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Hypocrisy is the act of persistently pretending to hold beliefs, opinions, virtues, feelings, qualities, or standards that one does not actually hold. Hypocrisy is thus a kind of lie.
Example: A man who complains of cars speeding down his street, but speeds himself would be considered a hypocrite
Hypocrisy may come from a desire to hide from others actual motives or feelings. Hypocrisy is not simply an inconsistency between what is praised or admired and what is done. Samuel Johnson made this point when he wrote about the misuse of the charge of "hypocrisy" in Rambler No. 14:
Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.[1]
The word hypocrisy comes from the Greek ὑπόκρισις (hypokrisis), which means "play-acting", "acting out", "coward" or "dissembling"[2]. The word hypocrite is from the Greek word ὑποκρίτης (hypokrites), the agentive noun associated with υποκρίνομαι (hypokrinomai), i.e. "I play a part." Both derive from the verb κρίνω, "judge" (»κρίση, "judgement" »κριτική (kritiki), "critics") presumably because the performance of a dramatic text by an actor was to involve a degree of interpretation, or assessment, of that text.
The word is an amalgam of the Greek prefix hypo-, meaning "under", and the verb "krinein", meaning "to sift or decide". Thus the original meaning implied a deficiency in the ability to sift or decide. This deficiency, as it pertains to one's own beliefs and feelings, informs the word's contemporary meaning[3].
Whereas hypokrisis applied to any sort of public performance (including the art of rhetoric), hypokrites was a technical term for a stage actor and was not considered an appropriate role for a public figure. In Athens in the 4th Century BC, for example, the great orator Demosthenes ridiculed his rival Aeschines, who had been a successful actor before taking up politics, as a hypokrites whose skill at impersonating characters on stage made him an untrustworthy politician. This negative view of the hypokrites, perhaps combined with the Roman disdain for actors, later shaded into the originally neutral hypokrisis. It is this later sense of hypokrisis as "play-acting," i.e. the assumption of a counterfeit persona, that gives the modern word hypocrisy its negative connotation.
Although hypocrisy has been called "the tribute that vice pays to virtue,"[4] and a bit of it certainly greases the wheels of social exchange, it may also corrode the well-being of those people who are continually forced to make use of it.[5] As Boris Pasternak has Yurii say in Doctor Zhivago, "Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike... Our nervous system isn't just fiction, it's part of our physical body, and it can't be forever violated with impunity."
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Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).
HYPOCRISY, pretence, or false assumption of a high character, especially in regard to religious belief or practice. The Greek inrimpevcs, from which the word is derived through the Old French, meant primarily the acting of a part on the stage, from inToKptvEO-Oat, to give an answer, to speak dialogue, play a part on the stage, hence to practice dissimulation.
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Hypostasis >> |
(Greek hypo, under, and krinesthai, to contend hence adequately "to answer" on the stage, "to play a part", "to feign or pretend".)
Hypocrisy is the pretension to qualities which one does not possess, or, more cognately to the scope of this article, the putting forward of a false appearance of virtue or religion.
Essentially its malice is identical with that of lying; in both cases there is discordance between what a man has in his mind and the simultaneous manifestation of himself. So far as the morality of the act goes, it is unimportant that this difference between the interior and the exterior be set out in words, as happens in formal lies, or be acted out in one's demeanour, as is true of simulation. It is deserving of notice that the mere concealment of one's own sin, unless one be interrogated by legitimate authority, is not straight-way to be accounted hypocrisy. With the purpose of measuring the degree of sinfulness attributable to this vice, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that we must carefully differentiate its two elements: the want of goodness, and the pretence of having it. If a person be so minded as definitely to intend both things, it is of course obvious that he is guilty of grievous sin, for that is only another way of saying that a man lacks the indispensable righteousness which makes him pleasing in the sight of God. If, however, the hypocrite be occupied rather with successfully enacting the role he has assumed, then, even though he be in mortal sin at the time, it will not always follow that the act of counterfeiting is itself a mortal sin.
To determine when it is so, cognizance must be taken of the motive which prompts the sinner to adopt his hypocritical bearing. If the end he has in view be such as to be incompatible with the love of God or one's neighbour, for example, if his purpose were thus to spread abroad false doctrine more unimpededly and more thoroughly, he must clearly be considered to have commited mortal sin. When, on the other hand, his animus does not involve such opposition to the supreme law of charity, the sin is esteemed to be venial, as, for instance, when one finds satisfaction in the completeness with which he carries off his part.
The portrait of hypocrisy is drawn with appalling vividness by Christ in His denunciation of the Pharisees in Mt 23:23ff: "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you tithe mint, and anise, and cummin, and have left the weightier things of the law; judgment, and mercy, and faith. These things you ought to have done, and not to leave those undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel."
  | Translated from the Pâli - Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 10: The Dhammapada and Sutta Nipata: The Dhammapada: Chapter XXVI. The Brâhmana (Arhat). |
| | Naves Topical Bible Index for Hypocrisy - HYPOCRISY in Naves Topical Bible (Bible History Online) |
| | The Different Types of Hypocrites - The Psychology of Hypocrisy |
| | Hypocrisy - The Catholic Encyclopedia - CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Hypocrisy |
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