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    Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices
    Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices
    Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices
    Ebook443 pages11 hours

    Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices

    By Jennifer A. Herdt

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    Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. Putting On Virtue reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. 
    Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument of broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, Putting On Virtue traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 12, 2010
    ISBN9780226327259
    Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices
    Author

    Jennifer A. Herdt

    Jennifer A. Herdt is Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics, Yale Divinity School, Yale University.

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      The ebook looks like a scanned PDF without OCR. The font is impossibly small to read. None of the other ebooks I've read on Scribd have this problem.

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