitfalls that accompanied the demonization of pagan ethics in the early modern period, the irony of the fact that those who most sharply criticized pagan virtue instead ended up bolstering its independence. Hyper-Augustinian anxiety about the natural processes through which the virtues are socially formed made it difficult for early modern Christians to accept that the early stages of the acquisition of virtue do rest on our desire for love and approval, and later for self-approval. Christian anxiety about acquired virtue was doubly problematic in that it led both to blanket condemnations of pagan virtue and to deracinated accounts of grace. It made it difficult for Christian thinkers to recognize the possibility of accepting these as stages in the acquisition of virtue while also insisting—with Aristotle—that they can and must be transcended, that persons can come to act virtuously for virtue’s own sake, simply because to do so is to act in the way appropriate to a particular situation. All virtuous action, affirm Christians, is properly referred to God, and God is our last end; the appropriate way to act in any situation is a way that properly acknowledges God as our creator and redeemer, source of all gifts and capacities. Acting for virtue’s own sake and acting for God’s sake are not in tension with one another, but insofar as persons know God and come into closer relationship with God, they are increasingly capable of acting appropriately, of properly acknowledging God. Because Hume does not distinguish between goods internal to and external to the virtuous life, because he speaks only the language of pleasure and the fulfillment of desire, it is more difficult for Christians to make common cause with Humean virtue than with Aristotelian virtue (at least, Aristotelian virtue sans magnanimity). It is more difficult to show how the Humean agent acts for the sake of proximate ends capable of being directed beyond themselves to our true final end, because it is difficult to say that the Humean agent ever comes to understand that the good life is not the life lived for the sake of maximized stable pleasure. This is a judgment that Humean virtue is

Hume and the Bourgeois Rehabilitation of Pride

321

finally a mere semblance of virtue, but it is not a return to a generalized anxiety over semblance; it does not issue from a refusal to acknowledge the social construction of moral character or an aspiration to a special kind of purity of will. Kant, too, worried that Hume failed to grasp that ethics is about something fundamentally different from subjective fulfillment. In developing this critique and articulating an alternative stance, though, Kant reintroduced a secularized version of the hyper-Augustinian horror of social formation, along with its perception of the cultivation of virtue as cultivation of hypocrisy and its longing for absolute honesty. If in Christian accounts this led to a deracinated account of grace, in Kant it led to the shadowy realm of the noumenal and to deracinated human agency. However, recent work on Kant, in seeking to draw him closer to an Aristotelian understanding of character and habituation, arrives at a neopagan ethic considerably more subject to fruitful rapprochement with a Christian ethic of virtue.

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

12

Rousseau suspected that the acquired virtues represented a betrayal of the authentic self. While recognizing that human beings could not simply remain in a state of natural goodness, Rousseau never fully came to terms with what he saw as the artificiality of virtue. Hume, in contrast, was much more sanguine about acquired virtue, and much less worried about both honesty and authenticity. It was not, from Hume’s perspective, the artificial virtues that are hypocritical or represent a betrayal of the natural, but only the artificial lives of those who live according to irrational religious beliefs. Still, I have argued that Hume does not finally help us understand the acquisition of virtue in that he does not capture how the virtuous act for virtue’s own sake. In another way, too, Hume negatively reinscribes worries over acquired virtue—precisely by valorizing pride, the epitome of glittering vice, he shows that he has not quite left these worries behind. He cannot quite resist thumbing his nose at the Augustinian tradition. In contrast to Rousseau, Kant’s concern is with autonomy rather than authenticity. The self to which one must be true is not the idiosyncratic self but the self capable of recognizing and adhering to principle. Virtue, then, when properly understood, is for Kant no alien imposition on the self. In contrast to Hume, though, Kant’s concern is not to root the acquisition of virtue in nature but to display its rational character. There is no natural virtue, and in fact, acquiring a good will requires a revolution of our natural propensities. While Kant’s thought is of course in many ways distinctive, there are two important respects in which Kant’s thought, too, carries its own traces of modern hyper-Augustinianism.

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

323

First, he shares the anxiety that eudaimonism reflects a problematic form of self-love and addresses this anxiety through an analogous strategy of separation. Second, he is preoccupied with purity of will in a way that undercuts any account of the fundamental transformation of character through action and habituation.1 I will discuss each of these in some detail. First, though, given the lingering picture of Kant as archetypal deontologist, I draw on the rich body of recent scholarship that helps establish that Kant can intelligibly be understood within a framework of an ethic of virtue.

Kant as Virtue Ethicist While Hume’s star has risen along with the recent revival of interest in virtue ethics, Kant’s fell, at least initially. As philosophical virtue ethicists sought to distinguish themselves over against what were seen as the two exclusive options within modern ethics—utilitarianism and deontology—Kant was made the deontologist par excellence, representative of the Enlightenment refusal of history, tradition, community, and embodiedness. Philippa Foot, for instance, on the first page of her pathbreaking book, Virtues and Vices, mentioned Kant prominently among those responsible for the neglect of virtue among analytic philosophers, furthering the “tacitly accepted opinion . . . that a study of the topic [of the virtues and vices] would form no part of the fundamental work of ethics.” 2 Alasdair MacIntyre, writing a few years later, claimed that “in Kant’s moral writings . . . we have reached a point at which the notion that morality is anything other than obedience to rules has almost, if not quite, disappeared from sight.” 3 It was not long, though, before this depiction of Kant as archenemy of virtue was challenged.4 Today, revisionist readings of Kant seek in various ways to show how central the concept of virtue is to Kant’s ethics and to bridge the gap between Kant and Aristotle.5 Some of these accounts are openly constructive, seeking not to recover Kant’s own views but rather to develop further a recognizably “Kantian” perspective. Others argue that Kant’s own views have been misunderstood in various ways. According to the view dominant at the outset of the twentieth century, Kant is concerned about the rightness of action, not about the goodness of the agent. Anything that we say about goodness is derivative from

ch a p t er t w elv e

324

duty, the performance of obligatory acts for their own sake and not for the sake of any good to be achieved. The agent who does the right thing in the presence of contrary inclinations is more praiseworthy than one whose inclinations lead her to do the right thing; indeed, Kant has often been read as claiming that an action can have moral worth only when no inclination exists to perform the action.6 The affective life of the agent thus appears simply as something to be overcome or set aside. Moreover, Kant attacks eudaimonism as fatally infecting the capacity to act for duty’s own sake; the will must be determined directly by reason alone, not by the thought that doing one’s duty will render one happy.7 On this received view, Kant is not so much a critic of false or apparent virtue as he is simply changing the subject away from virtue altogether. Like Luther, he might be seen as leading an exodus from virtue, though from virtue to duty rather than grace. And it is certainly the case that moral philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century gave little attention to virtue, character, habituation, and so on, most of their attention being taken up with the dispute between deontology and utilitarianism. However, now that we are able to look at Kant outside the lens of that particular philosophical dispute and in relation to the flourishing revival of virtue ethics, the received view no longer seems adequate. For Kant is in fact deeply concerned about the character of the agent, so much so that he insists, in a direct echo of the Augustinian critique of glittering vice, that “every pretended good that is not grafted upon a morally good frame of mind is nothing more than a pretense and glittering misery.” 8 Duties performed, good actions, these things that seem most crucial in an act-centered ethic, are here set aside as “pretence and glittering misery” if not proceeding from a good state of character. Or, as Kant puts it at the outset of the Groundwork, “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will” (G 393/7). “Kant’s opening claim concerning the unqualified goodness of the good will means that what is fundamentally important in his ethics is not acts but agents.” 9 Of course, when we ask about what constitutes the good will we are returned to duty and the moral law: the good will is one that acts always out of respect for the moral law. In this sense, the good will is subordinate to the moral law and defined in terms of it. What is most objectionable to virtue ethicists about a deontological approach, though, is not present in Kant’s approach: “the conceptual commitment to agency and long-term characteristic behavior rather than atomic acts and decision procedures

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

325

for moral quandaries is evident here, as one would expect in virtue ethics.” 10 Kant’s concern is not with following determinate rules specifying particular acts but with a basic qualification of agency—the capacity to live in accordance with reason. One who acts out of respect for the moral law, that is, asks always whether a particular incentive to act truly gives her a reason to act.11 And this is closely akin to Aristotle’s notion that the fully virtuous agent acts for the sake of the noble, perceiving that virtuous actions are good in themselves and choosing them for this reason.12 Both Kant and Aristotle, then, are deeply concerned with the character of the agent and with the agent’s capacity to choose actions for their own sake, as intrinsically good.13 Can we similarly claim that Kant shares Aristotle’s concern that our natural inclinations come to harmonize with reason? Is the affective life important to Kant except as something to be overcome? Should we act, as Aristotle insists, from “understanding combined with desire or desire combined with thought,” (Nicomachean Ethics 1139b4–5) or from reason alone? If the sole determining ground of the will must be respect for the moral law, where Kant takes pains to show that this respect is an a priori, nonempirical feeling generated purely out of our awareness of the moral law, it seems that natural emotions have no role to play. Even here, though, recent interpretations of Kant, which take into fuller account Kant’s ethical writings beyond the Groundwork, have offered an important corrective. Direct determination of the will by the moral law is certainly necessary to the moral worth of actions for Kant, but it is not sufficient to secure a virtuous disposition. Kant does think that it is easier to determine whether an act was performed from duty if the agent had no natural inclination to perform it, or indeed had an inclination to perform an opposing act. It is hazardous “to let any other incentive . . . so much as cooperate alongside the moral law” (KpV 72/62). Nevertheless, genuine virtue requires a certain joy in the performance of duty: “Now, if we ask, ‘What is the aesthetic constitution, the temperament so to speak of virtue: is it courageous and hence joyous, or weighed down by fear and dejected?’ an answer is hardly necessary. The latter slavish frame of mind can never be found without a hidden hatred of the law, whereas a heart joyous in the compliance with its duty (not just complacency in the recognition of it) is the sign of genuineness in virtuous disposition.” 14 Kant admits, then, the need for an “ethical ascetics,” a form of ethical gymnastics, which trains the emotions to work in harmony with reason.15

ch a p t er t w elv e

326

If desires and emotions can and should be trained to harmonize with reason, to be reason responsive, a constructive Kantianism can go beyond simply saying that the presence of desire is benign as long as secondary. Building on Kant’s admission that desire can be reason responsive, it is possible to argue, as Barbara Herman has done, that “the strict separation of desire from the reason-connected motive of duty may not be appropriate, given the possibility of connection, in human beings, between reason and the developing system of desire.” This is not to say that the good moral agent will after all act directly from desire. A desire provides an incentive to act, but the good agent always asks whether acting in response to a given incentive in a given situation will be good: “an incentive is present in the deliberative field in what we might call a normalized or rationalized form—as a possible motive—to the extent that its representation and affective significance have been transformed from that of an impulse or an intentional disposition into a rational value.” Acting from duty will in such a person not function as a distinct motive but will be “dispersed in the motives that satisfy the constraints of the deliberative field.” 16 Kant’s own primary focus of attention, though, is elsewhere, on sharply distinguishing autonomous from heteronomous willing, determination of the will by the moral law from determination of the will by contingent facts. Moreover, as noted above, Kant thinks it risky to allow any motive other than respect for the moral law to play a cooperative role. He worries that any further motives “would produce sheer hypocrisy without any substance” (KpV 72/62), would compromise the purity of will, the goodness of disposition, which is the only goodness that is not “pretense and glittering misery.” One commentator suggests that Kant and Aristotle were remarkably close in their understandings of the role of the emotions in action from virtue, “the major difference being that Kant was much more aware than Aristotle of the dangers of self-deception by emotional enthusiasm pretending to be moral inspiration.” 17 Kant responds to this danger by stressing examples in which the agent has no natural inclination to perform an act. Even in such cases, he insists that we cannot know with certainty whether the action was determined by respect for the moral law. The determining reasons for action always remain opaque, both to spectators and to agents. There is no guarantee of the possession of a morally good disposition; perhaps all that we and others possess is glittering vice.

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

327

Eudaimonism and Heteronomy There is much more to be said, in connection with Kant’s remarkable account of radical evil, about his preoccupation with the morally good disposition and the unreliability of any phenomenal indication of it. First, though, I take up a further dimension in which Kant has traditionally been understood as opposed to an ethic of virtue: his hostility to eudaimonism.18 The eudaimonists make, according to Kant, a critical error in that they seek to define the highest good as an empirical, a posteriori object that serves directly as the determining ground of the will (KpV 64/56). This cannot but be heteronomous, on Kant’s account, since it renders moral principles merely hypothetical, their force contingent on whether or not we have a sufficiently strong inclination toward the end promoted by that principle. Epicureans, for instance, regard virtue as a mere means to happiness (KpV 112/94). The Stoics, meanwhile, in defining happiness as the consciousness of virtue, make the mistake of regarding this happiness or state of contentment as the agent’s motive for acting virtuously (M 377/183). This cannot be, argues Kant, since this specific kind of contentment is available only to those who recognize a reason to act virtuously apart from and prior to the supervening pleasure (M 377– 78/183). The happiness cannot provide a justifying reason. Eudaimonism reduces to a form of self-love inasmuch as it relies on subjective inclination as determining ground of the will, that is, as a sufficient reason to act: “this propensity to make oneself as having subjective determining grounds of choice into the objective determining ground of the will in general can be called self-love; and if self-love makes itself lawgiving and the unconditional practical principle; it can be called self-conceit” (KpV 74/64). This critique reflects, though, a misunderstanding of ancient eudaimonism, in both its Stoic and Aristotelian forms. For both, virtue is the supreme practical principle, offering objective grounds for action independent of subjective inclination. The claim is not that eudaimonia is a consequence of achieving the good but that eudaimonia simply is the good. If something promotes my flourishing, I have a reason to do it, whether or not I happen to care about my flourishing. As Irwin points out, “the eudaemonist is entitled to claim that I have a reason to pursue my eudaemonia not because I desire eudaemonia, but because it is my ultimate good, and my good depends on the sort of being I am, not on

ch a p t er t w elv e

328

what I happen to desire.” 19 There is here no subordination of the moral law to inclination, even if there is (in Aristotle) a subordination of morality to the highest good. Moreover, the virtues are constitutive of, not instrumental to, happiness; they are part of happiness since they are worth choosing for their own sake, not for the sake of any contentment that acquiring them may bring. Kant’s critique of ancient eudaimonism was at the same time a critique of the moral thought of his own day. He believed that the same errors were present in both, even if less evident in the latter due to neglect of the concept of the highest good (KpV 64/56). And if his critique of ancient eudaimonism was misplaced, it is less evident that the same can be said of his critique as applied, say, to Hume’s thought. For Hume, as we have seen, thinks precisely along the lines Kant criticizes. For Hume the virtues and the actions performed by the virtuous are “valued purely for their causal consequences in achieving ends that we can reasonably value even if we have no prior concern with morality.” 20 Goods are always for Hume natural goods, good alike for the virtuous and the nonvirtuous. And the contentment that supervenes on virtuous activity is seen as directly motivating this activity, as providing reasons for it. The reflexivity in Hume’s account actually compounds the problem, for it moves a person from a state in which she unreflectively follows her natural inclinations to act in socially beneficial ways to a state in which she reflectively acts in these ways for the sake of the pleasure deriving from satisfying these inclinations. Such a person is consciously employing a principle of self-love.21 If Kant’s critique of eudaimonism as heteronomous is more successful as a critique of Hume’s moral thought, this is not to say that the distance between Kant and a properly construed ancient eudaimonism disappears altogether. Eudaimonism can be seen as differing from Kant insofar as it does subordinate the moral to the nonmoral, not in an objectionably instrumentalizing way but, as Irwin suggests, in the sense that “in order to show that a rational agent is justified in accepting the ends prescribed by morality, we have to show that these ends have something else to be said for them besides the fact that they are prescribed by morality,” that they constitute the perfection, the flourishing, of the agent.22 Something analogous could be said about Augustine’s eudaimonism and about the way in which virtue, for Augustine, is subordinated to the final good of communion with God, a good partly distinct from, even if also partially constituted by, virtue. Thus the Christian acts for virtue’s own sake but,

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

329

beyond this, seeks to become virtuous for God’s sake. As for the Aristotelian eudaimonist, virtue is subordinated to, even while it also partially constitutes, the final good. So we see once again, from a different angle, why it was that Aquinas could regard pagan virtue (seen primarily through an Aristotelian lens) as true if imperfect virtue, directed toward true if proximate goods, and why Erasmus could adopt a similarly generous attitude toward pagan virtue. It is not, then, Kant’s insistence that persons act from the motive of duty as such, but his refusal to allow that this may itself be done for the sake of a higher end, that is, for God’s sake, that is most problematic from the vantage point of a Christian account of mimetic virtue. Of course, Kant, too, regards virtue as the condition of a highest good of which it is itself only partially constitutive, speaks of the highest good as God’s final end for creation, and upholds God as an object of worship (R 6–7/36). Still, in insisting that the ideas both of the highest good and of God are determined wholly by morality and what is required for the intelligibility of morality, Kant precludes the possibility of regarding these as having true priority over against morality, as having, in Irwin’s terms, “something else to be said for them.” Returning to Kant’s overriding concern with the morally good disposition, we are in a position to discern the deep influence on Kant of the hyper-Augustinian tradition. Kant’s definition of virtue as “fortitude . . . with respect to what opposes the moral disposition within us” can be seen as authentically Augustinian (M 380/186). Virtue is always a struggle to resist inclinations that oppose the moral law.23 It is thus only an approximation to the holy will, which possesses no inclinations in tension with reason. “Human morality in its highest stage can still be nothing more than virtue,” always involving the concept of constrained inclination (M 383/188). Augustine, similarly, claimed that virtue in this world is nothing but “unceasing warfare” with our own vices, the particular struggle of the virtue of temperance, “the virtue which bridles the lusts of the flesh to prevent their gaining the consent of the mind.” 24 Like Augustine, Kant parts ways with ancient pagan ethics by denying that there are sages among us; for Kant human morality “in its highest stage is an ideal (to which one must continually approximate), which is commonly personified poetically by the sage” (M 383/188–89). Beyond this understanding of virtue as struggle and of perfection as eluding human reach is a shared emphasis on the good will. For Augustine, a person sins even in performing a good action if this is not performed with a clean heart, wholly out of love.25 And we have already

ch a p t er t w elv e

330

seen how for Kant good actions not based on a morally good disposition are mere pretence. At the same time, there is a fundamental difference between the good will in Augustine and in Kant. For Kant, the good will is one determined wholly by the internal demands of morality. For Augustine, the good will is determined by love of God. What for Kant would constitute an impermissible subordination of morality to an understanding of God prior to narrowly moral concepts is for Augustine the essential feature differentiating true from false virtue. It is not that Augustine subordinates morality to subjective inclination but rather that he perceives God, not the moral law, as the unconditioned good. Even an agent who does not subjectively desire community with God has an objective reason to seek community with God as the ultimate good. We have already seen in chapter 4 how eudaimonism becomes suspect even within the late medieval period, as the love of God as highest good itself comes to be seen as a form of self-love, as catering to subjective inclination. This suspicion fosters Scotus’s attempt to separate a purely selfless love of God from the reward bestowed by God in response to this love. Given such a separation, however, the reward is always present as a threat to pure love of God, making it more rather than less likely that love of God will be cultivated as an instrumental means to heavenly reward, and will thus fail after all to be selfless love. A vigilant policing of motivation, and a persistent anxiety about the possibility of selfdeception, is an unsurprising result, particularly when reinforced, as in the early modern period, by social changes that seemed to foster deception and hypocrisy. Kant preserves not only this hyper-Augustinian suspicion of eudaimonism but also the accompanying strategy of separation. In his concern to avoid contamination of the pure will by the motive of reward, though, he detaches both the pure will and the highest good from any affective love of God. Thus, “the [moral] incentive of the human will . . . can never be anything other than the moral law; and . . . the objective determining ground must always and quite alone be also the subjectively sufficient determining ground of action if this is not merely to fulfill the letter of the law without containing its spirit” (KpV 72/62). The moral law itself must offer both the sole justifying and the sole motivating reasons for action. The highest good, meanwhile, is happiness conditioned on and proportioned to virtue (KpV 110–11/92–93). Intent as Kant is to avoid any infection of the pure will, his intensified strategy of separation nevertheless reproduces the problem encountered by his predecessors. God

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

331

enters in as a cause adequate to the effect of the highest good, that is, as the source of reward, the guarantor of happiness proportioned to virtue (KpV 124/103). Because the existence of God, immortality, and freedom are assumed only as postulates of practical reason, necessary in order to render the highest good comprehensible but not in any way necessary to determine action in accordance with the moral law, Kant believes that purity of will can be preserved. From a theological perspective, the cost is high. Persons neither pursue community with God as their end nor act out of affective love for God; God is neither object nor determining ground of action. Kant does praise the Gospel command to “Love God above all and thy neighbor as thyself,” but as he interprets this command, “to love God means, in this sense, to do what he commands gladly; to love one’s neighbor means to practice all duties toward him gladly” (KpV 83/71). And Kant feels pressed to add a further qualification, for what is significant about God’s commandments is not that they are God’s but simply that they command the moral law, that they are “essential laws of every free will in itself” (KpV 129/108). The intensifying impulse to purify love of God from any taint of self-love has culminated in a definition of “love of God” that evacuates it of any personal and relational content.

Radical Evil and the Problem of Conversion Turning to Kant’s account of radical evil, we find a further aspect of his thought that is deeply shaped by modern hyper-Augustinianism. Karl Barth once called radical evil absolutely “the last thing one would expect” to find Kant writing about on the heels of his earlier ethical writings.26 Be that as it may, Kant in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone speaks of the reality of this evil, our incapacity to extirpate it, and the permissibility of hope in divine grace to enable us to overcome it. As in Luther, we find here a concern for a pure foundation, without which any progress in the moral life is deceptive. Kant recognizes the danger that this concern for a pure fundamental disposition will result in paralysis and obsessive self-scrutiny. He is unable, though, to give an account of moral progress as anything other than strengthening a frail or impure fundamental disposition. He cannot show how it could amount to a conversion of a perverse disposition. He appeals to hope in the possibility of divine aid, but in order to protect human autonomy this must be construed as

ch a p t er t w elv e

332

contingent on a prior human effort that makes no sense on Kant’s own account of radical evil. One commentator perceptively comments that Kant’s “theory of radical evil appears to force him in an Augustinian direction, while his conception of grace or divine aid reintroduces an obviously Pelagian element based on human effort and merit.” 27 Kant can conceive of human and divine agency only as either competing or cooperating with one another; he cannot grasp human agency as utterly enabled by and participating in divine agency. If Luther’s pure foundational starting point is one of relinquishing agency and recognizing absolute dependency on God, then Kant’s pure foundational moment is one of perfect autonomy and independence, of self-determined agency. Neither can make sense of a fundamental transformation of being through doing, of character through action, proceeding gradually through external practices to fundamental inner transformation, which is at the same time a transformation wholly dependent on grace. It must be conceded at the outset of any attempt to unpack Kant’s puzzling account of evil that the Religion is a slippery text. It seeks to set aside metaphysical questions and address itself simply to the question, “What may I hope?” not “What can I know?” or even “What must I do?” yet the metaphysical questions continually hover. The status of the fundamental disposition, for instance, is quite unclear, as is the relation of temporal to nontemporal “events.” Kant is aware of the indeterminacy and evasiveness of his account, yet he finds it preferable to develop an indeterminate and evasive account rather than simply refrain from speaking of radical evil, conversion, and grace. That in itself is remarkable. The starting point of Kant’s account of radical evil is the Gesinnung. Underlying all my specific actions and the maxims or reasons for action that they embody, we must postulate a fundamental disposition that grounds all of them. It is this fundamental disposition that determines whether my will is good or evil. It is always either one or the other, for “the disposition, i.e., the first subjective ground of the adoption of maxims, can only be a single one, and it applies to the entire use of freedom universally” (R 25/50). As the ground of all our particular actions, the fundamental disposition is not in the usual sense the result of a choice or action. Nevertheless, it is something freely acquired, for which we are responsible (R 31/54–55). Like freedom in general, it is for Kant noumenal, not accessible to experience, because it escapes the causal determination of the Newtonian phenomenal realm (R 21–22/47). It therefore also stands outside of time, though it is reflected in all our actions within time. We

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

333

postulate it in order to avoid an infinite regress in adducing maxims for action while still retaining moral responsibility (R 25/50).28 The fundamental disposition of a human being, suggests Kant, cannot be devilish, since it cannot reject the moral law just for the sake of rejecting the moral law. Our original predisposition to good, an innate and ineradicable feature of human nature, keeps the moral law ever before us. While we cannot reject the authority of the moral law outright, we can fail to honor it, and thus fall into evil, in three ways: through frailty, impurity, and perversity (R 29–30/53–54). Frailty is the failure to observe maxims that have been adopted, that is, weakness in the face of opposing inclinations. In order for frailty to be properly evil, it must be understood not as unintentional but as resulting from a free failure to commit fully to the primacy of moral principles over subjective inclinations.29 Impurity is mixed motivation, in which the moral law does not act as a sufficient determining ground of the will but determines the will only given the presence of reinforcing subjective inclinations—again, reflective of a lack of full commitment to moral principles. A perverse will, lastly, is one that has actually subordinated the moral law to the law of self-love, having decided to make it a principle to obey the moral law only when I want to; it “reverses the ethical order [of priority] as regards the incentives of a free power of choice” (R 30/54). These forms of evil are radical in that they lie at the root of all of our actions and are thus reflected in all particular maxims and actions. Thus, while our actions may conform to the moral law even if they issue from a perverse will, we remain fundamentally evil rather than good (R 30/54). This evil is also radical in the sense of being inextirpable by us (R 37/59). Any maxim we can intentionally form, any action we can carry out, will reflect our fundamental disposition. If our fundamental disposition is evil, how can it form a good maxim that would transform itself into good? It is “not to be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims—something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted” (R 37/59). If the moral law is fundamentally subordinated to self-love, every attempt to reverse this prioritization will itself be an expression of the rule of self-love, rather than that of the moral law.30 Even if we manage throughout our lives to perform actions that are in accord with the moral law, so long as our fundamental disposition is evil, we are evil despite these apparently good actions. Actions cannot transform the quality of our fundamental disposition. Finally, we cannot experience

ch a p t er t w elv e

334

our own fundamental disposition, since everything that we experience is by definition phenomenal. Thus, we cannot even know whether our fundamental disposition is good or evil. As an Augustinian account of original sin goes hand in hand with an account of absolute human dependence on divine grace, so in Kant the inextirpability of radical evil, the dilemma created by the fact that any effort to pull ourselves out of radical evil will itself be an expression of the radical nature of that evil, drives Kant to speak of conversion and grace. The necessary change, “so long as the foundation of the maxims of the human being remains impure, cannot be effected through gradual reform but must rather be effected through a revolution in the disposition of the human being” (R 47/68). In the context of Kant’s project of rationalizing Christian faith and of establishing the absolute independence of morality from religion, this move is an uncomfortable one, to which Kant has recourse only as a necessary means of sustaining moral motivation in the face of recognition of our depravity.31 Kant’s discussion of the conversion of the perverse disposition is profoundly unsatisfying, though. Each time Kant approaches the question of how the subordination of the moral law to self-love is reversed, he either slips from discussing conversion of the perverse disposition to discussing the much less intransigent issue of the frailty of the will, or he simply assumes that the revolution of disposition has already occurred. Kant notes, for instance, that our lives, our actions, will never display anything more impressive than a gradual growth in the predominance of the moral law over self-love, but that God, who alone sees the noumenal, sees in a sense the sum of the series, sees the line that the asymptote progressively nears, and considers our fundamental disposition as good, even though in the phenomenal realm our will continues to display considerable frailty (R 48/68, 67/85). Here, of course, is Kant’s translation of the doctrine of justification. But this account does nothing to address the situation of the perverse rather than frail will. To focus on frailty is to make it appear that while we can never reach perfect goodness, we can make progress toward goodness, progress in overcoming our own radical evil. If our will is perverse, though, our actions cannot display anything more than apparent progress in goodness; we are not actually approaching closer to goodness. No light has been shed on the fundamental revolution of disposition. Kant concedes this inasmuch as he notes that “If by a single and unalterable decision a human being reverses the supreme ground of his maxims by which he was an evil human being . . . he is to this extent, by

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

335

principle and attitude of mind, a subject receptive to the good; but he is a good human being only in incessant laboring and becoming” (R 48/68). Here we have an admission that the reversal in the order of maxims must precede any gradual progress in goodness—but this simply reveals that the basic problem of the perversity of the will has not been addressed and that the topic has been shifted from the problem of apparent goodness that arises from a perverse will to the very different and much more tractable problem of imperfectly good acts arising from a good will. A similar evasion of the central problem is present in Kant’s discussion of the role of Christ in the moral life. Christ is for Kant the ideal of moral perfection, the “personified idea of the good principle” (R 60/79). To speak of salvation through Christ is to speak of the way in which contemplation of this moral ideal, present already in our reason as archetype, can give us energy to fuel our own pursuit of moral perfection. But this does not resolve the conundrum of conversion, for it is not simply an input of energy, of zeal for perfection, that is required. That might assist us in overcoming moral frailty, but it does not address the problem of perversion. An account of conversion would seem to require that a power other than ourselves reach in, as it were, to reverse the subordination of moral law to self-love. The problem with this, for Kant, is, of course, that it would infringe on human autonomy. It would be an action for which we would not be morally responsible. But this would in turn mean that such an action could not actually make us good, since the resulting moral worth would not be something for which we were responsible. We are good only if it is our choice that has subordinated self-love to the moral law. Kant is unable to see how grace could actually make us good. We must make ourselves good. Kant does seek to develop an account that leaves room for assistance from grace, but grace must follow upon human effort, not precede it, so that moral responsibility will lie with the initiating human effort: “granted that some supernatural cooperation is also needed to his becoming good or better, whether this cooperation only consists in the diminution of obstacles or be also a positive assistance, the human being must nonetheless make himself antecedently worthy of receiving it; and he must accept this help” (R 44/65–66). Since we cannot know our own fundamental disposition, hope in grace allows us to get on with living out the moral law, keeping us from being paralyzed by our fear of our own fundamental evil. Yet this Pelagian account of grace cannot cope with Kant’s Augustinian account of the inextirpable perversity of the will.32

ch a p t er t w elv e

336

Kant’s only resolution to the dilemma posed by the perverse will is not really a resolution at all, but simply an invocation of the mantra that “ought” implies “can”: “if a human being is corrupt in the very ground of his maxims, how can he possibly bring about this revolution by his own forces and become a good human being on his own? Yet duty commands that he be good, and duty commands nothing but what we can do” (R 47/68). Because ought implies can, we may not after all rule out the possibility that a corrupt fundamental disposition can reverse itself, even though we cannot make the “how” of this possibility intelligible.33 And because human freedom, along with the fundamental disposition, is noumenal, not existing in time, Kant has a ready defense for the inconceivability of the necessary revolution: such things seem contradictory to the thesis of innate corruption “so far as the comprehensibility of, i.e., our insight into, its possibility is concerned, or, for that matter, the possibility of anything that must be represented as an event in time (change) and, to this extent, as necessary according to nature, though its opposite must equally be represented, under moral laws, as possible through freedom; it is not however opposed to the possibility of this restoration itself” (R 50/70). Moreover, the same inscrutability applies to the acquisition of a corrupt disposition as to its reversal: since these are free actions, they cannot be determined or grounded by any preceding state or other, and it is therefore “a contradiction to look for the temporal origin of the moral constitution of the human being” (R 40/62). This suggests that Kant should simply eschew all talk of a propensity to evil, yet he both admits this outright and continues to do so, finding it after all irresistible to tell a story about nontemporal “events” that should properly evade all possible narration (R 42–43/64). In the face of the fact that no assurance is available to us that the necessary revolution has taken place, Kant counsels an emphasis on gradual improvement in action, rather than fruitless self-examination. If persons were incessantly hounded by fears that their fundamental disposition remained perverse, moral effort would be impossible to sustain: “without any confidence in the disposition once acquired, perseverance in it would hardly be possible” (R 68/86). Kant keenly perceives how the emphasis on a pure disposition can lead to paralysis. He argues that a reasonable confidence is available on the basis of conjecture from a person’s actions over time: “For [take] a human being who, from the time of his adoption of the principles of the good and throughout a sufficiently long life henceforth, has perceived the efficacy of these principles on what he does,

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

337

i.e. on the conduct of his life as it steadily improves, and from that has cause to infer, but only by way of conjecture, a fundamental improvement in his disposition . . . he can legitimately assume that his disposition is fundamentally improved” (R 68/86). There is something odd about this, since Kant has already asserted that gradual improvement in action is not contingent on a revolution of the fundamental disposition and so cannot be a sign that such a revolution has in fact taken place. Moreover, even hope for grace will not help address the problem of perversity, since that is the issue we must resolve for ourselves (R 31/54–55). In what sense, then, is the conjecture to the fundamental disposition reasonable? It is finally unclear how we can avoid getting bogged down in anxiety over the state of our fundamental disposition.

