The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Most of the stories in the Facetiae are about sex, and they convey, in their clubroom smuttiness, misogyny mingled with both an insider’s contempt for yokels and, on occasion, a distinct anticlerical streak. There is the woman14 who tells her husband that she has two cunts (duos cunnos), one in front that she will share with him, the other behind that she wants to give, pious soul that she is, to the Church. The arrangement works because the parish priest is only interested in the share that belongs to the Church. There is the clueless priest who in a sermon against lewdness (luxuria) describes practices that couples are using to heighten sexual pleasure; many in the congregation take note of the suggestions and go home to try them out for themselves. There are dumb priests who, baffled by the fact that in confession almost all the women say that they have been faithful in matrimony and almost all the men confess to extramarital affairs, cannot for the life of them figure out who the women are with whom the men have sinned. There are many tales about seductive friars and lusty hermits, about Florentine merchants nosing out profits, about female medical woes magically cured by lovemaking, about cunning tricksters, bawling preachers, unfaithful wives, and foolish husbands. There is the fellow humanist—identified by name as Francesco Filelfo—who dreams that he puts his finger into a magic ring that will keep his wife from ever being unfaithful to him and wakes to find that he has his finger in his wife’s vagina. There is the quack doctor who claims that he can produce children of different types—merchants, soldiers, generals—depending on how far he pushes his cock in. A foolish rustic, bargaining for a soldier, hands his wife over to the scoundrel, but then, thinking himself sly, comes out of hiding and hits the quack’s ass to push his cock further in: “Per Sancta Dei Evangelia,”15 the rustic shouts triumphantly, “hic erit Papa!” “This one is going to be pope!”

  The Facetiae was a huge success.

  If Poggio’s work—the best known jokebook of its age—captures anything of the atmosphere of the papal court, it is less surprising that Lapo tried to call attention to himself by signaling openly a strange blend of moral outrage and cynicism. (As it turned out, a few months after he penned his Dialogue in Praise of the Papal Court, poor Lapo died of plague at the age of thirty-three.) By the sixteenth century, the Catholic hierarchy, deeply alarmed by the Protestant Reformation, would attempt to stamp out within its own ranks this current of subversive humor. Poggio’s Facetiae was on a list,16 alongside books by Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Machiavelli, that the Church wished to burn. But in the world Poggio inhabited, it was still permissible, even fashionable, to reveal what was, in any case, widely understood. Poggio could write of the institution where he spent most of his working life that “there is seldom room17 for talent or honesty; every thing is obtained through intrigue or luck, not to mention money, which seems to hold supreme sway over the world.”

  Ambitious young intellectuals, living by their wits, the papal scribes and secretaries looked about and felt that they were cleverer, more complex, more worthy of advancement than the overstuffed prelates they served. Theirs was, predictably, a world of resentment: we complained, Poggio writes, “of the inadequate men18 who hold the highest dignities of the Church, discreet and learned men being left out in the cold, whilst ignorant and worthless persons are exalted.”

  Theirs was also, equally predictably, a world of intense sniping, competitiveness, and backbiting. We have, in the snide remarks about Poggio’s parentage, already had a taste of what they dished out to one another, and Poggio’s own “jokes” about his enemy, the rival humanist Filelfo, are cut from the same cloth:

  At a meeting19 of the Pope’s Secretaries, in the Pontifical palace, attended, as usual, by a number of men of great learning, conversation had turned upon the filthy and disgusting life led by that villain, Francesco Filelfo, who was, on all sides, charged with numerous outrages, and someone inquired if he was of noble extraction,—“To be sure,” said one of his fellow-countrymen, assuming a most earnest look, “to be sure he is, and his nobility is even most illustrious; for his father constantly wore silk in the morning.”

  And then, eager to make sure that his readers get the point of the wisecrack, Poggio adds an explanatory note (always a sign of a damp squib): “meaning by that that Filelfo was the bastard of a priest. When officiating, priests are generally clothed with silk.”

  At this distance, much of this squabbling seems childish. But these were adults intent on drawing blood, and on occasion the blows were not only rhetorical. In 1452, Poggio had been having a running quarrel with another papal secretary, the notoriously morose humanist George of Trebizond, over the burning question of who deserved more credit for several translations of ancient texts. When Poggio screamed at his rival that he was a liar, George struck Poggio with his fist. The two sulked back momentarily to their desks, but then the fight resumed, the seventy-two-year-old Poggio grabbling the fifty-seven-year-old George’s cheek and mouth with one hand while attempting to gouge out his eye with the other. After it was over, in an angry note to Poggio about the fracas, George represented himself as having acted with exemplary restraint: “Rightly I could have20 bitten off the fingers you stuck in my mouth; I did not. Since I was seated and you were standing, I thought of squeezing your testicles with both hands and thus lay you out; I did not do it.” The whole thing seems a grotesque farce, akin to one of the stories in Poggio’s jokebook, except for its real-world consequences: with his better contacts and more genial manner, Poggio had George expelled from the curia. Poggio ended his life covered with honors; George died obscure, resentful, and poor.

