3. Nonreligious hypocrisy

Often emphasis is given to the social and cultural significance of some beatitudes. It is not unusual to read "Blessed are the peacemakers" on the banners carried in demonstrations by pacifists. And the beatitude of the meek who will inherit the earth is rightly invoked in regard to the principle of nonviolence, to say nothing of the beatitude of the poor and the persecuted for justice's sake. But the social relevance of the beatitude of the pure of heart is never spoken of and seems to be exclusively reserved for the personal sphere. I am convinced, however, that this beatitude could have a much needed critical function in our society. We have seen that in Christ's thinking, purity of heart is not opposed primarily to impurity but to hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is perhaps the most widespread human vice, and the least confessed. There are individual and collective hypocrisies. Man, Pascal wrote, has two lives: One is his true life and the other is his imaginary one that he lives in his own opinion or in that of other people. We work hard to embellish and conserve our imaginary being and we neglect our true being. If we have some virtue or merit, we are careful to make it known, in some way or other, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave.[10] The tendency brought to light by Pascal has grown enormously in the present culture, dominated by the mass media, film, television and the entertainment industry in general. Descartes said: "Cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am); but today this tends to be substituted with "I appear therefore I am." Originally the term hypocrisy was reserved for the theater. It simply meant to act, to represent in a scene. St. Augustine notes this in his commentary on the beatitude of the pure of heart. "The hypocrites," he writes, "are the creators of fiction in the sense that they present the personality of others in plays."[11] The origin of the term puts us on the way toward discovering the nature of hypocrisy. It is making one's life a theater in which one acts for an audience; it is to put on a mask, to cease to be a person and become a character. Somewhere I read this explanation of the two things: "The character is nothing else than the corruption of the person. The person is a face, the character is a mask. The person is radical nakedness, the character is only clothing. The person loves authenticity and essentiality, the character lives by fiction and artifice. The person obeys his own convictions, the character obeys a script. The person is humble and light, the character is heavy and cumbersome." But the fiction of the theater is an innocent hypocrisy because it always maintains the distinction between the stage and life. No one who sees a performance of Agamemnon -- this is Augustine's example -- thinks that the actor is really Agamemnon. The new and disquieting development is that today there is a tendency even to annul this division, transforming life itself into a play. This is what the so-called reality shows are about that are now all over television. According to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who died just last week [March 6], it has now become difficult to distinguish real events -- the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Gulf War -- from their media portrayal. Reality and virtuality are confused. The call back to interiority that characterizes our beatitude and the whole Sermon on the Mount is an invitation to not allow ourselves to be drawn into this tendency that tends to empty the person, reducing him to an image, or worse -- using a term dear to Baudrillard -- a "simulacra." Kierkegaard drew our attention to the alienation that results from living in pure exteriority, always and only in the presence of other people, and never simply in the presence of God and our own "I." A farmer, he observed, can be an "I" before his cows, if he is always living with them and has only them as his measure. A king can be an "I" before his subjects and he will feel like an important "I." The child grasps himself as an "I" in relation to his parents, a citizen before the state. But it will always be an imperfect "I" because it lacks the proper measure. "But what an infinite reality my 'I' acquires when it becomes aware of existing before God, becoming a human 'I' whose measure is God.... What an infinite accent falls on the 'I' in the moment that God becomes my measure!" It seems like a commentary on the saying of St. Francis of Assisi: "That which man is before God, that is what he is and nothing else."[12]