The Intelligibility of Graced Human Agency What lands Kant in this dilemma surrounding the perverse will? First, there is the seriousness with which he takes evil, his conviction that human moral evil is indeed radical. Were he to consider evil wholly a matter of frailty, rather than perversity, the dilemma would dissolve. Second, there is the notion of the fundamental disposition, which makes of good and evil finally an all-or-nothing thing. It is this all-or-nothing account that lends unity to human moral agency, but it is also this that makes the reorientation of the fundamental disposition such a conundrum. Third, Kant’s austere conception of moral responsibility plays a key role. Prevenient grace would destroy moral responsibility and is thus ruled out. If it is God who makes us good, then it is not we who are good. Grace is permitted only to assist us, to give us an extra surge of energy, but not to redirect our own moral energy. Were it to do the latter, it would destroy our moral agency, which is the heart of our identity. Kant must conceive of autonomy as independence from God, since he is unable to conceive of how an action could be fully my own while at the same time being an act of God. There is real insight in Kant’s worry about a grace that simply bypasses human agency. As Phil Quinn trenchantly puts it, “the sola fide motto has sometimes been taken to say that saving faith is implanted in the human breast by direct divine causation, and then produces good life-conduct and whatever else may be necessary for worthiness of salvation by a process that bypasses the human subject’s apparatus of voluntary choice

ch a p t er t w elv e

338

altogether.” 34 If God simply reaches in to reorient the will, in what sense is this reoriented will my will, and the actions issuing from it my actions? A grace that simply displaces voluntary human action plants the question of whether it has in fact succeeded in making that individual good, or rather has just destroyed one agent and created another. Some basis for continuity of identity, agency, and moral responsibility is necessary. The irony here is that Kant’s resolution, which requires that the individual first reverse the subordination of the moral law to self-love in order to render herself worthy of divine assistance in further moral progress, and thus requires change in the noumenal, timeless realm, is itself riddled with similar problems. Having allowed that all events experienced in time are subject to strict causal determination, while requiring a strong indeterminism for freedom and moral responsibility, Kant finds that he can protect freedom only by walling it off from temporality. As Gordon Michalson comments, the result is that “Kant has utterly crippled his ability to make clear sense of any instance of moral and religious ‘change,’ of any alteration in one’s moral condition or religious state that occurs in sequential terms.” Talk of moral conversion seems to require reference to a “before” and an “after,” yet it is not clear how one can use such terms in relation to a nontemporal “act.” In fact, it is unclear how the notion of “act” itself can make sense: “Kant’s theory of moral conversion or re-generation culminates in the paradox that an act having no relation to time produces a moral agent who is materially different ‘after’ the act from ‘before.’ A related paradox resides in the ethically peculiar implication that the dispositional act producing moral regeneration stands in no relation to any previous act by the moral agent.” Given that the fundamental disposition is outside of time, it would seem either that it is eternal and unchanging, in which case it is always either good or evil, or that the agent is at each moment utterly unconditioned by any “previous” decision, and is thus always “choosing” a fundamental disposition afresh. There is here no intelligible account of agency as continuous over time: “Kant can string no metaphysical ‘thread’ through the successive moments of the agent’s life, considered morally; he cannot show how a ‘previous’ act or moral condition would be relevant to a ‘present’ act.” 35 Some of the very same problems posed by a grace that reaches in, as it were, over the head of human agency are inherent within Kant’s own account of human agency and are made particularly salient by the need for conversion. Some commentators have found in the mysteriousness of the revolution of fundamental disposition something attractive, which

Kant and the Pursuit of Noumenal Purity

339

can be regarded as Kant’s opening the door to prevenient grace. So Jacqueline Mariña, rather than perceiving it as problematic that Kant can give no account of the revolution of the perverse will, echoes Kant in saying that “because the adoption of a disposition is an act of freedom, it is impossible to inquire into the grounds or causes leading to such an act.” Mariña tries to argue that this leaves room for the possibility that the change in the fundamental disposition is brought about by God, though it does not allow for any practical use of such an idea. She concedes that this would mean that “God bypasses the personhood of the agent” and that “for all practical purposes there is no principle of personal identity between the old individual and the new one whose desires have been altered,” but she concludes from this only that there is nothing practical and existential that we can do with such an understanding of grace.36 It is true that Kant concedes the common incomprehensibility of grace and human freedom: “freedom itself, though not containing anything supernatural in its concept, remains just as incomprehensible to us according to its possibility as the supernatural [something] we might want to assume as surrogate for the independent yet deficient determination of freedom” (R 191/183). Given that both lie beyond the experienced realm of phenomenal reality, one wonders how it is possible to keep them distinct from one another. Still, even as Kant comes close to admitting this, in the same breath he continues to insist that grace be nothing more than a “supplement” to independent human action, or, as he terms it elsewhere in the same passage, that it be nothing more than a “supernatural help,” a form of “supernatural assistance” (R 191/183). How could we possibly know that grace is nothing but a supplement? We can know this only in the sense that this is, according to Kant, required if the moral law’s demand for autonomous obedience is not to be incoherent. Attempting to address the problem of the perverse will by assimilating a noumenal prevenient grace with a noumenal human freedom, then, runs clearly counter to Kant’s intention. Additionally, it only deepens the intelligibility problems that surround Kant’s nontemporal account of human agency. What is needed, rather, is an account of human agency as temporal and thus as capable of change in time, and an account of grace not as bypassing human agency but as working within that agency.37 This, of course, would require a very different account of human freedom, along with a noncompetitive account of human and divine agency, such that human freedom is not understood in terms of independence from divine determination.38

ch a p t er t w elv e

340

What is important to underline, in this context, is the fact that it is Kant’s very strong account of human freedom and moral responsibility that makes a pure starting point (a revolution of the perverse will) necessary as the condition of the possibility of any incremental moral progress. Where Luther required a pure passivity to make room for divine agency, Kant requires a pure activity, which may leave room for a divine agency now safely limited as a “supplement.” Both betray a similar need for clarity and control, a need to be able to isolate a moment at which the only active agency is, in Luther’s case, divine, and, in Kant’s case, human. For both, any incremental, phenomenal moral progress is finally devoid of value, splendid vice, merely apparent virtue, if not grounded in this pure starting point. For both, anxiety about splendid vice and merely apparent habituation into virtue revolves around the status of independent human agency. Kant, then, like Rousseau and Hume, if in strikingly different ways, remains entangled in the legacy of the splendid vices.

conclusion

In the early modern period, virtue was under suspicion. This is true despite the fact that virtually everyone could agree that good character is to be preferred over reliance on constraining laws. Insofar as the virtues were understood as products of human agency, they were often regarded as an expression of pride, of self-love, and thus as inherently hypocritical or false. This worry over the hypocrisy of virtue takes particularly stark form in Luther’s thought and in the Jansenist tradition, both of which applied to would-be Christians the Augustinian charge that all pagan virtue is to be understood as rejection of grace, as a refusal to acknowledge the dependent character of human moral agency and achievement. For Luther, all genuine development in goodness must rest on a prior recognition and acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of human moral agency and of our utter dependency on God. Our radical passivity to God’s act of justification can be properly underscored only through subjective awareness of justification as sharply distinct from sanctification. The sort of dawning recognition of the work of grace and of the dependency of all aspiration on God traced in Augustine’s Confessions was inadequate on this score. Given the prerequisite of passivity, of acknowledged evacuation of agency, human agency is channeled into the task of self-eradication, of understanding its own aspirations as sinful and of rooting them out. The Jansenists preserved a more authentically Augustinian understanding of justification and sanctification as a single process in which Christians are transformed by charity into persons capable of entering the divine fellowship. They did not, therefore, require the same foundational moment of passivity, and they conceived of grace as active within, rather than as displacing, human agency. Indeed, they were hostile toward the

Conclusion

342

Quietists, who extended the ideal of passivity to its limits. Nevertheless, the Jansenists sharply distinguished between natural civility, which they analyzed as an expression of sinful self-love, and true Christian charity, animated by grace. Whereas Augustine had preserved, even while transforming, a form of eudaimonism that required a distinction between virtuous and vicious self-love, the Jansenists were hostile to any hint of eudaimonism. Love of God requires the defeat and destruction of self-love. Human virtue, in contrast, is merely a refinement of selflove; its existence may reflect God’s providential ordering of the fallen world, but the possibility that it is a site for the work of saving grace is ruled out. Where Nicole attempts to broach this possibility, he lapses into self-contradiction. These hyper-Augustinian traditions of reflection on the false character of human virtue helped foster the emergence of secular conceptions of morality and shaped them in peculiar ways. Conceptions of courtly courtesy and civility had from their onset been functionally independent of Christian commitments, but they had also initially been construed quite narrowly, as a code of conduct for gentlemen, rather than as an encompassing moral/spiritual vision. The Jansenist analysis of all human virtue as essentially kin to the self-serving machinations of courtiers nourished a correspondingly broader secular moral philosophy that appropriated this analysis and simply set aside the realm of “true” Christian virtue, where this was understood as passive, devoid of self-love, the realm of mysterious divine activity. Human virtue, in contrast, however complex, however hidden its underlying motives, was subject to human analysis and manipulation, a field for human activity and control. Of course, modern moral thought was hardly univocal. But Rousseau, Hume, and Kant surely constitute three of the most important voices within eighteenth-century moral philosophy. In their own distinct ways, each reflects the defining influence of inherited anxieties concerning the authenticity of humanly acquired virtue, anxieties that revolved around issues of human and divine agency, of eudaimonism, and of the legitimacy of self-love. Rousseau continues to worry about the negative moral influence of social life, even as he seeks to recover a positive form of self-love. In his worry over the tendency of social life to replicate the falsifying charades of the court, he arrives at an ideal of authenticity that elevates truthfulness and independence over aspiration and growth. Hume dismisses both these residual fears over the corrupting influence of social formation and the accompanying passion for truthfulness. Pride

Conclusion

343

becomes a central virtue, and hypocrisy something benign. But for all his efforts to set aside the Augustinian inheritance, Hume’s moral thought remains defined by that inheritance; thumbing his nose at the Augustinian tradition, Hume celebrates the pleasure derived from virtuous pride. In seeking to reclaim the splendid vices, though, he proves unable to differentiate the goods internal to the life of virtue from external goods available to the vicious. In Kant, the legacy of early modern anxiety over acquired virtue is apparent in his (wrongheaded) critique of eudaimonism and in his sense of the need for a foundational moment grounding good moral agency—but this is now a moment of pure activity rather than of pure passivity. To move fully beyond this inherited complex of concerns surrounding acquired virtue would make it possible for a secular moral thinker to affirm all of the following: that virtue is properly pursued not for the sake of external goods such as honor, pride, or the pleasure of positive selfregard but for its own sake, for the sake of goods internal to the practice of virtue, for the sake of a life constituted in part by virtuous activity; that there is a place within ordinary processes of moral development for the desire for love, recognition, and praise, but these can and should be transcended, maturing into a desire to participate in and contribute to the emergence and flourishing of (good) community; and that the virtuous are responsible for their character only in a highly qualified sense, since good character emerges out of a complex array of relationships and institutions, to which the virtuous remain indebted. It would also make it possible to appreciate that human moral agency is fundamentally conditioned and dependent in character and that authenticity must not be confused with unconditioned agency, freedom from social formation, or rejection of moral exemplars. In fact, though, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant each sustained one or more of these insights at the expense of the others, thereby giving modern moral philosophy its lasting—if internally diverse—shape. Meanwhile, among those committed to a robustly theological conception of virtue, retrieving a mimetic conception of virtue while moving beyond the legacy of the splendid vices involves, with Luther, affirming absolute divine sovereignty and the utter dependency of human on divine agency, but without insisting that any exercise of human agency not grounded in and preceded by clear recognition of this dependency constitutes by that token a repudiation of God. It regards sin as resistance to dependency, refusal of gift, but it considers all insight into the depen-

Conclusion

344

dent character of human moral agency, however partial and incomplete, as preparing the ground for the recognition of divine sovereignty. It understands the virtues as perfecting human persons in ways that allow them to participate ever more fully in the fellowship of the divine life, and thus regards perfect virtue as constituted by a love of God that completes rather than competes with love of human persons, including ourselves, and of other finite goods. It accepts virtue as a gift the goodness of which is rightly honored even as it is also always rightly directed to God as its ultimate source. It understands this gift as mediated through scripture, church, and sacraments and also through ordinary inclinations and social relationships, such as a parent’s affirming love of a child and a child’s desire to emulate a beloved parent, or through attraction to the beauty of social harmony. Such a conception can be characterized as mimetic in that it regards virtue as a finite reflection of God’s infinite perfection. In that ultimate sense virtue is imitative rather than original, while nevertheless being reflective of the distinctiveness of each individual character and each particular social and historical context—at the same time mimetic and authentic. This approach appreciates how human persons transform their character through their actions, becoming the personae they enact, but enabled so to act by the power exercised over them by attractive exemplars. It grasps, therefore, that there is nothing mechanical about habituation, and nothing in it that necessarily represents an exclusion of divine agency, even if this agency goes unrecognized. It regards virtue most centrally as imitation of Christ and expects the character of those who truly recognize Christ to be marked by that recognition, even as it acknowledges the very imperfect extent to which Christ is recognized even by those who bear Christ’s name. It understands the church as a foretaste of the perfection of the fellowship of the divine life, insofar as it is constituted by those who are at least dimly aware of how their agency is grounded in divine agency, their virtue reflective of divine perfection, their understanding of God’s gifts and God’s goodness incomplete. It does not, though, make consciousness of God’s grace a condition for the working of God’s grace, and it regards nature as we concretely encounter it as always already both fallen and in the course of being redeemed. What relation does this bear to the contemporary revival of virtue ethics? Contemporary Christian virtue ethics, particularly as it has taken its cues from Alasdair MacIntyre and developed these within the context of narrative theology, has emphasized the particular narratives and

Conclusion

345

communities within which virtuous character is formed.1 MacIntyre argued that the virtues require for their intelligibility reference to living practices and traditions: “the virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context.” 2 This argument has been embraced perhaps more wholeheartedly by Christian ethicists than by moral philosophers, since it made it possible for aspects of Christian moral reflection that had seemed to be handicaps in the context of the dominant modern moral theories to be heralded instead as advantages.3 Both the intelligibility and the distinctiveness of Christian ethics have seemed easier to articulate in the context of the revival of virtue ethics. Stanley Hauerwas has led the way here in focusing increasingly on Christian particularity—not just narrative but scripture, not just practices but liturgical practices, not just tradition and community but the church.4 If the rediscovery of virtue ethics has revived the flagging sails of Christian ethicists, there nevertheless remains a certain uneasiness even among the very theologians who have led the way in recovering for theology the language of virtue. Several sources of discomfort can be identified. All are variations on a by now rather familiar theme—the anxiety that the virtues cannot be cleansed from the taint of the splendid vices. First, an ethic of virtue is seen as problematic insofar as it fosters a focus on self-cultivation rather than on love of neighbor. So Gilbert Meilaender cautions that “we should consider . . . the possibility that even those thinkers who have returned to notions of virtue in an attempt to escape the individualism of our times . . . may be part of a larger current of history in which their turn is only a small part of an increasingly dangerous concentration upon self and self-development.” 5 A person who aspires to the virtue of gratitude will act not only out of gratitude itself but also out of the motivation of seeing herself as a person who acts gratefully. In fact, insofar as the one who aspires to develop the virtue of gratitude as yet lacks it, this second-order motivation, with its reflexive focus on the self, will be central. This reflexive motivation “subtly directs my attention and concern back to myself rather than the one to whom gratitude is given.” 6 Second, a virtue-centered ethic poses problems for Christians if the

Conclusion

346

virtues are seen as possessions of the self—indeed, more secure than any of one’s other possessions—as well as achievements of the self, for which praise and recognition are due. In Christians among the Virtues, Hauerwas and Pinches raise questions about the extent to which Christians can be comfortable with claiming responsibility for our virtues: “Perhaps the presumption of responsibility for our character which Aristotle assumes his audience shares is not an appropriate Christian presumption. Or even if it is, perhaps Christians cannot understand it in just the same way that Aristotle assumed his contemporaries would understand it. Maybe, indeed surely, they will not understand pride as a virtue, talking instead about humility or obedience.” 7 In part, this is a disagreement over specific virtues and their content. But it is also a more encompassing concern; the virtues as such cannot be seen by Christians as (or only as) achievements but as (or also as) gifts. Christian faith chastens our sense of moral autonomy, our sense that our moral character depends on ourselves. Implicit within this discussion is a concern not only with the proper stance a Christian should take toward her own virtue but also with the possibility of affirming the priority of grace in an understanding of the moral life that emphasizes human agency and achievement. One of the primary ways of coping with this sense of discomfort with the language of virtue has been to draw a sharp distinction between one understanding of the virtues (alternately designated pagan, secular, or modern), which is properly subject to the above-mentioned critique, and a Christian understanding, which is not. Some Christian thinkers have found leverage in virtue ethics for a critique of secular modern culture both as hostile to virtue ethics and as incapable of sustaining the virtues themselves. MacIntyre in After Virtue did not retrieve an ethic of virtue solely as a corrective to existing forms of moral philosophy, but linked this with a critique of modern society, which he accused of fragmentation and fundamental incoherence. The ethics of virtue has thus become a weapon in a war against modernity, in which theologians, too, have joined forces.8 Jeffrey Stout argues that in Hauerwas and his followers, MacIntyre’s traditional-modern dualism is mapped onto a church-world distinction.9 This supplies grease for a slide from the meta-ethical claim that virtue ethics offers a vocabulary that allows Christians to articulate what is distinctive about the Christian moral life to the normative claim that the virtues are truly sustained only within the church. In denouncing “liberalism,” the nation-state, and secular modernity, and in implying that these bad things somehow exhaustively encompass the world outside

Conclusion

347

the church, it becomes tempting to falsely idealize the church and Christian virtue. Instead of an ever-shifting boundary between church and world, we encounter “a rigid and static line between Christian virtue and liberal vice.” 10 On the one hand, the world “consists of those, including ourselves, who have chosen not to make the story of God their story.” 11 On the other hand, the world is liberalism, the nation-state, and secular modernity.12 Hauerwas is both more critical of the church and more appreciative of the world than Stout indicates.13 He has always sought to hold together the claim that Christians are “radically anti-world, that is, aligned against the prevailing values of their cultures,” with the insistence that claims for the distinctiveness of the church “are not attempts to underwrite assumptions of superiority.” 14 He also repeatedly notes that we do not have the right to determine the boundaries of God’s kingdom, and thus that “as Christians we may not only find that people who are not Christians manifest God’s peace better than we ourselves, but we must demand that they exist.” 15 Still, the temptations to which Stout points are very real ones for contemporary Christian virtue ethics: on the one hand, that of falsely idealizing the church and its practices and, on the other, that of denouncing secular modernity rather than discerning God at work within it. And Hauerwas’s rhetoric does feed these tendencies at times. In a creative appropriation of scholastic categories, Hauerwas and Pinches suggest that we conceive of the distinction between acquired and infused virtues as “a problem of divided narratives.” This has the virtue of avoiding the implication that the infusion of grace disrupts rather than works through human agency. And the authors do not hesitate to suggest that Aristotle’s account of habituation can be used by Christians as a resource for understanding not only the acquired but also the infused virtues: “Aristotle’s powerful account of how the virtues are acquired can continue to serve as a rich resource for displaying how training in the virtues might occur. Rather than the rapidity of acquisition, or even the mode, ‘infusion’ points to the source from whence the theological virtues come, namely by a special act of God which brings us into relation with God, not only forming but utterly transforming our character.” 16 At first, then, it seems that the distinction between acquired and infused virtues might simply help us articulate the fact that Christians are formed by multiple narratives, without implying any necessary negative judgment on any of these narratives. But as Hauerwas and Pinches go on to discuss what it means to live with divided narratives, in the next breath the nar-

Conclusion

348

ratives correlated with the acquired virtues are identified with the world of sin. Those formed solely by the acquired virtues must then be sinful, and insofar as Christians are formed by any narratives other than that of God’s work in Christ, they too are sinful. This preoccupation with boundaries, though, runs counter to Hauerwas’s own affirmation of the wideness of God’s kingdom. Both the anxieties about the contamination of Christian virtue and the tendency to denounce secular vice can be better understood when seen at the same time as the latest embodiment of the legacy of the splendid vices. Stout hints at this connection in his suggestion that Hauerwas’s thought combines an anti-Constantinian narrative derived from John Howard Yoder with an antimodern narrative derived from MacIntyre: “Pagans in the ancient world could at best exhibit splendid vices, given that they did not worship the true God, but at least they were trying to live virtuously in terms of a shared narrative framework. Their modern successors, having lost their grip on the concept of virtue and being content to live in a society that treats commitment to large-scale narratives as a private affair, are simply vicious.” 17 If in the early modern period the animus against pagan virtues was generalized into a suspicion of virtue as such, or at least of acquired virtue, the effort to reclaim the language of virtue has gone along with the installation of modernity, or at least of liberal modernity, as a new “pagan” other. The tendency to collapse modern into pagan is even more visible in the work of John Milbank.18 In Theology and Social Theory, Milbank argues that secular discourse is best understood as either “heretical” or “neo-pagan,” certainly not as neutral. Milbank is far too critical of both pagan and modern to be an advocate of virtue ethics as such. Questioning MacIntyre’s linkage of virtue ethics with antimodern critique, Milbank asks, “Are liberalism and secularity simply the children of Renaissance and Enlightenment, or do they commence, in some sense . . . already when philosophy in ancient Greece distinguishes itself from religion, and in some measure distinguishes ethics from custom, simply by asking what is ‘the good’ for humanity in general?” The intended answer is clearly yes—modern secularity, pagan philosophy, and MacIntyre himself all share in a move toward “vacuous universalism.” Rightly understood, Christian virtues offer a radical challenge and alternative to pagan virtues. Whereas Greek arete has meaning only in relation to victory in confl ict, for Christians, peace, rather than confl ict, is primary. As the Greek tradition developed from Homer to Aristotle, the centrality of

Conclusion

349

confl ict became less obvious and arete less a matter of military heroism. The giveaway, though, is Aristotle’s understanding of magnanimity, which reveals Aristotelian pursuit of the virtues to be simply another version of the heroic pursuit of honor. “Although this person must only seek honours as rewards for a true exercise of virtue, he is still primarily motivated by this seeking for public acclaim. . . . Not only does the magnanimous man seek to be liberal, he seeks to outshine others in liberality, which implies a competition for limited economic resources. He prefers to be a benefactor rather than receive benefit, and if this sounds possibly ‘Christian,’ one must note that he also remembers his giving rather than his receiving, and is encouraged to be ‘haughty’ to those above him in station, but to ‘hold back’ to those below.” 19 Milbank’s critique of Aristotle’s magnanimous person is very close to the one developed in these pages; while Milbank focuses on the issue of conflict, the specific form that conflict takes in the context of magnanimity is competition for honor, such that the magnanimous person is not truly pursuing virtue for its own sake but for the sake of honor, reputation, and so on. The difference between Milbank’s analysis and that developed here lies in the fact that I see the ideal of the magnanimous person as standing in tension with other, more central, aspects of Aristotle’s ethics, and I refrain from taking Aristotle’s magnanimous person as definitive of pagan moral thought more generally. At the least, I would argue, we can say that there are strands of pagan moral thought that recognize that the truly virtuous are those who transcend the pursuit of honor and seek only the goods intrinsic to virtuous activity. And a Christian charity that seeks mutuality rather than confl ict has a responsibility not to ignore these strands. Otherwise Christian virtue, as much as any “pagan” virtue, fuels claims like that of Schneewind, that “since virtue theory must treat disagreement with the virtuous agent as showing a flaw of character, it discourages parties to a moral dispute from according even prima-facie respect to differing points of view.” 20 One of my primary reasons for probing the early modern legacy of anxiety over the splendid vices has been to dispel the remaining traces of this anxiety, which both leads to a problematic preoccupation with defending the purity of Christian virtue over against pagan vice and fuels a generalized suspicion of the modern world. Many of the specific problems associated with early modern hyper-Augustinian anxiety over the splendid vices have largely been overcome within contemporary Christian reflection on virtue: social formation of character is now acknowl-

Conclusion

350

edged and embraced, obsessions about the hiddenness of intentions and deceptiveness of actions have been laid to rest, human agency as such is no longer suspect, and grace is no longer denaturalized and deracinated. Still, a closer look suggests that the underlying anxiety remains and has simply assumed a new form. Early modern Augustinian thought was characterized by the suspicion that acquired virtue, ordinary social formation in virtue, is in fact deformation, that it merely deepens pride and self-love and gives rise thus only to false or merely apparent virtue. Contemporary revivers of virtue ethics, in contrast, have enthusiastically embraced the notion that habituation in virtue takes place within the context of a community and its practices. This focus on the communal formation of character and agency helps to relieve the theological reservations about virtue noted earlier: by shifting attention from the individual to the community, it reveals how an ethic of virtue can foster rather than frustrate the acknowledgment of dependency. A vision of Christian virtue as formed by the church and its practices has also made possible a naturalized account of the Christian moral life that renders Christian moral agency intelligible as agency rather than a miraculous surd. And it does so without reducing Christian ethics to a stronger motivation to perform universal duties, or a principle or set of principles that simply restates in somewhat different vocabulary a universal moral law. On this view, it is not through an instantaneous evangelical rebirth, a lightning bolt from heaven, that Christians are made such, but through hearing the scriptures that proclaim the story of God with us and participating in the practices of the church constituted by its willingness to be defined by that story. Christian identity is thus formed gradually, in time, by forces that are embodied and open to view—narratives, institutions, practices. Moreover, so long as we refuse to conceive of human and divine agency as mutually exclusive, there is no reason that the turn to narrative and practices need be reductionistic or need involve any denial of divine reality and activity. Rather, the sort of naturalization that takes place through a narrative virtue ethic is one that, at least potentially, recovers an appreciation for what Aquinas sought to name as the secondary causes through which God works. It does so, moreover, with a new grasp of the social construction of human character and agency. As our exploration of a mimetic understanding of Christian virtue underscores, the sort of character formation that takes place through imitation of exemplars of virtue can be understood at the same time as a form of habituation through which

Conclusion

351

human communities perpetuate their practices and traditions, and as God’s transforming activity, drawing us into the divine community. The hyper-Augustinian tendency to protect the purity of Christian righteousness by conceiving of grace as acting outside of or against natural human agency has, then, been productively overcome. And yet, the concern, evidenced particularly within Protestant accounts of Christian virtue, to safeguard Christian distinctiveness reflects an ongoing preoccupation with the threat of the splendid vices or “pagan” virtues—the worry that secular “virtue” will either erode Christian particularity or contaminate Christian character.21 One piece of evidence of this is the tendency, particularly among Protestant advocates of virtue ethics, to define Christian identity by sharply distinguishing habituation in Christian virtue from any habituation that is not explicitly Christian. Contamination is now to be avoided not through the individual’s ceding moral agency to God but by locating each person’s formation in Christian virtue within an emphatically defined social and institutional context. Thus it is emphasized that habituation in the Christian life takes place through the encounter with scriptural narratives and more generally through participation in the practices and traditions of the church, including the sacramental life of the church. These explorations of Christian practices allow for a thicker, more holistic account of the Christian life, one that reunites liturgy, spirituality, theology, and ethics. Moreover, emphasizing the centrality of the church in this way makes it possible to articulate illuminating accounts of human moral agency while still preserving the claim that formation of Christian virtue is wholly dependent on grace. But once we concede that distinctively Christian virtues, like the virtues of non-Christians, develop through habituation, we should also recognize that this means that Christian identity is porous. What attending to habituation allows us to articulate is a chastened account of Christian distinctiveness, which can serve finally to free us from anxiety over the splendid vices and the threat of contamination. What I envision here is based not on a neutral account of human nature but on a Christian account of nature as we encounter it—already fallen and in the process of being redeemed. In this sense, of course, it is distinctively Christian. But if what truly matters is the work of divine grace, we need not worry so much about defining identity and defending distinctiveness, though we must certainly be concerned about sin, about our capacity to see beauty in evil, about our resistance to dependency

Conclusion

352

and gift. If we trust the practices of the church to form us in true—and distinctive—virtue, we will be tempted to despair when we become aware of the sinful failures of the church (just as our sinfulness leads us to despair of our own agency). We must trust wholly in God, even as we embrace the practices of the church and strive to develop our own moral agency. Acknowledging that all virtue shares in the clay feet of a sinful and redeemed Adam involves a deepened relinquishing of control, a further acknowledgment of dependency.22

a bbr e v i ations

CD Conf. CWE De Benef. De Doct. Chr. de Trin. DSD E EE G KpV LB LW M (ch. 12) M (ch. 9) MS NE NHR OE PM R ST T WA

Augustine, De Civitate Dei Augustine, Confessiones Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus (trans.) Seneca, De Beneficiis Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana Augustine, De Trinitate Augustine, De Sermone Domini in Monte Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics (Bekker numbers) Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft Erasmus, Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia Luther, Luther’s Works, English translation Kant, Metaphysics of Morals La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, maxim La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, withdrawn maxim (maxime supprimé) Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Bekker numbers) Hume, The Natural History of Religion Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, posthumous maxim Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature Luther, Luthers Werke, Weimar Ausgabe

notes

i n t r oduc t ion 1. Romans 13:14, cf. Galatians 3:27, Colossians 3:9–10, Ephesians 4:22–24. 2. My use of the term hyper-Augustinian aligns with that of Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 246–47, for whom it likewise includes Luther, the Puritans and other radical Calvinists, and the Jansenists. There were, though, Puritans within the tradition of Protestant scholasticism who sustained a conception of secondary causes that left room for human agency; we might think in particular of William Perkins and William Ames. See Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 3. Lee Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 20–21. 4. Ibid., 20. 5. William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 117. 6. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 13, 15. For a social analysis of Puritan despair linked with increased social mobility, see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 61–84. See also Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1984), 75–76. 7. Robert Merrihew Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), which offers a sustained philosophical defense of the view “that the goodness of finite things consists in a sort of resemblance to God” (15), can be seen as a contemporary embodiment of this tradition. Jeffrey Stout critiques Adams for engaging in metaphysics, more precisely, for appealing to God to bolster the objectivity of ethics. I agree with Stout that such an appeal is

Notes to Pages 6–10

356

wrongheaded. I would want to appropriate Adams’s theory of excellence along the lines of what Stout approvingly refers to Karl Barth as doing, that is, affirming “as an article of faith that God’s excellence is the analogue and any finite instance of excellence is the analogate” and then seeking to describe the world in that light, Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 258–67, here 267. As I read Adams, he is not so much seeking to bolster the objectivity of ethics with theistic hypotheses as he is seeking to show that the moral world is illuminated and enriched when depicted from a standpoint of faith, Finite and Infinite Goods, 5. This is problematic only if interpreted as a claim that the moral world is more intelligible for both those with and those without faith when depicted from a standpoint of faith. But Adams concedes that nontheists will reject most of his framework. 8. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 171–72. Stout intends this specifically as an immanent critique of Hauerwas, not as an indiscriminate dismissal of the ideal of imitatio Christi. Nevertheless, his critique raises issues that must be faced by any contemporary advocate of such an ideal. 9. Ibid., 172, 29. Stout borrows the concept of “Emersonian perfectionism” from Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Stout does not, though, see Emersonian perfectionism as the only legitimate form of moral striving within our society; in fact, he seeks to make common cause with a certain form of Augustinianism, Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 40. 10. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 22, 29, 61, 71, 74. 11. See, e.g., Marie Dennis, Joseph Nangle, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, and Stuart Taylor, St. Francis and the Foolishness of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993). 12. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 173. 13. This is of course not to claim that these acts of interpretation never go astray. If they do, it will be through further acts of interpretation that we determine this to be the case. 14. That I put this in terms of disentanglement from the hyper-Augustinian legacy should signal my hesitation about Taylor’s claim that the modern ideal of authenticity is somehow originally pure and only subsequently degraded, although, to give him credit, Taylor also at times suggests that the ideal has always been imperfectly understood. 15. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 30. 16. Ibid., 38, quoting from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 491. 17. It is important to Stout that Emerson continues to speak unashamedly of his own merit—“he does not take the possibility of merit to be cancelled out by the fact it would not have arisen entirely of its own accord,” Stout, Democracy

Notes to Pages 10–14

357

and Tradition, 39. There is certainly room for Christians to make an analogous claim—witness the long Catholic tradition of reflection on merit, by no means confined to Pelagian and semi-Pelagian thinkers. The Emersonian, though, will be more interested in trying to distinguish precisely who is responsible for what, “taking due pride in one’s accomplishments, praising others for theirs,” 39. For Christians, indebtedness to God precludes any such allocation of merit; our effort itself is not our own private contribution, but is itself part of the gift we receive from God. 18. Ibid., 34, drawing here on Edmund Burke, “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770), in The Works of the Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1 (Boston: John West and O. C. Greenleaf, 1806). 19. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 91. 20. See Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990; orig. French publication 1983). 21. Alasdair MacIntyre offers a different explanation of this shift from plural to singular as “part of a general process whereby the moral vocabulary gradually came to be simplified and homogenized,” in After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; 1984), 233. For MacIntyre, this process is best understood as resulting from a loss of a teleological context for understanding the virtues; it is no longer possible to understand the virtues as sustaining communal practices and thus as contributing to a common social good, and so the virtues begin to lose substance and distinctness. MacIntyre also links this shift with a repeated tendency to turn to Stoicism, with its valorization of virtue for its own sake, in the absence of teleology (168–69). But this was not how singular virtue was in fact understood even by renaissance admirers of Cicero; the renaissance vir virtutis is at the service of the republic, and according to Skinner, humanist affirmations that virtue is pursued for its own sake were nothing more than “priggish asides”; Skinner, Foundations of Political Thought, 100. 22. Nicholas Lash, “Performing the Scriptures,” in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM, 1986), 37–46; Rowan Williams, “Postmodern Theology and the Judgement of the World,” in Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World, ed. Frederic B. Burnham (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 97; Walter Brueggemann, Texts under Negotiation: The Bible and the Postmodern Imagination (London: SCM, 1993), 64–70; Shannon Craigo-Snell, “Command Performance: Rethinking Performance Interpretation in the Context of Divine Discourse,” Modern Theology 16.4 (2000): 475–94; Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2004; Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2004), ch. 3; Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, Ky.:

Notes to Pages 23–26

358

Westminster John Knox, 2005). Hans Urs von Balthasar’s massive Theodramatik provided much of the original stimulus for the contemporary embrace of the theatrical metaphor; Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, 5 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988–1998). This latter-day revival of the tradition of theatrum mundi, world as theater, underscores certain affinities between our own context and that of Baroque humanism, affinities that make this a ripe time to explore the tradition of Jesuit school theater, as I do in chapter 5.

ch a p t er on e 1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1105a18–20. Unless otherwise specified, further references to Aristotle are to this work. I cite from Terence Irwin’s translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985). 2. See, e.g., M. F. Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 62–92, esp. 73–74; Nancy Sherman, “The Habituation of Character,” in Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays, ed. Nancy Sherman (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 231–60, esp. 231–32; Richard Sorabji, “Aristotle on the Role of Intellect in Virtue,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973–74): 107–29; Rosalind Hursthouse, “Moral Habituation,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julia Annas, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 201–19, esp. 210–11. 3. It is telling that contemporary neo-Aristotelians continue to wrestle with the virtue of magnanimity, some arguing, as I do (see below), that it reveals internal inconsistencies in Aristotle’s thought. Peter Simpson, while not specifically discussing magnanimity, highlights more generally the aristocratic aspects of Aristotle’s thought and argues that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is not properly Aristotelian at all, “Contemporary Virtue Ethics and Aristotle,” Review of Metaphysics 45 (1992): 503–24; here 523–24. I would not go so far, although Simpson is right to remind us that these aspects of Aristotle’s thought cannot simply be ignored. 4. Since, as one recent commentator notes, Aristotle insists on habituation but “has almost nothing to say about how or why by acting in a certain way we acquire the corresponding moral disposition,” filling out the account, particularly of the earliest stages, requires some constructive work; Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 104. 5. Ibid., 109. 6. Aristotle, Poetics 48b5. 7. Karl F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 24. 8. Ibid., 24. 9. Sherman offers valuable reflections on how mimesis fosters the develop-

Notes to Pages 27–32

359

ment of “discriminatory activity,” which she takes to be key to the development of rational and reflective capacities intrinsic in the habituation process, “Habituation of Character,” 239–40. Mimesis involves learning to identify kinds of character, action, feelings, circumstances, etc. 10. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 188. 11. As Hursthouse argues, 1179b28 applies not to the young student of virtue but to those confirmed in vice, “Moral Habituation,” 214. 12. In an ideal Aristotelian polis this could in fact be the case, and the laws might be accepted as intended, like parental guidance, to foster the good of the child (though more solicitous than a parent of the whole community and of each and every member, and so not partial to this particular one). Mary Keys defends this possibility in relation to Aquinas’s reflections on the positive pedagogy provided by law (and in relation to our own society) in “Aquinas’s Two Pedagogies: A Reconsideration of the Relation between Law and Moral Virtue,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2001): 519–31. 13. See Hursthouse, “Moral Habituation,” 210, and Sherman, “Habituation of Character,” 236–37. An alternative interpretation, which denies that virtuous action is pleasant for the virtuous and which makes internalized punishment the heart of habituation, is offered by Howard J. Curzer, “Aristotle’s Painful Path to Virtue,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 141–62. 14. Sherman notes that “the special affection children have for their parents makes the family a privileged and effective environment for ethical learning” but classifies this with other kinds of “external pleasures and pains,” not noting how inseparable it is from “the intrinsic pleasure of approximating to virtue through action and emotion,” “Habituation of Character,” 257. 15. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 188. 16. Richard Sorabji emphasizes this, terming it the role of induction in moral education, “Aristotle on the Role of Intellect,” 124–25. 17. See Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” 78. Broadie understands her own position as a disagreement with Burnyeat, but I think it can be seen simply as an earlier stage in the process. 18. See Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” 79, 85. 19. On incontinence in Aristotle, see Terence H. Irwin, “Will, Responsibility, and Ignorance: Aristotelian Accounts of Incontinence,” in Akrasia und incontinentia: Das Problem der Willensschwäche in der Philosophie des Mittelalters, ed. Tobias Hoffmann, Jörn Müller, and Matthias Perkams (Leiden: E. J. Brill, forthcoming). While more squarely focused on incontinence in Aquinas, Tobias Hoffman, “Aquinas on the Moral Progress of the Weak Willed,” in the same volume, is also illuminating. 20. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 127, 134.

