One of Alasdair MacIntyre's colleagues at Notre Dame once told me that of all the passages in all his books, there is one of which MacIntyre is most proud. It is found, of course, in After Virtue:

The colleague may have been exaggerating a remark made merely in passing, but I would like to believe this passage really is MacIntyre's favourite. It ought to be because the child-learning-chess is more than an offhand example. It comprehends, but then decisively overcomes, the most pervasive misunderstandings of eudaimonism. What appears to be hypocrisy on the part of the child (who initially plays only for candy) and manipulation on the part of the teacher (who bribes when the pursuit ought to be worthy for its own sake) are necessary, normal and even paradigmatic stages in moral development. Becoming good requires that we discover the goods intrinsic to practices which make them worthy of pursuit and that we develop habits so that our actions in pursuit of those goods are pleasant and easy. Yet viewed superficially, this process of moral formation can appear self-centred and hypocritical.

Putting on Virtue is an elaborate defence of a eudaemonist Christian ethics against these sorts of objections, especially against those arising within the Christian tradition. It proceeds in the form of a historical narrative which traces how two particular suspicions of virtue are manifested throughout church and Western intellectual history. On the one hand is the worry that virtue is corrupted by pride and self-love when separated from its true, final end of God. On the other is the worry that ‘even the pursuit of God as one's final end is itself a problematic expression of self-love’.Footnote ² The book traces how these objections and counter-objections recur as thrusts and parries in a skirmish running from Augustine, Aquinas and Erasmus all the way to Luther, Hume and Kant. Herdt's goal is to recover a vision of eudaemonism free from these objections and that, further, provides an improved Christian account of virtue as expressed by non-Christians – what Augustine called (or didn't call, as we learn) ‘glittering vices’.

In the following pages I will summarise Herdt's book and offer some constructive criticisms of her analysis of Augustine and Luther. My only other task, of evaluation, is in this case an easy one and so it is where I begin. The book is a brilliant success. Putting on Virtue has all the scope, excitement and elegant simplicity of Theology and Social Theory, but with a more nuanced and generous use of sources. It shares Milbank's concern for Christian virtue but not his contempt for all pagan virtue as equally vicious. The clarity of its prose will make it an excellent text for graduate seminars on the history of Christian thinking on the virtues. It touches on all of the most important ongoing debates about virtue ethics, and many more across theology more generally: the metaphor of theatre and drama in performative theology, the challenge offered by Finnish interpreters of Luther to the stark distinction of justification and salvation, Jean Porter's retrieval of a Thomistic natural law ethics, Stout's challenge of Hauerwas regarding moral exemplars and the modern novel, the importance of rhetoric for theology, and the possibility of seeing Kant as a virtue ethicist, among others.

Herdt's story begins with Aristotle, but she introduces him by immediately engaging, and expanding, MacIntyre's chess example. She expands it by showing that it demands a certain sort of relationship: one of love and friendship. ‘Insofar as the child loves the teacher, she wants to become more like her teacher and wants to love what her teacher loves’ (p. 29). What emerges, although Herdt does not make this explicit until much later, is that this process of moral formation is not one way among many of becoming good. Rather, ‘there is no other way to become what we are called to be except by acting a part’ (p. 168). Insofar as the child becomes good at all, it is by this process, because only in this way can the child love what is good for its own sake. ‘The fully virtuous agent, then, is one who has learned to take pleasure in virtuous action’ (p. 31). Yet a problem arises when Aristotle describes the magnanimous man, who possesses complete virtue, as self-sufficient. His claim to self-sufficiency is potentially hypocritical because it denies the communal dependence of his virtue (as if the child who became a chess grandmaster denied what she learned from her teacher).

