Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (review)

In the third of his studies devoted to early modern French thought (see also French Studies, 60 (2006), 104–05, and 62 (2008), 475–76), Michael Moriarty moves to the question of virtues, pagan and Christian. Although the title makes a clear reference to the much-quoted epigraph of La Rochefoucauld, the Maximes are the principal subject only of the last three chapters, to which the preceding material affords an extensive scholarly contextualization, dealing both with the differences between pagan and Christian understandings of virtue and with intra-Christian disagreements, and fore-grounding the ways in which ‘thinking about pagans also prompted Christians to raise questions about their own moral lives’ (p. 7). The first chapters are devoted to Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, in so far as they impinge on later French thought (and that teleology prevails throughout). Moving to the patristic realm, Moriarty explores in particular Augustine’s examination of ‘human virtue not subordinated to God’ (p. 73), stressing the end of an action as the defining criterion for its moral evaluation. The enquiry then moves forwards to the Reformation and Counter-(or, better, Catholic) Reformation, when such questions as the salvation of pagans again took centre stage among Protestants in claims made by Calvin, inter alia, that true virtue was impossible to non-believers. But the real problem arises when Augustine’s anti-Pelagian emphasis shifts into the Roman Church with the writings of Jansenius, who reasserts the Augustinian imperative of the relationship between the ‘agent and the end of his action’ (p. 154), as against the emphasis on intention evident in such contemporary documents as the (predominantly Jesuit) manuals of casuistry. Moriarty next turns to Montaigne, Charron, and Descartes, and considers the Jesuit Antoine Sirmond and the libertin La Mothe le Vayer as writers who, from different perspectives, defend (or appear to defend) the possibility of such more nebulous concepts as ‘natural virtue’ and ‘implicit faith’, before Jansenist writers reclaim the debate, first with Arnauld’s riposte to Le Vayer, and then with Nicole’s more irenic acceptance that the right management of human vices might contribute to the good of human society. In this way, Moriarty suggests, ‘[Nicole’s] concern has shifted from false pagan virtue to false human virtue in a community assumed to be Christian’ (p. 252). Finally, the more immediate framework to the Maximes is introduced in the contributions of such society figures as Madame de Sablé and Jacques Esprit, alongside an elucidation of the terminology that they shared (intérêt, honnêteté, and so on). Here we come on to more familiar ground, but are now able, as a result of this magisterial survey, to situate the interpretative challenges of the Maximes in the whole framework of Western thought, both pagan and Christian, that is their heritage. In this way, La Rochefoucauld’s nuanced and complex account of human behaviour is renewed by Moriarty’s exposition of the transcendent values that it both assimilates and throws into question, as the reader confronts this wilfully and artfully provocative text in which, somme toute, ‘moral agency is largely an illusion’ (p. 357).