Notes to Pages 34–37

360

21. Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 371. Hursthouse takes a similar position; acting for the sake of the noble means nothing different from choosing virtue for its own sake. Despite her interpretation on this particular point, Annas does argue that the whole practice of ancient ethics reflects a conviction of the practical importance of theoretical reflection on ethics. 22. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 379; see also Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12, who follows and expands on Broadie. 23. Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 21. Although framed in terms of reflection on what it means to value things for their own sake, rather than in terms of what it means to act virtuously, Robert Merrihew Adams’s discussion in Finite and Infinite Goods of “teleological” and other senses of “for the sake of” is very helpful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 153–57, 187–92. Adams argues that valuing A for the sake of B in a teleological sense does not allow A to be loved for its own sake, but that it is nevertheless possible for particular objects to be loved for their own sake while at the same time being loved as an instance of some more general goodness if one has a disposition to value particulars that have certain good qualities. The different structure of these higher order attitudes means that they do not infect love of the particular: “my end in wanting to have altruistic desires may be to be a better person; but if I do have genuinely altruistic desires, their end will be the good of other people, not my own improvement,” 189. 24. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 381. 25. I have found Jean Porter’s reflections in “The Common Good in Thomas Aquinas” to be particularly helpful in examining this issue as it arises also in Aristotle. See In Search of the Common Good, ed. Dennis P. McCann and Patrick D. Miller (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 94–120. 26. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 15–16, argues that since happiness can be ascribed only to individuals, the statesman aims at the good of citizens in general; “whether a person achieves it for one man or for a cityful, the difference is in quantity,” 16. This seems, though, to miss the significance Aristotle accords to political friendship (see below). Broadie does recognize friendship as a good perfecting the central good of virtuous activity, but she does not relate this back to Aristotle’s discussion of political friendship and in any case regards friendship as wholly consequential on realization of the good of virtuous activity, 28. 27. Annas, Morality of Happiness, 260, and more generally Annas’s dismantling of the concern that formally agent-centered theories leave no room for genuine other-concern, 223–26, 249–53. 28. This point is underscored in Aristotle’s book 5 treatise on justice. As Kenny puts it, “With only solitary concerns, without the excellence that consists in having an appropriate regard for the good of others, a human being

Notes to Pages 38–41

361

will lack not just one important human end, he will lack all of the excellences” (Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 43). 29. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 93, 94, 95. 30. I should note, though, that Aristotle makes awareness of one’s own complete virtue a necessary but not a sufficient condition for magnanimity; he also suggests that magnanimity requires great deeds, and presumably not all virtuous persons would be in a position to carry out such great deeds (1124b24). 31. I am indebted to John Infranca for this suggestion. 32. David Horner argues that “if it is not objectionable for a person to have a conception of herself to which she aspires, it cannot be objectionable for her to have a (truthful) conception of herself in via, to be aware of her own status as she progresses toward the goal, and on that basis to act,” “What It Takes to Be Great: Aristotle and Aquinas on Magnanimity,” Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998): 427. Horner argues that Aristotelian magnanimity rightly captures the psychological stance necessary to attempting great deeds but acknowledges that it lacks “sufficient balancing factors of moderating humility and positive concern for others” (427). 33. See Annas’s critique, Morality of Happiness, 118. 34. Aristotle does say that in order for the good to be complete and selfsufficient, it must be what suffices not for an isolated individual but for an individual in society, since human beings are by nature social animals (1097b5–15). This has led some commentators to insist that self-sufficiency has nothing to do with self-reliance or independence: “Self-sufficiency has of course nothing to do with isolation or even with self-development. A self-sufficient life is one whose activities are intrinsically worthy, have their ends in themselves, are worth choosing regardless of what may come of them,” Amélie O. Rorty, “The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 389; see also Annas, Morality of Happiness, 39–42. But Aristotle does suggest that aiming to be self-sufficient involves making one’s happiness as dependent as possible on oneself and as independent as possible of external factors (see T. H. Irwin, annotated glossary in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. H. Irwin [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985], 407–8, and Kenny’s discussion in Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 42–55). This is reflected, for instance, in Aristotle’s elevation of the activity of theoretical contemplation, for “the wise person is able, and more able the wiser he is, to study even by himself; and though he presumably does it better with colleagues, even so he is more self-sufficient than any other [virtuous person],” 1177b1. It is in this sense that the magnanimous person seems to aim at being self-sufficient. The tension within Aristotle’s account of self-sufficiency is another manifestation of the tension that also appears between his account of magnanimity and his accounts of character formation and friendship. The former emerges particularly strongly in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics. In-

Notes to Pages 42–48

362

terestingly, Julia Annas points out that this aspect of Aristotle’s thought, which has something in common with Neoplatonic notions of becoming like God, was apparently not known in the Hellenistic period. See Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics Old and New (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 52n4. 35. Other pagan thinkers attend to this even more explicitly; Cicero, for instance, holds up the virtue of piety, a special form of gratitude to parents and civic community, those responsible for one’s upbringing. On the polyvalence of pagan conceptions of piety, see James D. Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 9–12. 36. As Mary Keys writes, “while the striving of the megalopsychos to imitate the divine is in many ways admirable, it causes him to depart from the order of right reason insofar as he fails to acknowledge frankly and with pleasure his need of and indebtedness to those ‘others’ who have contributed to his flourishing,” “Aquinas and the Challenge of Aristotelian Magnanimity,” History of Political Thought 24 (2003): 46. Jacob Howland identifies many of the same tensions internal to Aristotle’s account but argues that Aristotle’s account of the magnanimous man is ironic and intends to point to Socrates alone as truly magnanimous, insofar as Socrates appreciates the imperfection of his virtue and its dependence on others. I do not find the evidence for Howland’s interpretation fully persuasive, but if he is correct, this would support my broader contention that pagan thinkers could and did, pace Augustine, acknowledge the fundamentally dependent character of their virtue, Howland, “Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man,” Review of Politics 64 (2002): 27–56.

ch a p t er t wo 1. Joseph Mausbach, Die Ethik des Hl. Augustins, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1909), 2:259. 2. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 172. 3. St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, V, 12. Translation is by Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972; 1984), 199. Further references, given parenthetically to CD, will give book and chapter numbers followed by the page number from the Bettenson translation. 4. Rist, Augustine, 163. “So wird die Liebe zum summum bonum entscheidend für die Echtheit der Tugend: bei den Stoikern (in ihrer Polemik gegen die Epikureer) die Liebe zur Tugend: bei Augustin (in seiner Polemik gegen die Stoiker) dagegen die Liebe zu Gott,” Gösta Hök, “Augustin und die antike Tugendlehre,” Kerygma und Dogma 2 (1960): 129. 5. Robert Markus, Saeculum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 57. This is part and parcel of a larger ambiguity in Augustine’s treatment of the two cities. On the one hand, Augustine tends to assert that Rome is the earthly

Notes to Pages 49–52

363

city, but on the other hand, he is clear that the earthly city cannot be equated with any particular state, nor the church with the heavenly city, since members of the city of God may serve the state, while members of the earthly city are found even within the church. 6. De Genesi ad Litteram XI, 15.20, “alter communi utilitati consulens propter supernam societatem, alter etiam rem communem in potestatem propriam redigens propter adrogantem dominationem.” 7. There is some tension between this and Augustine’s later affirmation that members of the earthly city refer all use of temporal things to the end of earthly peace (CD XIX, 14). In seeking to identify Augustine’s stance toward Rome as “neutral” (58), and further in arguing for the limited autonomy of politics (71), Markus, understandably, leans heavily on passages of the latter sort in Saeculum. 8. And Augustine has been attacked for his eudaimonism, perhaps most famously by Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, Part I—A Study of the Christian Idea of Love (1930); Part II—The History of the Christian Idea of Love (1936), rev. ed., trans. P. S. Watson (London, 1953). Oliver O’Donovan provides an invaluable discussion of the debate, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), ch. 6; a response contemporary to Nygren’s attack and still helpful is John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938, 1947), 15–21. 9. Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32, 37, 329. 10. See Rist, Augustine, 115; Burnaby, Amor Dei, 47. Augustine understood Aristotle only through a Stoic lens, while at the same time assimilating Stoicism to Aristotelianism. See CD XIX and James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48–51. On Augustine’s relationship to Neoplatonic understandings of virtue, see Hök, “Augustin und die antike Tugendlehre,” 110–12; and note 19 below. 11. Annas, Morality of Happiness, 36; see also Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 32. 12. T. H. Irwin offers a very helpful constructive analysis of Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue, arguing that it is more consistent with Augustine’s overall position to say that pagans do possess true virtues, given that they do pursue virtue for its own sake and for the sake of happiness, even if they lack a complete understanding of our true supernatural end. Irwin thus assimilates Augustine’s position to that of Aquinas. T. H. Irwin, “Splendid Vices? Augustine For and Against Pagan Virtues,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 8 (1999): 105–27. While I agree with Irwin that Augustine can and should grant that pagans can pursue virtue for its own sake (as long as their pursuit of virtue is not contaminated in the way characteristic of Aristotle’s magnanimous person), we fail to understand Augustine’s critique unless we understand his suspicion

Notes to Pages 54–55

364

that pagan eudaimonism’s formal assumption that our final good is something fundamentally up to us predisposes or even dooms pagan virtue to corruptions like the magnanimous person’s falsifying denial of dependency. 13. Translation is from De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), I.8, 15. 14. Rist suggests further that the modern language of use as a translation of uti is misleading—to talk about how something is to be “used” is to talk of how it should be treated, Augustine, 163. In fact, the uti/frui distinction is soon set aside by Augustine in favor of speaking of properly ordered love. As Burnaby notes, “a means which can be loved is not only a means. The keyword is referre ad Deum, ‘relation to God’, and the distinction of uti and frui is merged in the ‘order of love’ ” (Amor Dei, 106). 15. Rist, Augustine, 164–65. Although Robert Merrihew Adams criticizes Augustine for his teleological understanding of how love for finite goods is to be related to love of God, Adams’s own conception of love of God is closely akin to this, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 186–92. For Adams, love of God can be understood as an “integrative organizing principle for our motivational structures” (191). The primary difference is that Adams is reluctant to say that finite goods cannot be loved rightly unless loved in the light of love of God. Rather, he would argue that an implicit love of God can be present when true fi nite goods are loved, and that this right loving of finite goods is more fully developed when accompanied by explicit love of God (198). 16. Burnaby, Amor Dei, 86. 17. Among ancient ethical schools, Augustine’s understanding of virtue is most closely related to that of the Middle and neo-Platonists. As Julia Annas notes, for these thinkers, “becoming like God, or assimilating oneself to God, is not meant as an alternative to the idea that we seek happiness; it is just a specification of what happiness is. Moreover, the idea is also not intended as an alternative to the idea that virtue is sufficient for happiness; for it is explicated, in many of the passages in which it occurs, by the thought that becoming like God is what becoming virtuous is. . . . We seem here to have the idea that virtue turns a human life into something different in kind,” Platonic Ethics Old and New (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 53. Augustine departs from the Platonists, though, in understanding God in terms of love and thus of relationship. Becoming godlike is not thus for Augustine simply a matter of identifying with reason as the divine within us, nor just of fleeing from a world of mutability and disorder to a divine realm of perfect order, but of accepting, returning, and passing on the love that is offered to us. This departure from the Platonic understanding of what it means to become godlike makes it easier for Augustine to resolve what Annas suggests is a fundamental problem with Platonist conceptions of virtue as becoming like God—that of the relationship

Notes to Pages 55–60

365

between godlike virtue and ordinary civic or social virtue (see Annas, Platonic Ethics Old and New, 65–71). 18. O’Donovan, Self-Love in Augustine, 157. 19. Burnaby, Amor Dei, 121, quoting Augustine, Epistulae 155.15, 122, 90, 123. 20. O’Donovan helpfully distinguishes between formal and substantial aspects of Augustine’s eudaimonism in evaluating the charges of Augustine’s anti-eudaimonist critics; the charges of egocentrism are easiest to make given a formal account of Augustine’s eudaimonism, but then they also seem rather trivial. On an account that takes Augustine’s eudaimonism as metaphysically realist, the charge of egocentrism collapses, since it becomes clear that “man’s goal is an objective reality which the subject has not chosen for himself and his orientation to which is a necessity of his creation” (Self-Love in Augustine, 156). 21. O’Donovan, Self-Love in Augustine, 115, 130–36; see Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 39.4. O’Donovan wrestles with the strains this places on Augustine’s account of the good as transcendent (115). 22. Burnaby, Amor Dei, 127. 23. Ibid., 47. 24. O’Donovan, Self-Love in Augustine, 157. 25. Rist, Augustine, 190. As Burnaby says, “Augustinian humility is not a purely moral characteristic which may belong to any man without regard to his religion. It has nothing to do with self-depreciation. It is the humility of the believer as such, the manward aspect of faith in God as the source of all good, the necessary implication of acceptance of the doctrine of grace” (Amor Dei, 73). 26. Rist, Augustine, 190. 27. Burnaby, Amor Dei, 71, quoting Ep. 118.17. 28. Note that there remains a fundamental asymmetry between God’s humility in Christ and our own humility; God’s humility is strength and independence willing to become weak and dependent, while our humility is dependency accepting this truth about itself. 29. De Sermone Domini in Monte, II.2.5, abbreviated in what follows as DSD. Translation is from St. Augustine, The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, trans. John J. Jepson (Westminster, Md.: Numen, 1948). 30. Rist, Augustine, 169. As John Langan points out, “Augustine’s doctrine on the unity of the virtues in charity results in an understanding of the moral life which makes the crucial division not between the sage who possesses virtue perfectly and the unwise who fall short of the ideal of apathy, but between those who possess charity even in a rudimentary degree and those who, whatever their other attainments, lack charity and so lack true virtue altogether.” “Augustine on the Unity and Interconnection of the Virtues,” Harvard Theological Review 72 (1979): 93.

Notes to Pages 61–67

366

31. Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 29. 32. See Michael Foley, “Right Reading: The Mystagogical Unity of Augustine’s Confessions,” unpublished manuscript, ch. 1, 6–9. 33. James K. A. Smith attributes such a Platonic critique to Augustine, then develops an Augustinian response in “Staging the Incarnation: Revisioning Augustine’s Critique of Theatre,” Literature & Theology 15 (2001): 124–27. 34. For example, Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 5–28. 35. Plato, Republic, 598b. Translation from The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 823. 36. For example, Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Charles Griswold, “The Ideas and the Criticism of Poetry in Plato’s Republic, Book 10,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19.2 (1981): 141. This interpretation allows for a more unified reading of books II and III of the Republic with Book X and makes better sense of the fact that Plato saw mimesis as properly central to moral education. It nevertheless remains the case that Plato offers no defense of the importance or goodness even of “good art.” See Christopher Janaway’s Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), ch. 5–6. 37. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 43. 38. Foley, “Right Reading,” 2, 6; Robert McMahon, Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent: An Essay on the Literary Form of the Confessions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 136–41. 39. Augustine, Soliloquies II.16, translation from Saint Augustine, Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul, intr. and trans. Gerard Watson (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990). 40. Quoted in Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 57. 41. On Christian absorption of the civilization of paideia, see Peter Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” in Saints and Virtues, ed. John Stratton Hawley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3–14. 42. H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 223, 322. 43. Smith, “Staging the Incarnation,” 127. 44. E. J. Hundert, “Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self,” Political Theory 20 (1992): 94, 95. 45. Karl F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 80. 46. Ibid., 71.

Notes to Pages 67–71

367

47. I am indebted here to Donovan Johnson, “Story and Design in Book Eight of Augustine’s Confessions,” Biography 14.1 (1991): 39–60. 48. Some scholars suggest that Augustine relies less and less on the example of Christ as his career goes on, emphasizing instead human fallenness and the need for grace. See, e.g., Rist, Augustine, 266. But as I am trying to suggest here, an emphasis on example need not imply a denial of grace. 49. Lewis Ayres, “Exemplum, Imitation and the Confessing Identity in Augustine’s Conversion,” paper presented at the 2004 North American Patristics Society annual meeting, Chicago, May 27, 2004. 50. On the ancient use of exempla, see Ayres, “Exemplum,” 4–5; K-.J. Hölkeskamp, “Exempla und mos maiorum: Überlegungen zum kollektiven Gedächtnis der Nobilität,” in H.-.J.Gherke and A. Möller, eds., Vergangenheit und Lebenswelt: soziale Kommunikation, Traditionsbildung und historisches Bewusstsein (Tübingen, 1996), 301–38. 51. Ayres, “Exemplum,” 9. 52. Wetzel, Limits of Virtue, 166–68. 53. Aaron Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006), 208–11. 54. Augustine, Confessiones VIII.2. Translations are from Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1942; 1992), 130. 55. “Here the struggling Augustine made the crucial breakthrough: he recognized that his submission had to begin with an acknowledgement of his dependence on the divine agency which makes it possible,” Johnson, “Story and Design,” 56. 56. Translation from The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, Works of Saint Augustine, pt. 1, vol. 5 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: New City Press, 1991). 57. De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione 2.7.9; translation from Roland J. Teske, Answer to the Pelagians, pt. 1, vol. 23 of The Works of Saint Augustine (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1997), 86. 58. See Stalnaker’s fascinating study of spiritual exercises in Augustine, which examines in addition the practice of studying the liberal arts as well as contemplation of the Eternal (Overcoming Our Evil, 211–41). 59. Pierre Hadot’s history of spiritual practices has been particularly influential not only in offering this as a lens for reconceiving the practice of philosophy but also for conceiving the relation between ancient pagan and Patristic thought: Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 60. Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil, 214, 219, 228, 230. 61. De Trin. 13.26; discussed in Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil, 232. 62. Rist, Augustine, 175–76. Stalnaker, similarly, notes the centrality of “disciplina” for Augustine’s understanding of Christian discipleship, where disci-

Notes to Pages 73–74

368

plina is understood as comprising both instruction and, increasingly, restraint or chastisement (Overcoming Our Evil, 214–15).

ch a p t er t h r ee 1. Unless otherwise specified, citations from Aquinas are from the Summa Theologiae and are given parenthetically, indicating part, question, and article. Translations are taken from Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981). 2. I-II:109.8; see Brian Shanley, “Aquinas on Pagan Virtue,” The Thomist 63 (1999): 553–77; in this connection see 558, 570. The sins are mortal in kind as being incompatible with the love of God, but they need not be acts deliberately opposed to charity. 3. In an article critical of Brian Shanley and of Bonnie Kent’s Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), Thomas Osborne argues in defense of “The Augustinianism of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory,” The Thomist 67 (2003): 279–305. Osborne proceeds largely from a catalogue of the various imperfections of pagan virtue to the conclusion that while Aquinas affirms that “even sinners and infidels can perform many good actions, he agrees with Augustine that it is impossible for someone to live a virtuous life if his natural powers are unassisted by grace,” 283. By suggesting that the options are exhausted by “good actions” on the one hand and “a virtuous life” on the other, Osborne is able to downplay Thomas’s own very clear affirmations that pagans can acquire virtues, which are perfective of the agent, if to an incomplete extent. He therefore also confuses Aquinas’s claim that the infused virtue of prudence cannot be without charity with the distinct claim that acquired prudence cannot be without charity, 292. While it is correct to say that perfect acquired prudence cannot be without charity, Osborne moves from this to the conclusion that “without charity there is no prudence” (292,emphasis added). Osborne seeks through his discussion to change the question, which should not, on his account, be whether pagans can have true virtues but rather “whether without grace someone can be good by the fact that he has acquired virtues that are perfect” (301). The good actions of pagans, he insists, do not make pagans good. And this is obviously true insofar as without grace all merit damnation. Nevertheless, drawing our attention to this bottom line does not do justice to Aquinas’s nuanced and sensitive treatment of pagan virtues as true if imperfect, directed toward true goods if not to our final good. 4. “We may speak of virtue being where there is no charity, in so far as it is directed to some particular good. But if this particular good is not a true, but an apparent good, it is not a true virtue that is ordered to such a good, but a counterfeit virtue” (II-II:23.7).

Notes to Pages 74–77

369

5. So Brian Shanley argues, drawing on I-II:89.6, that for Aquinas the fundamental option is between self and some good other than self; “either an agent makes himself the ultimate end or he recognizes the exigencies of achieving a due end outside himself” (“Aquinas on Pagan Virtue,” 573). 6. Insofar as a virtuous pagan orders his actions to the common good, the bonum civile, he “is faciens quod in se est and so implicitly opening himself up to the Good that transcends his nature” (ibid., 572). 7. I draw here on Jean Porter’s discussion in “The Common Good in Thomas Aquinas,” in In Search of the Common Good, ed. Dennis P. McCann and Patrick D. Miller, 94–120 (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 101–2, and on Odon Lottin, “Le premières défi nitions et classifications des vertus au moyen âge,” in his Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. 3.2 (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1949), 153–94. 8. Porter’s argument is based here on the fact that on Aquinas’s account the virtues of temperance and fortitude are directed immediately toward the good of the individual (I-II:60.2; 64.2; II-II:58.9–10); that prudence simply as such is distinguished from political prudence, with the latter directed toward the common good (II-II:47.10–11); and on his further distinction between regnative prudence, proper to rulers, and political prudence, proper also to those without political authority (II-II:50.1–2); see Porter, “Common Good,” 112. 9. This position is associated with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century versions of neo-Thomism, sometimes known as two-tiered Thomism. For an extended argument against two distinct ends for humanity, one natural and the other supernatural, see Denis J. M. Bradley, The Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1977). Aquinas argues (I-II:1.4) that there can be only one ultimate end of human life. 10. This reading stands within a tradition of interpretation initiated by Henri de Lubac, in The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), and by Karl Rahner, for instance in “On the Relationship between Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroad, 1961, 1965), 1:297–318. De Lubac’s insistence that there is a purely natural desire for the beatific vision of God is problematic, though, in that it tends to undermine any distinction between natural and supernatural, making it difficult to understand what Christ assumes in the Incarnation. Steven Long articulates these concerns, while nevertheless maintaining a holistic interpretation of Aquinas, in “Obediential Potency, Human Knowledge, and the Natural Desire for God,” International Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1997): 45–63, here 53–54. 11. My discussion of Aquinas’s account of magnanimity is particularly indebted to Mary M. Keys, “Aquinas and the Challenge of Aristotelian Magnanimity,” History of Political Thought 24 (2003): 37–65.

Notes to Pages 78–89

370

12. Ibid., 52. 13. Jeffrey Stout appeals to the virtue of piety as a common ground that might allow Christians currently alienated from a public life they perceive as hostile to faith to cooperate with pious nonbelievers for the sake of the common good. As he recognizes, the status of pagan virtue is key to his enterprise; only if Christians accept that secular piety is true, if imperfect, piety can they perceive believers and nonbelievers as embarked on a common social enterprise, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 1, and 103. 14. This serves as a salutary reminder that (as we have already seen in discussing Aristotle) habituation is not a matter of mindless repetition; virtues “are consciously and voluntarily created by human reason and will,” Andrew J. Dell’Olio, Foundations of Moral Selfhood: Aquinas on Divine Goodness and the Connection of the Virtues (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 95. Even in order to imitate a virtuous exemplar, we must have some inchoate grasp of the good for which that person acts in order even to want to imitate her. 15. Ibid., 117; Aquinas, II-II:23.1. 16. Paul Wadell, Friends of God: Virtues and Gifts in Aquinas (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 106. 17. Dell’Olio, Foundations of Moral Selfhood, 101. 18. Ibid., 134. 19. Respectively, Dell’Olio, Foundations of Moral Selfhood, 138; Jean Porter, “The Subversion of Virtue: Acquired and Infused Virtues in the Summa Theologiae,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1992): 19–41, here 20; Joseph Mausbach, Grundlage und Ausbildung des Charakters nach dem hl. Thomas von Aquin (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1920), 134, my translation; Romanus Cessario, The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 122. 20. What health and social tact are to the acquired virtues, the acquired virtues are to the infused virtues, argues Mausbach—prerequisites for optimal development (Mausbach, Grundlage und Ausbildung des Charakters, 134). Dell’Olio notes, moreover, that while only with the infused virtues is it possible to refrain from mortal sin, the presence of the acquired virtues makes it less likely that venial sins will become a habit and thus make it less likely that the infused virtues will be lost through an act of mortal sin (Foundations of Moral Selfhood, 139). 21. Porter, “Subversion of Virtue,” 30. 22. Mausbach, Grundlage und Ausbildung des Charakters, 133, my translation. 23. Porter, “Subversion of Virtue,” 32, 23. John Bowlin has argued that even the acquired moral virtues are in Aquinas’s account not unduly fragile: “the life of virtue is, for Aquinas, largely comic even without the assistance of grace” (Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 197). Bowlin focuses, though, on how the acquired virtues, once

Notes to Pages 90–92

371

acquired, function to allow the virtuous to cope with contingencies that threaten their pursuit of the good. Even when he takes up the importance to the virtuous of a just moral community as an arena for action, his concern is with those who are already virtuous and who “lay claim to their moral inheritance, accept what is useful in it, transform or reject what is not, and as a result make fortune’s gifts their own” (203). Bowlin rightly emphasizes here the active, reflective aspects of the process of developing the virtues, but he also finds he must concede that the capacity for reflective appropriation itself results from the good fortune of having been raised in a decent moral community. On Bowlin’s account, Aquinas’s acquired virtues are Aristotelian, suitable to our human form of life, while the infused virtues are Stoic in character, suitable to the life of the blessed. Bowlin therefore has a stake in separating the two kinds of virtue in minimizing the effects of fortune on the moral virtues and hence in downplaying the way in which the infused moral virtues transform the acquired virtues. 24. Dell’Olio, Foundations of Moral Selfhood, 101. 25. Porter, “Subversion of Virtue,” 31; Mausbach, Grundlage und Ausbildung des Charakters, 126. 26. In addition to safeguarding human agency, the fact that the infused virtues are created entities, rather than simply the Holy Spirit acting within, also safeguards the ontological distinction between the human soul and the Holy Spirit and the uniqueness of the hypostatic union. 27. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are a relatively neglected topos in Aquinas’s theology, although Ulrich Horst’s Die Gaben des Heiligen Geistes nach Thomas von Aquin (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001) has remedied the gap. 28. Wadell, Friends of God, 124, 121. 29. And Wadell does note this, writing that the gifts “are not passing or superfluous activities, unexpected signs of the presence of God, but habitual ways of behavior which portray a quality intrinsic to the person” (ibid., 129). 30. Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 43–44. I offer here no comprehensive account of grace as an extrinsic principle of human action. For my purposes, it is sufficient to note that while Aquinas insists on the necessity of grace for perfecting human action and differentiates a variety of ways in which this is accomplished (not all grace is habitual, nor is it all cooperative), he always remains concerned to show that virtue perfects human agency, rather than rendering it nugatory. 31. See Kent, Virtues of the Will, 93. Kent’s account of ethics in the late thirteenth century has called into question Gilson’s dramatic depiction (more recently taken up by Alasdair MacIntyre) of opposing schools of Augustinians on the one hand and Averroists or radical Aristotelians on the other, with Aquinas mediating between them but getting caught in the shuffle, Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955),

Notes to Pages 92–94

372

363–410; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 164–208. Kent argues that the disputes were among parties virtually all of whom maintained their allegiance to Aristotle. Aquinas’s particular synthesis was called into question, but not the possibility of synthesis as such. 32. Several of the condemnations of 1277, issued by Tempier, the bishop of Paris, came close to censuring Aquinas on this score. The proposition “that the will necessarily embraces what is firmly believed by reason and that it cannot abstain from what reason ordains” was condemned, as was the proposition “that after the conclusion about what should be done the will does not remain free.” Anthony Levi, Pagan Virtue and the Humanism of the Northern Renaissance, Annual Lecture of the Society for Renaissance Studies (London: Broadwater, 1974), 4. 33. Kent offers a helpful discussion of this issue. On the perceived problems posed to freedom and moral responsibility, see Virtues of the Will, 224–26. On Henry of Ghent’s confinement of habits to the will as deliberative rather than allowing them within the will as free, see 230–31. 34. Kent, Virtues of the Will, 204. Scotus did not himself defend the view that struggle is intrinsically good, but he was focused on what is subject to choice as an arena controlled by the moral agent, which did reinforce the sense that the greater the moral obstacles, the more an action seems to be one’s own achievement, reflecting credit on him as agent (251–52). 35. Mandonnet’s # 208; discussed in Kent, Virtues of the Will, 72. 36. On the shift to a contractual model, see Charles Trinkaus, foreword to The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus with Heiko Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), xii. For a helpful survey and assessment of changes in scholarly understandings of late medieval scholasticism, see William J. Courtenay’s article in the same volume, “Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion,” 26–59. 37. Heiko Oberman, “The Shape of Late Medieval Thought: The Birthpangs of the Modern Era,” in Pursuit of Holiness, 15. Or, as Kathryn Tanner puts it, human beings are on this view seen as capable of acting in a sphere of pure nature, unsupported by God in their exercise of agency, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 134. 38. Scotus, for instance, thought there was no need to posit such virtues; see Scotus, Ordinatio III, distinction 36, in Allan Wolter, ed., Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 414–16. 39. This is true despite the fact that older perceptions of the capricious God of late medieval scholasticism must be revised. Notorious examples like Ockham’s claim that God could have commanded human persons to hate him were constructed to emphasize the contingent status of the created order, not its

Notes to Pages 94–102

373

arbitrariness. “It is the belief of both Ockam and Biel that the ethical system reflects the wisdom and intellect of God as well as his will (these being one and the same), and the voluntary nature of the present moral order (voluntary only for God, not for man) does not prevent God from having his own reasons for choosing the present order, even if man cannot know them” (Courtenay, “Nominalism,” 47). By distinguishing sharply between the inherent moral value of human actions and their value within the pactum, via moderna theologians sought to show both the contingency of the created order and the reliable graciousness of God. 40. Levi, “Pagan Virtue,” 5. 41. Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005). A similarly nuanced mediation is also offered by Steven Long in “Obediential Potency.” Long argues that it is both more faithful to Aquinas and more adequate theologically to speak of an “obediential potency” to the active agency of God within created human nature than to speak as de Lubac does of a natural desire for God. I find Long’s argument persuasive as an analysis of what Karl Rahner would term the “remainder concept” of pure nature, of human nature, in Long’s words, “in precision from grace” (“Obediential Potency,” 60). Unlike Porter, though, he does not take up here in any detail the matter of human nature as we encounter it in actual history, of the scope of grace, the virtues, etc., so her discussion is more relevant to the current project. 42. Porter, Nature as Reason, 384; 381n65; 389; 388; 392; 397–98; 398. 43. Long’s point that the intelligibility of the Incarnation requires a conception of human nature as possessing relative independence is well taken (“Obediential Potency,” 54); here I confine my attention to human nature as already assumed by Christ, that is, as fallen-and-already-in-process-of redemption. 44. Porter appeals to Jacques Dupuis’ work on religious pluralism, which I, too, find helpful. According to Dupuis, there are diverse forms of divine selfdisclosure through Word and Spirit, even as the Christ-event is taken as having a foundational role to play “as the guarantee of God’s manifold way of selfmanifestation, self-revelation, and self-gift to humankind” through manifold paths that converge on the absolute mystery of God: Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997), 209. Porter concedes that Dupuis is “more sympathetic to Rahnerian analysis of grace” than she herself is (Nature as Reason, 397).

ch a p t er f ou r 1. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860). 2. Kristeller’s position is summed up by H. H. Gray, “Renaissance Human-

Notes to Pages 102–4

374

ism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” in Renaissance Essays, ed. P. O. Kristeller and P. P. Wiener (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 199–216. See also Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 113–38; Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought, Martin Classical Lectures 15 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for Oberlin College, 1955); and Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). Kristeller does, though, concede that some common moral questions animated humanist thought: “they wrote extensively on such themes as fate and free will, the highest good, the various virtues and vices, the active and contemplative life, will and intellect, the immortality of the soul and the dignity of man” (“Humanism,” 135). 3. Charles Nauert, “Renaissance Humanism: An Emergent Consensus and Its Critics,” Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 32 (1979–80): 17. See also Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), I, xiii–xxv. 4. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, II.xviii.42–43, trans. J. E. King, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927), 195. On the centrality of Cicero to humanistic education and on humanist optimism concerning the transformative power of education, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 121–24, 119, 410. 5. Petrarch, cited in Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 89. Skinner’s analysis of virtue in the Renaissance is found on 69–112 and 213–43. 6. Skinner, Foundations, 91. 7. Jill Kraye argues that the common assumption remained that “classical morality, although vastly inferior to Christian, was not in fundamental confl ict with it” but rather prepared the groundwork for or led up to Christian truths: “Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 321. She points out, though, that there was a growing chorus of voices insisting that pagan moral philosophy could offer Christianity nothing but error, and even those who held out for harmony appreciated more fully than their medieval predecessors the challenge involved in reconciling pagan and Christian ethics (322). 8. Skinner, Foundations, 92, 101. 9. Skinner assimilates even Erasmus to this pattern, but even in the passages Skinner cites, Erasmus speaks of obeying honor rather than of pursuing honor, and he does not invoke fame or glory, Foundations, 234. As I shall argue, Erasmus’s apparent willingness at times to instrumentalize Christian virtue must be understood as a temporary pedagogical strategy.

Notes to Pages 104–6

375

10. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 11. Kraye, “Moral Philosophy,” 325. 12. Anthony Levi, Pagan Virtue and the Humanism of the Northern Renaissance, Annual Lecture of the Society for Renaissance Studies (London: Broadwater, 1974), 8. 13. Scotus, Ordinatio III, suppl., dist. 46, D. 26, translation from Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, trans. Allan B. Wolter (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986, 1997), 153. 14. Wolter, introduction to Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 39–41. 15. Ordinatio III, suppl., dist. 27, A. 3, translation from Wolter, Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, 282. 16. In fact, though, Scotus fails to show a contradiction within Aristotle’s eudaimonism; while the citizen’s life is tragically cut short without any expectation of an afterlife, the citizen can nevertheless be understood to be achieving the good of eudaimonia, living and acting well, in the act through which his life comes to an end. 17. See Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 197. 18. Servais Pinckaers, outlining ways in which Catholic moral theology changed directions in the wake of St. Thomas, notes that “the intentional bond uniting our successive acts from within so as to form them into one integral whole disappeared. . . . From this time onward, each action was considered as an isolated entity, an independent case of conscience. The concept of finality shrank to the measure of the immediate intention behind the individual action”: The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 230–31. This restriction of the scope of finality, the end for which one acts, could have the result of rendering problematic the process of acquiring virtue; as long as finality unites successive acts into an integral whole, the mismatch between inner and outer could be more easily accepted, since, as we saw in Aquinas’s deflationary treatment of hypocrisy, what counts is the fact that our broader aspiration toward virtue is sincere, even if our character falls short and with it our individual motivations. 19. Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 10. 20. For a chastening review of Levi’s Renaissance and Reformation, see Marcia Colish, “Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis” (book review), Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 811–14. As Colish notes, Levi has made notable contributions to the study of Erasmus and the French Renaissance but in Renaissance and Reformation seeks falsely to assimilate these movements

Notes to Pages 107–10

376

to one another and reduce them to a revolt against voluntarist anthropology and ethics. 21. John O’Malley, introduction to Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 66, Spiritualia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), xii–xiii. Erasmus’s substantial indebtedness to the Devotio Moderna is now generally accepted; R. L. DeMolen’s effort in The Spirituality of Erasmus (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1987) to paint Erasmus as an outgrowth of the modern devotion probably overstates the case, but R. J. Schoeck delineates Erasmus’s dependence on the Devotio Moderna in a more nuanced fashion: Erasmus of Europe: The Prince of Humanists (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 369. James Tracy identifies the Brethren with the barbarians whom Erasmus castigates in Antibarbarorum Liber but argues that Erasmus later came to appreciate aspects of the piety of the Devotio Moderna even as he continued to oppose the corporate solidarity characteristic of his native land with a vision of a free society of cultivated individuals. See Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 25, 46, 50, 106. 22. Letter to Paul Volz, Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–1958; hereafter OE), III, 858, lines 176–77. Translation from Collected Works of Erasmus (hereafter CWE), vol. 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 77–78. In fact, though, we now recognize in the spiritual malaise of the period a yearning on the part of the populace for greater involvement in the spiritual economy. We see this vividly in the fourteenth century in the Devotio Moderna; Gerard Groote (d. 1384), founder of the Brethren of the Common Life, argued that “to love God and worship him is religion, not the taking of special vows”: De Simonia, quoted in Albert Hyma, The Christian Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Hamden, Conn.: Anchor Books, 1965), 25. How could the elite spirituality of the monastery be made available to the masses without becoming a mere parody of the original? And, on the other hand, how could monasteries filled with many who lacked a vocation to the vowed religious life avoid degeneration into merely exterior observance? 23. OE III 858, 468–70, 339–41, 347–50, 342–46; CWE 6:82, 86. 24. Enchiridion Militis Christiani, Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia, ed. J. Leclerc (Leiden, 1703–06; rptd. 1961–62) (hereafter LB) V 30F; CWE 66:71; cf. OE III 858, 352–53; CWE 6:83. 25. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 33; on Erasmus’s sources more generally, see John O’Malley, introduction to CWE 66:xiv. 26. LB V 8D, LB V 27C–28D; CWE 66:35, 65–67. Invisible things are the things of the spirit, while visible things are worldly, distracting us from Christ and tempting us to vice. 27. O’Malley, introduction to CWE, xxix. On Erasmus’s praise for Patristic authors, xii.

Notes to Pages 110–12

377

28. See Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 29. 29. John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), xi, 16. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. O’Malley insists that “Erasmus did not propose a ‘disembodied’ or an entirely ‘spiritualized’ religion, as sometimes used to be said” (O’Malley, CWE, xvii). Still, Erasmus’s drive against the “external” threatens at times to undermine the sacramentality of the Catholic tradition. The resurrected Christ, says Erasmus, rebuked the apostles for their unwillingness to let him go; “It was the flesh of Christ that stood in the way, and that is what prompted him to say: ‘If I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come. It is expedient for you that I go.’ If the physical presence of Christ is of no profit for salvation, shall we dare to place our hopes for the attainment of perfect piety in any material thing?” (LB V 32B; CWE 66:73). Erasmus did not fail to appreciate how liturgical practices work to form Christians into the Body of Christ, but he did insist that they cannot perform this work fully until those who partake understand themselves as having thereby been made living members of the Body of Christ. At times the postmodern revival of liturgical theology, seeking to move away from an excessive focus within modern theology on individual belief, falls into nostalgia for a time of greater social embeddedness. Erasmus’s critique of ceremonialism is a salutary reminder that social formation can always go awry and that we cannot dispense with some notion of personal (i.e., individual) involvement in processes of social formation. 32. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Annemarie Holborn and Hajo Holborn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1933), 139–49; here 139. Translated in Christian Humanism and the Reformation, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Fordham University Press, 1975), 93. 33. Paraclesis, in Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Holborn, 139–40; Christian Humanism, ed. Olin, 94. 34. Wayne A. Rebhorn, “The Metamorphoses of Moria: Structure and Meaning in The Praise of Folly,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 89 (1974): 464, 472. 35. Lyons, Exemplum, 34. 36. In the Paraclesis Erasmus famously states that the philosophy of Christ is “the restoration (instauratio) of human nature originally well formed” (Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Holborn, 145; Christian Humanism, ed. Olin, 100. 37. This does not, though, mean that Erasmus was relying in particular on Augustine; Erasmus had no particular predilection for Augustine and tended to champion Jerome as leading church father. See Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 71. On the other hand, there were humanists who favored Augustine, and a revived Augustinianism cannot be seen as purely a Reformation phenomenon.