Aristotle can avoid this pitfall, Herdt shows, by turning to Augustine, for whom humble dependence on God is itself a virtue. Yet Augustine's eudaimonism creates as many problems as it solves – and it is here that the book really begins. She identifies two problems in particular, and these form the thread woven through the subsequent chapters. The first objection, as mentioned above, is that virtue not directed to its true end could remain always hypocritical and a semblance of true virtue. It is as if the 7 year old, now an adult, were still playing chess solely for candy. In Augustine, such misdirected virtue can take two forms: pagan virtue and corrupted Christian virtue. Pagan virtue falls short because it is always directed only to an end short of the final end (this lesser end Augustine typically calls pride, self-love or will to dominate). Yet this pitfall threatens not only pagans, for ‘the imperfect virtue of Christians is often corrupted by the same ordering to self which rendered pagan virtue merely counterfeit’ (p. 60). The second objection does not occur in Augustine but allegedly originates there, manifesting itself fully only in early modern hyper-Augustinianism. Here, ‘the attempt to act virtuously in order to become virtuous is seen as essentially hypocritical’ (p. 2). We see this in the Lutheran objection to ‘earning’ salvation and the broader early-modern devotion to authenticity. I will take these two instances of misdirected virtue in turn, both summarising and critically engaging Herdt's historical conversation with them.

Herdt's treatment of Augustine can be divided in two halves. One half shows that Augustine overcomes the self-sufficiency of Aristotle's magnanimous man in a distinctively Christian way. For Christians, dependence on God is a virtue because it acknowledges what is actually the case – we do not become who we are solely on our own – but also because it locates the move towards virtue in God's sovereignty. ‘We cannot choose to be inspired by an example and cannot thus convert ourselves. We rely on inspiration from beyond ourselves’ (p. 68). The other half concerns the problem of both pagan and Christian virtue being potentially directed to a lesser end than God. Concerning this second half, however, there is something puzzling in Herdt's analysis. Why does she see this as an instance of hypocrisy? The broader problem is clear: the first steps on the path to virtue are not themselves wholly virtuous, but those first steps are unavoidable. But the problem of pagan virtue is not exactly this. Aspiring to virtue but falling short is different from passing oneself off as a saint.

How serious a problem this poses for Herdt's project I am not sure, but it is present from the very beginning. In the first paragraph of the book's preface she describes her initial interest: the puzzle of how some Christians ‘champion a theatrical conception of moral development while others judge it false and hypocritical’. She came to see this problem as rooted in ‘a transformed and exacerbated rendition of Augustine's critique of pagan virtue’ (p. ix). On this I wonder whether Herdt has not conflated two issues. These two problems – the theatricality of moral development and pagan virtue – are quite distinct, at least in Augustine. Granted, she says that the connection lies in a transformed and radicalized version of Augustine's concern with pagan virtue, not in Augustine himself, but if so then Augustine ought to be able to help us out of the puzzle. Herdt's story, by contrast, is that instabilities in Augustine lead (eventually) to the subsequent pitfalls.

While I would not deny Augustine's various instabilities, I think he can help more than Herdt supposes. Because she is eager to fit the question of pagan virtue into her paradigmatic metaphor of the hypocrisy-theatricality problem, she overlooks places where it is better comprehended via other images. The most important Augustinian metaphor for assessing pagan virtue is not the actor (hupocrites), but rather the journey gone astray. Unfortunately, this is found chiefly in De Doctrina, on which Herdt's take is brief and almost exclusively negative. There, Augustine depicts misguided love, including love of virtue, as a delay on a journey. If I am too much in love with my Ferrari, I may drive around the countryside instead of using it for its true end: getting me home. That is what Augustine's virtuous pagans do: they sincerely and faithfully pursue ends that, it turns out, are not the best ends. So Rome's founders pursued the common good and displayed ‘a certain characteristic uprightness’ by means of ‘natural virtues’.Footnote ³ But there may be an end beyond the common good, thus conceived, just as there may be something better than driving around in my car – even though the common good and my Ferrari are very fine indeed. But my mistake in not initially perceiving this is not hypocrisy; it is rather a failure to see where my true home lies. Or, more generously, I may perceive my true home in a qualified sense, but not know the best route to get there.

Augustine also uses the misguided journey as a metaphor for ‘wrong’ biblical interpretations, which we might plausibly extend to include the authoritative sources of pagan ethics. What matters, he says, is reaching the destination and if a wrong reading of the Bible helps you love your neighbour, then it can be considered ‘correct’ even if it would be preferable, all things considered, to stick to the main roads and thus reach the destination more easily and directly.Footnote ⁴ But again, this is different from the problem of hypocrisy. To see better the distinction, we might ask if Augustine's problem of pagan virtue could be recast in the terms of MacIntyre's child playing chess. I do not think it could be, which seems to confirm it is indeed a different (though obviously related) matter.Footnote ⁵

Herdt next turns to Aquinas. She deftly shows how he overcomes many of the questions left unsettled by Augustine by his rehabilitation of magnanimity and distinction between acquired and infused virtues. While ‘for Aquinas, these [questions of hypocrisy and semblance] are not particularly pressing’, they quickly become pressing in the early modern period because of what she (following Charles Taylor) calls hyper-Augustinianism (p. 81). The voluntarist concern for free human agency rejects elements of Aquinas’ solution. ‘Freedom seemed to require the possibility of a 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’ (p. 94).

