hypocrisy

In fifth-century Athens, the word hypokrisis (ὑπόκρισις) named what actors did behind a mask: answer back, respond from within a character, deliver lines that were not their own. The verb hypokrinesthai joined hypo (under) and krinein (to judge, to separate) into something like "to put on a judgment from below." Aristotle used hypokrisis in his Rhetoric to discuss the art of vocal delivery in public speaking. The actor who did it well was a hypokritēs, and the performance was his craft.

The word began gathering moral weight in the Hellenistic period, as philosophers applied theatrical metaphors to criticize false appearances in civic life. The Septuagint, completed in Alexandria around 200 BCE, used hypokritēs to translate Hebrew words for the godless and the defiled. By the first century BCE, moralists had extended the theatrical vocabulary to condemn anyone who wore a civic face that did not match their conduct. That theological shading would prove more durable than the theatrical one.

Latin borrowed hypocrisis unchanged, and Church Latin kept it. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus condemns the hypokritai of the Pharisees nine times in succession. Old French received it as ypocrisie by the twelfth century, and Middle English had ypocrisye by 1225. The initial h returned in later English spelling, restoring a visual connection to the Greek that pronunciation had long since dropped.

By Chaucer's time in the 1380s, the theatrical root was invisible to most readers. What remained was the gap: the distance between the self on display and the self that acts in private. Samuel Johnson defined hypocrisy in 1755 as "the act of counterfeiting qualities which we do not possess." The stage had become an ethics.