Notes to Pages 112–15

378

38. Tracy discusses Erasmus’s use of the metaphors of “springs” and “wells”: Erasmus of the Low Countries, 104–11. 39. O’Malley, introduction to CWE, xxii. 40. On the Enchiridion’s reliance on Pico’s letter to his nephew, see Levi, introduction to Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, by Erasmus of Rotterdam (London: Penguin, 1971, 1993), xxx; on its reliance on Origen’s Platonism, see Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 33. For a discussion of Stoic elements within the Enchiridion, see Tracy, 34. 41. See, e.g., Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 295, and James Tracy, who sees in Erasmus a tension representative of “larger tensions in European Christian thought” at the time, “Two Erasmuses, Two Luthers: Erasmus’ Strategy in Defense of De Libero Arbitrio,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 78 (1987): 38. 42. A Diatribe or Sermon Concerning Free Will in Erasmus-Luther: Discourse on Free Will, trans. and ed. E. F. Winter (New York: Continuum, 1961, 1994), 87, LB IX 1244F. 43. A similar reading is given by Charles Trinkaus, “Erasmus, Augustine, and the Nominalists,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 67 (1976): 20–23. Trinkaus argues, drawing on Hyperaspistes Diatribae, the “Hotly-Defended Diatribes” written in response to Luther’s Bondage of the Will, that Erasmus accepts a seed of virtue remaining in human nature even after the Fall that itself must be acknowledged as general grace. Through this seed of virtue we are capable of responding to the driving grace of God that attracts us to the good. See LB X 1534E–F. 44. A. H. T. Levi, introduction to Praise of Folly, xxx. 45. Levi, Pagan Virtue, 3, 14. 46. Rebhorn, “Metamorphoses of Moria,” 467. 47. Ibid., 467, 471. When Christ “forbade his disciples to worry about how they should answer the charges of the governors and told them not to seek to know times and seasons, it was surely because he wanted them not to rely on their own intelligence but be wholly dependent on him. Erasmus, Moriae encomium, LB IV 497A, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 27, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 148. 48. Already in the Enchiridion, Erasmus notes the dangers of pride and insists that “mercy will come to the aid of him who has lowered himself, as to a little child. But whoever raises himself up to call attention to himself cuts himself off from the assistance of grace” (LB V 62C; CWE 66:122). True virtue refers all glory to God rather than accepting praise as its own due (LB V 62C, cf. LB V 44C, LB V 48D; CWE 66:122, see also 93, 100). “When after the defeat of the instigator or at the completion of some pious action you feel that your mind is immersed in a kind of secret interior pleasure, then be on your guard, again

Notes to Pages 115–18

379

and again, not to attribute anything to your own merits, but ascribe it all to the free gift of God” (LB V 52D; CWE 66:107). 49. See O’Malley, introduction to CWE, xxii–xxiii. O’Malley’s verdict is balanced: “there was, no doubt, a strong moralizing strain in Erasmus, and Stoic influences and vocabulary were everywhere present in his day. None the less, he was aware of the pitfalls of Pelagianism and did his best to avoid them. Taken in the large, his spirituality cannot be labeled Pelagian. The Christian was saved in and through the grace that Christ brought to earth and in no other way. It is in that grace that all our confidence must be placed,” xxiii. Christ’s teaching and example are more and other than any other teaching or example, as we see in the Paraclesis: Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Holborn, 140–41; Christian Humanism, ed. Olin, 95. 50. Paraclesis, in Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Holborn, 149; Christian Humanism, ed. Olin, 106. 51. L. W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 225. 52. Paraclesis, in Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Holborn, 141; Christian Humanism, ed. Olin, 96. 53. Along with this theme, Erasmus shares with the Devotio Moderna movement the emphasis on inner piety and on conformity with Christ’s charity and humility. See Levi, introduction to Praise of Folly, xviii, xxvi–xxvii. 54. LB I 990D, “The Ciceronian,” trans. Betty I. Knott, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 379. 55. G. W. Pigman, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1–32; here 22. 56. Ibid., 16, 23. 57. Betty Knott suggests that we might term what Erasmus is proposing some sort of “Christian Ciceronianism”: introductory note to “The Ciceronian,” CWE 28:328. 58. Pigman discusses this resentment particularly as it emerges in examples from Calcagini. He also notes, though, that emulation requires open acknowledgment of the model, since it is only possible to determine that a particular stylistic effort has surpassed a model if it can be compared with that model. Thus, emulation contrasts with some other ideals of imitation, in which concealment of the relationship between text and model, and thus of the relationship of dependency, are advocated (“Versions of Imitation,” 18, 26, 10). 59. Erasmus’s aemulatio, then, is, in this respect at least, like the Emersonian perfectionism of Jeffrey Stout discussed in the introduction—it acknowledges dependency and expresses gratitude yet also seeks to transcend any fixed definition of perfection: Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 172, 29. 60. Those who are Christians in name only Bulephorus charges with pa-

Notes to Pages 119–25

380

ganism (LB I 998C; CWE 28:394). This is the only context in which the terms pagan and paganism have negative connotations for Erasmus—when applied to Christians who fail to express the deeper grasp of God and their own final end given to them in Christ. 61. Karl F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 71, 230. 62. “The Christian Pedagogy and Ethics of Erasmus,” in Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present, by Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 128, 121, 122. 63. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 3, 7–16, 38–39, 87–103. 64. LB V 54D; CWE 66:95. 65. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 3. 66. O’Malley terms Erasmus’s mode of piety “societal or communitarian,” noting that “respectful though he may have been in principle for the solitude of the monastic cell, he located his ideal elsewhere—in the company of other human beings and especially in the community of the church” (O’Malley, introduction to CWE, xx). 67. They “should embrace the intense purity of the centre and pass on as much as they can to those next to them” (OE line 245–50; CWE 6:80). 68. A remarkable example of Erasmus’s indulgence comes when he admonishes young men, “if Christ is of little account to you, although you cost him dearly, refrain from base conduct at least for your own sake. . . . This is not the final goal of happiness, but from there one is one step closer to happiness” (LB V 51C; CWE 66:105). Tracy remarks that “such tepid injunctions . . . seem out of place in the manual of piety the Enchiridion in its finished form was meant to be” (Erasmus of the Low Countries, 37). This is true, and yet the remark is characteristic of Erasmus’s commitment always to proclaim the ideal without compromise, to be critical particularly of those who ought to be teachers of that ideal and yet to be indulgent of the “infants.” 69. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 17–21. Delumeau suggests that “most probably it was the Imitation of Christ that was first responsible for introducing the philosophy of contempt for the world to a large public” (23). He also tries to assimilate Erasmus to this general outlook, emphasizing Erasmus’s early and ambiguous work De Contemptu Mundi (22–23). But as Tracy argues, this is one of the points at which Erasmus quite decisively parted ways with the Devotio Moderna (Erasmus of the Low Countries, 20). The world, and human nature, continues to manifest the goodness of created being. In particular, if some human passions are sinful, other, “humane,” emotions remain inherently good (36). 70. The classic text on the salvation of unbelievers is Louis Capéran’s Le problème du salut des infidèles (Toulouse: Grand Séminaire, 1934), who takes up

Notes to Pages 125–30

381

Erasmus’s position, 247–51. See also Roland Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 21. 71. Colloquies, LB I 683. 72. Trinkaus, “Erasmus, Augustine, and the Nominalists,” 26. 73. Levi, Pagan Virtue, and Levi, Renaissance and Reformation, 300. 74. There are interesting affinities between this view and that articulated by Robert Merrihew Adams in Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Adams understands goodness in terms of resemblance to God and argues that it is more meaningful to say that we love God if we love the things that resemble God in the absence of faith than if we believe in God but do not love what is truly good: “if it is love for God, the real God, and not for our idea of God, that is in question, the theistic conceptualization may be less important than how faithfully the finite things we are disposed to love image God” (191). Adams goes on to affirm that “doubtless alliance with God can be more fully developed if it is theologically explicit, but theological explicitness does not guarantee the authenticity of such alliance,” (198). 75. Paraclesis, in Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Holborn, 139–49 (author translation).

ch a p t er f i v e 1. A study of Jesuit theater cannot stand in for a study of Jesuit theology. The Erasmian tradition I wish to trace is better represented, though, by these more popular expressions of Jesuit thought than by formal Jesuit theology. In particular, as the “de auxiliis” controversy between Jesuits and Dominicans got under way, the drive for a precise articulation of the respective contributions of divine grace and human action led on both sides to highly problematic accounts and, in the case of the Jesuits, to a conception of human freedom that could hardly avoid falling into semi-Pelagianism. 2. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 171. 3. John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 14. 4. Ibid., 28. 5. In my account of the relationship between Erasmus and the Jesuits, I rely in particular on John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 253–64; A. H. T. Levi, “Erasmus, the Early Jesuits and the Classics” in Classical Influences on European Culture, AD 1500–1700, proceedings of an international conference held at King’s College, Cambridge, April 1974, ed. Robert R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and A. H. T. Levi, introduction to Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, by Erasmus of Rotterdam (London: Penguin, 1971, 1993), xi–lii. See also Marcel Bataillon’s massive study of Erasmianism as a profound cultural movement,

Notes to Pages 131–32

382

Érasme et l’Espagne (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1937; 1991), I, 848, and Jean-Claude Margolin, Erasme, précepteur de l’Europe (Paris: Julliard, 1995). 6. On the controversies surrounding Erasmus and the reformers, see R. J. Schoeck, Érasmus of Europe: The Prince of Humanists, 1501–1536 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), ch. 34, 38, 39; Roland Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), ch. 7–9; and J. Huizinga, Erasmus of Rotterdam (London: Phaidon, 1952), ch. 16–19. 7. Quoted in O’Malley, First Jesuits, 262. 8. Erasmus, Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, in Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten van Dorp, 1515, trans. Betty Radice, ed. A. H. T. Levi (London: Penguin, 1971), 138. 9. Nancy Sherman points to Cicero and Seneca (key authorities for humanist educators) as sources for the view, which she wishes to retrieve, that formal manners and decorum, facial expression, and personal bearing more generally are morally important as ways in which we acknowledge others as worthy of respect and “nurse a change from the outside in,” “Of Manners and Morals,” British Journal of Educational Studies 53.3 (2005): 277. See also Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 3, and “The Look and Feel of Virtue,” in Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity, ed. C. Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10. “Rules for Thinking with the Church,” #11, in The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Loyola, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 210. 11. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300– 1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 363–81. 12. Quoted in Louis J. Oldani, foreword to William H. McCabe, S.J., An Introduction to the Jesuit Theater, ed. Louis J. Oldani, S.J. (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1983), vi. 13. My discussion of Jesuit theater relies primarily on McCabe’s Jesuit Theater, 1–66. See also Wilfried Barner, Barockrhetorik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1970), 321–66; “Jesuit Drama,” in The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and “University and School Drama (16th–18th Centuries),” in The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, ed. Martin Banham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 14. D. G. Dyer, introduction to Cenodoxus, by Jacob Bidermann, Edinburgh Bilingual Library 9, ed. and trans. D. G. Dyer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 3. 15. On school theater within the broader humanist movement, see James A. Parente Jr., Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian Theater in Germany and in the Netherlands, 1500–1680 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), and Barner, Barockrhetorik, 302–20.

Notes to Pages 132–34

383

16. Latin school theater was overwhelmingly a humanist practice, so it was strong where Protestant humanism flourished, though always confronting, in Barner’s words, a “stete Auseinandersetzung mit dem Bestrebungen der Reformpädagogik” (Barockrhetorick, 321). Melanchthon, for instance, revealed his confidence in the possibility of character formation in his defense of the educational use of Greco-Roman drama. He argued that ethical lessons could be derived from a play only if “viewers were confronted with a choice between virtuous and evil behaviour”: Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider (Halle: Saale, 1834–1860), XIX, col. 695, quoted in Parente, Religious Drama, 20. Luther himself defended classical dramatic performances, but on a more limited set of grounds—as training in language and as a vivid reminder of one’s proper social station and position. That is, Luther held that theater could encourage social conformity—but not true transformation of character. See Barner, Barockrhetoric, 304. Barner denies any tension between Luther’s view and that of humanists, but Parente rightly argues that Luther’s embrace of theater ensued in a “practical but paradoxical compromise . . . between education and his theology” (93; see also 26, 90–92). 17. Early on, some Puritan critics of theater were willing to exempt school theater from their attacks, but this grew increasingly problematic as the antitheatrical movement mounted. See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 82–83. 18. See Jan-Lüder Hagens, “Spielen und Zuschauen in Jakob Bidermanns Philemon Martyr (Teil II): ‘Theatrum Mundi’ als anti-deterministische und anti-humanistische Waffe des Jesuitentheaters,” Daphnis 29 (2000): 720, and Dyer, introduction to Cenodoxus, 20. Marc Fumaroli puts the point the other way around: “Jesuit college drama and ballet at their best are, within their erudite allegories, another and an outer form of spiritual exercises, rehearsing the anagogical and mystical drama of the divine Word at work in the labyrinthine world of human souls and actions, in order to return multiplicity to unity, disorder to order, anguish to joy”: “The Fertility and the Shortcomings of Renaissance Rhetoric: The Jesuit Case,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 19. McCabe, Jesuit Theater, 47. 20. See William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 132. 21. Richard Alewyn, Das große Welttheater: Die Epoche der höfischen Feste (Munich: Beck, 1989), 61–62. 22. Ibid., 88. 23. Heinz Otto Burger, “Dasein heißt eine Rolle spielen”: Studien zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Munich: Carl Kanser Verlag, 1963), 76.

Notes to Pages 135–38

384

24. Alewyn, Das Große Welttheater, 79, my translation. 25. Ibid., 78–79, my translation. 26. McCabe, Jesuit Theater, 19. 27. Bouwsma, Waning of the Renaissance, 136. 28. Unlike the Renaissance tradition of courtly civility typified by Balthasar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, the Jesuits were not concerned solely with appearances; they emphasized effective self-expression rather than dissimulation or repression. On the tradition of courtly civility in contrast to the Christian tradition of civility represented by Erasmus and (I maintain) by the early Jesuits, see Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18, 30–31. 29. Bouwsma, Waning of the Renaissance, 134. 30. William Prynne, Histriomastix, 1632, quoted in Bouwsma, Waning of the Renaissance, 141. 31. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), quoted in Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 89. 32. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 105. 33. Christopher J. Wild, Theater der Keuschheit-Keuschheit des Theaters: Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-) Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 2003), 171. 34. R. Po-Chia Hsia interprets Jesuit theater within a broader context of early modern Catholic renewal; the religious elites were mobilized to properly Christianize the masses, and tensions emerged between those who sought “to discipline, control, and enforce sacramental conformity on the one hand” and those who sought “to instruct, inspire, and accommodate on the other,” The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 198. The Jesuits took the latter route, the Jansenists the former. This is a helpful lens, and one that transcends confessional boundaries, even if Hsia’s analysis is confined to Catholicism. 35. Quoted in McCabe, Jesuit Theater, 66. 36. See Max Wehrli, afterword to Jacob Bidermann, Philemon Martyr: Lateinisch und Deutsch, ed. Max Wehrli (Köln: Jakob Hegner, 1960), 319. A brief biography of Bidermann is given in Ruprecht Wimmer, “Jesuitendrama: Jakob Bidermanns Philemon Martyr, in Handbuch der Literatur in Bayern vom Frühmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Albrecht Weber (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1987), 189. 37. Dyer, introduction to Cenodoxus, 1–2. 38. Günter Hess questions the historicity of the account while offering an extensive analysis of how it functioned rhetorically as an “Idealfall” in “SpectatorLector-Actor: Zum Publikum von Jacob Bidermanns Cenodoxus,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 1 (1976): 30–106; here 39. 39. Dyer, introduction to Cenodoxus, 10.

Notes to Pages 139–50

385

40. Bidermann, preface to Cenodoxus. 41. Dyer, introduction to Cenodoxus, 10. 42. Georg Braungart, “Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus: Zeitdiagnose, superbiaKritik, komisch-tragische Entlarvung und theatralische Bekehrungsstrategie,” Daphnis 18 (1989): 590–91. 43. Bidermann, Cenodoxus, line 43. Subsequent references are given parenthetically to line number. 44. See Braungart, who takes teaching the discernment of spirits as the central aim of at least the first four acts of Bidermann’s drama, “Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus,” 598–99. 45. See ibid., 585, 587–88. 46. Dyer, introduction to Cenodoxus, 16. 47. Several other Spanish treatments of the theme are discussed by Elvezio Canonica in “De la ficción de la verdad a la verdad de la ficción en Lo fingido verdadero de Lope de Vega,” El teatro dentro del teatro: Cervantes, Lope, Tirso y Calderón, ed. Irene Andres-Suárez, José Manuel López de Abiada, and Pedro Ramírez Molas (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 1997), 99. 48. See, notably, the works of Stanley Cavell; Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Iris Murdoch’s Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985, c1970); Alasdair MacIntyre’s appeal to Jane Austen in After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), ch. 16; Stanley Hauerwas’s use of Iris Murdoch in Vision and Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974) and of Watership Down in A Community of Character (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 49. See Jan L. Hagens, “Spielen und Zuschauen in Jakob Bidermanns Philemon Martyr: ‘Theatrum Mundi’ als dramatisches und pädagogisches Prinzip des Jesuitentheaters,” Daphnis 29 (2000): 122. 50. On the ways in which Spanish court life was shaped by conceptions of world as theater, see J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), ch. 7–8. 51. Michael D. McGaha, “Introduction: Lope de Vega and Acting Is Believing,” in Lo fingido verdadero, Acting Is Believing: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts by Lope de Vega (c. 1607–1608), trans. Michael D. McGaha (San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 1986), 20. 52. Ibid., 12. 53. Canonica, “De la ficción de la verdad,” 100. Charles Aubrun, who names Lope the creator of the “new comedy” or “Spanish comedy,” and thereby of modern drama itself, says of Lo fingido verdadero, with its metatheatrical elements, that “allí se ve la piedra clave de todo el prodigioso edificio de la comedia española,” La comedia española, 1600/1680 (Madrid: Taurus, 1981). See also Elaine

Notes to Pages 150–64

386

Canning, “Metaplay: Lo fingido verdadero,” in Lope de Vega’s Comedias de Tema Religioso (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2004), 95–127. 54. References are given parenthetically to the page numbers of McGaha’s edition. 55. Canonica, “De la ficción de la verdad,” 104. 56. Canonica notes that “en la primera comedia, él ha querido transformer la realidad en ficción y es la ficción la que se ha transformando en realidad; en la segunda, al revés, él ha querido transformer la ficción en realidad, pidiendo el bautismo para poder representar mejor, pero aquí también la ficción que él había creado acaba transformándose en la realidad, gracias a la intervención sobrenatural” (ibid., 110). 57. Cf. Canning, “Metaplay,” 111. In a later scene, Canning notes, “the association of human love with random, irrational forms of behaviour is also underscored” (116). 58. Max Wehrli, afterword to Philemon Martyr, 320. 59. Ibid., 321. 60. I, 5. All references to the play are to act and scene, making use of Wehrli’s edition. The translations are my own. 61. Cf. Wehrli, afterword to Philemon Martyr, 327–28. Burger argues persuasively that Bidermann intends Philemon also as a Zeittyp, a representative of his age, preoccupied as it was with masks and roles, both on- and off-stage (“Dasein heißt eine Rolle spielen,” 80). 62. Cf. Wimmer, “Jakob Bidermann,” 194. 63. Hagens, “Dramatisches und pädagogisches Prinzip,” 117. 64. Ibid., 119–20, my translation. 65. Ibid., 128. 66. I part ways here with commentators who read Bidermann as promoting a Molinist account of grace, according to which human persons accept or reject grace through a wholly undetermined act. Philemon, who is always driven by his desires, never possesses the liberty of indifference required by a Molinist account. See Wimmer, “Jakob Bidermann,” 191; Hagens, “Anti-deterministische und anti-humanistische Waffe,” 695–704. 67. Wehrli notes that “der Gestaltentausch, der Selbstverlust erweist sich als ein glückliches Sichfinden,” afterword to Philemon Martyr, 326. 68. Hagens, “Dramatisches und pädagogisches Prinzip,” 133–35. 69. “Mit dem Begriffspaar von simulatio und dissimulatio sind zwei zentrale Termini der neuen säkularen Verhaltenslehre genannt, welche Strategien für erfolgreiches Sich-Behaupten im sozialen und politischen Kontext des sich etablierenden monarchischen Machtstaats der frühen Neuzeit bereitstellt. Und bei dessen Aufbau in den katholischen Territorien spielten die Jesuiten ja eine nicht unbedeutende Rolle” (Braungart, “Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus,” 605–6). 70. Kathryn Tanner has characterized this problem in terms of a loss of “non-

Notes to Page 164

387

contrastive transcendence”: God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 45–46, 82. William Placher takes up Tanner’s vocabulary in his narration of The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1996), esp. 6, 111–12. Placher, though, insists that Luther successfully retained a noncontrastive understanding of divine transcendence; I am less sanguine about this, as I have suggested in “Affective Perfectionism: Community with God without Common Measure,” in New Essays on the History of Autonomy: A Collection Honoring J. B. Schneewind, ed. Natalie Brender and Larry Krasnoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37–41. 71. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2005). Fascination with the theatrical metaphor is hardly limited, though, to the Anglo American world. Indeed, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theodramatik led the way and continues to serve as an inspiration for these discussions, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, 5 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988–1998). Also important to note is that theologians are drawing on the work of sociologists, who have for decades recognized how productive performative metaphors can be for social analysis. Perhaps the most influential sociological account of contemporary social life in terms of theatrical performance is that of Erving Goffman, developed in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1973). Goffman seeks to show how important it is to individuals to create certain impressions in others. “Instead of allowing an impression of their activity to arise as an incidental by-product of their activity, they can reorient their frame of reference and devote their efforts to the creation of desired impressions,” thus becoming “amoral” “performers” rather than moral actors (250–51). The self, Goffman dramatically concludes, is nothing more than a “performed character,” “a dramatic effect arising diff usely from a scene that is presented” (252–53). Goffman’s “self” would have been right at home in the court of Louis XIV. A more recent study in the tradition of Goffman is Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Hochschild draws on Stanislavski’s method acting to analyze the ways flight attendants work to imaginatively create in themselves sincere emotions that lend a “genuine” quality to the way they act within their professional roles. 72. These assumptions are most closely associated with postliberal or narrative theology, but the influence of narrative theology and Alasdair MacIntyre converged on these issues, particularly within Christian ethics. The key texts for narrative theology include Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), and George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984). Lindbeck concludes The Nature of Doctrine by suggesting that the ultimate test of the cultural-linguistic understanding of religion is “performance,” though he notes that there has been to

Notes to Pages 165–67

388

date little actual performance of narrative theology, 134–35. The most influential of MacIntyre’s books have been After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics after MacIntyre, ed. Nancey Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg, and Mark Thiessen Nation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), and many of Stanley Hauerwas’s writings, notably A Community of Character (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), are indicative of the influence of MacIntyre’s thought on contemporary Christian ethics. 73. Nicholas Lash, “Performing the Scriptures,” in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM, 1986), 42. 74. Shannon Craigo-Snell, “Command Performance: Rethinking Performance Interpretation in the Context of Divine Discourse,” Modern Theology 16.4 (2000): 480; Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2004), 62–65. 75. Craigo-Snell, “Command Performance,” 480. 76. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 118, 18. 77. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 13, 7, 88, 365, 16, 22. I am grateful to John Perry for illuminating conversations about Vanhoozer’s work and its broader context. 78. Ibid., 292, 17, 26. 79. Ibid., 87–88, 14. 80. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 65. Lindbeck’s position can of course still be considered a form of pragmatism, but a wholly benign form, which is not antirealist and which allows for robust theological truth claims. The statement that “credibility comes from good performance, not adherence to independently formulated criteria” can sound a bit like a crude pragmatism, but read in context, it is simply a denial of access to an external authority, along with an affirmation that religious claims are nevertheless subject to confirmation and disconfirmation as the lives that embody them bump up against reality (Nature of Doctrine, 131). Bruce Marshall has helpfully clarified Lindbeck’s various uses of the word truth, showing that intrasystematic truth is for Lindbeck “a necessary but not sufficient condition for ontological truth,” “Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian,” Thomist 53 (1989): 366. In his appreciative response to Marshall, Lindbeck adds that a theist may certainly combine a correspondence theory of truth with a coherentist or pragmatist epistemological stance. “In God, and only in God, are knowledge and reality, not only in correspondence, but directly known to correspond. . . . Our beliefs may correspond to reality, but we are justified in holding that they do so, not by directly seeing the correspondence, but by some other means”: “Response to Bruce Marshall,” Thomist 53 (1989): 404.

Notes to Pages 167–77

389

81. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 294. 82. Jeffrey Stout’s articulation of what a social-pragmatic theory of obligation looks like on a theistic view is helpful here (Democracy and Tradition, 260). 83. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 292. 84. Ibid., 366. 85. Ibid., 371–74, 369. 86. Lash, “Performing the Scriptures,” 46.

ch a p t er si x 1. Martin Luther, Tractatus de libertate christiana, D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1897), 7:50. Translation from Martin Luther, Freedom of a Christian (1520), Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehman, vol. 31, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957), 5. Further citations are given parenthetically, first to the volume and pages of the Weimar Ausgabe (WA), then to the volume and pages of the English translation (LW). I do not take up the complex and fascinating issue of the development of Luther’s thought. My interest is in his post-“breakthrough” position, roughly 1519 and thereafter. 2. Luther had very little knowledge of earlier scholastic theology, including that of Aquinas. See David Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1995, 2002), 47–58. 3. Martin Luther, Against Latomus, (1521), WA 8:54, 104–5; LW 32:153–54, 225. 4. Martin Luther, Treatise on Good Works (1520), WA 6:209; Luther’s Works, vol. 44, trans. W. A. Lambert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 30. 5. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, WA 56:158; Luther’s Works, vol. 25, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia, 1972), 136–37. 6. Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), WA 40.1:407; Luther’s Works, vol. 26 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 259. 7. See Wilfried Joest, Gesetz und Freiheit. Das Problem des tertius usus legis bei Luther und die neutestamentliche Parainese, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1951, 1968), 24–25. 8. Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 89–91. 9. “Fides Christi” thus shifts from being a natural human act, performed without the special assistance of grace, to an act of God within the human individual; “whereas Luther had earlier regarded fides Christi as an indirect gift of God, in that God was understood to have established the theological framework within which man’s faith could be reckoned as worthy of justification, it is now regarded as a direct gift of God to the believer”: Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 132. 10. Ibid., 111, 61.

Notes to Pages 177–82

390

11. Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), ch. 1–4, WA 40.1:448, 435–36; Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 26, ed. Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 287, see also 278–79. Reading Erasmus through this lens, Luther worried as early as 1516 that Erasmus was reducing Jesus to mere ethical example. See Steven E. Ozment, The Age of Reform (1250–1550): An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 292. 12. For further discussion of Luther’s rejection of mimetic Christology, see Karl F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 230–32. 13. This has been underscored by Finnish interpreters of Luther; see Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification, ed. Kirsi Stjerna (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 4, 17–22. This is a translation of a central portion of Mannermaa’s Der im Glauben gegenwärtige Christus: Rechtfertigung und Vergottung. Zum ökumenischen Dialog (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1989). Mannermaa, Simo Peura, and their colleagues have made an important contribution in recovering the centrality for Luther’s theology of participation in Christ. As they stress, the “gift” of faith is not merely the sinner’s awareness of divine forgiveness and acceptance but the ontological presence of Christ in the Christian. They hope by their recovery of the authentic Lutheran account of the gift of faith to undermine any hard distinction between justification and sanctification: Mannermaa, “Justification and Theosis,” in Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), 38. Still, they must continue to speak of the “forensic” and “effective” aspects of justification, even while emphasizing that both take place only through the actual presence of Christ in the believer. Peura, “Christ as Favor and Gift (donum): The Challenge of Luther’s Understanding of Justification,” in Union with Christ, 42–44. 14. McGrath takes as the central novelty in Protestantism as a whole the introduction of a distinction between justification and sanctification (Iustitia Dei, 184). Justification had earlier always been seen as “both an act and a process, by which both man’s status coram Deo and his essential nature underwent alteration” (182). Insofar as Luther understands imputation not solely in relation to any external work of Christ but always in relation to Christ’s indwelling in the human person, he stands on the far side of this divide, but insofar as he transforms the basic meaning of union with Christ, he stands on the near side. 15. Peura, “Christ as Favor and Gift,” 52. 16. Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), WA 6:457; LW 44:200. 17. See Bernhard Lohse, Luthers Theologie in ihrer historischen Entwicklung und in ihrem systematischen Zusammenhang (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 254–56. On the Holy Spirit’s role in bringing us the gift of faith, see

Notes to Pages 183–85

391

Peura, “What God Gives Man Receives: Luther on Salvation,” in Union with Christ, 90–91. Luther’s emphasis on faith as coming through the church was further underscored by the Augsburg Confession, which condemned Anabaptists and all those who allowed for the action of the Holy Spirit apart from explicit preaching of the Word. See Louis Capéran, Le problème du salut des infidèles (Toulouse: Grande Séminaire, 1934), 230–38. David Yeago has recently drawn attention to this public, institutional aspect of Luther’s thought in “ ‘A Christian, Holy People’: Martin Luther on Salvation and the Church,” Modern Theology 13 (1997): 101–20. Yeago corrects the tendency to understand justification in Luther as “the establishment of a private, individual relationship to God which may subsequently find expression in adherence to the church,” arguing instead that it is “incorporation into the communal priesthood of the church” (116). Yeago’s correction is a welcome one, though Luther’s emphasis on faith as personal trust should not thereby be overlooked. 18. Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 54. 19. I am indebted to Gilbert Meilaender’s discussion of Luther’s understanding of virtue, and of Against Latomus in particular, even if our conclusions differ. See The Theory and Practice of Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), ch. 5, and also The Freedom of a Christian: Grace, Vocation, and the Meaning of Our Humanity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2006), 15–77. 20. Not only is the Christian joined with Christ but “he is in this union transformed into a likeness of Christ. This change is a process, and it creates in the Christian the same form ( forma) as Christ” (Peura, “Christ as Favor and Gift,” 60). 21. See Joest, Gesetz und Freiheit; also Lohse, Luthers Theologie, 278–80. 22. Morrison, Mimetic Tradition, 234. Alister McGrath argues that this notion of mystical union with Christ, present in Luther, is developed more fully by Calvin in a way that links together the forensic act of justification with the process of sanctification, through which believers are incorporated into or grafted into Christ, becoming what they already are: “Humanist Elements in the Early Reformed Doctrine of Justification,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 73 (1982): 15–17. McGrath notes how far this is from a merely moralistic understanding of sanctification. According to the Finnish school, participation in Christ is a central element of Luther’s own theology; the gift is itself Christ. See Tuomo Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” in Union with Christ, 13–15. 23. See Joest, Gesetz und Freiheit, 26, and Lohse, Luthers Theologie, 278–80. 24. As Paul Althaus comments, “ ‘works’ are nothing but the concrete realization of faith itself. Faith needs works—that is, concrete, specific acts of life—in order to be itself at any point,” The Ethics of Martin Luther, 1965, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 17.

Notes to Pages 187–98

392

25. Here Luther follows the whole modern Augustinian school; see McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 84. 26. Peura, “Christ as Favor and Gift,” 59–60. 27. Peura, “What God Gives Man Receives,” 77. 28. Ibid., 78. 29. Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating?” 10. See also “Justification and Theiosis in Lutheran-Orthodox Perspective,” in Union with Christ, 39. 30. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 33. 31. The pedagogical literature had always recognized the effectiveness of appeals to the competitive urge to excel. In the sixteenth century, such arguments were particularly characteristic of humanist thinkers, but as Strauss discusses, Lutheran pedagogues made similar appeals and rarely attempted to show how they could be made consistent with their theology (Luther’s House, 59–60). 32. Ibid., 79, 34–35, 37. 33. Ibid., 300, 153–54. 34. Quoted in Strauss, Luther’s House, 42, from a response to Wolf von Salhausen, WA 15:228. 35. Althaus, Ethics of Martin Luther, 11. 36. Randall Zachman, The Assurance of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 40–43. 37. Ibid., 246. 38. Even Meilaender, who offers what is perhaps the most compelling contemporary defense of the way Luther depicts the life of discipleship as a “continual return to the starting point,” argues that this “should not become the chief structuring principle of Christian ethics” (Freedom of a Christian, 20, 40).

ch a p t er se v en 1. The Lutheran character of Bunyan’s theology, in particular, has been explored in detail by Richard L. Greaves, John Bunyan, Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology 2 (Abingdon, Berkshire: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1969) and upheld by more recent studies: Dayton Haskin, “Bunyan, Luther, and the Struggle with Belatedness in Grace Abounding,” University of Toronto Quarterly 50 (1981): 304; Rebecca S. Beal, “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: John Bunyan’s Pauline Epistle,” Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 147–60. 2. Martin Bucer is sometimes seen as the source of the Reformed emphasis on sanctification, but the theme is prominent in Calvin as well. See W. P. Stephens, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Martin Bucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 23, 37, 71, 261; Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1959), 199.