This leads to Erasmus, who could be seen as the implied hero of the book. Echoing the Hebrew prophets, Erasmus targets chiefly his fellow believers, not pagans. Thus he most pointedly rebukes overemphasis on ‘external’ acts such as the importance of daily mass, veneration of the saints and so on. From our side of the Reformation this sounds characteristically ‘Protestant’ – hence the subsequent criticism of Erasmus, noted by Herdt, for ‘laying the egg that Luther hatched’. But she shows that this is largely mistaken. Erasmus was simply expressing something he shared with Aquinas:

As a Christian renaissance humanist, this leads Erasmus back to writers such as St Paul, the church fathers and Cicero, from whom he appropriates both an appreciation of rhetoric as a Christian virtue and a new understanding of imitation of Christ. Herdt finds in Erasmus, ‘as in Augustine, the hope that human rhetoric placed in the service of Christ will itself become a vessel of transformative grace’ (p. 111). Eloquence becomes a Christian virtue so that speaking and listening well forms one's character. Further, Erasmus employs the renaissance distinction between imitatio and aemulatio (imitation and emulation) to offer a more sophisticated portrait of ‘putting on Christ’. In this debate, imitatio could be called mere copying (as seen in the Ciceronians who refused to use any Latin words unless they could be found in Cicero's writings). By contrast, aemulatio is a nuanced imitation that in some sense ‘surpasses’ the exemplar. This does not mean the apprentice displaces the exemplar (as if the Ciceronian could replace Cicero or the Christian replace Christ); it means that we must observe decorum, which demands a sensitive attention to one's socio-historical context. Becoming Christ-like in Erasmus’ day, or ours, would not mean pretending to be a wandering rabbi from Galilee.

Herdt defends Erasmus against the subsequent thinkers who saw him as proto-Protestant (or worse, pseudo-Pelagian). Becoming like our exemplars is not possible by mere human effort; it depends on prior divine action. ‘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.’ This is best depicted in Erasmus’ analogy of the boy and the apple. Yes, the child picks the apple but only because the father first pointed it out, lifted him to reach it and so on. Ultimately, Erasmus can be the hero of Herdt's story because he ‘sees grace as enabling rather than displacing human agency’ (p. 113).

This perspective is then compared to that of emerging Protestantism by means of a fascinating engagement with two contrasting artistic movements: Jesuit theatre embodies ‘an Erasmian trust in habituation-through-acting’ while Puritan autobiography, such as in Bunyan, ‘narrated the Reformed obsession with truthfully unearthing the hidden self’ (pp. 128, 197). The former is especially important because of an excursus on the contemporary performative theology of Kevin Vanhoozer, Samuel Wells and Nicholas Lash. I pass over these, however, better to explore the challenge posed by Luther himself.

If Erasmus is the book's implied hero, should we see Luther as the villain? On a superficial level he must be, for his critique of ‘works’ is the pinnacle of opposition to a semblance of virtue and the definitive Christian rejection of eudaimonism. Because Luther holds that ‘there is no route from “external” practices to fundamental inner transformation’, it is no wonder he calls Aristotle's Ethics ‘the worst of all books’ (p. 180). Herdt begins with a sympathetic statement of Luther's objection to eudaimonism. ‘When the virtuous Aristotelian becomes conscious of acting in the sight of God’ she hopes to win God's applause – but then she is not pursuing virtue for its own sake. She can escape this vicious cycle only by relinquishing her agency to God, realising she is a sinner because unable to keep the law. Yet, as Herdt shows, this seems to mean that Luther simply replaces one form of hypocrisy with another. We are disguised in Christ's righteousness, while he takes on our mask as sinner. Thus both the Lutheran Christian and the eudaemonist Christian employ pretence. However, says Luther, ‘the latter are damnable hypocrites’ and the former are ‘saved hypocrites, because they service sin with the flesh and are evil in appearance, but in truth are good’ (p. 179).

