Sincerity: The Impossible but Necessary Project

Excerpt

Was anyone in England sincere before the 1530s—when the word “sincere” in English was first recorded? Perhaps not, if the nature and existence of moral and psychological qualities depend on their being conceptually formulated (as some believe). “The sincerity of Achilles and Beowulf cannot be discussed: they neither have nor lack sincerity”, says Trilling, and to call Abraham “sincere” would be “comical” (Trilling 1972: p. 2); similarly, C S Lewis claims that the “far from natural” notion of ennobling love in Courtly Love literature would have been inexplicable to “Aristotle, Virgil, St Paul, or the author of Beowulf” (C. S Lewis 1936: p. 3). A concept (sincerity, romantic love) “cannot be applied to a person [even retrospectively] without regard to his cultural circumstances”, says Trilling (p. 2). Like Lewis, he identifies a sea-change in moral life and the human character “at a certain point in history”, after which, he says, “the value … attached to the enterprise of sincerity became a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of Western culture for some four hundred years.” (p. 6) …