Notes to Pages 198–201

393

3. John Calvin, Institutio Christianae religionis 1559, II.viii.51:415, O.S. III.390.15–20. Cited by book, chapter, and section, followed by the page number from the English translation: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960). Volume, page, and line numbers are also given to Ioannis Calvini opera selecta, ed. Peter Barth, Wilhelm Niesel, and Dora Scheuner, 5 vols. (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1926–1952). 4. Inst. III.vi.2:686; O.S. IV.147.33–37. 5. Inst. III.vi.3–4:686–88; O.S. IV.148.11–33-149.28–32. Randall Zachman suggests that this is a direct echo of Erasmus’s Paraclesis. See The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 198. Calvin identifies both Christ and the law as exemplars of divine purity (Inst. II.viii.51:415; O.S. III.390.15–20), but the latter is subsumed under the former, as the order of creation is subsumed under the order of redemption. See Zachman, Assurance of Faith, 197. 6. Zachman, Assurance of Faith, 8. 7. These differences, but also the underlying similarities discussed in the following paragraph, are articulated by Zachman, Assurance of Faith, 9–13, 242. 8. Ibid., 3–4. 9. Ibid., 6, 220. 10. Inst. III.xi.15:746; O.S. IV.200.3–6. 11. Inst. III.xiv.6:773; O.S. IV.225.29–32. 12. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 212, 205–6, 216. 13. This is not to claim that either Lutheran or Calvinist traditions were univocal. In particular, there were strongly perfectionist strands of Calvinist thought that, drawing in part on categories sustained within Protestant scholasticism, insisted that virtuous character rather than faith offered the most reliable assurance of salvation. See Janice Knight’s account of the “Intellectual Fathers” in contradistinction to the “Spiritual Brethren,” in Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 36, and Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520–1725, vol. I, Prolegomena to Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2003), 355–58. Particularly as they sought to respond to antinomian movements, Reformed thinkers affi rmed the inherent and not simply imputed goodness of the saints. For the most part these conceptions of inherent righteousness were united with steady resistance to habitual grace, since the latter was associated with Catholicism. Stephen Wilson, however, in a fascinating and wide-ranging study, argues that Jonathan Edwards and other American Puritans “made broader and more substantive use of the concept of infused habits,” Virtue Reformed: Rereading Jonathan

Notes to Pages 201–3

394

Edwards’s Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 52. What even these thinkers maintain, though, is a sharp differentiation between the true virtue of the saints, preceded by conversion, and the hypocritical virtue of the reprobate. 14. Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 230. The quoted phrase is from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 104. 15. Inst. III.xxiv.4, O.S. IV.414.21–23, 30–32. 16. On the centrality of this question, and the despair to which it often gave rise, see the evidence amassed by John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 27–61. 17. Inst. III.ii.11, O.S. IV.20.26–21.35. 18. Dewey D. Wallace Jr. stresses the close connections between English Protestant theology and Continental Reformed thought but notes the exceptional “fervor, intensity, and warmly personal character to the Puritan use of this theology of grace”: Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), x–xi. 19. William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 136; see also 21, 32. 20. Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969), 6, 11–12. 21. Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken, 1972), ix. 22. Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 7, 71. 23. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 23. 24. The account of Puritan life-writing in the next three paragraphs is indebted to Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, 72–98. 25. Ibid., 86. 26. Richard Parkinson, ed., The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, 2 vols., Chetham Society Publications XXVI and XXVII (London, 1852), I, 14. 27. Isaac Ambrose, Media: The Middle Things, in Reference to the First and Last Things, or, The Means, Duties, Ordinances, both Secret, Private, and Publike, for Continuance and Increase of a Godly Life, (Once Begun), till We Come to Heaven Wherein Are Discovered Many Blessed Medium’s or Duties, in Their Right Manner and Proceedings, that So a Christian (the Spirit of Christ Assisting) May Walk on the Holy Earth, which Leads from His New-Birth to Everlasting Life, Drawn for the Most Part, Out of the Most Eminently Pious, and Learned Writings of Our Native Practical Devices: With Additionals of His Own, 2nd ed. (London: printed by T.R. and E.M. for

Notes to Pages 204–7

395

Nathanael Webb and William Grantham, 1652), 72, 59. The claim that Ambrose was first to recommend the practice is that of Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, 75–76. 28. Ambrose, Media, 73. 29. Samuel Clarke, Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age, pt. I, 129 (London: printed for Thomas Simmons, 1683). 30. Matthew Henry Lee, ed., Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry of Broad Oak, Flintshire 1631–1696 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882), 239. 31. Newcome, Autobiography I, 2. 32. Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, 92. 33. See Helen C. White, The Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 170–71. The broader theme of the (often minimal) adaptation of Catholic devotional books by sixteenth-century reformers is explored throughout White’s book; see 9–10. See also James F. Keenan, “Jesuit Casuistry or Jesuit Spirituality? The Roots of Seventeenth-Century British Puritan Practical Divinity,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 627–40. 34. Weintraub, Value of the Individual, 241. 35. John Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 155. 36. Newcome, Autobiography I, 2. 37. As Patrick Riley has argued, “the hallmark of modern autobiography is the drama of authorship itself,” one in which God’s transforming agency is displaced by that of the author: Character and Conversion in Autobiography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 5. 38. Charles Taylor’s effort to situate Augustine’s inwardness between Plato and Descartes remains insightful: Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), ch. 7. Nicholas D. Paige has explored how Augustine’s Confessions was appropriated for a new form of hermeneutics of self within seventeenth-century French thought in Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), ch. 1. 39. For a careful situating of Bunyan amidst the varied landscape of English Protestant theology of his day, see Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 164–65, 185–86. 40. On the centrality of the doctrine of passive justification in Bunyan’s writings, see Thomas Hyatt Luxon, “The Pilgrim’s Passive Progress: Luther and Bunyan on Talking and Doing, Word and Way,” English Literary History 53.1 (1986): 73–98. On the paradoxical character of all efforts to cease all effort, see 78. 41. My thesis bears some resemblance to that of Stuart Sim’s Negotiations

Notes to Pages 207–11

396

with Paradox: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Sim’s preoccupation, though, is on the free will– determinism debate, which I take to be a bit of a red herring. Moreover, Sim’s argument that paradox is employed by Bunyan and Defoe as an antiauthoritarian device, even as this same paradox functions to undermine the possibility of human agency and thus of social criticism (178–86), is overly reductive. 42. In Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Michael Davies offers a forceful indictment of received scholarly views of Bunyan’s theology as “harsh, inhumane, and obsessed with the horrors of Calvinist predestination,” arguing instead that Bunyan’s theological focus is on salvation by faith alone and thus on reassuring the converted that their ongoing doubts and sins do not jeopardize their salvation through the imputed righteousness of Christ (vii). Davies is right to insist that Bunyan’s aim in Grace Abounding is to “teach the reader precisely not to ask the question ‘How do I know I am saved?’ ” (113). What Davies fails to appreciate, though, is the fact that Bunyan is not finally able to escape from these questions, not able once and for all to make the move from introspection to relying on Christ, not able because doubt can always creep in as to whether one indeed has faith, or has been effectually called, has truly repented, etc., and the attempt to answer these questions drives one back into self-examination. 43. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 1987), preface. With the exception of the preface, citations will be to paragraph numbers. 44. On the pastoral shaping of Grace Abounding, see Michael Mullett, John Bunyan in Context (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1997), 9–10. 45. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, preface. 46. Ibid., preface. 47. On Bunyan’s rhetorical sophistication, see Mullett, Bunyan in Context, 57–59. 48. Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London: Macmillan, 1967), 6. 49. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, preface. 50. Ibid., 7; see Owens, introduction to Grace Abounding, xiii, viii, and Mullett, Bunyan in Context, 10–11, who notes that Bunyan identifies here with a central Christian theme of God’s election of the poor and lowly. 51. See Watkins, Puritan Experience, ch. 3. 52. Delany, British Autobiography, 92. 53. Owens, introduction to Grace Abounding, xviii. 54. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 8, 4, 99–100, 24. 55. For Bunyan’s more formal account of the hypocrisy of those who seek to save themselves through works, see W. R. Owens, ed., Of Justification by an

Notes to Pages 211–18

397

Imputed Righteousness, I, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. XII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 394–95. 56. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 11, 16, 17. 57. Ibid., 32, 118. 58. Ibid., 37, 39, 38, 77, 105. 59. Stachniewski argues persuasively that “the act of writing Grace Abounding emerges from the need to overcome the alienated individualism fostered by the doctrine of reprobation”: Persecutory Imagination, 128. But if Bunyan’s act of narrative agency helps to heal his own sense of isolation, it does so precisely in offering itself to others. 60. Owens, introduction to Grace Abounding, xii; Mullett, Bunyan in Context, 45. 61. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 61. Owens contrasts Bunyan’s reliance on scripture alone with Quakers’ recourse to the inner light; lacking anything akin to the inner light, Bunyan struggles to apply scripture, the external criterion, to himself and his “inner” experiences, introduction to Grace Abounding, xiii. 62. Ibid., 195, 117. 63. As Luxon argues, on Bunyan’s view “the work of understanding (laying hold of) the scriptures is not something he does as reader and interpreter, but something the Word does to him,” “Pilgrim’s Passive Progress,” 77. 64. Owens, introduction to Grace Abounding, xxi. 65. Ibid., 114. 66. Ibid., 92, 129. 67. Ibid., 131, 139. 68. Ibid., 173, 189, 212, 213. 69. Ibid., 222. Davies, borrowing terminology introduced by Thomas Luxon, argues that this represents the triumph of a spiritual “anti-hermeneutics” over a rational and logical form of interpretation (Graceful Reading, 129–34). This is a puzzling claim. The reverse might be closer to the truth, although really it is a false opposition; what Bunyan recognizes is that attention to scripture as a unified whole does not constitute a refusal to receive God’s communication to him through scripture. See Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 167–68, 175. In contrast to Luxon, Mullett characterizes Bunyan’s new hermeneutical approach as an “orderly, ratiocinative method” (Bunyan in Context, 41). 70. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 229, 232, 234. 71. Ibid., 236. Stachniewski, too, notes that “Bunyan has not, even by the end of the narration, graduated from his reprobate fears” (Persecutory Imagination, 132). 72. Stuart Sim argues that the necessarily inconclusive nature of Grace Abounding is part of what draws Bunyan into the realm of fiction, where this incompleteness can be remedied: Negotiations with Paradox, 8–10.

Notes to Pages 221–22

398

ch a p t er eigh t 1. Letter to Père Thomas Esprit, quoted in Henry C. Clark’s La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France (Geneva: Librarie Droz S.A., 1994), 119. 2. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 1:3. Parenthetical references will be to volume and page number. 3. One very useful resource for understanding this phenomenon, and particularly attentive to concrete social history, is Clark’s Language of Unmasking; the scope of the work is considerably broader than the title suggests. What Clark terms “unmasking” is what I here call the project of the “Anatomists.” Anthony Levi’s erudite French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions 1585 to 1649 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) remains indispensable for understanding the moral psychology of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century moralists and its background, although he has relatively little to say about mid-century thinkers such as Pascal, Nicole, and La Rochefoucauld. See also Nannerl O. Keohane’s Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980) and A. J. Krailsheimer’s Studies in SelfInterest from Descartes to La Bruyère (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). 4. For a recent treatment of Machiavelli from the standpoint of contemporary political theory, see Ruth W. Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). On Montaigne as inaugurating a tradition in French social theory of exploring how private vices contribute to public good, see Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 98–116, esp. 112. On the influence of Castiglione, see Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19–21. 5. See the pathbreaking essay by Wolfgang Reinhard, “ ‘Gegenreformation als Modernisierung?’ Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977), 226–52, along with more recent works, such as Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990) and R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6. Use of the term Jansenism has fallen somewhat out of favor since Jean Mesnard argued forcefully that the term exaggerated the influence of Jansenius’s Augustinus and that the so-called Jansenists understood themselves as followers of Augustine, not of Jansenius: Les Pensées de Pascal, 2nd ed. (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1993), 138–43. However, the term remains useful in distinguishing the defenders of Port-Royal, who resisted signing the Formulary condemning “Jansenist” propositions from other forms of Augus-

Notes to Pages 223–24

399

tinianism present in the culture. For helpful overviews of Jansenism, see Louis Cognet, Le Jansénisme, que sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), who stresses the internal diversity of the movement, and Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France: Voices from the Wilderness (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977). 7. Paul Bénichou, in Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), suggested a similar three-stage trajectory within seventeenth-century French thought and culture, from heroic ethic (typified by Corneille) to Christian rigorism (influencing Racine) to a skeptical worldly morality (captured by Molière). Bénichou, too, argued persuasively that the Jansenist movement contributed despite itself to the emergence of secular modernity, though his Marxist identification of Jansenism with bourgeois-class interests is overplayed. 8. This is J. G. A. Pocock’s thesis in “Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37–50. For a classic examination of worldly civility or politeness in relation to the broader ideal of honnêteté, (civility, propriety, integrity, decency) in seventeenth-century France, see Maurice Magendie, La politesse mondaine (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1993; orig. pub. 1925). Keohane, too, discusses the displacement of the ideals of sage and hero by that of the honnête homme (Philosophy and the State in France, 283–89). 9. Pocock, “Virtues, Rights, and Manners,” 49. 10. On the widespread tendency to use the metaphor of the marketplace to describe social relations, see Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 289. 11. On key distinctions between a courtly and a bourgeois society, with special attention to etiquette and to the importance of social opinion in a courtly society, see Norbert Elias’s sociological classic The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983; German original 1969), 78–116. The relevant form of dependency in a courtly context is social, not economic, and in such a context, the capacity to fathom intentions and motives is crucial to maintaining prestige (104–6). 12. Peltonen, Duel in Early Modern England, 225–40, demonstrates how an English conception of courtly civility borrowed from Renaissance Italian sources was subjected to ongoing critiques as selfish and dishonest and eventually gave way to a redefined notion of civility as a natural expression of inner virtue and directed toward the public good. While Peltonen does not identify the critiques of courtly civility as expressions of civic republican impulses, it is helpful to do so; later notions of virtue as manners can then be understood as adaptations of notions of courtly civility in the face of republican critiques. 13. On the pervasiveness of the concept of gloire in French political thought, see Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 197–202. 14. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, in Collected Works

Notes to Pages 224–27

400

of Erasmus, ed. A. H. T. Levi, vol. 27 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 199–288; on flattery, see 245–53. 15. Peltonen, Duel in Early Modern England, 160; see also 22–23, 30–31. 16. This claim lies at the heart of Ruth Grant’s analysis of the place of hypocrisy within politics. “Political relationships,” she argues, “unlike either true friendships or open enmities, require hypocrisy because they are relationships of dependence among people with conflicting interests” (Hypocrisy and Integrity, 20–21). 17. Some interpretations of courtly civility have set up a strong contrast between court and city and thus between courtly civility and bourgeois manners, analyzing the latter as an essentially new phenomenon. In addition to Pocock, “Virtues, Rights, and Manners,” see, e.g., Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Peltonen, in contrast, demonstrates how both court and city from mid-seventeenth century onward were contrasted with country and thus linked with one another as sites of civility and politeness (Duel in Early Modern England, 150–51, 300–301). There was a shift in terminology from courtesy to politeness, but not so much a shift in substance as an expansion of scope (148). 18. Peltonen takes note of a Christian critique of courtly courtesy, but argues that since advocates of courtesy openly admitted that its focus on defending honor was in tension with Christian teaching, the Christian critique was ineffective (Duel in Early Modern England, 78–79, 228–29). More effective were the critics who developed an internal critique, seeking to redefine true civility as expressive of inner virtue rather than as mere surface appearance. This is what I am characterizing as the civic republican approach, since it advocated the pursuit of virtue both as true source of honor and as crucial to the common good. 19. J. H. Elliott’s studies of the court of the Spanish Habsburgs make it plausible to think that such an enterprise was particularly apt in Spain, where acute awareness of the importance of image and the possibility of manipulating image and appearance were joined with the conviction that the nation had been specially chosen by God to further the Catholic faith. See Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), ch. 7–8, especially 162–65. 20. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 263. 21. Aurora Egido, introduction to Baltasar Gracián, Obras Completas, ed. Luis Sánchez Laílla (Madrid: Espasa, 2001), xiv. 22. Ibid., xv. Clark similarly reads Gracián as privatizing raison d’état and placing it at the disposal particularly of courtiers. He places Gracián within

Notes to Pages 227–35

401

a broader movement along these lines, which included such figures as Pierre Charron and Eustache du Refuge, Language of Unmasking, 39–54. 23. See Manfred Hinz, “Castiglione und Gracián: Bemerkungen zur Strategie höfischer Sprache,” in El mundo de Gracián: Actas del Coloquio Internacional, ed. Sebastian Neumeister and Dietrich Briesemeister (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1988), 127–48. 24. Monroe Z. Hafter, Gracián and Perfection: Spanish Moralists of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 3; Egido, introduction, xvii–xxiii; leading examples of this anti-Machiavellian discourse include Pedro de Rivadeneira’s Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano (1595) and Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s Maquiavelismo degollado (1637). Quentin Skinner places this Spanish anti-Machiavellian tradition within a broader context in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 248–54. 25. Egido, introduction, xxv, xviii, xxxii; see also Hafter, Gracián and Perfection, 16–17. 26. Hafter, Gracián and Perfection, 11–18. Maria Pilar Cuartero surveys recent scholarship tracing the influence of Seneca and Tacitus on Gracián in “Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia,” in Baltasar Gracián: Estado de la cuestión y nuevas perspectivas, ed. Aurora Egido y María Carmen Marín (Zaragoza: Institución “Fernando el Católico,” 2001), 90–93. 27. By L. B. Walton, Christopher Maurer, and Virginia Ramos Foster, respectively. 28. Egido, introduction, xxviii. 29. Translations are from Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, trans. Christopher Maurer (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Parenthetical references are to aphorism number. 30. Arturo Zárate Ruiz, Gracián, Wit, and the Baroque Age (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 134–35, fn. 29. 31. Ibid., 148–49. 32. The formulation is that of Gracián, not Loyola. Where Ignatius spoke of trust in God and of the hope of discovering how the apparently profane was in fact saturated by the divine, Gracián spoke of “medios divinos,” divine means, which by being placed at the disposition of human agents are no longer an expression of divine initiative. See the perceptive analysis of Georg Eickhoff, “Die ‘regla de gran maestro’ des ‘Oráculo manual’ im Kontext biblischer und ignatianischer Tradition,” in El mundo de Gracián, 111–26; especially 115–17. 33. Ibid., 118. 34. I use the term activism in a relative sense, as will become clear below— Jansenists can be regarded as activist in comparison with Luther or with Quietism, though not in comparison with Jesuit theology. Nor do I mean to suggest any sort of political activism; Jansenists have often been criticized for

Notes to Pages 236–39

402

their withdrawal from public life: e.g., Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 197–99. 35. In fact, Jansenist treatment of sufficient grace is more complicated than this implies, and varied depending on whether they were at the moment seeking to assimilate themselves to contemporary neo-Thomism or not. J. D. Chrichton insists on the need to distinguish theological Jansenism from moral Jansenism, with the latter proving to be the more lasting phenomenon. Allegiance to Jansen’s specific interpretation of grace tended to give way to a more Thomist understanding, which was still distinctively “Jansenist” in its austerity, bleak view of human nature, consciousness of sin, rigorous practice of the sacrament of penance, and distrust of frequent Communion: J. D. Chrichton, Saints or Sinners? Jansenism and Jansenisers in Seventeenth-Century France (Dublin: Veritas, 1996), 8, 30–40. Jean Delumeau, too, argues that Jansenist moral rigorism was much more influential than specific Jansenist theological tenets: Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire (London: Burns & Oates, 1977), 100–108. 36. Phillips notes, for instance, “the importance of a profound sense of individual responsibility in penitential obligation” (Church and Culture, 199), while Sedgwick notes that “in the mind of Saint-Cyran, the true importance of theology was . . . to encourage the Christian to undertake spiritual exercises that might eventually lead to his conversion to God’s purpose”; “all Jansenists . . . underwent conversion, not as a result of a sudden, extraordinary transformation brought about by the miraculous intervention of God, but as the result of hard work” ( Jansenism, 33, 35). 37. Levi, French Moralists, 225–29. Keohane traces the emergence of this distinctive understanding of amour-propre back to earlier fi fteenth-century precursors (Philosophy and the State, 188–97). 38. Quietism sought a total resignation to the will of God via a death of the human will to be achieved though contemplation. Miguel de Molinos published his Spiritual Guide in 1675, while Francois Fénelon’s Explanations of the Maxims of the Saints appeared in 1697 and Madame de Guyon’s Works appeared from 1767 to 1791. Thus, while Quietism is not a direct target of Pascal’s thought, Nicole’s attacks on mysticism are a critique of the passivity idealized by the Quietists. 39. E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist: A Study of His Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 83. 40. Ibid., 86. Nicole insisted that the true practice of the presence of God is to seek to perform God’s will and that a true love of God is expressed in a horror of injustice: “De la soumission a la volonté de Dieu,” Oeuvres philosophiques et morales (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), ch. 6, 112–13; ch. 2, 106. 41. René Taveneaux, in an attempt to capture this activist stance, has gone so far as to characterize Jansenism as l’héroïsme de la charité, the heroism of charity, in an explicit departure from Paul Bénichou’s description of Jansenism

Notes to Pages 239–47

403

as a demolition of the heroic: Jansénisme et réforme catholique (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1992), 40–44. 42. Numbers correspond to the edition by M. Louis Lafuma, Oeuvres complètes, Collection L’Intégrale (Paris: Seuil, 1963). Translation is from A. J. Krailsheimer, Pascal: Pensées (London: Penguin, 1966). I have previously discussed Pascal’s account of self-deception in Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 182–87. On Pascal’s “rhetoric of disruption,” see John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 170. 43. Lyons argues that these are contradictory activities, since “a point of view is what we see from when we look at something else” (Exemplum, 155). 44. For a sustained exploration of the central role of imagination and illusion in Pascal’s thought, see Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 102–21. 45. Pascal takes discomfort with the sacrament of confession to be a sign of how unwilling we are to reveal to others our sinful selves. Catholicism, he notes, is already “mild” and “charitable” in requiring self-revelation not to everyone but only to a single confessor; “it allows us to remain hidden from all other men, with one single exception, to whom it bids us reveal our innermost heart and show ourselves for what we are” (978). Nevertheless, “such is man’s corruption that he finds even this law harsh, and this is one of the main reasons why a large part of Europe has revolted against the Church” (978). Ironically, while Luther rejected the Catholic penitential system because he thought that it fostered a focus on the mere appearance of virtue, Pascal here suggests that the Protestant Reformation is due to a sinful refusal to reveal the gap between outer appearance and inner sinfulness. 46. As Moriarty notes, “the very logic of the wager could be construed . . . as an appeal to an enlightened self-love” (Early Modern French Thought, 141). 47. Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 164; Krailsheimer, Studies in Self-Interest, 152. 48. Levi, French Moralists, 301–28. 49. Ibid., 317, 324. 50. Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing, 169. 51. Although for Pascal the starting point is a search for self-knowledge, an attempt to pierce through habitual human hypocrisy, he does not go so far as to say that the pagan seeker-after-self-knowledge, too, may be said to be on the way. Salvation—and self-knowledge, which is to be had only in Christ—is mediated by the church. The activism through which we habituate ourselves in faith is a participation in the grace-filled sacramental life of the church, not simply a participation in the ordinary life of “virtue.”

Notes to Pages 248–53

404

ch a p t er n i n e 1. Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 294. 2. Locke’s translations are available in John Locke as Translator: Three of the Essais of Pierre Nicole in French and English, ed. Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000). 3. Yolton, introduction to John Locke as Translator, 3. 4. Louis Cognet, Le Jansénisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1961), 50–51. 5. Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10. 6. Pierre Nicole, Traité de la grâce générale (n.p., 1715), I.3.16, 209–17, II.2.12, 166– 76. Parenthetical references are to volume, chapter, section, and page(s). 7. Nicole, Traité de la grâce générale, I.3.23, 236–39. On Nicole’s understanding of general grace, see E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist: A Study of His Thought (Nijhoff: The Hague, 1972), 13–17. While I find James’s analysis helpful, ultimately I disagree with his characterization of Nicole as a humanist, just as I disagree with Patrick Laude’s insistence that Nicole is the most consistent of Jansenists: Patrick Laude, “Les leçons de l’amour-propre chez P. Nicole,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 78 (1994): 241–70, here 266. 8. Nicole, Traité de la grâce générale, I.3.30, 253–61. 9. James, Jansenist and Humanist, 44. 10. Ibid., 20, 37, 27–28. Michael Moriarty suggests that Nicole “had little sympathy with the strict Augustinianism of Jansenius, and sought a rapprochement with the Thomists”: Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41. But actually Nicole sought to remain fully Augustinian even in developing his account of general grace. 11. “De la connaissance de soi-même,” pt. I, ch. 1, in Oevres philosophiques et morales, ed. Charles Jourdain (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970; reprinted from 1845 Paris edition), 11. 12. See James, Jansenist and Humanist, 46–50; Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France: Voices from the Wilderness (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 86. 13. “De la connaissance de soi-même,” I.4:20. See also “De la charité et de l’amour-propre,” 2:182. 14. Nicole’s account of general grace and worldly virtue is helpfully contrasted with the role of the natural law and what scholars have called “common grace” in John Calvin’s thought. As Susan Schreiner has argued, Calvin’s statements concerning the natural law are best understood “as an extension of his doctrine of providence”: The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1991), 79. God’s providential care sustains human society despite the radical character of the Fall.

Notes to Pages 253–59

405

However, on Calvin’s account, what preserves a minimal social order is a Godplaced fear of coercive civil authorities. For Nicole, it is not fear but the desire for love and respect that plays the central providential role in sustaining fallen human society, and this is capable of securing not merely external restraint but characters fully habituated in a perfect imitation of Christian charity. 15. Nicole, “De la charité et de l’amour-propre,” 1:179. All translations from Nicole are my own. A partial English translation of this essay, “Of Charity and Self-Love,” is available in The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E. J. Hundert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1–9. 16. On the deceitful character of enlightened self-love, see also “De la civilité Chrétienne,” 2:268. 17. Maurice Magendie explores the parallel developments of the aristocratic-worldly conception and the bourgeois-moral conception of honnêteté in seventeenth-century France in La politesse mondaine, arguing that while they exist side by side from 1600 to 1660, later the worldly conception becomes dominant: La politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté, en France au xviie siècle, de 1600 à 1660 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1993), xxxix–xl. 18. Nicole appears as one of the key reinterpreters of the tradition of courtly civility in Markku Peltonen’s The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness, and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 228–29, 235–36, despite the fact that Peltonen’s overall argument is that the reinterpretation and reappropriation of civility was largely carried out in the name of secular rather than Christian virtue (214, 254). 19. On Nicole’s conception of “le Dieu caché,” a God hidden in the phenomenon, see James, Jansenist and Humanist, 68–73. 20. Jennifer A. Herdt, “The Endless Construction of Charity: On Milbank’s Critique of Political Economy,” Journal of Religious Ethics 32.2 (2004): 304–9. See also John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 29. 21. While Laude notes that Nicole shifts between insisting on a radical discontinuity between supernatural and natural on the one hand and recognizing a certain continuity between these two orders on the other hand, ultimately he argues that this represents a dialectical progression rather than an oscillation in Nicole’s thought (“Les leçons de l’amour-propre chez P. Nicole,” 243, 264). Laude argues that Nicole’s position constitutes a correction and an extension of Pascal, who developed an analogous dialectical justification of the acceptance of the natural order in the name of the supernatural order but who applied this solely to social and political institutions, not to interior principles of motivation (263–64). Laude argues, further, that Nicole represents Jansenism at its most consistent; maintaining the utter discontinuity of nature and grace alongside the absolute interiority and hiddenness of charity, Nicole grants a certain autonomy and legitimacy to worldly morality in order to prevent Christian charity from being reduced to social ethics (266, 269). But Laude fails to show how it is con-

Notes to Pages 260–62

406

sistent for Nicole, given his assertion of the utter opposition between self-love and charity, to argue that the former can serve as a kind of propaedeutic to the latter and can make this seem plausible only by appealing to the intrinsic opacity of moral action. But if this is emphasized, how can Nicole be confident of either the opposition of self-love and charity or of the possibility of one giving rise to the other? As Laude himself concedes, “c’est une chose en effet que d’imiter les attitudes extérieures de la piété et de la charité en vue de préparer l’âme à la grâce, c’en est une autre que d’ “utiliser” l’amour-propre de la nature déchue en vue d’instaurer une vertu réelle à fondements spirituels” (258). 22. “Des moyens de conserver la paix avec les hommes,” I.2:209; I.15:239. 23. “De la civilité Chrétienne,” 4:275. 24. “Des moyens de conserver la paix,” I.12:234. 25. James argues that Nicole’s notion of self-love comes to comprise both “the legitimate instinct of self-preservation and amour-propre” (Nicole, 160). James regards this not as incoherence but as an affirmation that the good is not utterly foreign to human nature and that reason, for Nicole, has survived the Fall largely intact, still able to perceive and pursue the good. I read Nicole as torn between this view and a more traditional Jansenist one. 26. “Des moyens de conserver la paix,” I.2:211. 27. Ibid., I.2:210; II.4:250–51. 28. The Maximes, or Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, was published in 1665 and was reedited a number of times by La Rochefoucauld, culminating in the fifth edition of 1678. For further reflections on the title, see La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Stuart D. Warner and Stéphane Douard (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s, 2001), vii–x. This is a bilingual edition, to which I refer when citing either the original or the English translation. I cite by maxim number (M), with withdrawn maxims cited as MS number (maxime supprimé) and posthumous maxims as PM. 29. On the Fronde, see Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 213–40. 30. “Portrait of La Rochefoucauld by Himself,” included in Maxims, 134–35. 31. Jean Lafond, Augustinisme et littérature (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977). A. J. Krailsheimer, too, regards La Rochefoucauld as a Jansenist, even if perhaps a self-deceived one: Studies in Self-Interest from Descartes to La Bruyère (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 96. See also Vivien Thweatt, La Rochefoucauld and the Seventeenth-Century Concept of the Self (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1980), 241. For a critical assessment of Lafond’s thesis, much more detailed than I can provide here, see Henry C. Clark, La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 105–20. My interpretation, as will become clear, is substantially in accord with Clark’s. 32. Thweatt, Concept of the Self, 10.

Notes to Pages 262–66

407

33. Warner and Douard, introduction to Maxims, 2. 34. Gracián’s Oráculo manual was well known to La Rochefoucauld; it was a favorite of the Marquise de Sablé, who included much of it within her own collection of maxims. See Clark, Language of Unmasking, 49. 35. See Warner and Douard, introduction to Maxims, xi. 36. Krailsheimer, Studies in Self-Interest, 88. Jean Starobinski also makes this point forcefully: “L’amour-propre, au lieu d’être un centre d’activité, un premier moteur, un principe d’unification, est en réalité ce qui nous décentre, ce qui nous dérobe toute consistance intérieure”: “La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” La Nouvelle Revue Française (July–August 1966): 16–34, 211–29; here 19. 37. Warner and Douard complain that La Rochefoucauld is often not faithfully translated in this regard (introduction to Maxims, xi–xii). 38. On La Rochefoucauld’s determinism, see Clark, Language of Unmasking, 124; Starobinski, “La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” 32–34. 39. See Starobinksi on the ethic of force, “La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” 25–32. This is not, though, Starobinski’s fi nal interpretation, which centers instead on an aestheticized, social form of honnêteté. Starobinski does insist that the latter does not in any simple way displace the former (212). 40. Clark, Language of Unmasking, 130, 136–37, 192. 41. Starobinski suggests that La Rochefoucauld renounces an ethic of action, placing in its stead an aesthetic of expression (“La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” 213). While it would be foolish to deny in the author of the so carefully crafted Maximes a strong aesthetic sensibility, this aesthetic element does not displace the ethical. One might well ask how, on La Rochefoucauld’s deterministic picture of the human psyche, a person is able to achieve the total honesty that comprises true honnêteté. The frank answer, I think, is that luck renders a few persons masters of themselves through their own capacity for selfknowledge. Starobinski takes this as a reason for rejecting the ethic of sincerity, not seeming to recognize that the same determinism must apply to the realm he seeks to carve out of aestheticized honnêteté. 42. These are Clark’s words. He goes on to add that the self-portrait would give us to believe that La Rochefoucauld “possesses many virtues that he would teach us to regard as difficult if not impossible to acquire,” that he “is generally possessed of ‘virtuous’ sentiments,” and “that he is one of those rare ‘well-made souls’ who act by reason rather than by the passions that hold ‘le peuple’ in thrall”: “a picture of human possibilities more at odds with the psychology normally associated with the Maximes would be difficult to imagine” (Language of Unmasking, 135). It is critical, though, that the Maximes indicate these to be rare and difficult, not impossible. Clark’s own analysis is qualified later in his book, where he concludes that “the moral core of La Rochefoucauld’s honnêteté, then, far from being in contradiction with the unmasking enterprise, is rather its very definition and rationale” (188).

Notes to Pages 267–69

408

43. Some commentators have found in the Réflexions diverses an affirmation by La Rochefoucauld that sincerity serves also as the basis for a positive social order. In addition to Starobinski, see Richard Hodgson, Falsehood Disguised: Unmasking the Truth in La Rochefoucauld (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995), 92–108; in a more qualified form, see Clark, Language of Unmasking, 192–97, and Thweatt, Concept of the Self, 133–52. Since these Réflexions were never published by La Rochefoucauld, they were discovered only in the eighteenth century, and their dating is uncertain, I refrain from basing my analysis of his thought on them. One of the difficulties with this line of interpretation is that it ends up suggesting that La Rochefoucauld did after all embrace certain forms of concealment and deception, since pleasing others becomes a central value. See Starobinski, “La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” 223–24. Thweatt is on fi rmer ground in her suggestion that La Rochefoucauld in the Réflexions is concerned to define “the frontier between the necessary accomodations of social commerce and the unacceptable compromise of the essential liberty, integrity, and inner sincerity of the self” (Concept of the Self, 137). On her account, he always “unequivocally condemns” paraître (240). 44. F. B. Kaye’s introduction to his edition of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees was influential in arguing for extensive French influence (in particular from Bayle and La Rochefoucauld, but also Nicole) on Mandeville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988). Also see Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (London: Macmillan, 1978), 19–31. 45. Anonymous, The Character of the Times Delineated (London, 1732), quoted in Phillip Harth, introduction to The Fable of the Bees, by Bernard Mandeville (London: Penguin, 1970), 8. 46. Kaye, introduction to Fable of the Bees, xxi. Mandeville does advocate duels as part and parcel of his defense of courtly civility; where the appearance of honor is what counts, only the willingness to resort to a duel can secure its possession. See Peltonen’s analysis in Duel in Early Modern England, ch. 5, which is invaluable, even if it fails to take account of Mandeville’s satirical tone and his own defiance of the rules of politeness. 47. Jennifer A. Herdt, Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52–53. 48. Hector Monro offers an annotated bibliography that traces the debate over Mandeville, particularly between the years 1924 and 1975, in The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 270–78. 49. M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56. 50. Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, vol. I, 5. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically.

Notes to Pages 269–73

409

51. Harth, introduction to Fable of the Bees. 52. The defense of luxury as stimulating economic prosperity was a common theme in quattrocento Florence, but here it went hand in hand with an outright rejection of Augustinian conceptions of human nature. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 74. Mandeville continues to pay lip service to an Augustinian tradition of moral anatomy while deploying it for antiAugustinian purposes. Moreover, Renaissance Florentines did not generalize from luxury to vice in general; private virtue was indeed requisite for public flourishing. 53. Goldsmith, Private Vices, 24. Note that Augustan civic republicanism (associated particularly with the thought of James Harrington) here diverges from the Renaissance republicanism discussed in the previous note. See also Horne, Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, 1–18. 54. David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1987), 280. 55. Albert O. Hirschman argues that Mandeville limits the idea of harnessing the passions, turning private vice into public benefits, to one particular vice, that of luxury, suggesting that this represented a “retreat from generality.” See The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 18. But while it is significant that the other vices must be concealed in order to be publicly beneficial, it remains the case that all virtue for Mandeville is merely concealed vice—there is no retreat from generality on this score. 56. By calling the reward imaginary, he seems to mean that honor offers no concrete, tangible benefit—he points out that it “costs nothing” (I, 42). Moreover, honor and dishonor are conventional rather than natural. Different actions and characters receive honor in different societies, even if Mandeville believes he has discerned the characteristics shared by anything that is honored—it must benefit society. 57. Goldsmith suggests that Mandeville’s account of the invention of virtue is thus “an elliptical way of pointing to a gradual development whose stages we may not know but which we can reconstruct conjecturally” (Private Vices, 62). F. A. Hayek argues that it is this insight into the generative social power of the unintended consequences of individual actions that marks Mandeville’s genuine innovation: “Dr. Bernard Mandeville,” in Proceedings of the British Academy LII (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 129. For an interpretation that takes Mandeville’s “skilful politicians” literally, see Horne, Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, who reads Mandeville as a mercantilist advocating the need for a powerful state to bring about artificial order (51–75, see esp. 71). 58. On Grotius, see Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),

Notes to Pages 273–76

410

67–70. Schneewind’s entire discussion of the modern natural law tradition is indispensable (15–166). Hobbes is of course the exception to this generally Providentialist character of the modern natural law tradition. Unlike Mandeville, though, Hobbes did think it vital for the sovereign to impose both moral rules and religious doctrine. 59. The argument was developed in Pierre Bayle’s Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). See especially sections 92, 129, 133–38, 161, 172–79. Bayle shared with the Jansenists the conviction that fallen human nature is governed by passions rather than reason. But while agreeing that what is required is a transformation of the heart and that persons cannot love God without the inward operation of the Holy Spirit (sec. 157), he was more pessimistic than they about the extent to which grace reforms human nature (sec. 92). 60. Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 281. 61. See Goldsmith, Private Vices, 47–54. 62. As John Colman writes, Mandeville is best understood “as giving an account not of something which once happened in primitive or pre-social conditions, but of something taking place in society. What he gives is an analysis of moral education”: “Bernard Mandeville and the Reality of Virtue,” Philosophy 47 (1972): 125–39, here 129. See Fable of the Bees, I, 53, on curtsying. 63. On “harnessing” the passions, see Hirschman, Passions and the Interests, 14–20. 64. Hume was later to explicitly connect commerce and civility—it is through commerce (contact, exchange, interaction with others) that persons as well as nations become civilized: David Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985), 119–23. Hirschman’s Passions and the Interests is centrally directed toward showing how wide-ranging reflections on self-interest and the passions became narrowly focused on the economic realm. If Hirschman is clearly right to see the emerging discipline of economics as coming out of discussions within moral theology and philosophy, he is wrong to imply that economic discourse simply displaced these broader concerns and conversations. They continued, but the emerging specialization of disciplines meant that economic discourse was often effectively insulated from their attempts at criticism. 65. On Mandeville’s thought in relation to Shaftesbury, see Horne, Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, 32–50. On Shaftesbury’s ties to the republican tradition, see Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 289–309, who is influenced by J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 66. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of

Notes to Pages 276–79

411

Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711; 1714), ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), I.246–80. 67. For Shaftesbury, both virtue and beauty are forms of harmony, which have an immediate pleasurable effect on observers. This was the origin of later notions of the moral sense, though the latter are stripped of the Neoplatonic context of Shaftesbury’s reflections on cosmic harmony. On Shaftesbury’s account of natural moral goodness in relation to genuine virtue, see Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 176–206. 68. For most of those seeking to refute Hobbes and Mandeville, it was important to reply without recourse to Augustinian accounts of the need for grace to heal fallen human nature, not because of any widespread repudiation of Christian faith but because the notion of a God who holds human beings eternally responsible for an inherited guilt was increasingly found irrational and morally reprehensible. A loving God would not demand of human beings anything impossible, and thus human nature as we encounter it every day (as opposed to in the Garden of Eden) must be capable of goodness. On responses contemporary to Hobbes, see Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); for the general theological developments, see Daniel P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 69. Joseph Butler, “Upon the Love of Our Neighbor,” sermon XI, in Fifteen Sermons (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1860; reprinted Charlottesville, VA: Lincoln-Rembrandt, 1993), 127. 70. Ibid., sermon I, in Fifteen Sermons, 29. 71. Butler, “Upon the Love of Our Neighbor,” 131. 72. See Monro, Ambivalence of Mandeville, 114–15. 73. And in fact these concepts were the respective Achilles heels of Shaftesbury and Butler, for in appealing to a natural faculty of moral judgment, they in effect sought to insulate some aspect of the moral life from critical analysis, making that the privileged site of connection to God—a kind of naturalized grace. Instead, it would have been more productive to have allowed that the processes of social formation go all the way down, and thus that we have no unmediated access to true moral judgment, while continuing to point out that the reduction of all principles of action to self-love does not do justice either to discursive or social reality. The possibility of grace is always present, but it does not constitute a guarantee against moral failure. 74. Monro, Ambivalence of Mandeville, 260. 75. Ibid., 260. 76. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 9.