Luther is a crucial figure in Herdt's story, and so this point is worth pressing further. Ultimately, her treatment either gives Luther too little credit (if he has something unique to offer, something which should sweep us outside the bounds of her narrative) or too much credit, by over-generously thinking he has something to contribute to the Augustinian trajectory. The former is the conclusion of Gilbert Meilaender's review, but I am convinced of the latter.Footnote ⁶ As a mere historical contingency, perhaps Luther belongs in the trajectory, but the problem with his hyper-Augustinianism is that it is hardly Augustinian enough to be called it. If so, Herdt should have been much harder on Luther, showing how radically he breaks from the eudaemonist trajectory she is tracing. Augustine's doubts about splendid vices and semblances of virtue are just that – doubts. He never questions the underlying eudaimonism (p. 50). Luther does, and this means it is hard to see him as contributing to the conversation Herdt is tracing.

I noted above that Herdt is concerned throughout with two different problems of hypocrisy in virtue ethics: the charge that the child who first plays chess for candy is initially hypocritical, and the worry that ‘even the pursuit of God as one's final end is itself a problematic expression of self-love’ (p. 2). But the latter turns out, in Luther, simply to mean that the whole effort at moral formation as captured by MacIntyre's chess example – the whole project of eudaimonism – is fundamentally misguided. When Herdt speaks positively of Erasmus’ claim for the ‘essential theatricality of virtue’, she has opted in to a eudaemonist game that Luther is simply unwilling to play. For those who have already cast their lot with Augustine, Luther is not an attractive alternative; he is not even a temptation. In other words, when Herdt says ‘there is no other way to become what we are called to be except by acting a part’, she has by implication already said something important about MacIntyre's chess example: that it captures something essential and indispensable to ethics as such.

But Luther will have none of this. Why? The answer, I think, lies in something important to Luther that Herdt hardly addresses: the Bible. His objection is rooted in a certain reading of the New Testament, which then maps onto ethical matters in problematic and perhaps unintended ways. This is not to say that if Herdt examined Luther's biblical theology he would have been vindicated, but it would have allowed her better to explain where he does, and does not, fit in her story. Consider her statement that Luther's mature position sees humans as incapable of fulfilling even the minimum condition needed to begin the process of moral formation (as the child willingly and humbly allows herself to be taught the rules of chess). Luther rejects this, she says, because it is based on the ‘basic misconception . . . that there is something that we can do to earn God's favour and to avert God's wrath’ (p. 175). But there is an ambiguity in the claim that there is nothing we can to do earn God's favour. Does it mean that I am incapable of earning God's favour in the same way that I cannot earn a nicer Christmas present or earn the jackpot in the lottery? That is, the category of desert does not apply to gifts or games of chance any more than to God's favour. Or does it mean that am I unable to earn God's favour in the same way that I am unable to earn a living as a professional Italian interpreter? Here the category of merit does apply, but I am not able to merit the pay because I do not know Italian.

Luther's view seems to be the former, so Herdt writes in his voice, ‘God wants to give us a gift, but we want to buy it’ (p. 176). But Augustine would agree, as would Erasmus. Neither thinks that pursuing God as one's true end would earn God's favour in that sense. There is no possibility of putting God in our debt. Their question is what object is worthy of pursuit. Is this not just another instance of Luther's focus on forensic justification spilling over into other areas, such as ethics, which were not really his intended target?

This would best account for the evidence Herdt brings to the table, even if she never explicitly draws this conclusion. For example, Luther concedes, she says, ‘that Aristotle gives an adequate account of the social formation of civic virtue’. Luther's point is merely that ‘civic virtue does not affect our standing in the sight of God’. Those who neglect this ‘do not understand that a sincere heart and good will mean something different in theology than in temporal affairs’ (p. 181). But if this stark distinction exists, then how are his objections even relevant for the broader conversation? Herdt makes two attempts to show that Luther might have something to contribute.

