Putting on Virtue

"The topic of Herdt’s book is whether a person can pretend to be virtuous in order to become virtuous, whether we can pretend to be acting from virtuous motives in order to one day truly act from virtuous motives. That’s complicated! Generally, the definition of whether you lie or not is whether you are knowingly doing something or saying something that you think is false. But in the religious tradition for an act to be truly virtuous it has to be an act inspired by charity: it requires grace. So, if you are performing acts of virtue without the requisite grace your actions may not be virtuous at all. In the seventeenth century — in the wake of the Reformation — self-deception becomes a huge problem. The Protestant ideal is that if you have grace whatever you do can be virtuous, but if you lack grace and you try to act from virtuous motives, you’re actually prideful. You think you’re doing something, but only God can do something for you. Francois La Rochefouçauld worries about this, Pierre Nicole worries about this, Pascal worries about this. They get to the point where they argue that self love is potentially so great that you could even be a martyr and die for you faith out of self love and you wouldn’t know it! We can never tell if what we do is actually virtuous. Herdt’s book is so good because she lays out how a classical vision of the acquisition of virtuous habits gets gutted with the Reformation insistence on justification through faith alone. The classical idea goes back to Aristotle. He thinks that we can become magnanimous or virtuous through the performance of virtuous and magnanimous acts. We begin to do these things when we are not yet good people and by doing them we slowly make ourselves into the virtuous person we longed to be. Protestant thinkers and the Catholics they influence criticize this process, they call it ‘putting on virtue.’ It is like putting on a costume of virtue over our inherently sinful selves. They worry that it’s just teaching people to become hypocrites. Most Catholics all along argued, and re-argued after the council of Trent, that God had set up a system whereby if we do certain things then He will do things for you — baptism, confession, good works. By contrast, in the Treatise on Works , Luther essentially argues that once you’re justified, anything you do is virtuous. Before God there is no difference between picking up a pencil or saving someone’s life so long are you are justified. Yes, that God has made you one of the elect. For many people after this it becomes harder and harder to tell whether their actions are virtuous or not. Soon lying seems more and more central to a functioning society. Pierre Nicole will argue that, superficially, a society in which everyone operates from principles of self-love will be indistinguishable from a society in which everyone acts from motives of charity. Self love actually has the capacity to mimic charity. This is what Bernard Mandeville contends in The Fable of the Bees. We are all prideful, look only after ourselves, and lie wantonly. Society flourishes because of our bad behavior, not despite it. “Conceived biblically God seems rather fond of the occasional deception.” If that’s the case, lying starts to look necessary and not demonic and at that point Rousseau is merely a step away contending that lying is an entirely natural phenomenon. This is why ‘The Devil Wins’ is the title of my book. For millennia people believed lying was a demonic disruption undoing the perfect world of Paradise, by the seventeenth and eigthteenth century, people look around and fear that without our lies society would fall apart. Lying is what allows us to get along with each other. It’s as if God listened to the Devil and realized what a horrible place this world would be if we actually told one another what was actually on our minds. Imagine a day in your life when you don’t lie and you’ll catch my drift. Yes, at least when it comes to lying. It surprised me that I ended up writing a secularisation book because I certainly didn’t intend to. But it seems this is how lying and all the things associated with lying become natural."