  In a celebrated nineteenth-century book on “the revival of learning,” John Addington Symonds, recounting these gladiatorial struggles among humanist scholars, suggests that “they may be taken21 as proof of their enthusiasm for their studies.” Perhaps. However wild their insults, the arguments swirled around fine points of Latin grammar, accusations of mistakes in diction, subtle questions of translation. But the extravagance and bitterness of the charges—in the course of a quarrel over Latin style, Poggio accused the younger humanist Lorenzo Valla of heresy, theft, lying, forgery, cowardice, drunkenness, sexual perversion, and insane vanity—discloses something rotten in the inner lives of these impressively learned individuals.

  Though he was knocking at the door trying to gain admission, Lapo seems to have understood and analyzed the sickness of the whole environment. The problem was not only a matter of this or that difficult personality; it was structural. The papal court had, to serve its own needs, brought into being a class of rootless, ironic intellectuals. These intellectuals were committed to pleasing their masters, on whose patronage they utterly depended, but they were cynical and unhappy. How could the rampant cynicism, greed, and hypocrisy, the need to curry favor with perverse satraps who professed to preach morality to the rest of mankind, the endless jockeying for position in the court of an absolute monarch, not eat away at whatever was hopeful and decent in anyone who breathed that air for very long? What—apart from attempts at character assassination and outright assassination—could be done with the seething feeling of rage?

  One way that Poggio dealt with the sickness—to which he himself had quickly succumbed and from which he was never entirely cured—was through laughter, the abrasive, obscene laughter of the Facetiae. The laughter must have given him some relief, though evidently not enough. For he also wrote a succession of dialogues—On Avarice, Against the Hypocrites, On Nobility, On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, On the Misery of Human Life, and so forth—in which he adopted the stance of a serious moralist. There are clear links between the jokes and the moral essays, but the moral essays allowed Poggio to explore the issues only hinted at in the comical anecdotes.

  The essay Against the Hypocrites, for example, has its share of stories of clerical seducers, but the stories are part of a larger, much more serious analysis of an institutional dilemma: why churchmen, and especially monks, are particularly prone to hypocrisy. Is there a relation, Poggio asks, between
religious vocation and fraud? A full answer would certainly involve sexual motives, but those motives alone cannot adequately account for the swarms of hypocrites in a place such as the curia, including monks notable for their ostentatious piety and their ascetic pallor who are feverishly seeking benefices, immunities, favors, privileges, positions of power. Nor can sexual intrigues adequately explain the still larger swarms of robed hypocrites in the world outside the curia, charismatic preachers who mint money with their sonorous voices and their terrible threats of hellfire and damnation, Observant friars who claim to adhere strictly to the Order of St. Francis but have the morals of bandits, mendicant friars with their little sacks, their long hair and longer beards, and their fraudulent pretense of living in holy poverty, confessors who pry into the secrets of every man and woman. Why don’t all these models of extravagant religiosity simply shut themselves up in their cells and commit themselves to lives of fasting and prayer? Because their conspicuous professions of piety, humility, and contempt for the world are actually masks for avarice, laziness, and ambition. To be sure, someone in the conversation concedes, there are some good and sincere monks, but very, very few of them, and one may observe even those slowly drawn toward the fatal corruption that is virtually built into their vocation.

  “Poggio,” who represents himself as a character in the dialogue, argues that hypocrisy is better at least than open violence, but his friend Aliotti, an abbot, responds that it is worse, since everyone can perceive the horror of a confessed rapist or murderer, but it is more difficult to defend oneself against a sly deceiver. How is it possible then to identify hypocrites? After all, if they are good at their simulations, it is very difficult to distinguish the frauds from genuinely holy figures. The dialogue lists the warning signs. You should be suspicious of anyone who

  displays an excessive purity of life;22

  walks barefoot through the streets, with a dirty face and shabby robes;

  shows in public a disdain for money;

  always has the name of Jesus Christ on his lips;

  wants to be called good, without actually doing anything particularly good;

  attracts women to him to satisfy his wishes;

  runs here and there outside his monastery, seeking fame and honors;

  makes a show of fasting and other ascetic practices;

  induces others to get things for himself;

  refuses to acknowledge or return what is given to him in trust.

  Virtually any priest or monk who is at the curia is a hypocrite, writes Poggio, for it is impossible to fulfill the highest purposes of religion there. And if you happen at the curia to see someone who is particularly abject in his humility, beware: he is not merely a hypocrite but the worst hypocrite of all. In general, you should be wary of people who seem too perfect, and remember that it is actually quite difficult to be good: “Difficile est bonum esse.”