Notes to Pages 283–85

412

ch a p t er t en 1. On the centrality of hypocrisy to Rousseau’s concerns and its relation to earlier French thought, see Nannerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 420–27. Keohane argues that Rousseau’s core critique of artificial moralities based on self-interest is that they falsely assume “a natural harmony of selfish interests. Since no such harmony exists, a morality that begins by teaching us to serve the interests of others to advance our own becomes the hypocritical cover for a continual struggle among individuals attempting to make themselves happy” (428). Maurice Cranston, similarly, takes the distinction between reality and appearance to be an underlying theme of much of Rousseau’s thought: Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 305. 2. Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), 75. See also Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Peter Gay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954; 1963), 73–78. 3. See Paul Meyer, “Rousseau’s Emile,” Modern Language Quarterly 19 (1958): 99–114. Rousseau has successively been viewed as extreme individualist, extreme collectivist, self-contradictory, and proto-Kantian. Peter Gay, in his introduction to Cassirer’s Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, agrees with Cassirer on the basic unity of Rousseau’s thought, the central doctrine of which is “the belief that man, by nature good, can transform himself into the good citizen in the good society” (18). Nevertheless, Gay suggests that Cassirer, by reading Rousseau too fully through a Kantian lens, imposes greater unity on Rousseau’s thought than actually exists (24). Scholarship following Cassirer has tended to follow along the lines suggested by Gay—acceptance of some degree of unity in Rousseau’s thought that overcomes initial appearances of an utter clash of individualist and collectivist extremes, along with a recognition of significant remaining contradictions. 4. Judith Shklar makes this point in Men and Citizens: Rousseau’s Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), as does Clifford Orwin, “Rousseau on the Sources of Ethics,” in Instilling Ethics, ed. Norma Thompson (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 66. 5. My thesis thus bears some resemblance to that of Mark Cladis, who argues that the tensions in Rousseau’s thought reflect his location at a crossroads between Augustinian pessimism and Enlightenment humanist optimism: Public Vision, Private Lives: Rousseau, Religion, and 21st-Century Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), especially ch. 6. Unlike Cladis, though, I am not interested in the hyper-Augustinian tradition primarily as an expression of pessimism, but rather as a set of particularly rigorous expectations for what can count as true virtue.

Notes to Pages 286–92

413

6. I return to these contemporary debates in greater detail in the conclusion. 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, vol. III, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 4 vols. (Paris: Pleiade, 1959–1969), 152. Translation is from The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1964), 128. Further references are given parenthetically to the volume and page number from the Pleiade edition and the page number from the English translation. 8. It was long held by scholars of Rousseau that amour-propre was seen by Rousseau as itself a vice, not simply the source of all vices. But amour-propre is now better understood as in itself neutral; without it, one would lack all sense of oneself, as an I in relation to other I’s. At the same time, there are passages in which Rousseau does argue not simply that amour-propre degenerates in a context of social inequality but that by rendering persons dependent on the opinions of others it cannot but degenerate. On amour-propre as properly neutral, see Nicholas J. H. Dent, Rousseau (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). For a view that is supportive of Dent while dwelling more fully on the internal tensions in Rousseau’s account, see Timothy O’Hagan, “Amour-propre,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sources of the Self, ed. Timothy O’Hagan (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997), 66–84. 9. Jonas Barish sets Rousseau’s critique of theater within the broader tradition of antitheatrical commentary in The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 256–94. 10. J. J. Rousseau Citoyen de Genève, À Monsier d’Alembert, vol. V, Oeuvres complètes, 15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. and intr. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960), 16. 11. In “novels of sentiment,” argues R. F. Brissenden, sympathetic feelings are seen as valuable in themselves and as taking the place of active response to suffering: Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974). See also Norman S. Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 195–218. 12. As Amal Banerjee notes, it is precisely because of this confidence in an innate moral sense that Rousseau can afford simply to reject, rather than attempt to channel, the transformative power of theater; he can decry every attempt to be other than oneself: “Rousseau’s Concept of Theatre,” British Journal of Aesthetics 17 (1977): 171–77. As we shall see, though, it is not after all clear that authenticity and the moral sense are so easily reconciled in Rousseau. 13. As the reference to “manners” and “commerce” suggests, Rousseau’s critique of society, though presented in general terms, is properly an indictment of modern bourgeois society. Even if, as Adam Smith argued, a modern com-

Notes to Pages 292–94

414

mercial society in fact fosters honesty as the best policy, in doing so it regards honesty as useful to its possessor rather than an intrinsic good. Thus, when the bourgeois “raises his exaggerated claims to honesty, he does so not from a genuine faith in or admiration of honesty . . . but from a calculated desire for the material benefits of being thought honest”: Arthur M. Melzer, “Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Owen and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 285. Thus, Melzer argues, the honest bourgeois is really a hypocrite, and it was against this form of hypocrisy that Rousseau proclaimed the new ideal of authenticity. 14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Èmile ou de l’Éducation, vol. IV, Oeuvres complètes, 282. Translation from Émile, or On Education, intr. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 63. 15. As Mary Nichols notes, Émile “wants only to be himself,” and she draws attention to Émile’s utter lack of desire to imitate Plutarch’s heroes: “Rousseau’s Novel Education in the Emile,” Political Theory 13.4 (1985): 535–58; here 535. Rousseau rejects the ideal not only of the ancient hero but also of the bourgeois and the religious man, since all become dependent on something or someone outside themselves. 16. I employ masculine pronouns in discussing Rousseau’s educational philosophy because Rousseau is notoriously explicit that men and women require a substantially different education. Women are in Rousseau’s view properly dependent on the regard of men. They ought therefore to be concerned with reputation: “opinion is the grave of virtue among men and its throne among women” (IV 702–3, 365). 17. Nichols perceptively notes that Rousseau as tutor serves as God for Émile, who is Rousseau’s “creation, work, child, and property” (“Rousseau’s Novel Education,” 549). Lester Crocker explores the ironies of the tutor’s manipulative role in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 2:132–42. 18. Keohane argues that Émile’s virtue is constituted by his pity, the “extension of his self-love to others” (Philosophy and the State, 433). It is this expansion of the self that prevents Émile’s self-interest from clashing incessantly with that of others. 19. In effect, Rousseau in Émile abandons the opposition between amourpropre and amour de soi-même, as Orwin emphasizes (“Rousseau on Sources of Ethics,” 75). The emphasis is placed instead on the particular form that social comparison takes, which will determine whether amour-propre gives rise to generosity or to prideful competition. It is surprising to find in Rousseau a positive account of gratitude, since this implies a positive recognition of dependency. But Rousseau distinguishes between dependence on nature and dependence on persons (IV 311, 85). To feel that one has been lucky elicits a kind of impersonal gratitude for one’s good fortune, rather than a feeling of personal indebtedness.

Notes to Pages 294–97

415

20. Elsewhere, Rousseau explores a different line of argument, according to which comparison with others can be good so long as we compete with others only for recognition of virtue, rather than look for admiration of our wealth, power, or other natural advantages. When Rousseau idealizes Sparta and Geneva as small, egalitarian societies, he often elevates this kind of ethic of glory. See O’Hagan, “Amour-propre,” 74–76; Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 441. But an ethic of glory, in which virtue is pursued for the sake of winning others’ esteem, is consistent neither with independence from the opinions of others nor with the freedom of obedience only to self-imposed law. 21. Paul Meyer arrives at a similar conclusion: “The Individual and Society in Rousseau’s Emile,” Modern Language Quarterly 19 (1958): 99–114; here 103. 22. This point is driven home forcefully by Julia Simon, who notes that “because sociability and morality are largely motivated by sexual desire in Rousseau, he fails to address the serious question of moral relations arising through relations of care”: “Natural Freedom and Moral Autonomy: Emile as Parent, Teacher and Citizen,” History of Political Thought 16.1 (1995): 21–36, here 27. She argues further that while Émile possesses one sort of independence, this is not moral autonomy; he “has not been educated to understand moral autonomy as necessarily bound up with others” (36). Simon does not attend sufficiently to the latter parts of Émile, which move beyond the “education from things” on which she focuses; nevertheless, her overall conclusions remain persuasive. 23. Needless to say, this is an account equally applicable to both girls and boys, women and men. 24. “Transparency” is the central lens of analysis for Jean Starobinski, who argues that a concern for transparency unites all the various prescriptions offered by Rousseau, individual and social, revolutionary and conservative: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; original French ed., 1971), 13. 25. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions, vol. I, Oeuvres complétes, 5. Translation from Confessions, ed. and intr. P. N. Furbank (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 1. 26. It is this level of Rousseau’s thought that is emphasized by Ronald Grimsley, who argues that for Rousseau, sincerity actually functions as a guarantee of objective, universal validity: The Philosophy of Rousseau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 8. 27. Ruth W. Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 58–59. 28. Charles Taylor associates this value placed on originality or uniqueness with Herder in particular, and he sees it as a development that occurs after Rousseau. It is true that it exists in tension with other ideas in Rousseau, such as that through contact with ourselves we come into proper relationship with conscience as a universal moral source. But both elements are nonetheless

Notes to Pages 297–99

416

present in Rousseau. See Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28; Melzer, “Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity,” 286. Melzer uses the term sincerity but means by it what I am calling authenticity—”being oneself regardless of what one may be.” Starobinski’s suggestion is that “Jean-Jacques desires this difference but also deplores it: it is both a misfortune and a reason to be proud” ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 7). 29. Melzer, “Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity,” 289. 30. Cassirer notes that sentiment has a double meaning in Rousseau; it can mean either feeling or moral judgment. Cassirer argues that the two must be distinguished in order to preserve the intelligibility of Rousseau’s thought, “if this double meaning is ignored, the tortuous threads of Rousseau’s doctrine threaten to become tangled up again and again” (Question of Jean-Jacques, 110). Yet Cassirer emphasizes the latter and dismisses the former as “mere” sentiment. Understanding Rousseau requires, though, recognizing that, as was common among “sentimentalists” of the period, Rousseau does not differentiate between these two senses of sentiment, and the fact that he does not helps to explain why he does not see more clearly the tension between the ideal of individuality and the ideal of obedience to conscience, both of which could credibly make a claim to the title of authenticity. 31. As Cassirer notes (with hearty approval), it is due to his faith in an infallible conscience that Rousseau can categorically reject ethical exemplars (Question of Jean-Jacques, 124). 32. For the relevant autobiographical details, see P. N. Furbank, introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Confessions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), x. 33. Orwin’s cryptic comment, in an essay that attempts to reveal the unity of Rousseau’s moral thought, is that “whether or not the sort of conscience that Rousseau preaches is compatible with Rousseau’s principles, it alone can serve his rhetorical turn” (“Rousseau on Sources of Ethics,” 70). 34. I do not intend here to be condemning the ideal of authenticity as such. As understood by Charles Taylor, in a way that recognizes rather than seeks to exclude what Taylor calls the “dialogical” character of human life and a horizon of significance beyond the self, it is not problematic for the understanding of virtue I am advancing here. See Ethics of Authenticity, 31–41. Taylor seeks to explain why the ideal of authenticity slides into subjectivism, into deviant selfcentered forms. My project seeks to show that the ideal was from the outset shaped in problematic ways by the legacy of the splendid vices. 35. Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 51. 36. On a broader context of French civic humanist thought to which Rousseau is heir, see Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 82–87. 37. Patrick Coleman notes the importance of knowing one’s fellow citizens

Notes to Pages 302–4

417

as particular persons, not merely as abstract others: “what makes the fête so important is not merely that the people are transparent to each other, but that at the same time each citizen knows who his fellows are”: Rousseau’s Political Imagination: Rule and Representation in the “Lettre à d’Alembert” (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 145. 38. As Keohane notes, “Rousseau was convinced that, although there is no natural harmony of selfish interests, there are such things as true common interests” (Philosophy and the State, 437). The Genevan social practices Rousseau praises can be understood as enabling citizens to discover these shared interests. Keohane adds that the legislator’s art “requires creating new areas of common interest not found in nature, to bolster those that are, so that the common interest can grow to a point where it holds a dominant position in men’s lives,” 439. What Rousseau fails to see, though, is that this will be less, not more, possible if individuals are subjected to a negative education that postpones socialization and moral formation in the name of the preservation of natural freedom. 39. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, vol. III, Oeuvres complétes, 361–62. Translation from The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 164. For readings of Rousseau as totalitarian, see, e.g., Lester G. Crocker, Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Interpretive Essay (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968), and John W. Chapman, Rousseau—Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). 40. These corrections are stressed by Ferrara, in Modernity and Authenticity, 55–58, but he also recognizes some remaining “totalitarian” features (59–60). 41. The need for the legislator stems from the fact that Rousseau here so closely links the creation of moral personhood with the creation of political society, rather than understanding political society to be formed by persons who are already moral beings. Even Grimsley, who defends the unity of Rousseau’s thought, notes that “the Lawgiver is an interesting example of Rousseau’s somewhat ambiguous attitude toward the problem of authority. Although his political principles are clearly democratic in their implications, in as much as they rest upon the notion of popular consent and sovereignty, he tends to doubt man’s ability to put them into operation without the help of some kind of superior being” (Philosophy of Rousseau, 107). 42. Nichols suggests that, at least within the context of Émile, “the capacity of the imagination to endow the world with beauty, and finally Emile’s love of Sophie, will be the solution Rousseau offers to the problems that religion cannot solve” (“Rousseau’s Novel Education,” 550–51). Given a society made up of persons who have not had Émile’s ideal education, however, Rousseau favors after all the symbolic power of religion over the aesthetic imagination, or at least thinks that the aesthetic imagination yoked with religion, rather than yoked with romantic love, will prove more reliable.

Notes to Pages 304–7

418

43. For a sympathetic treatment of Rousseau’s attempt to unite civil religion with freedom of religion, see Cladis, Public Vision, Private Lives, 187–213.

ch a p t er el e v en 1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; 1984), 230–31. 2. Michael Slote argues that a variety of different sentimentalist views can be found at various points in Hume, including emotivism, projectivism, and ideal-observer theory: “Sentimentalist Virtue and Moral Judgement: Outline of a Project,” Metaphilosophy 34.1/2 ( January 2003): 131–43, here 139. Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) is perhaps the best-known example of an expressivist or projectivist Humean project. My own interpretation, like that of Annette Baier, V. M. Hope, and others, is closest to the third of these. See Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s “Treatise” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), and V. M. Hope, Virtue by Consensus: The Moral Philosophy of Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 3. Baier, Progress of Sentiments, 288. 4. Others who make similar claims include W. D. Falk, “Hume on Practical Reason,” Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 1–18; Kate Abramson, “Two Portraits of the Humean Moral Agent,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2002): 301–34; J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 354–77. Jacqueline Taylor recognizes important differences between Hume’s account of the virtues and that of Aristotle and contemporary neo-Aristotelians; she suggests that new Humeans characterize their position as “sentiment-based ethics” rather than virtue ethics: “Humean Ethics and the Politics of Sentiment,” Topoi 21 (2002): 175–86; here 175. Where Aristotle and Hume part ways, she champions Hume, as offering an account that “is wellsuited to take on the task of critically examining . . . multiple perspectives and discourses, by combining an expressive account of ethical attitudes and a more substantive account of socio-cultural constructions of ethical or ethicallyimbued attitudes and the characters and other aspects of persons to which they are directed” (181). Like Baier, then, she regards Hume as offering an account of virtue more suited to a modern context, even if she differs from Baier in the specific aspects of Hume’s thought that she highlights and in conceding that Hume’s account is not recognizably Aristotelian. It is not clear, though, that Hume’s sentiment-based ethic is in fact free from the conservative tendencies Taylor finds problematic in Aristotelianism (180), since while it provides resources for the description of moral diversity, it is less clear, as I shall discuss below, on what basis “critical examination” can proceed, beyond the search for internal consistency.

Notes to Pages 307–10

419

5. Annette Baier, “Civilizing Practices,” in Postures of the Mind (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 249, 257, 258. Baier’s critique of MacIntyre’s assessment of Hume is based solely on After Virtue, in which MacIntyre does not explicitly take up a Christian standpoint. 6. Judith Shklar places Hume in the company of Benjamin Franklin in this respect: Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1984), 72. What she notes of Franklin could also be said of Hume, that “the necessity of assuming social roles is not only inevitable; it does not merit, apart from the notion of a supreme inner self, the charge of hypocrisy, for it does not hide a public crime” (74). Neither Hume nor Franklin shared Rousseau’s commitment to the authentic inner self, neither did they seek to adhere to what Shklar terms the “religious conscience.” They slip between a hyper-Augustinian concern for honesty and a Romantic concern for authenticity, both of which tend to give birth to charges of hypocrisy. 7. David Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, text revised by P. H. Nidditch from the 1777 ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 10. Further citations are given parenthetically to “E.” 8. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, text revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 486–87. Further citations are given parenthetically to “T.” 9. David Fate Norton helpfully situates Hume’s argument against the reduction to self-interest against the background of related discussions reaching back to Grotius: “Hume, Human Nature, and the Foundations of Morality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 148–81. 10. Frederick Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 140–49. 11. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971; facsimile of the first ed., 1725), 21. 12. Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971; facsimile of the first ed., 1725), 275. Knud Haakonssen makes a similar point in “Moral Philosophy and Natural Law: From the Cambridge Platonists to the Scottish Enlightenment,” Political Science 40 (1988): 107. 13. Hume was clearly also impressed with the arguments of Joseph Butler, many of which he reiterates in appendix 2 of the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. 14. Hume has seemed to some interpreters to change his position on this issue in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; I have argued for his essential consistency in Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75–77.

Notes to Pages 310–13

420

15. On the artificiality of the moral viewpoint, see also Hope, Virtue by Consensus, 10, 52–63. 16. Baier, Progress of Sentiments, 97. 17. On the reflexivity of pride, see Baier, Progress of Sentiments, 134. On the role of pride in the construction of the self, see Pauline Chazan, “Pride, Virtue, and Self-Hood: A Reconstruction of Hume,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22.1 (1992): 45–64. 18. A similar account is offered by Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 360. 19. Baier, Progress of Sentiments, 170. R. G. Frey argues, in contrast, that Hume does not succeed in showing that motives arising out of desire for esteem will win out over motives arising directly from self-love: “Virtue, Commerce and Self-Love,” Hume Studies 21.2 (November 1995): 275–87, here 284. On Frey’s view, Hume is driven back into the arms of Mandeville, unable to argue for a reconciliation between virtue and economic motivation (286–87). What is striking here is the inflexibility Frey assumes to exist in the structure of human motivation, perhaps due to the fact that his starting point is with reflection on economic motivation. But Hume is writing at a time when assumptions concerning economic motivation are still in the process of being formed by the emergent social sciences. 20. Charlotte Brown persuasively argues that Hume’s view is not internalist, that is, it does not show that the consciousness that a particular course of action is the right one itself provides the agent with a motive to choose that course of action. This is somewhat surprising, since Hume is often viewed as an internalist and indeed seems to commit himself to internalism in his famous argument that moral judgments “excite passions, and produce or prevent actions,” in contrast to reason, which is “utterly impotent in this particular” (T 457). But Brown rightly notes that “in both the natural and artificial case, the regard for the moral worth of the action motivates not in virtue of being moral but in virtue of its relation to pride and the desire to be happy”: “Is Hume an Internalist?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988), 69–87, here 86. Moreover, as she notes, the rationalists against whom Hume was arguing (notably Samuel Clarke) were themselves internalists (349). If Hume is inconsistent, it is in part because he understood himself to be contributing to an argument over reason and sentiment rather than over internalism versus externalism. NeoHumean internalists need to show that the moral sentiments in themselves possess motivational power. Internalist readings of Hume tend to do this by stressing as primary the motives associated with the natural virtues. (See, for instance, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, “How Does the Humean Sense of Duty Motivate?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 [1996]: 383–407.) However, our natural “moral” sentiments are, on Hume’s account, partial, limited, and unreliable in ways that contrast dramatically with fully developed moral sentiments. Once

Notes to Pages 314–17

421

this is taken into account, it becomes much more difficult to view Hume’s moral thought as consistently internalist. 21. As Sharon Krause points out, Hume frequently refers to the category of immediately agreeable characteristics as “noble” (i.e., E 90, E 102f, T 620). “Hume uses the language of nobility and elevation while rejecting the framework of independent value that had once given it meaning. . . . Yet in rejecting it without replacing it, Hume undercuts his ability to explain why certain qualities are immediately agreeable and why we associate them with nobility and elevation. These perceptions fit no larger pattern of meaning”: “Hume and the (False) Luster of Justice,” Political Theory 32.5 (October 2004): 628–55; here 635. 22. Hume does pay lip service to Christian beliefs at various points in his writings, but in such a way that these affi rmations cancel one another out. For instance, at some points he implies that the faithful have no choice but to embrace fideism, while at other points he suggests that only a rational faith can survive. Throughout, though, he openly insists that morality requires no religious foundation and that Christian faith has a strong tendency to undermine character and corrupt moral judgment. His primary concern is not to spread atheism as such but to set human morality free from any connection with religious faith. Scholars continue to debate the nature of Hume’s own religious beliefs; J. C. A. Gaskin, “Hume’s Attenuated Deism,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 65 (1983): 160–73; Paul Russell, “Skepticism and Natural Religion in Hume’s Treatise,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 247–65; Shane Andre, “Was Hume an Atheist?” Hume Studies 19 (1993): 141–66; Keith Yandell, Hume’s “Inexplicable Mystery”: His Views on Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). 23. For a fuller discussion of Hume’s account of the hypocrisy of theistic belief and the artificiality of the lives inspired by these beliefs, see Herdt, Religion and Faction, 175–88; 197–206. See also Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), pt. XII. 24. Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 139. Further citations are given parenthetically to “NHR.” 25. Hume, Dialogues, 84. 26. Baier, “Civilizing Practices,” 254, 257. Baier also notes Hume’s dismissal of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary; here she seems wrongly to suggest that Aristotle envisions actions being determined by “feats of will by the individual” (255). 27. Ibid., 260. 28. I did the same in Religion and Faction, where I argued that “once the practice of moral approbation has come into its own, new motivational possibilities

Notes to Pages 318–19

422

are created—it is now possible for us to be motivated by the desire to be loved and respected qua virtuous. Virtue emerges as a good in its own right—it is not simply an instrumental good used to obtain love and respect, but rather a good internal to or constitutive of a life worth living” (70). My key mistake then was in thinking that the first of these two sentences implied the second. A similar argument has been developed more recently by Abramson in “Two Portraits.” She argues that Humean greatness of mind, which she takes to be strength of mind arising out of consciousness of virtuous character, allows its possessors to take pleasure in their character even in the extreme case in which it leads to their own death. The agent is thus better off only “in the specifically moral sense of making him more virtuous” (325). Abramson argues that true greatness is the endpoint of a natural developmental path, at the outset of which virtues are held always to produce natural goods, while at the end the virtuous agent recognizes purely moral goods, goods only for the virtuous, 326. In fact, though, what Abramson shows is that Hume can be assimilated to Aristotle only insofar as Aristotelian magnanimity is made central to the comparison—but then the same problems that plagued Aristotelian magnanimity recur, undermining the claim that magnanimity constitutes a crown of the virtues. As Abramson concedes, “the great man has no where else to turn for psychological support but to his affective investment in his conception of the value of his own character—his pride in consistently regulating his passions in the ways of which he morally approves” (324). 29. Krause, “(False) Luster of Justice,” 645–46. 30. Chazan also argues for a close resemblance between Hume’s virtuous person and Aristotle’s magnanimous person, although she notes that the selfworth of Aristotle’s megalopsuchos is not socially constituted (“Pride, Virtue, and Self-Hood,” 62–63). And see Abramson, “Two Portraits,” 306. 31. On Hume’s departure from the republican tradition, see Krause, “(False) Luster of Justice,” 637. 32. Of course, the natural virtues offer their own motives for action— generosity, gratitude, etc. But these require correction and supplementation in the ways noted above and are ineffective in the realm of the artificial virtues. 33. On the calm passions as the key to the unity of Hume’s corpus, see John Immerwahr, “Hume on Tranquillizing the Passions,” Hume Studies 18.2 (1992): 293–314. As Immerwahr notes, “in addition to being more intrinsically pleasant, calm passions are [on Hume’s account] also essential to the task of maximizing our long-run satisfactions” (297). 34. Neo-Aristotelian critiques of Humean standpoints are plentiful. For example, see Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” The Journal of Ethics 3 (1999): 163–201.

Notes to Pages 323–24

423

ch a p t er t w elv e 1. Patrick Riley insists on the importance of the Augustinian good will to Kant in “The Elements of Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” in Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 9–37. Riley argues that “the Platonic (rationalist) and Aristotelian (teleological) strands in Kant can be partially realized only if one side of Augustinianism comes to the rescue of the other: if good will is rendered impotent by self-love, if Augustinian morality and Augustinian psychology collide to produce an impasse, then at best certain moral ends (for example, peacefulness) can be slowly attained through the self-love of intelligent ‘devils’ who are weak in moral ‘incentives’ ” (10). From Riley’s perspective, then, the Augustinian elements in Kant’s thought collide to require the centrality of politics, but this arena of gradual change takes center stage as a concession to the failure of fundamental moral transformation. 2. Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1. Somewhat surprisingly, Hume is also on Foot’s list, together with Mill, G. E. Moore, W. D. Ross, and H. A. Prichard. 3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 236. 4. One of the first to stress the prominence of virtue in Kant’s thought was Onora O’Neill, in “Kant after Virtue,” Inquiry 26 (1984): 387–406. 5. Among the most significant are Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); the essays in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Robert B. Louden, “Kant’s Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy 61 (1986): 473–89. 6. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), vol. 8, Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften (formerly Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), 29 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), 397–98. Translation is from Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10–11. Further citations are given parenthetically to “G,” with the page numbers from the Prussian Academy edition preceding the page numbers of the translation. 7. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), vol. 5, Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften (formerly Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), 29 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), 116. Translation is from Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and

Notes to Pages 324–25

424

trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 97. Further citations are given parenthetically to “KpV,” with the page numbers from the Prussian Academy edition preceding the page numbers of the translation. 8. Immanuel Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in der weltbürgerlichen Absicht,” Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, 15–31. Translation is from Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent,” trans. T. M. Greene and H. Hudson, in German Essays on History, ed. Rolf Sältzer (New York: Continuum, 1991), 12. 9. Louden, “Kant’s Virtue Ethics,” 477. 10. Ibid., 478. 11. Christine Korsgaard, “From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics, 203–36, here 212. See also Rosalind Hursthouse on moral motivation, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123. Barbara Herman shows in detail why it is a mistaken interpretation to think that Kant held that only when an agent acts in the absence of inclination can an action have moral worth: The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–22; esp. 18–19. Thus Alasdair MacIntyre’s complaint against Stoicism, which he applies also to Kant, that “virtue is, indeed has to be, its own end, its own reward and its own motive,” is not after all to the point; the virtuous Kantian has the normal range of incentives for action, and various life-projects, but always asks if these incentives give her adequate reason to act here and now, if it is appropriate to pursue this project in this way at this time, etc.: After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 233. 12. Korsgaard, “From Duty,” 216–17. 13. Korsgaard argues that it is not enough to say that a morally good action must be chosen for its own sake, since some persons do an action for its own sake just because it is what they like to do, not because they perceive its intrinsic value. Their actions are chosen as desirable, rather than chosen as the right thing to do (ibid., 206). This distinction, I would argue, is already built into Aristotle’s understanding of what it means to choose virtuous actions for their own sake; to do so cannot simply be to choose these actions because one wants to do them, even though the fully virtuous agent will want to do these actions. 14. Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793), vol. 6, Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften (formerly Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), 29 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), 23. Translation is from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49, note. Subsequent references will be given in the text to R, followed by the page number from the Prussian Academy edition and the page number from the Wood and Giovanni translation.

Notes to Pages 325–33

425

15. Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797), vol. 6, Kants gesammelte Schriften, 484. Translation is from The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 273; see also 402/203 and 457/251, where Kant goes so far as to say that the practice of beneficence can generate love and that compassionate feelings ought to be cultivated as a means to feeling appropriate to moral principles. Subsequent references will be given in the text to M, followed by the page number from the Prussian Academy edition and the page number from the Gregor translation. Part II of the Critique of Practical Reason, the “Methodology of Pure Practical Reason,” is also important in this respect—although it is striking that it is only about one-tenth of the length of part I. 16. Barbara Herman, “Making Room for Character,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics, 36–60; here 44–45, 49, 51. Herman develops this account of acting from duty more fully in The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially ch. 5–10. 17. Louden, “Kant’s Virtue Ethics,” 489. 18. On this subject I have found T. H. Irwin’s essay “Kant’s Criticisms of Eudaemonism,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics, 63–101, particularly helpful. 19. Ibid., 80. 20. Ibid., 94. 21. Korsgaard’s discussion of the difference between the unreflective and the reflective sympathetic person is helpful here; see “From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble,” 208–9. In a footnote, Korsgaard states that although both Butler and Hume “make arguments in favor of beneficent action that take this form . . . neither of them thinks that this is the way to establish the moral value of beneficence; it is just a way to establish the harmony of beneficence and self-interest” (230n9). But while this is true of Butler, it does not quite capture Hume’s stance, which, while it undeniably renders moral approval independent of self-interest, rests moral motivation in the pursuit of subjective inclination. 22. Irwin, “Kant’s Criticisms of Eudaemonism,” 94. 23. Even when Kant speaks of the cheerfulness of the ethical ascetic, this cheerfulness is not a delight in the moral law as such but enjoyment specifically in “the consciousness of one’s restored freedom” and involves continual combat against natural impulses (M 485/274). 24. St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, IX, 4, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972; 1984), 853–54. 25. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168–73. 26. Karl Barth, From Rousseau to Ritschl (London: SCM, 1959), 176. 27. Gordon E. Michalson Jr., Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 97. 28. What noumenal agency amounts to can be interpreted in a variety of

Notes to Pages 333–34

426

ways. Recent interpretations tend to resist taking this as actual timeless agency, arguing instead that the point of such expressions in Kant is simply to note features that are inseparable from our conception of ourselves as moral agents. So, in this case, agents must regard their particular choices as expressions of an underlying choice that provides a meta-reason or fundamental maxim of action. Agents thus become aware of the Gesinnung as something they must, upon moral reflection, presuppose in themselves. Henry Allison’s account has led the way in this direction, see his Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 140–44, 154. But as Karl Ameriks argues, Allison’s claims seem driven by his own resistance to noumenal metaphysics rather than by Kant’s own thought. Allison seeks to translate Kant’s claims about our “intelligible character” and “transcendental freedom” into “what is simply a different perspective, a practical perspective on oneself as having a capacity to determine oneself by non-sensible norms.” As Ameriks points out, though, “surely, any actual determining must itself be regarded ultimately as either caused naturally or not so caused.” If nature is a closed system, as Allison holds, the latter is excluded, unless Allison has recourse after all to the noumenal metaphysics he rejects. Karl Ameriks, “Kant and Hegel on Freedom,” Inquiry 35.2 (1992): 219–32; here 222. Ameriks mounts a broader critique of contemporary antimetaphysical readings of Kant in Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4–13. George di Giovanni, too, questions Allison’s account on the basis of a close contextual study of Kant’s thought, Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ix–x. 29. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 159–60. 30. Ameriks makes precisely this point in “The Hegelian Critique of Kantian Morality,” in New Essays on Kant, ed. Bernard den Ouden and Marcia Moen (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 179–212; here 201. Even Allison’s insistence that the Gesinnung is “a kind of meta-reason or supreme value with respect to which we decide on particular courses of action rather than . . . functioning as a fixed habitus that causally conditions our subsequent choices” fails to obviate this problem (Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 143). Allison grants this; “put simply, the basic problem is that the very radical evil, which makes such a revolution necessary as a precondition of the attainment of virtue, would also seem to make it impossible.” He seeks to mitigate the “air of paradox” by suggesting that all that is required is that we “struggle against this propensity,” that we “commit” ourselves to this struggle (Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 170). But it is this very act of basic commitment that is unintelligible, given the inextirpability of radical evil. 31. On Kant’s project of translating Christian faith into rational categories, see the prefaces to the Religion; on the independence of morality from religion, see Religion, 4/33. Michalson emphasizes the problems Kant faces with sustaining motivation (Fallen Freedom, 100).

