RELIGION HYPOCRISY

Religion Hypocrisy



Religion Hypocrisy

Introduction

The term, if not the concept, derives from the Greek hypocrisy (also hypocrites), originally "answer" or "reply," but more commonly "play a part (on stage)." The moral opprobrium attached to hypocrisy is absent in the Greek derivatives in the writing of Plato and Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) and most Greek writings, prior to the New Testament. The term with a respectable charge found in "The Wolf and the Lamb," a fable (284 Halm = 166 Haurs) of Aesop (sixth century bc), and in Job and II Maccabees in the Septuagint. The import differs from the later use in the New Testament.

In Job 34:30 and 36:13, the charge of hypocrisy, interestingly, leveled against the righteous Job. In II Maccabees 6:25, Eleazar, a venerated old Jewish scribe, refuses to commit a deception he calls a "hypocrisy," for he fears that it will mislead the youth into thinking that he has abandoned his religion to gain a few more years of life. Although the "hypocrisy" has morally undesirable consequences, it is not the deceitful playacting but its potential to mislead unintended dupes that restrain Eleazar. Matthew 23 provides the most sustained employment of the term in the sense which has become paradigmatic. The Pharisees and scribes derided by Christ as hypocrites who attend only to the outward, superficial appearance of their actions without attending to the "weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith."

Discussion

The hypocrisy denounced here is less a deception aimed at pleasing others for personal gain and more a delusion and a self-delusion born of self-interest; and self-satisfaction concerning what counts as religious conviction. Within the Christian ethos, more perhaps than within Judaism or Greek and Roman religious life, the play actor condemned. Where outward ceremony is not only unnecessary but irrelevant to religious life (c.f. Matthew 15), where the state of one's soul, that "which is within, the cup; and platter" (Matthew 23). No one's outward cleanliness count for virtue, there the pretense of the play-actor can hardly be tolerated (see also Luke 12). It is an offense not only to God (as in the hypocrisy condemned by Job's friends) and not only to other men (as in the hypocrisy renounced by Eleazar) but also to oneself. To pretend to be other than one is most egregious where the only value of outward words and deeds for a shared religious life is to indicate an inner "true" state. There the hypocrite mocks the foundation of religious community. The concept of hypocrisy undeniably shaped by the moral tone it received with the emergence of Christianity, where attention to what hidden from view often from one's own view) is paramount. (Gopnik, 2005)

Religion, writes William Hazlitt (1778-1830), "either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both." Both in its origin and its conception religion bear a special relation to hypocrisy, especially religious belief that gives priority to sincerity and the inwardness of faith. The religious community has a special interest in the purity ...