First, Luther's overlooked distinction between grace and gift might allow some room for a positive moral habituation. Both are freely given; God's gift is an indwelling faith which transforms us gradually into Christ's likeness. This is drawn partly from the important Finnish interpreters of Luther, who seek to reduce the split between justification and sanctification commonly attributed to him. However, this looks suspiciously like an attempt to find a place for the infused virtues in Luther without having to acknowledge the existence of infused virtues. Second, Luther's pedagogical writings seem to concede the necessity of a process something like the child-playing-chess example. What begins as a quest for candy ‘can – if it is an occasion for encounter with the Word – become something genuine, a spontaneous expression of love of God’. Thus, as Herdt notes, ‘Luther on education can sound remarkably like Erasmus’ (p. 191). Unfortunately, these parts of Luther's corpus are highly unsystematic and seemingly contradict what he says elsewhere. As Herdt finally concedes, once we cease to ‘conceive of divine and human agency in competitive terms, [Luther's] insistence that the starting point of the Christian life must be pure trust in God is no longer compelling’ (p. 193).

To restate my assessment of Herdt's treatment of Luther, she may not be critical enough. I just do not see why his view that eudaimonism attempts to earn God's favour is even vaguely the same sort of objection as the worry about hypocrisy which animates Augustine's thought and lies at the heart of the chess example – unless this is all just a misunderstanding on Luther's part. As I have suggested, I think the confusion is exacerbated by Herdt largely ignoring the biblical theology which grounds Luther's distinction between justification and sanctification.

In the transition from Luther to subsequent thinkers, Herdt's ultimate conclusion becomes clearer. It is this: the early modern demonisation of pagan ethics had the ironic effect of making ethics more independent, because it prioritised purity of will and independence of agency. She finds this problematic, of course, and so wants both to trace this transition through writers such as Pascal, Rousseau, Hume and Kant, while also fostering a more fruitful exchange among Christians about the pagan virtues. It is impossible to summarise her analysis of all of these thinkers, so I will focus on Hume.

I asked above whether we might consider Luther the villain of Herdt's story. I now want to suggest that the distinction belongs to Hume. Or perhaps more accurately, he is the great rival and alternative to Augustine and Erasmus and in this he is the greatest threat to Herdt's Christian vision of the virtues. Although Luther represents a major turning point in Herdt's historical narrative, his contributions are more often at cross purposes with the other characters treated here than they are in genuine conversation with them. By contrast, Hume sees what is at stake in Augustine's Christian eudaimonism – and then simply sweeps it all away.

Recall that the Augustinian legacy of the splendid vices is concerned with both pagan virtue (aiming at an end less than God) and corrupted Christian virtue (selfishly aiming at one's own good). Hume sees these worries and embraces them: we are and must always be aiming at our own pride. ‘Hume's moral philosophy, then, is an explicit attempt to restore a fully pagan ethic, one that does not even pay lip service to Christianity . . . he utterly rejects an Augustinian moral psychology, no longer employing 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’ (p. 314). On MacIntyre's account, the problem with this is simply put: it denies the existence of goods internal to a practice. The child may move beyond playing chess solely for candy, learning to play to impress the teacher and perhaps eventually beyond that, learning to play for her own pride. But that is where the chain ends. There are no deeper reasons, no basic goods, available. Annette Baier defends Hume against this charge by proposing ‘inward peace of mind’ as analogous to Aristotelian eudaimonia. Herdt rightly rejects this as too subjective and thus instrumental.

The real test for Christian ethics is what to say next. As Augustine's great rival on these matters, Hume will readily concede the subjectivity of flourishing and its associated virtues. Here, Herdt's project uncovers a crucial similarity (or mirror image) in Hume and Luther. Both are forced to concede that moral formation, like learning chess, can be about nothing more than winning prizes. Hume's response is to pursue the best prizes all the more eagerly, while Luther would have us abandon the whole effort because God's favour is not a trophy to be won. Thankfully, these are not the only choices. What Herdt opens up is a whole world of Christian reflection on the virtues free of these false alternatives.

The real sign of the book's genius is that it detects a current running, implicitly and unobserved, through the entire Western tradition of ethics, but also connected to so much recent moral theology. As she shows in her conclusion, MacIntyre, Stout, Hauerwas, Milbank – they have all been dancing around her topic but have been unable to pinpoint what lies between them. Here, it finally crystallises.