Notes to Pages 335–39

427

32. Nor is it fully clear how such hope in grace can be kept from creeping into, and thus corrupting, our actual motivations for acting. 33. Sharon Anderson-Gold offers an intriguing social interpretation of the propensity to evil, which, as she herself points out, assimilates Kant much more closely to Rousseau. Understanding the propensity to evil not as “simply ‘within me’ and ‘within you’ but something that operates between us,” she argues that the necessary revolution “rests upon the transformation of the social conditions of our existence”: “God and Community: An Inquiry into the Religious Implications of the Highest Good,” in Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, ed. Philip J. Rossi and Michael Wreen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 124–25. While Kant does note a distinction between the highest good for an individual and the highest good as such, which is social, the notion that the revolution of fundamental disposition is somehow itself social runs counter to the grain of Kant’s insistence that this must be possible for the individual moral agent. Anderson-Gold’s thesis is developed more fully in her book Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 34. Philip L. Quinn, “Saving Faith from Kant’s Remarkable Antinomy,” Faith and Philosophy 7 (1990): 418–33, here 431. Quinn agrees with Kant that “morality requires . . . that at some point the iron chain of determinism, theological or natural, be broken to make room for a contribution to worthiness to be happy from free and imputable human action,” but he argues that this need not require the moral agent to take the first step by bringing about a revolution in his or her fundamental disposition (432). Alternative models are possible: God may offer saving faith and leave individuals free to accept or reject it, or saving faith may be given irresistibly, but subsequent good works may require free human cooperation as a necessary condition. In either case, saving faith “contributes causally to engendering good works without causally necessitating them in accordance with some wholly deterministic law and quite apart from the spontaneity of moral freedom” (433). Another alternative, to which I gesture below, breaks with Kant’s antinomy rather than resolve it by suggesting that we need not construe human freedom and divine determination as excluding one another. 35. Michalson, Fallen Freedom, 84–85, 85. 36. Jacqueline Mariña, “Kant on Grace: A Reply to His Critics,” Religious Studies 33 (1997): 395n25, 387. 37. In Kant’s reflections on the ethical commonwealth we do see a shift to a this-worldly, gradual understanding of moral regeneration, for which the community, rather than the individual, is the primary site. Michalson offers an illuminating discussion of this shift in Kant’s understanding of moral regeneration, arguing that it reflects a decisive immanentization of the role that God plays in Kant’s earlier thought. As Michalson notes, though, Kant does

Notes to Pages 339–45

428

not offer any “neat integration of his view of moral regeneration in individual and corporate terms,” so the problems with the account of individual moral regeneration do not disappear: Kant and the Problem of God (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), 107. 38. There are contemporary efforts to show that Kant’s thought may coherently be interpreted along compatibilist lines. See, in particular, Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Compatibilism,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Allen Wood (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 73–101; Karl Ameriks draws attention to the problematic character of such attempts in “Kant and Hegel on Freedom,” 230. For a theological account of human and divine agency along the lines I suggest here, see Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

concl usion 1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Even prior to the publication of After Virtue, though Stanley Hauerwas had already begun to focus on character, if not yet explicitly on practices, narratives, and traditions, in Character and the Christian Life (San Antonio, Tex.: Trinity University Press, 1975; 1985). 2. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 223. 3. Within moral philosophy, virtue ethics was likewise embraced as an escape from deontology and utilitarianism. For some, the revival of virtue was explicitly an attempt to rid moral philosophy of baggage—notably the concept of obligation and morality understood in terms of law—left over from a Christian era. For others, it was primarily a critique of a moral philosophy focused on quandaries, on the task of formulating general moral principles and applying them to cases, especially hard cases. For the former, see Elizabeth Anscombe’s pathbreaking article “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958); reprinted in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26–44. For the latter, see Edmund Pincoffs, “Quandary Ethics,” Mind 80 (1971): 552–71. 4. Several key essays reflecting Hauerwas’s ecclesiological turn are included in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), notably “The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” (1983), 371–91, and “The Church as God’s New Language” (1986), 142–62. See also the volume edited by students of James McClendon, Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics after MacIntyre, ed. Nancey Murphy, Brad Kallenberg, and Mark Thiessen Nation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), and Gilbert Meilaender, Theory and Practice of Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Both Hauerwas and Meilaender drew on Catholic retrievals of a theological

Notes to Pages 345–47

429

account of Thomas Aquinas on the virtues, notably on Josef Pieper, Etienne Gilson, Servais Pinckaers, and Jacques Pohier. 5. Meilaender, Theory and Practice, 13–14. 6. Meilaender also notes that there is an element of hypocrisy or deception present; I only appear to be grateful; I am acting the part. But while one who acts from this reflexive motivation fails truly to exemplify gratitude, she may nevertheless be on the road to developing gratitude and therefore to true concern for the other. Insofar as this is indeed how we develop the virtues, and so a transitional and perhaps even a necessary transitional stage, Meilaender is willing to concede that “in this sense, hypocrisy is not always bad in the moral life,” Ibid., 15. In some respects, the present book is an extended historical reflection on this puzzle and on why, in the early modern period, this problematic preoccupation was no longer accepted as merely a transitional stage. 7. Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 27. 8. Secular moral philosophers have joined in as well, countering that virtue ethics is inherently secular, and/or that Christian ethics is decisively not an ethic of virtue. J. B. Schneewind argues that Christianity itself was the first of several misfortunes suffered by virtue-centered ethics and that Christian ethics has for the most part been decidedly a quandary ethics, J. B. Schneewind, “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” in Virtue Ethics, ed. Crisp and Slote, 178–200; here 180–81. Annette Baier regards notions of original sin, divine law, grace, and otherworldly happiness as inimical to virtue ethics. “Were a Humean historian to retell the narrative MacIntyre has given us,” she writes, “then the fall from Aristotelian grace, the original sin, would occur precisely with the doctrine of original sin”: “Civilizing Practices,” in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 261. 9. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 148–49. Oliver O’Donovan, too, is critical of what he sees in Hauerwas as “a tendency to describe the church-world frontier in exclusively confrontational terms”: Resurrection and Moral Order (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986; 1994), xviii. For Hauerwas’s response to Stout, see “Postscript: A Response to Jeff Stout’s Democracy and Tradition,” in Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2004), 215–41. 10. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 154. 11. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 101. 12. See, e.g., Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), introduction and ch. 4, “The Democratic Policing of Christianity.” William T. Cavanaugh, in the same vein,

Notes to Pages 347–52

430

claims that “the modern state is but a false copy of the Body of Christ”: Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 46. 13. Stout does note that “it is clear that he [Hauerwas] does not intend to allow the boundary to harden in this way at the level of doctrine. But his antiliberal rhetoric can easily give the impression that the boundary has hardened in practice” (Democracy and Tradition, 155). So Stout is, fairly enough, trying to hold Hauerwas responsible for his exaggerated rhetoric, a rhetoric whose impact is not undone by the presence of qualifying statements. 14. Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 59–60. 15. Ibid., 101. Hauerwas cites and reiterates this claim in Performing the Faith, 232, see also 14. 16. Hauerwas and Pinches, Christians among the Virtues, 128, 69. 17. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 154. 18. Hauerwas’s initial enthusiasm for Milbank may help to explain some of those texts in which Hauerwas seems most prone to the equation modern = sinful. Certainly he and Pinches endorse Milbank’s argument against pagan virtue in ch. 4 of Christians among the Virtues. More recently, Hauerwas has criticized Milbank’s willingness to countenance Christian use of violence. See “Explaining Christian Nonviolence: Notes for a Conversation with John Milbank and John Howard Yoder,” in Performing the Faith, 169–83. 19. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 3, 329, 353. Referring to Augustine’s critique of pagan Rome, Milbank explicitly notes that “my analysis in the present chapter [11] is an attempt to extend this charge against the whole of antiquity” (363). 20. Schneewind, “Misfortunes of Virtue,” 200. 21. I have focused here primarily on Protestant virtue ethics rather than on Catholic (largely Thomist) retrievals of the language of virtue. In the latter, the distinction between acquired and infused virtues remains, but the former typically receive the lion’s share of attention. While to some extent this pattern reflects the long-standing neo-Thomist tendency to separate philosophy from theology, it appears even within theological treatments of the virtues. My hunch is that talking about the infused virtues threatens to trade away some of the gains associated with the turn to virtue, in that it reintroduces a strong contrast between nature and grace, natural and supernatural. Jean Porter is frank about the difficulties associated with retrieving the acquired/infused distinction for contemporary Christian ethics, in particular the problems posed for a coherent account of human agency by the presence within an individual of both acquired and infused virtues and the presupposition of a sharp distinction between natural and supernatural: “The Subversion of Virtue: Acquired and Infused Virtues in the Summa Theologiae,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1992): 19–41; here 38–39. 22. Such generosity need not rule out a differentiated critique of particular

Notes to Page 352

431

virtues and vices, though I have not taken on that task here. Instead, it encourages just such a critique, directed both inward, toward the church, and outward, avoiding both paralyzing self-castigation and blanket demonization of the other. Rather than using secular modernity primarily as a contrast point against which Christian identity is defined, it seeks to determine with which forms of “secular” virtue Christians can best stand in solidarity. This is not to say that the virtues are always and everywhere the same, or that any generic account of moral development is available. When Christ is known as God’s ultimate act of loving self-revelation, when our dependency on grace is fully recognized and joyfully embraced, this will transform our character, and not simply in terms of something added on but all the way down.

inde x

Abramson, Kate, 418n4, 421n28, 422n30 acquired virtue, ix, 1–2, 320, 346–47, 350, 430n21; early modern anxiety over, 11–13; vs. infused virtue, ix, 12–13, 72–73, 86–87, 370n20, 370n23; as semblance of virtue, 5. See also habituation of virtue acting. See theater Adams, Robert Merrihew, 355n7, 360n23, 364n14, 381n74 Addison, Joseph, 223 affability, 104 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 306–7, 346–47, 419n5, 428n1 Against Latomus (Luther), 175, 179, 184–86, 195, 389n3, 391n19 agency, 2–3, 14–18, 344, 346–47; in Anatomist thought, 225–27, 233, 236–47; in Aquinas’s account of free will and intellect, 92–94, 372nn32–37; in Aquinas’s infused virtues, 73, 88–91, 93–97, 371n26, 371n30; in Aristotle’s reflective choice, 24, 26–27, 31–35, 38, 44, 325–26, 360n21; in Augustine’s view of dependency, 12, 57–58; Bunyan’s suspicions of, 207; in Calvinist doctrine of predestination, 15–16, 201–2, 393n13; con-

temporary constructs of, 349–51; in Erasmus’s mimesis of Christ, 112–15, 119; gifts of the Holy Spirit in, 90–91, 93–94; as grace enabled, 97, 177–78, 225–26, 373nn43–44; in Jansenist activism, 236–47, 401n34, 403n51; in Jesuit theatrical traditions, 163–64, 386n70; in Kant’s account of evil and grace, 334–40, 425n28, 426–27nn30–32, 427–28nn37–38; Kant’s commitment to autonomy, 18, 322–23, 337, 339–40; in Kant’s pure will, 18, 323–25, 330–31, 335–36, 424n11, 424n13, 425n15; Luther’s displacement of, 175–81, 188–89, 194–96; in Mandeville’s natural law, 272–75; medieval contractual model of, 93, 372n36; in Nicole’s understanding of moral capacity, 251–52, 274; Quietist abdication of, 238–39, 402n38; role of honesty in, 17; in true virtue, 2–3, 14–15. See also dependency; free will Alberti, Leon Batista, 103 Alewyn, Richard, 134–35, 383nn21– 22, 384nn24–25 Allison, Henry, 425nn28–30 Althaus, Paul, 192, 391n24, 392n35

Index Ambrose, Isaac, 203–4, 394n27 Ameriks, Karl, 425n28, 425n30, 428n38 Ames, William, 355n2 amour-propre: Nicole’s understanding of, 238, 402n37; Rousseau’s understanding of, 286–87, 413n8. See also self-love Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (Butler), 257 Anatomist thought, 13, 16, 221–27, 398n3; critiques of Jesuit virtue in, 13, 16, 235–40; grace and human agency in, 225–27, 233, 236–47; Gracián’s ideal of grandeza, 227–34, 400n22; on hypocrisy, 16, 222–25, 265, 268–72, 400n16, 409n53, 409n55; impact on Hume of, 307– 8; La Rochefoucauld’s affirmation of true virtue, 263, 265–67, 407– 8nn41–43; La Rochefoucauld’s deceptive self-love, 261–65, 407n36, 407n39; Mandeville’s natural law, 272–80, 409–10nn56–59; Mandeville’s response to Shaftesbury, 276–80, 410–11nn65–67, 411n73; Mandeville’s satire of hypocrisy, 268–72, 409n53, 409n55; manners and civility in, 223–25, 255, 274–75, 280, 399n8, 399nn11–13, 400nn17–19, 405n18, 408n46; Nicole’s account of worldly virtue, 248–61, 405n21, 406n25; Pascal’s search for self-knowledge, 239–47, 403n51; Pascal’s Wager on faith, 235–38, 243–47, 259, 403n45; true (Christian) virtue in, 222–23, 225, 226, 238, 278; worldly focus of, 223–24, 226–27, 256–61, 270–71, 399n10. See also Jansenism Anderson-Gold, Sharon, 427n33 Andre, Shane, 421n22 Annas, Julia, 360n21, 360n27, 361nn33–34, 363n9, 363n11, 364n17

434 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 18–19, 428n3 apparent virtue, 3–5. See also hypocrisy; semblances of virtue Aquinas (St. Thomas Aquinas), 72–97, 428n4; acceptance of pagan virtue by, 3, 12–13, 72–74, 76, 320, 368–69nn3–6, 369n8, 369n10; categories of virtue of, 61, 73–74, 96–97, 350–51, 368n3; contemporary role of, 18; on dependency, 72–73, 79; on developing good habits, 82–86, 92–93, 370n14; on free will and intellect, 92–94, 372– 73nn32–43, 375n18; on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, 90–91, 93–94, 371n27, 371n29; on grace, 12, 73, 95–97, 371n30; on human agency, 73, 88–91, 93–97, 371n26, 371n30; on hypocrisy, 80–82, 375n18; on infused moral virtues, 12, 72–73, 82–83, 86–91, 370n20, 370n23; on magnanimity, 12, 72–73, 77–80, 318–19, 369n11, 370n13; on natural/acquired virtue, 72–76; on salvation, 73, 76, 89–90, 94–95; on self-knowledge, 78; on self-love, 75–76; on the state’s role in moral education, 359n12; synthesis of Aristotelian and Augustinian thought by, 91–92, 371n31 Aristotle, 23–44; on choosing virtue for its own sake, 32–36, 40–41; in contemporary virtue ethics, 18; eudaimonism of, 11, 34–38, 51, 52, 317, 329, 363n10; on false virtue, 24; on friendship, 37, 42–43, 360n26, 362n35; on habituation of virtue, 5, 11–12, 23–32, 347–48; Hume’s response to, 18, 317–21, 418n4, 421n26, 421n28, 422nn30– 34; ideal of magnanimity of, 9–12, 24, 38–44, 50, 72, 317–18, 349, 358n3, 361n 30; Luther’s critique of, 180–84; moral elitism of, 12; polit-

Index ical science of the common good, 36–38, 360nn26–28; on reflective choice of the noble, 24, 26–27, 31–35, 38, 44, 325–26, 360n21; on self-knowledge, 39, 40–41, 361n30, 361n32; on self-sufficiency, 41–44, 361–62nn34–36; on semblances of virtue, 33, 36, 43–44; the state’s role in moral education, 27–28; on temperance, 60; on truly virtuous action, 23 Arnauld, Antoine, 249, 262 atheism, 309 attrition, 236 Aubrun, Charles, 385n53 Augustine, ix, 1–5, 45–71; anthropocentricity of, 57; on choosing virtue for its own sake, 46; on the common good, 48–49; critique of pagan virtue by, 1–4, 12, 45–50, 66–67, 75, 362–63nn5–7, 363n12; critique of rhetoric by, 65–66; critique of theater by, 47–48, 61–66, 366n36; on dependency on grace, 2–4, 12, 47–48, 52–53, 68, 206, 285, 367n48, 367n55; on eternal life, 52–58; eudaimonism of, 12, 46–47, 50–58, 328–29, 363n8, 363n10, 363n12, 365n20; on habituation of virtue, 2–4, 12, 45, 47–48; on humility, 58, 68, 365n25, 365n28; on hypocrisy and semblances of virtue, 45, 46, 58–61, 365n30; on love of God, neighbor, and self, 54–56, 75, 364nn14–15, 364n17; on mimesis of Christ, 6, 12, 47, 61, 206, 367n62; on moral agency, 12, 57–58; Platonic perspective of, 364n17; on pride, 49–50, 52; on “putting on Christ,” 2; self-examination of, 205–6, 395n38; on splendid (glittering) vices, 2–3, 12, 45–46; on temperance, 60; on transformation of conversion,

435 67–71, 238, 367n55, 367n58; on true (Christian) virtue, 2–5, 47–48, 53, 66–71, 75–76; “virtue” terminology of, 10–11. See also hyper-Augustinian tradition Augustinus (Jansenius), 238, 250, 398n6 Austen, Jane, 385n48 authenticity, 1–2; in mimetic virtue, 6–10; Rousseau’s ideal of, 17, 284–85, 291–92, 296–99, 305, 322, 412n3, 416nn33–34; in splendid vices, 9–10; Taylor’s ideal of, 7–10, 356n14 autobiographical writing, 15–16, 197–218; Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 206–18; discernment of election through, 201–2, 206, 207–8, 215, 217–18, 394n16, 396n50; interpretation of scripture in, 213–17; possibilities of exemplarity in, 205–6; private devotional practice in, 203, 204, 395n33; Renaissance origins of, 202; schematic diaries for, 197; self-examination in, 202–11, 394n18, 394n27, 395n37; social role of, 213 Ayres, Lewis, 67 Baier, Annette, 306–7, 312, 316–17, 418–19nn2–5, 420nn16–17, 421nn26–27, 429n8 Bainton, Roland, 381n70, 382n6 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 358n22, 387n71 Banerjee, Amal, 413n12 baptism, 89 Barish, Jonas, 366n34, 366n37, 383n17, 384n32, 413n9 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 400n17 Barner, Wilfried, 382n13, 383nn15–16 Baron, Marcia, 423n5 Barth, Karl, 331, 355n7, 425n26 Bataillon, Marcel, 381n5

Index Bayle, Pierre, 273, 408n43, 410n59 Beal, Rebecca S., 392n1 Beiser, Frederick, 419n10 Bénichou, Paul, 399n7, 402n41 Bidermann, Jakob, 128–29, 287; allegorical figures of, 139–40; Cenodoxus, 4, 138–46, 162–63, 230, 384n38, 385n44; early neo-Stoicism of, 143; Philemon Martyr, 146–47, 157–63, 386n61, 386n66; portrayals of Carthusian spirituality by, 138, 145–46 Biel, Gabriel, 175 Blackburn, Simon, 418n2 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione), 227 Booth, Wayne, 385n48 Bouwsma, William J., 135, 202, 355n5, 383n20, 384n27, 384n29, 394n19 Bowlin, John, 370n23 Bradley, Denis, 369n9 Braungart, Georg, 385n42, 385nn44– 45, 386n69 Brissenden, R. F., 413n11 Broadie, Sarah, 34, 38, 358n4, 359n17, 360n22, 360n24, 360n26, 361n29, 363n11 Brown, Charlotte, 420n20 Brown, Peter, 366n41 Bucer, Martin, 392n2 Bunyan, John, 16, 197, 206–18; affinities with Lutheran theology of, 392n1; biographical details of, 206, 208, 213; efforts to discern election of, 215, 217–18, 396n42, 396n50, 397nn71–72; goal of honesty of, 207–11, 239; interpretive agency of, 208–9, 212–14, 218, 395nn40– 41, 397n59; Pauline model for, 207, 209–10; plain style of, 208; rejection of hypocrisy by, 211–13; reliance on scripture by, 213–17, 397n61, 397n63, 397n69 Burckhardt, Jacob, 101 Burger, Heinz Otto, 383n23, 386n61

436 Burke, Edmund, 10 Burnaby, John, 55, 363n8, 363n10, 364n14, 364n14, 364n16, 365n19, 365n25, 365n25, 365n27, 365nn22–23 Burnyeat, M. F., 31, 358n2, 359n17 Butler, Joseph, 257, 277–78, 411n73, 419n13, 425n21 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 133, 134, 149 Calvin, John, 198–202, 355n2, 393n3; on common grace, 404n14; on consciousness of justification, 200–202; doctrine of predestination of, 15–16, 199–202, 393n13, 396n42; on God’s will and sanctification, 198–200, 392n2, 393n5; on hypocrisy, 198–99; on mimesis of Christ, 198; on mystical union with Christ, 391n22; on selfexamination, 199–201, 256; on works-righteousness, 199–200. See also autobiographical writing; Puritan traditions Canning, Elaine, 386n53, 386n57 Canonica, Elvezio, 385n47, 385n53, 386nn55–56 Capéran, Louis, 380n70, 391n17 cardinal virtues, 84, 96, 104. See also prudence Carthusian spiritual traditions, 138, 145–46 Cassirer, Ernst, 283–84, 412nn2–3, 416nn30–31 Castiglione, Balthasar, 221, 227, 384n28 Cato, 49–50 Cavanaugh, William T., 429n12 Cavell, Stanley, 356n9, 385n48 Cenodoxus (Bidermann), 4, 128, 138– 46, 162–63, 230, 384n38, 385n44 Cervantes, Miguél de, 149 Cessario, Romanus, 370n19

Index Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (Shaftesbury), 410n66 charity, 84–86, 88–90, 96 Chazan, Pauline, 420n17, 422n30 childhood. See moral development Chrichton, J. D., 402n35 Christians among the Virtues (Hauerwas & Pinches), 346–48 Christian virtue. See true (Christian) virtue Cicero, 102–3, 125–26, 374n4; Erasmus’s discussion of, 116–19, 125–26, 379n57; on piety, 362n35; on prudence, 228; rhetorical skills of, 66, 382n9; vir virtutus of, 10, 357n21 “Ciceronian, The” (Erasmus), 116–18, 379n54, 379n57, 379n60 City of God (Augustine), 48–50, 69 civic virtue, 74–76. See also common good, the; secular thought Cladis, Mark, 412n5, 418n43 Clark, Henry C., 265, 398n3, 400n22, 406n31, 407n38, 407n40, 407nn42–43 clemency, 104 cognitive-propositionalist approach, 166–68 Coleman, Patrick, 416n37 Colet, John, 106 Colish, Marcia, 375n20 Collected Works of Erasmus (Erasmus), 108–25, 376nn21–27, 377n31, 378n39, 378–79nn47–49, 379n54, 379n57, 379n60, 380n64, 380nn66– 68, 399n14 Colloquies (Erasmus), 131, 381n71 Colman, John, 410n62 common good, the: in Aquinas’s natural virtue, 72–76; in Aristotle’s political science, 36–38, 181, 329, 349, 360nn26–28; in Augustine’s pagan virtue, 48–49; in

437 Calvinist understandings of God’s will, 198; in Luther’s civic virtue, 181; in Mandeville’s political offspring of natural law, 272–75, 409–10nn56–59; in manners and civility, 223–24, 274–75, 280; in Nicole’s charity through enlightened self-love, 253–61, 267, 405n21, 406n25; in Renaissance humanist education, 103–4; in Shaftesbury’s optimistic view of human egoism, 276–80, 410–11nn65–67, 411n73 Condemnations of 1277, 92, 372n32 Confessions (Augustine), 62–69, 202, 205–6, 215, 341, 367n54, 395n38 Confessions (Rousseau), 284, 292, 296–99, 305, 415n25, 416n32 contemplation, 238–39 contemporary virtue ethics, 18–19; in Christian theology, 344–52, 428n1, 428n3, 429n6, 430n13, 430n18, 430nn21–22; constructs of pagan virtue in, 349–52, 430nn18–22; in secular thought, 343–44, 429n8 continence, 60, 69, 92 contrition, 236 conversion: Augustine’s account of, 67–71, 238, 367n55, 367n58; in Jesuit theatrical traditions, 128–29, 150–57; Kant’s account of, 334–37, 427n34 conversion narratives. See autobiographical writing Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 223, 224, 276, 410–11nn65–67, 411n73 Corneille, Pierre, 133 counterfeit virtue, 4–5, 61, 74, 77 courage, 33, 84 Courtenay, William J., 372n35, 373n39 courtly civility. See manners and civility Craigo-Snell, Shannon, 165, 357n22, 388nn74–75

Index Crocker, Lester, 414n17, 417n39 Cum occasione (Innocent X), 250 Curzer, Howard J., 359n13 Darwall, Stephen, 411n67 Davies, Michael, 396n42, 397n69 De Beneficiis (Seneca), 79 deception. See hypocrisy De civitate Dei (Augustine), 48–53, 56, 58, 60, 62, 66, 75, 362n3, 425n24 De Contemptu Mundi (Erasmus), 380n69 De Doctrina Christiana (Augustine), 53–54, 56, 364n13 De Genesi ad Litteram (Augustine), 363n6 Delany, Paul, 394n20, 396n52 De Libero Arbitrio (Erasmus), 113, 131 Dell’Olio, Andrew J., 86, 90, 370nn14–15, 370nn19–20 de Lubac, Henri, 369n10 Delumeau, Jean, 125, 357n20, 380n69, 398n5, 402n35 DeMolen, R. L., 376n21 Dent, Nicholas J. H., 413n8 deontology, 323–25, 428n3 De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione (Augustine), 367n57 dependency, 9–10, 13–14, 343–44, 351–52; in Aquinas’s thought, 72–73, 79; in Aristotelian ideal of magnanimity, 9, 41–44, 72–73, 362nn35–36; in Augustine’s thought, 2–4, 12, 47–48, 52–53, 68, 206, 285, 367n48, 367n55; in Calvinist doctrine of predestination, 15–16; contemporary constructs of, 349, 351; in Luther’s pure passivity, 14–15, 132, 174–75, 186–88, 194–95, 341, 392n38. See also agency Descartes, René, 205, 395n38 De Sermone Domini in Monte (Augustine), 59–60, 365n29 Desfontaines, Pierre, 146

438 De Trinitate (Augustine), 55, 70, 367n61 Devotio Moderna, 115–16, 376nn21– 22, 379n53, 380n69 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 421n23, 421n25 Dialogus Ciceronianus (Erasmus), 116–19 Diatribe Concerning Free Will (Erasmus), 113, 131 di Giovanni, George, 425n28 discipleship. See mimesis of Christ dissimulation, 80–82 doctrine of limited election, 199–202, 394n16; gifts of sufficient grace, 236–37, 250; life-writing, 206, 207–8, 215, 217–18, 396n50 Douard, Stéphane, 407n33, 407n35, 407n37 Drama of Doctrine, The (Vanhoozer), 164, 166–70 Duns Scotus, John, 92–93, 372n34, 372n38; on pure intention, 175, 330; on the two affections of the will, 105, 375n16 Dupuis, Jacques, 373n44 Dyer, D. G., 145, 382n18, 384n37, 384n39, 385n41, 385n46 ecstasis, 119 education. See moral development Education of a Christian Prince, The (Erasmus), 123–24, 224, 399n14 Edwards, Jonathan, 393n13 Egido, Aurora, 228, 400–401nn21–22, 401n28, 401nn24–25 El criticón, o la búsqueda de la inmortalidad (Gracián), 233 El discreto (Gracián), 228–29 election. See doctrine of limited election El héroe (Gracián), 227 Elias, Norbert, 399n10 Elliott, J. H., 400n19

Index Emersonian perfectionism, 6–10, 356n9, 356n17 Émile (Rousseau), 284, 292–96, 298, 299–300, 414nn14–19, 415nn22–23, 417n42 emulation, 116–19, 379nn58–60 Enchiridion (Erasmus), 108–10, 113–18, 122–25, 131, 376n24, 377n31, 378n40, 378n48, 379n60, 380n68 Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 308–10, 314, 316, 419n7 Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume), 419nn13–14 “Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, An” (Mandeville), 271–76 Erasmus, 13–14, 97, 106–27, 131; admiration of Cicero by, 116–19, 379n57; on the Body of Christ, 120–21, 377n31, 380nn66–67; ethic of glory of, 101, 106; generosity towards pagan virtue of, 10, 13– 14, 122–23, 125–26, 174, 320, 329, 379n57, 379n60, 380n68, 380n70; on grace, 97, 113–15, 125–26, 173–74, 378–79nn43–45, 381n74; on heaven, 121–27, 380n69; on human agency, 112–13, 119; on human perfectibility, 113–15, 121–25, 143; on imitatio and aemulatio, 116–19, 379nn58–60; impact on Jesuit education of, 130–31, 381n5, 384n28; on inward actions, 108–10, 126–27, 376n26, 377n31; Letter to Paul Volz, 120, 376n22; on mimesis of Christ, 6, 10, 13, 107, 112–19, 173–74, 252, 355n7, 376nn21–22, 377n31, 377nn36–37, 380n69; plea for renewed piety by, 107–12, 120, 131, 380n66, 380nn68–69; on the Reformation, 130–31, 382n6; on religious ceremonies, 108–10, 377n31; on rhetoric, 110–12, 129–30, 379n53. See also humanism

439 Essais de morale (Nicole), 249–50, 253–61 Essay on the Nature of the Passions and Affections, An (Hutcheson), 419n11 Essays (Montaigne), 129 eternal life, 52–56 eudaimonism, 11–12; in Aristotle’s account of the common good, 37–38, 329; in Aristotle’s virtue for its own sake, 11, 35, 36, 51, 52, 317, 363n10; in Augustine’s construct of eternal life, 52–58, 328–29; in Augustine’s construct of pagan virtue, 12, 46–47, 50–52, 363n8, 363n10, 363n12, 365n20; in contemporary virtue ethics, 19; in humanist thought, 105–6, 375n16; Hume’s construct of, 18, 317–21; Kant’s critiques of, 18, 323, 327–31, 425n21, 425n23; in Renaissance moral thought, 101; role of agency in, 2; Scotus’s suspicion of, 105–6, 330. See also happiness; pagan virtue Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 34 evil, 331–37, 351–52, 427n33 exempla, 67, 110–11, 119, 129, 206. See also mimesis of Christ “Experience” (Emerson), 9–10 external motivation, 26–27, 29–30, 357n21 Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 221, 268–80, 398n2, 408–9nn50–51, 408nn44–46, 410n62, 268273 faith, 84; Luther’s transformative sanctification through, 184–89, 192–96, 199–200, 390n17, 391n20, 391n22, 391n24; Pascal’s Wager on, 235–38, 243–47, 258, 403n45 Falk, W. D., 418n4 false virtue. See hypocrisy Fénelon, François, 402n38 Ferrara, Alessandro, 416n35, 417n40

Index fidelity, 104 Fifteen Sermons (Butler), 411nn73–74 Fish, Stanley, 208, 396n48 flattery, 273–74 Foley, Michael, 366n32, 366n38 Foot, Philippa, 323, 423n2 fortitude, 369n8 Francis, St., 8 Franklin, Benjamin, 419n6 Freedom of a Christian (Luther), 174, 176, 178–80, 183, 187, 389n1, 391n19, 392n38 free will: Aquinas’s account of, 92–94, 372–73nn32–43, 375n18; in Erasmian accounts of grace, 113–15; hyper-Augustinian defense of, 94, 423n1; Jansenist rejection of, 245; Kant’s pure will, 18, 323–25, 330–31, 335–36, 414n13, 424n11, 425n15; in Nicole’s understanding of moral capacity, 251–52, 274; in Pascal’s Wager, 245–46, 259; in pursuit of evil, 251; in Scotus’s disinterested choice, 105, 375n16. See also agency Frei, Hans, 387n72 Frey, R. G., 420n19 Fumaroli, Marc, 383n18 Gaskin, J. C. A., 421n22 Gay, Peter, 412n3 general grace, 249–53, 257, 261, 404n7, 404n10, 404n14. See also grace Genesius legend: Lo Fingido verdadero (Lope de Vega), 146–47, 150–57, 162–64, 233, 234; Philemon Martyr (Bidermann), 146–47, 157–62 Geneva, 299–302, 415n20, 417n38 Gilson, Etienne, 371n31, 428n4 godliness, 104 “Godly Feast, The” (Erasmus), 125 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 137 Goffman, Erving, 387n71

440 Goldsmith, M. M., 271, 408n49, 409n53, 409n57, 410n61 Gosson, Stephen, 136, 384n31 grace, 9–10, 343–44, 346–47; in Anatomist thought, 225–27, 233, 236; in Aquinas’s infused virtue, 12, 73, 95–97, 371n30; in Augustinian true (Christian) virtue, 2–4, 47–48, 61, 206, 367n55; in Calvinist doctrine of predestination, 15–16; Calvin’s common grace, 404n14; in contemporary virtue ethics, 351–52; in Erasman humanism, 97, 112–15, 119, 125–26, 173–74, 378–79nn43–45, 381n74; in humanist moral activity, 106; impact on human agency of, 97, 177–78, 225–26, 373nn43–44; Jansenist account of sufficient grace, 225–26, 236–37, 250, 402nn35–36; Kant’s noumenal grace, 334–40, 425n28, 426–27nn30–32, 427–28nn37–38; in Luther’s understanding of transformation, 184–85; in mimesis of Christ, 9, 13–14, 46, 61, 68, 356n13, 367n48; Nicole’s grâce générale, 249–53, 257, 261, 404n7, 404n10, 404n14 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Bunyan), 16, 197, 206–18; efforts to discern election in, 215, 217–18, 396n42, 396n50, 397nn71–72; goal of honesty in, 207–11, 239; interpretation of scripture in, 213–17, 397n61, 397n63, 397n69; interpretive agency in, 208–9, 212–14, 218, 395nn40–41, 397n59; Pauline model for, 207, 209–10; plain style of, 208; rejection of hypocrisy in, 211–13; suspicions of human agency in, 207–8 Gracián y Morales, Balthasar, 16, 222–34; biographical details of,

Index 227–28, 407n34; concept of sainthood and divinity of, 233–34; on desengaño, 230, 233; ideals of grandeza of, 227, 229–33, 400n22, 401n32; on prudence and discretion, 228–29; writings of, 228–29, 233, 407n34 Grant, Ruth W., 297, 398n4, 400n16, 415n27 Gran teatro del mundo of Calderón, 134 Greaves, Richard L., 392n1 Grendler, Paul F., 374n4, 382n11 Grimsley, Ronald, 415n26, 417n41 Griswold, Charles, 366n36 Groote, Gerard, 376n22 Grotius, Hugo, 273, 409n58, 419n9 Groundwork (Kant), 324–25, 423n6 “Grumbling Hive, The” (Mandeville), 269–72, 278–79 Guyon, Madame de, 402n38 Haakonssen, Knud, 419n12 habituation of virtue, 3, 23–30; Aquinas’s habituation gap, 82–84, 92–93, 370n14; Aristotle’s construct of, 23–35, 38, 44, 180–81, 347–48, 358n4, 360n21; in Augustine’s Christian virtue, 2–4, 12, 47–48, 70–71; choosing virtue for its own sake, 32–36, 40–41; Hume’s acceptance of, 17; mimesis in, 26, 28–30, 47–48, 358n9, 359n11, 359nn13–14; modern constructs of, 349–51; in Pascal’s Wager, 225–26, 243–47, 259; role of loving moral exemplars in, 28–30, 359nn13–14, 359n16; Rousseau’s hostility to, 292, 294. See also natural virtue/s; theater Hadot, Pierre, 367n59 Hafter, Monroe, 401nn24–26 Hagens, Jan-Lüder, 383n18, 385nn63– 65, 386n68 Halliwell, Stephen, 366n36

441 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 134 happiness, 24, 35, 51–56; in Augustine’s construct of eternal life, 52–56; Stoic constructs of, 51–52, 327, 363n10. See also eudaimonism; pagan virtue Haskin, Dayton, 392n1 Hauerwas, Stanley, 6, 345–48, 356n8, 385n48, 387n72, 428n1, 428n4, 430n13, 430n18 Hayek, F. A., 409n57 Henry, Philip, 204 Herdt, Jennifer, 387n70, 403n42, 408n47, 421n23, 421n28 Herman, Barbara, 326, 423n5, 424n11, 425n16 Hess, Günter, 384n38 Hirschman, Albert O., 409n55, 410nn63–64 Histriomastix (Prynne), 136 Hobbes, Thomas, 253–54, 276, 309, 409n58, 411n68 Hochschild, Arlie, 387n71 Hodgson, Richard, 408n43 Hök, Gösta, 362n4, 363n10 honesty, 17; in Augustinian dependency, 5, 285; in Hume’s natural virtue, 307–8, 315, 419n6; in La Rochefoucauld’s goal of self-knowledge of, 267, 296; in Mandeville’s commitment to selfknowledge, 278–80; in Rousseau’s search for self-knowledge, 17, 284–85, 296–99, 415n24, 415n26, 415n28, 416nn30–31 honor, 39–41, 77–78 hope, 84 Hope, V. M., 418n2, 420n15 Horne, Thomas A., 408n44, 409n53, 409n57, 410n65 Horner, David, 361n32 Howland, Jacob, 362n36 Hsia, R. Po-Chia, 384n34

Index Huizinga, J., 382n6 human agency. See agency humanism: Cicero’s contribution to, 102–3, 125–26, 374n4; critiques of pagan virtue in, 104–5; ethic of glory in, 101, 104, 204, 222–23; eudaimonist virtue in, 105–6; in Jesuit education, 130–32; Kristeller’s definition of, 101–2, 373n2; Levi’s account of, 104–6, 375n20; political role of, 103–4; rhetorical tradition in, 102–3, 107, 129–30, 379n49; role of theater in, 132–37, 383n16; self-conscious Christianity of, 103–4, 106; semblances of virtue in, 104–5, 107–8; Skinner’s account of, 102–4, 374n5, 374n9; truly manly man of, 102, 103. See also Erasmus Hume, David, 17–19, 221, 306–21, 342–43, 410n64; on Aristotle, 18, 317–21, 418n4, 420n19, 421n26, 421n28, 422nn30–34; on Christian morality, 315–16, 319–22, 421n22; in contemporary virtue ethics, 18; on hypocrisy, 285, 307–8, 314–16, 322, 419n6; MacIntyre’s critique of, 306–7, 317, 418n2, 419n5; on Mandeville, 269, 271–72, 307–9, 311; principle of essential benevolence of, 308–12, 419n9, 419nn12– 14, 425n21; on self-reflexive pride, 17–18, 278, 308, 312–19, 322, 328, 420–21nn19–21; sentimentalist ethics of, 418n2, 418n4; on “the Fall,” 283–84 humility: Aquinas’s views of, 77–78, 93, 318–19; Augustine’s views of, 58, 68, 365n25, 365n28; Jansenist constructs of, 255–56; Luther’s view of, 177 Hundert, E. J., 65–66, 366n44 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 32, 358n2, 359n11, 360n21, 422n34, 424n11

442 Hutcheson, Francis, 309, 311, 419n12 hyper-Augustinian tradition, 3–4, 13, 17–19, 305, 341–42, 355n2; anxiety about pagan virtue of, 320, 349– 52; in contemporary virtue ethics, 18–19, 349–52; defense of freedom of will in, 94, 423n1; Hume’s construct of pride, 17–18; impact of capitalist ethics on, 268, 409nn52– 53; Kant’s response to, 18, 323–25, 329–30, 331, 423n1; Luther’s pure passivity and dependency, 14–15, 132, 174–75, 186–88, 194–95, 341, 392n38; Rousseau’s anxieties about society, 285, 412n5; Scotus’s pagan interpretation of eudaimonism, 105–6, 330; splendid (glittering) vices in, 13, 45–46; Taylor’s ideal of authenticity in, 9–10, 356n14. See also Augustine; Jansenism hypocrisy, 1, 4–6; in Anatomist cultivation of virtue, 16, 222–25, 400n16; Aquinas’s recognition of, 80–82, 375n18; Augustine’s analysis of, 45, 46, 58–61, 225, 365n30; in Bidermann’s Cenodoxus, 138–46; Bunyan’s rejection of, 211–13; Calvinist concerns regarding, 198–99; in contemporary performative theology, 166; dual role in Jesuit theatrical tradition of, 5–6, 128, 136–37, 384n28; Hume’s dual understanding of, 285, 307–8, 314–16, 322, 419n6; La Rochefoucauld on, 265; in Luther’s view of good acts, 179–80; Mandeville’s satire of, 268–72, 409n53; in Rousseau’s ideal of independence, 283, 412n1. See also honesty; semblances of virtue “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent” (Kant), 424n8

Index ideal of magnanimity. See magnanimity identity: communal nature of Christian identity, 160–62, 164; performative nature of, 147–48, 387n71 Ignatius of Loyola, 130–31, 139, 233, 401n32 imitation. See mimesis of Christ Immerwahr, John, 422n33 imperfect virtue, 61, 73–74 independence, 17, 284–86, 291–92, 296–99, 305, 322 infused virtue, ix, 12–13, 346–47, 430n21; Aquinas’s insistence on, 12, 72–73, 82–83, 86–91, 370n20, 370n23; Aristotle on habituation of, 11–12, 73; human agency in, 73, 88–91, 93–97, 371n26, 371n30; perfection of, 72–73, 82–83, 85–86; role in salvation of, 73, 89–90, 94–95; role of baptism in, 89; role of grace in, 95–97, 371n30; role of the Holy Spirit in, 90–91, 93–94, 371n27, 371n29. See also true (Christian) virtue Innocent X (Pope), 250 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, An (Hutcheson), 419n12 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 393nn3–5, 393nn10–11, 394n15, 394n17 intellect. See free will internal motivation, 26–27, 29–30, 357n21 Irwin, T. H., 327–29, 363n12, 425n22, 425nn18–20 Isidore, 80 James, E. D., 251–52, 402nn39–40, 404n7, 404nn9–10, 404n12, 405n19, 406n25 Jansenism, 16–17, 235–40, 355n2, 398nn6–7; activism of, 235–40,

443 401n34, 402n41, 403n51; anatomized discourse of, 222–23, 235; on attrition and contrition, 236–37; on Calvinist perseverance, 256; on fallen human condition, 240, 248, 251, 253–54; habituation of virtue in, 243–47; on Jesuit worldly virtue, 13, 16, 235–40; on justification, 225–26, 236–37, 239, 258, 341–42; Nicole’s account of grace générale, 249–53, 257; Nicole’s account of worldly virtue, 248– 61, 267, 405n21, 406n25; opposition to Quietism in, 238–39, 342, 402n38, 402n40; Pascal’s search for self-knowledge, 239–47, 253, 267, 403nn43–45, 403n51; Pascal’s Wager, 235–38, 243–47, 258, 403n45; on self-love, 17, 226, 236, 237–38, 249, 253–61, 402n37; on sufficient grace, 225–26, 236–38, 250, 402nn35–36; on theater, 136, 384n34; on transformation of the will, 238, 245, 246–47, 258, 402n36, 403n51 Jansenius, Cornelius, 238, 250, 398n6 Jesuits: educational system of, 130–33, 381n5, 382n9, 383n18, 384n28; Jansenist critiques of, 13, 16, 235–40; theology of, 129, 381n1; writings of, 204, 227–28, 395n33 Jesuit theatrical traditions, 13, 128– 70; allegorical figures in, 139–40; ambiguity in, 148–49, 156–57, 163–64; Carthusian spirituality in, 138, 145–46; Cenodoxus (Bidermann), 4, 138–46, 162–63, 384n38, 385n44; conversion dramas, 146–47, 150–64, 386n70; critiques of, 5–6, 136–37; didactic intent of, 137; dramatic techniques of, 133–35; dual role of hypocrisy in, 5–6, 128, 136–37, 384n28; as embodied mimesis of Christ, 14, 46,

Index Jesuit theatrical traditions (continued) 127–37, 147–49, 160–62, 164, 235; as entertainment, 129, 137, 384n34; Erasman humanism in, 130–31; Lo fingido verdadero (Vega), 146–47, 150–57, 162–63, 233, 234, 385n53; Philemon Martyr (Bidermann), 146–47, 157–63, 386n61, 386n66; piety in, 131; transformative power of, 128–29, 133, 135–36, 138, 146, 384n38; vernacular language in, 134 Joest, Wilfried, 185, 389n7, 391n21, 391n23 Johnson, Donovan, 367n47, 367n55 justice, 84 Kant, Immanuel, 321, 322–40, 342– 43; on autonomy, 18, 322–23, 337, 339–40; on conversion, 334–37, 427n34; on eudaimonism, 18, 323, 327–31, 425n21, 425n23; on “the Fall,” 283; and hyper-Augustinian tradition, 18–19, 329–30, 423n1; on noumenal agency and grace, 332–33, 337–40, 425n28, 426– 27nn30–32, 427–28nn37–38; on pure will, 18, 323–25, 330–31, 335–36, 424n11, 424n13, 425n15; on radical evil, 331–37, 427n33; on reason and emotion, 325–26; received reputation as deontologist, 323–25; on self-love, 323; utilitarianism of, 306; as virtue ethicist, 324–26, 423nn1–5 Kaye, F. B., 408n44, 408n46 Kenny, Anthony, 360nn22–23, 360n28, 361n34 Kent, Bonnie, 366n31, 368n3, 371n31, 372nn33–35, 375n17 Keohane, Nannerl O., 248, 398nn3–4, 399n8, 399n10, 402n37, 404n1, 406n29, 412n1, 414n18, 415n20, 416n36, 417n38

444 Keys, Mary, 359n12, 362n36, 369n11 Kierkegaard, Søren, 228 Klein, Lawrence, 400n17 Knight, Janice, 355n2, 393n13 Knott, Betty, 379n57 Kolakowski, Leszek, 244, 246, 403n47, 403n50, 404n5 Korsgaard, Christine, 424nn11–13, 425n21 Krailsheimer, A. J., 244, 264, 398n3, 403n47, 406n31, 407n36 Krause, Sharon, 317–18, 421n21, 422n31 Kraye, Jill, 104, 374n7, 375n11 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 101–2, 373n2 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Kant), 325–31, 423n7 Lafond, Jean, 262, 406n31 Langan, John, 365n30 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 17, 221–24, 235, 249, 253, 261–67; biographical details of, 261–62, 407n34; on deceptive self-love, 262–65, 277, 407n36, 407n39; goal of honest self-knowledge of, 267, 296, 408n43; portraits of true honor by, 265–67, 407–8nn41–43; on true (Christian) virtue, 263, 265–67, 407–8nn41–43 Lash, Nicholas, 164–65, 170, 357n22, 388n73, 389n86 Laude, Patrick, 404n7, 405n21 Law of War and Peace (Grotius), 273 Lectures on Galatians (Luther), 176, 179, 181, 182, 215, 389n6, 390n11 Lectures on Romans (Luther), 176, 389n5 Letter to D’Alembert (Rousseau), 284–85, 288–91, 300–302, 413n10 Letter to Paul Volz (Erasmus), 112, 120–21, 376nn22–24, 380n67 Levi, Anthony: on agency, 94; on Erasmus, 378n40, 379n53, 381n53; on French moralists, 238, 398n3,

Index 402n37, 403nn48–49; on humanist debates over pagan virtue, 104–6, 114–15, 126, 244–45, 372n32, 373n49, 375n12, 375nn19–20, 378n45, 381n73 liberality, 104 Life of St. Antony, 67, 69 life-writing. See autobiographical writing Lindbeck, George, 165–68, 387n72, 388n76, 388n80 Locke, John, 223, 249 Lo fingido verdadero (Vega), 128–29, 146–57, 162–63, 233, 234, 385n53 Lohse, Bernhard, 390n17, 391n21, 391n23 Lombard, Peter, 75 Lonergan, Bernard, 91, 371n30 Long, Steven, 369n10, 373n41, 373n43 Lope de Vega, 14, 16, 133; biographical details of, 149–50, 385n53; Lo fingido verdadero, 128–29, 146–47, 150–57, 162–63, 233, 234 Lottin, Odon, 369n7 Louden, Robert B., 423n5, 424nn9– 10, 425n17 Luther, Martin, 15, 130–31, 173–96, 355n2, 389n1; on Christian pedagogy, 189–92, 392n31; doctrine of justification of, 177–80, 182, 192–93, 236, 389n9, 390n11, 390nn13–14; on good works, 179–80, 183; on human agency, 175–82, 188–89, 194–96; on mimesis of Christ, 13, 132, 174–75, 177–80, 185, 197, 390n11; on pagan virtue, 180–84; on piety, 173, 192; on pure passivity and dependency, 14–15, 132, 174–75, 186–88, 194–95, 341, 392n38; on pure will, 18, 113; on “putting on Christ,” 2, 179–80, 183, 186–88, 392n25; on theater, 132, 383n16; theatrical metaphors of, 180; on transformative sanc-

445 tification through faith, 184–89, 192–96, 199–200, 386n70, 390n17, 391n20, 391n22, 391n24; via moderna background of, 177–78, 181, 389n2 Lutheranism: educational methods of, 132, 191–92, 201, 392n31, 393n13; rhetoric of universal atonement in, 200, 201, 393n13 Luther’s Works (Luther). See Weimar Ausgabe (Luther) Luxon, Thomas Hyatt, 395n40, 397n63, 397n69 Lyons, John, 110, 112, 129, 205, 377nn29–30, 377n35, 381nn3–4, 395n35, 403n43 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 110, 221, 227, 231, 398n4, 401n24 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 346–47, 371n31, 385n48, 387n72, 428n1, 429n8; critique of Hume by, 306–7, 317, 419n5; critique of modernity by, 348; on external and internal goods, 26–27, 29–30, 357n21; on Kant as virtue ethicist, 323, 424n11; narrative theology of, 344–45 Magendie, Maurice, 399n8, 405n17 magnanimity, 50; Aquinas’s construct of, 12, 72–73, 77–80, 369n11, 370n13; Aristotelian ideal of, 9–12, 24, 38–44, 317, 349, 358n3, 361n30; Augustine’s response to, 58; modern critiques of, 349; self-sufficiency in, 41–44, 78–79, 361n34 Mandeville, Bernard, 17, 221–25, 235, 249, 267–80, 408n44; on beneficial vices, 271–72, 409n55; biographical details of, 268–69; capitalist ethic of, 268, 269–70, 275, 409nn52–53, 409n55, 410n64; on honest selfknowledge, 278–80; Hume’s response to, 269, 271–72, 307, 308–9,

Index Mandeville, Bernard (continued) 311, 420n19; on manners and civility, 274–75, 408n46, 410n64; on political offspring of natural law, 272–75, 409–10nn56–59; satire of hypocrisy of, 268–72, 409n53; on Shaftesbury’s optimistic anthropology, 276–80, 410n65, 411n67, 411n73 Mannermaa, Tuomo, 183, 188, 390n13, 391n22 manners and civility, 223–25, 262, 280, 399n8, 399nn11–13, 400nn17–19; in Mandeville’s capitalist ethic, 274–75, 408n46, 410n64; in Nicole’s perfect honesty, 255, 405n18; Rousseau’s critique of, 291–92, 413n13 Marguerite de Navarre, 110 Mariña, Jacqueline, 339, 427n36 Markus, Robert, 48–49, 362n5, 363n7 Marrou, Henry, 64, 366n42 Marshall, Bruce, 388n80 Mascuch, Michael, 203–4, 394n22, 394nn24–25, 394n27, 395n32 Mausbach, Joseph, 89, 362n1, 370nn19–20, 371n25 Maximes (La Rochefoucauld), 261–67, 406n28, 407nn41–42; posthumous maxims, 262, 406n28; withdrawn maxims, 262, 264, 406n28 McCabe, William H., 382n13, 383n19, 384n26 McClendon, James, 428n4 McGrath, Alister, 389nn8–10, 390n14, 391n22, 392n25 Media (Ambrose), 203–4, 394n27 Meilaender, Gilbert, 345, 391n19, 392n38, 428n4, 429n6 Melanchthon, Philip, 178 Melzer, Arthur, 413n13, 415nn28–29 mercy, 104 Mesnard, Jean, 398n6

446 Metaphysics of Morals, The (Kant), 327, 329, 425n15, 425n23 Meyer, Paul, 412n3, 415n21 Michalson, Gordon E., Jr., 338, 425n27, 426n31, 427n35, 427n37 Milbank, John, 348–49, 405n20, 430nn18–19 mimesis of Christ, ix, 6–10, 343–44; Augustine’s understanding of, 6, 12, 47, 61, 66–71, 206, 366n36, 367n62; in Calvinist theology, 198; in contemporary performative theology, 14, 130, 164–70, 357n22, 387nn71–72, 388n80; in contemporary virtue ethics, 19, 350–51; decorum in, 118; Devotio Moderna ideal, 115–16, 376nn21–22, 379n53, 380n69; in Emersonian perfectionism, 6–7, 8, 356n9; Erasmus’s account of, 6, 10, 13–14, 46, 107, 112–19, 173–74, 252, 376nn21–22, 377n31, 377nn36–37, 380n69; human limitations in, 118–19; imitatio and aemulatio, 116–19, 379nn58–60; inexhaustibility of, 8–9, 356n13; in Jesuit theater, 14, 46, 127–37, 147–49, 160–62, 164, 235; Luther’s rejection of, 13, 132, 174–75, 177–80, 185, 197, 390n11; moral exemplars in, 7–8, 67, 110–11, 119, 129–30, 344; role in conversion of, 67–71, 153–54, 367n55, 367n58; role of grace in, 9, 13–14, 61, 68, 119, 356n13, 367n48 mimesis of virtue (Aristotelian), 26– 30, 47–48, 343–44, 358n9, 359n11, 359nn13–14. See also habituation of virtue modern moral philosophy, 17–19, 285–86, 342–44; in contemporary virtue ethics, 18–19; dispute between deontology and utilitarianism in, 323–25, 428n3; Hume’s

Index optimistic view of human nature, 308–12, 322, 419n9, 419nn12– 14, 425n21; Hume’s practical rationality, 306–8, 310; Hume’s self-reflexive pride, 17–18, 278, 308, 312–14, 318–19, 322, 328, 420–21nn19–21; Kant’s autonomy and pure will, 18, 322–25, 330–31, 335–40, 424n11, 424n13, 425n15; Kant’s evil and grace, 334–40, 425n28, 426–27nn30–32, 427–28nn37–38; Mandeville’s honest self-knowledge, 278–80; Rousseau’s authenticity and independence, 283–88, 291–92, 296–99, 305, 322, 412n3, 416nn33–34; Rousseau’s ideal society, 299–305, 416–17nn37–38 “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Anscombe), 18–19 modern novels, 6, 129, 147, 385n48 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 133 Molina, Tirso de, 133, 149 Molinos, Miguel de, 402n38 Monro, Hector, 278–79, 408n48, 411n72, 411nn74–75 Montaigne, Michel de, 110, 129, 221, 398n4 moral agency. See agency moral anatomy. See Anatomist thought moral development, ix, 3–5, 343; Aristotle on the state’s role in, 27–28, 359n12; Aristotle’s habituation of virtue, 5, 11–12, 23–32, 358n4; Calvinist doctrine of predestination, 15–16; Hume’s self-reflexive survey, 312–13, 316–19; Jesuit theater, 5–6, 127–32, 147–49, 235; Luther’s pedagogical methods, 189–92, 392n31; mimesis in, 26, 28–30, 344, 358n9, 359n11, 359nn13–14, 359n16; modern novels, 6, 129, 147, 385n48;

447 Rousseau’s educational ideal, 284, 292–96 moral philosophy. See modern moral philosophy moral psychology. See free will More, Thomas, 106 Moriarty, Michael, 403n44, 403n46, 404n10 Morrison, Karl, 26, 119, 358nn7–8, 366nn45–46, 397n61 Muller, Richard A., 393n13 Mullett, Michael, 396n44, 396n47, 396n50, 397n60, 397n69 Munro, Hector, 408n48 Murdoch, Iris, 385n48 Natural History of Religion, The (Hume), 315–16, 421n24 natural law, 272–75 natural virtue/s, 3–4, 11, 84, 357n21; in Anatomist tradition, 13, 16; in Aquinas’s categories, 72–76, 96–97, 350, 368n3; contemporary constructs of, 350–51; imperfection of, 72–73; in Jansenist accounts, 13, 16–17. See also acquired virtue; pagan virtue Nature as Reason (Porter), 95–96 Nauert, Charles, 102, 374n3 neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, 358n3 Neoplatonism: on human perfectibility, 113, 114–15, 121–22, 123–24; on nature and grace, 245; on selfdivinization, 143 neo-Stoicism, 143, 144; on free will, 244–45; influence on Gracián of, 228, 401n26 neo-Thomism, 252, 369n9, 402n35 New Art of Writing Plays (Lope de Vega), 149 Newcome, Henry, 203–4, 205 New Héloise, The (Rousseau), 292 Nichols, Mary, 414n15, 414n17, 417n42

Index Nicholson, Eric, 380n69 Nicole, Pierre, 16–17, 222, 227, 235, 237, 248–62; biographical details of, 249–50; on courtly civility, 255, 405n18; on grâce générale, 249–53, 257, 261, 404n7, 404n10, 404n14; on honnêteté parfaite, 255–61, 266, 405nn17–18; on imitation of charity through enlightened self-love, 253–61, 267, 342, 405n21, 406n25; on moral capacity, 250–51, 252, 273; on Quietism, 238–39, 249, 402n38, 402n40 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 24–25, 28, 30–43, 60, 92, 325, 358n1, 361n34 nobility: Aristotle’s reflective choice of, 24, 26–27, 31–35, 38, 44, 360n21; courtly manners and civility of, 223–25, 255, 262, 274– 75, 280, 342, 399n8, 399nn11–13, 400nn17–19 Norton, David Fate, 419n9 novels. See modern novels Nussbaum, Martha, 385n48, 422n34 Nygren, Anders, 363n8 Oberman, Heiko, 93, 372n37 O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood, 119, 380n62 O’Donovan, Oliver, 57, 363n8, 365n18, 365nn20–21, 365nn24, 429n9 Oeuvres philosophiques et morales (Nicole), 253–58, 260, 402n40, 403n11 “Of Dissimulation and Hypocrisy” (Aquinas), 80–82 “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (Hume), 410n64 O’Hagan, Timothy, 413n8, 415n20 O’Malley, John, 376n21, 376n25, 376n27, 377n31, 378n39, 379n49, 380n66, 381n5

448 O’Neill, Onora, 423n4 On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (Augustine), 59–60 Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, 112, 120–21, 376n22, 380n67 Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (Gracián), 228–34, 401n26, 407n34, 410n32 Ordinatio (Scotus), 372n38, 375n13, 375n15 Orwin, Clifford, 412n4, 414n19, 416n33 Osborne, Thomas, 368n3 Owens, W. R., 214, 396n50, 397n61 Ozment, Steven, 378n41, 390n11 pagan virtue, ix, 1–18, 48–49; Aquinas’s acceptance of, 3, 12–13, 72–74, 76, 320, 368–69nn3–6, 369n8, 369n10; Augustine’s critique of, 1–4, 12, 45–50, 53, 66–67, 75, 362–63nn5–7, 363n12; Erasmus’s generosity towards, 10, 13–14, 125–26, 320, 329, 379n57, 379n60, 380n70; Jansenist accounts of, 13, 16–17, 235–40; Luther’s critique of, 180–84; modern constructs of, 348–52, 430nn18–22; in Nicole’s general grace, 252–53; Pascal’s critique of, 235–40; piety, 12, 79, 370n13; in Renaissance humanism, 104–6; self-sufficiency in, 47, 52–53; as splendid (glittering) vices, 2–3, 12, 45–46, 169–70, 348, 351. See also eudaimonism; magnanimity; modern moral philosophy; natural virtue/s paideia traditions of education, 64–65 Paige, Nicholas D., 395n38 Paraclesis (Erasmus), 111, 377n31, 377n36, 379nn49–50, 379n52, 381n75, 393n5

Index paradigmatic stories, 110–11 Parente, James A., 382nn15–16 Pascal, Blaise, 16, 205, 222, 235–47, 262, 405n21; on attrition and contrition, 236; on fallen human condition, 240; on free will, 245; on habituation of virtue, 225–26, 243–47; on Jesuit virtue, 235–40; search for self-knowledge by, 239–43, 253, 267, 288, 403nn43–45, 403n51; Wager on faith of, 235–38, 243–47, 258, 403n45 passivity, 2–3, 169–70; in Calvinist doctrine of predestination, 15–16, 201–2, 393n13; Luther’s reliance on, 14–15, 132, 174–75, 186–88, 195–96, 392n38; of spectators in the theater, 288–90 Pelagian tradition, 13, 113, 356n17, 379n49 Peltonen, Markku, 384n28, 398n4, 399n12, 400n15, 400nn17–18, 405n18 Pensées (Pascal), 239–47, 398n6, 403n42 perfectionism (Emersonian), 7, 356n9 perfect virtue, 61, 73–74, 344; Aquinas on transformative goal of, 81–82, 85–86; requirement of selfknowledge for, 78. See also true (Christian) virtue performative theology, 14, 130, 164– 70, 357n22, 387nn71–72, 388n80. See also Jesuit theatrical traditions “Performing the Scriptures” (Lash), 170 Perkins, William, 355n2 Perry, John, 388n77 Petrarch, Francesco, 103 Peura, Simo, 180, 187–88, 390n13, 390n15, 391n17, 391n20, 392n26–28 Philemon Martyr (Bidermann), 128–29, 146–47, 157–63, 386n61, 386n66 Phillips, Henry, 402n34, 402n36

449 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 103, 378n40 Pieper, Josef, 428n4 piety, 9–10, 12; in Aquinas’s interpretation of magnanimity, 79, 370n13; Erasmus’s plea for, 107–12, 120, 380n66, 380nn68–69; in Jesuit traditions, 131; Luther’s acceptance of, 15, 173, 192; Stout on, 9–10 Pigman, G. W., 116, 379n58, 379nn55–56 Pinches, Charles, 346–48, 430n18 Pinckaers, Servais, 375n18, 428n4 pity, 286, 288, 294 placability, 104 Placher, William, 386n70 Plato, 26, 31, 61–62, 395n38 Pocock, J. G. A., 399nn8–9, 400n17, 410n65 Poetics (Aristotle), 358n6 Pohier, Jacques, 428n4 political life. See secular thought political virtue, 74–76 Porter, Jean, 88, 95–96, 369nn7–8, 370n19, 370n21, 370n23, 370n25, 373nn41–44, 430n21 Port-Royal Logic (Nicole & Arnauld), 249 postliberal theology, 166–70, 387n72, 388n80 Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 110, 111, 123–24, 131, 143, 378n40, 378n44, 379n53, 381n5, 382n8 predestination, 15–17; Calvinist views on, 199–202, 393n13, 394n16; discernment of election through lifewriting, 206, 207–8, 215, 217–18, 396n42, 396n50; gifts of sufficient grace in, 236–37, 250; Hume’s construct of, 17–18 pride: in Augustine’s pagan virtue, 49–50, 52; Hume’s construct of, 17–18, 278, 308, 312–14, 322

Index princely virtues, 104 Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar (Rousseau), 298 Provincial Letters (Pascal), 235–40, 249 prudence, 84, 87–88, 89, 369n8 Prynne, William, 136, 384n30 Puera, Simo, 180, 187–88, 390n13 pure will, 18 Puritan traditions, 15–16, 355n2; condemnation of theater, 5–6, 132, 136, 147, 355n6, 383n17; doctrine of predestination and limited election, 199–202, 206–7, 215, 217–18, 393n13, 394n16; self-examination through life-writing, 15–16, 197, 201–18, 256, 394n18 “putting on Christ,” 15, 112; Augustine’s view of, 2; Luther’s view of, 179–80, 183, 186–88, 392n25. See also mimesis of Christ Quietism, 238–39, 249, 342, 401n34, 402n38, 402n40 Quinn, Philip L., 337–38, 427n34 Radcliffe, Elizabeth, 420n20 Rahner, Karl, 95, 114, 369n10, 373n41, 373n44 Ratio Studiorum of Jesuit education, 132 Rebhorn, Wayne, 114, 377n34, 378n47 Refléxions diverses (La Rochefoucauld), 408n43 Reformation: Augsburg Confession, 390n17; impact of Erasmus on, 130–31, 382n6. See also Calvin, John; Luther, Martin Regulus, 50, 72 Reinhard, Wolfgang, 398n5 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant), 329, 331–39 Renaissance thought, 101–6. See also humanism

450 Republic (Plato), 366nn35–36 rhetoric: Augustine’s critique of, 65–66; Bunyan’s distrust of, 208, 239; Erasmus’s belief in, 110–12, 129–30; exempla, 110–11, 129, 379n49; in Jesuit educational traditions, 131, 382n9; Pascal’s recognition of, 239–40; in Renaissance humanist tradition, 102–3, 107, 129 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 41–42 right action, 23–24 Riley, Patrick, 395n37, 423n1 Rist, John, 46, 362n2, 362n4, 363n10, 364nn14–15, 365nn25–26, 365n30, 367n48, 367n62, 425n25 Rogers, Richard, 203 Roman Index of prohibited books, 131 Rome, Augustine’s portrayal of, 48–49, 72, 362n5, 363n7 Rorty, Amélie O., 361n34 Rotrou, Jean, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 283–305, 342; on amour-propre, 286–88, 413n8, 414n19; biographical details of, 298; on education, 284, 292–95, 414nn15–19, 415nn22–23, 417n42; on honesty and self-knowledge, 17, 283, 285, 296–99, 412n1, 415n24, 415n26, 415n28, 416nn30–31; ideal of authenticity and independence of, 284–86, 291–92, 296–99, 305, 322–40, 412n3, 416nn33–34; on ideal social life, 299–305, 415n20, 416–17nn37–38; on legislative authority, 303–4, 417n41; on pity, 286, 288, 294; on religion and myth, 304, 417–18nn42–43; on society, 283–88, 291–92, 295–96, 412n5, 413n13; on theater, 288–91, 305, 413n9, 413nn11–12 “Rules for Thinking with the Church” (Ignatius of Loyola), 131

Index Rummel, Erika, 375n10 Russell, Paul, 421n22 Saint-Cyran, Abbé de (Duvergier de Hauranne), 245, 402n36 salvation: in Calvinist doctrine of predestination, 15–16, 201–2, 393n13; in humanist moral activity, 106; in Jansenist activism, 247, 403n51; in Luther’s justification of faith, 178–80, 236; in neo-Stoic traditions, 143, 144; role of infused virtue in, 73, 76, 89–90, 94–95; of unbelievers, 126–27, 380n70 Schneewind, J. B., 226, 349, 387n70, 400n20, 409n58, 410n60, 410n65, 418n4, 420n18, 429n8 Schoeck, R. J., 376n21, 382n6 Schreiner, Susan, 404n14 Scotus. See Duns Scotus, John Second Discourse, On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (Rousseau), 286–88, 413n7, 417n39 secular thought, 3–6; Anatomist cultivation of virtue, 16, 222–27; Aquinas’s natural virtue, 3–4, 72–76; Aristotle’s account of the common good, 27–28, 36–38, 181, 359n12, 360nn26–28; in contemporary virtue ethics, 18–19, 343, 348–52, 350–51, 429n8, 429n12, 430nn18–22; happiness, 24; humanist princely virtues, 103–4; Luther’s acceptance of external piety, 15; Mandeville’s political view of natural law, 272–75; manners and civility in, 223–25, 255, 274–75, 280, 399n8, 399nn11–13, 400nn17–19, 405n18; Rousseau’s idealized version of, 299–305, 415n20, 416–17nn37–38, 417n41. See also the common good; modern moral philosophy; pagan virtue

451 secular virtue. See pagan virtue self-love, 2–3, 330; Aquinas’s proper forms of, 75–76; Augustine on, 54–56, 75, 364nn14–15, 364n17; in the egoistic hypothesis, 277–78; Hume’s rejection of essential selfishness, 308–12, 311; Jansenist critiques of, 17, 226, 236, 237–38, 249, 402n37; Kant’s distrust of, 327; La Rochefoucauld’s deceptive version of, 262–65, 277, 407n36, 407n39; Nicole’s enlightened amour-propre, 238, 253–61, 267, 402n37, 405n21, 406n25; Rousseau’s two versions of, 286–87, 293, 413n8, 414n19. See also eudaimonism self-sufficiency: in Aquinas’s interpretation of magnanimity, 78–80; in Aristotle’s ideal of magnanimity, 41–44, 361–62nn34–36; in Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue, 47, 52, 53 semblances of virtue, 4–5, 81–82; in Aristotle’s process of habituation, 33, 36, 43–44; in Augustine’s false (hypocritical) virtue, 59–61, 225, 365n30; in Augustine’s pagan virtue, 45, 46, 61; in Erasmus’s exterior vs. invisible actions, 108–10, 126–27, 376n26, 377n31; in eudaimonist pursuits of happiness, 50; in Hume’s moral philosophy, 320–21; in Nicole’s account of worldly virtue, 248–61; in Pascal’s search for self-knowledge, 242–43; in Renaissance humanism, 104–5, 107–10. See also hypocrisy Senault, J. F., 238 Seneca, 79, 228, 241, 382n9, 401n26 Seven Treatises (Rogers), 203 Shaftesbury (Anthony Cooper, Third Earl of), 223, 224, 276, 410–11nn65–67, 411n73

Index Shakespeare, William, 134 Shanley, Brian, 368nn2–3, 369nn5–6 Sherman, Nancy, 358n2, 358n9, 359nn13–14, 382n9 Shklar, Judith, 355n6, 412n4, 419n6 Sim, Stuart, 395n41, 397n72 Simon, Julia, 415n22 Simon of Tournai, 75 Simpson, Peter, 358n3 sinfulness, 177–80, 351–52 Skinner, Quentin, 102–5, 357n19, 357n21, 374n2, 374nn5–6, 374nn8– 9, 401n24, 409n52 Slote, Michael, 418n2 Smith, Adam, 413n13 Smith, James, K. A., 366n33, 366n43 Social Contract (Rousseau), 284–85, 299–300, 302–5, 417n39 social mobility, 5–6 social-pragmatic theory of obligation, 389n82 Socrates, 362n36 Soliloquies (Augustine), 63–64, 367n39 sophists, the, 181–84 Sorabji, Richard, 358n2, 359n16 Spanish Index, 227 Sparta, 302, 415n20 spectatorship, 288–91, 413n11 spiritual autobiography. See autobiographical writing Spiritual Exercises, 132–33, 383n18 Spitz, Lewis, 115, 379n51 splendid (glittering) vices, 3–4, 169–70, 348; in Anatomist tradition, 13; in Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue, 2–3, 12; in contemporary virtue ethics, 345, 351; in Hume’s construct of pride, 17–18; in hyper-Augustinian tradition, 13, 45–46. See also pagan virtue Stachniewski, John, 355n6, 394n16, 397n59, 397n71 Stalnaker, Aaron, 367n58, 367n62

452 Stanislavski, Constantin, 168–69, 387n71 Starobinski, Jean, 407n36, 407nn38– 39, 407n41, 407n43, 415n24 Steele, Richard, 223 Steinmetz, David, 389n2 Stoicism, 51–52, 327, 363n10 Stout, Jeffrey, 6–10, 346–47, 370n13, 379n59, 429n9, 430n13; critique of Hauerwas, 6, 356n8; on Emersonian virtues, 6–7, 9–10, 356n9, 356n17; on mimesis, 6, 9, 355–56nn7–8; on moral exemplars, 7–8, 129; social-pragmatic theory of obligation, 389n82 Strauss, Gerald, 190–92, 392nn30–32, 393n12 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 80–82, 319, 368n1 supernatural virtue. See infused virtue synderesis, 251 Tanner, Kathryn, 372n37, 386n70, 428n38 Tatler, 223 Taveneaux, René, 402n41 Taylor, Charles, 7–8, 17, 355n2, 395n38, 415n28, 416n34 Taylor, Jacqueline, 418n4 teleological context of virtue, 357n21, 360n23 temperance, 60, 84, 92–93, 369n8 Tempier, bishop of Paris, 372n32 theater, 5–6, 13, 127–37, 147–49; Augustine’s critique of, 47, 61–66; contemporary performative theology, 14, 130, 164–70, 357n22, 387nn71–72, 388n80; educational role of, 132–37; inherent hypocrisy in, 128, 166; losses of identity in, 288–91; Luther’s views of, 132, 383n16; medieval mystery and mo-

Index rality plays, 129; Plato’s critique of, 61–62; Puritan condemnation of, 5–6, 132, 136, 147, 355n6, 383n17; role in humanist tradition of, 132–37, 383n16; Rousseau’s critique of, 288–91, 305, 413n9, 413nn11–12; Stanislavski’s method acting, 168–69, 387n71. See also Jesuit theatrical traditions theological virtues, 84, 96. See also charity Theology and Social Theory (Milbank), 348–49 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas (St. Thomas Aquinas) Thweatt, Vivien, 406nn31–32, 408n43 To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation (Luther), 390n16 Tractus de libertate christiana (Luther). See Freedom of a Christian (Luther) Tracy, James, 120, 376n21, 376n25, 376n28, 377–78nn37–38, 378nn40– 41, 380n63, 380n65, 380nn68–69 Traité de la grâce générale (Nicole), 404nn6–8, 404–5nn13–15, 406nn22–26 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 221, 310–14, 318–19, 419n8, 420n20 Treatise on Good Works of 1520 (Luther), 176–77, 180, 185–86, 189, 190, 389n4 Trilling, Lionel, 202–3, 279, 355n6, 394n23, 411n76 Trinkaus, Charles, 372n36, 374n3, 378n43, 381n72 true (Christian) virtue, 2–5, 169–70; in Anatomist thought, 222–23, 225, 226, 238, 278; Augustine’s construct of, 47–48, 53, 56–58, 61, 66– 71, 75–76; in contemporary Christian virtue ethics, 344–52; Hume’s critique of, 315–16, 319–21, 322,

453 421n22; in Jansenist traditions, 238; La Rochefoucauld’s affirmation of, 263, 265–67, 407–8nn41–43; in Lash’s lens of humanity, 170; Luther’s requirement of passivity in, 2–3, 47, 174–75, 183, 186–88; Nicole’s honnêteté parfaite, 255–61, 266, 405nn17–18; performative nature of, 169–70. See also perfect virtue Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 125, 374n4 utilitarianism, 323–24, 428n3 vainglory, 78 Valla, Lorenzo, 104 Vanhoozer, Kevin J., 164, 166–70, 357n22, 387n71, 388nn77–79, 389n81, 389nn83–85 Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (Bayle), 273 Vega, Lope de. See Lope de Vega via moderna theology, 177–78, 181 vice. See splendid (glittering) vices virtue. See acquired virtue; apparent virtue; civic virtue; counterfeit virtue; habituation of virtue; imperfect virtue; infused virtue; natural virtue/s; pagan virtue; perfect virtue; princely virtues; semblances of virtue; theological virtues; true (Christian) virtue virtue ethics, 18–19, 358n3 Virtues and Vices (Foot), 323 virtue terminology, 10–11, 102–3, 357n21 Voltaire, 133 Volz, Paul, 120, 376n22 Wadell, Paul, 91, 371nn28–29 Wallace, Dewey D., 394n18, 395n39 Ward, Dr. (Cambridge diarist), 203

Index Warner, Stuart D., 407n33, 407n35, 407n37 Watkins, Owen, 202, 394n21, 396n51 Wehrli, Max, 384n36, 386n61, 386nn58–59, 386n67 Weimar Ausgabe (Luther), 174–90, 195, 389n1, 389nn3–6, 390n11, 390n16, 392n34 Weintraub, Karl Joachim, 394n14, 395n34 Wells, Samuel, 165, 357n22, 388n74 Wesley, John, 285 Wetzel, James, 68, 363n10, 367n52 White, Helen C., 395n33 Wild, Christopher, 384n33 will. See free will

454 William of Ockham, 92–93, 175, 372n39 Wilson, Stephen, 393n13 Wimmer, Ruprecht, 384n36, 386n62, 386n66 Wood, Allen W., 428n38 worldly virtue. See Anatomist thought Yandell, Keith, 421n22 Yeago, David, 390n17 Yearley, Lee, 4–5, 355n4 Yoder, John Howard, 348 Zachman, Randall, 193–94, 199–200, 392nn36–37, 393nn5–9 Zwingli, Huldreich, 182