  Against the Hypocrites is a work written not in the wake of Martin Luther by a Reformation polemicist but a century earlier, by a papal bureaucrat living and working at the center of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. It indicates that the Church, though it could and did respond violently to what it perceived as doctrinal or institutional challenges, was willing to tolerate extremely sharp critiques from within, including critiques from secular figures like Poggio. And it indicates too that Poggio and his fellow humanists in the curia struggled to channel their anger and disgust into more than obscene laughter and violent quarrels with one another.

  The greatest and most consequential work in this critical spirit was written by Poggio’s bitter enemy, Lorenzo Valla. Valla famously used his brilliant command of Latin philology to demonstrate that the “Donation of Constantine,” the document in which the Roman emperor purportedly gave possession of the Western Empire to the pope, was a forgery. After the publication of this piece of detective work, Valla was in considerable danger. But the Church’s tolerance for internal critique extended, at least for a brief period in the fifteenth century, even to this extreme edge: the humanist pope Nicholas V eventually appointed Valla to the post of apostolic secretary, and thus this most independent and critical of spirits was, like Poggio, employed by the curia he had so relentlessly exposed and ridiculed.

  Poggio lacked Valla’s radicalism and originality. One of the speakers in Against the Hypocrites briefly floats an argument that might have led in a perilous direction, moving from the theatrical pretense of holiness in the Catholic Church to the fraudulent use of oracles in pagan religion as a means to overawe and manipulate the vulgar. But the subversive link—which Machiavelli would exploit to shocking effect in the next century in constructing a disenchanted analysis of the political uses of all religious faith—is never quite made, and Poggio’s work merely ends with a fantasy of stripping the hypocrites of their protective cloaks. In the afterlife, we are told, the dead, in order to enter the infernal kingdom, have to pass through gates of different diameters. Those who are known by the custodian to be clearly bad or good pass through the wide gates; through the narrow ones go those about whom it is not clear whether they are honest or hypocritical. The honest souls pass through, with only minimal scratching; the hypocrites have their skin entirely lacerated.

  This fantasy of laceration manages to combine Poggio’s aggression and his pessimism: the hypocrites will all be exposed and definitively punished, but it is not until the afterlife that it is possible even to reveal who they are. If anger always hovers within him just beneath the surface of his laughter, so too despair—at the impossibility of reforming abuses, at the steady loss of everything worth treasuring, at the wretchedness of the human condition—hovers just beneath his anger.

  Like many of his colleagues, Poggio was an indefatigable letter writer, and through these letters we glimpse him grappling with the cynicism, disgust, and worldweariness that seems to have afflicted everyone in the papal entourage. Monasteries, he writes to a friend, are “not congregations23 of the faithful or places of religious men but the workshops of criminals”; the curia is “a sink of men’s vices.” (158) Everywhere he looks around Rome, people are tearing down ancient temples to get the lime from the stones, and within a generation or two most of the glorious remains of the past, so much more precious than our own miserable present, will be gone. He is wasting his life and must find an escape route: “I must try everything,24 so that I may achieve something, and so stop being a servant to men and have time for literature.”

  Yet though he indulged at moments in fantasies of changing his life—“to abandon25 all these worldly concerns, all the empty cares, annoyances, and daily plans, and to flee into the haven of poverty, which is freedom and true quiet and safety”—Poggio recognized sadly that such a route was not open to him. “I do not know26 what I can do outside the Curia,” he wrote to Niccoli, “except teach boys or work for some master or rather tyrant. If I had to take up either one of these, I should think it utter misery. For not only is all servitude a dismal thing, as you know, but especially so is serving the lusts of a wicked man. As for school teaching, may I be spared that! For it would be better to be subject to one man than to many.” He would stay at the curia, then, in the hope that he would make enough money to enable him to retire early: “My one ambition:27 by the hard work of a few years to achieve leisure for the rest of my life.” As it turned out, the “few years” would prove to be fifty.

  The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life. But Poggio did not succumb to it, though he had every reason to do so. He lived in a world not only pervaded by corruption and greed but also repeatedly battered by conspiracies, riots, wars, and outbreaks of plague. He worked in the Roman curia, but the curia was not even stable in its location in Rome, since the pope and his entire court repeatedly were forced to flee the city. He grappled, as everyone in his world had to grapple, with the constant presence of pain—from which there was no medical relief—and with the constant threat of death. He could easily h
ave contracted into brittle, defensive cynicism, relieved only by unfulfilled fantasies of escape.

  What saved him was an obsessive craving, his book mania.

  In 1406, when he learned that his great mentor Salutati had died, Poggio was grief-stricken. The great old man had seized upon anyone in whom he had seen “some gleam of intellect”28 and had helped those whom he had so identified with instruction, guidance, letters of recommendation, money, and, above all, the use of his own books. “We have lost a father,” he wrote; “we have lost the haven and refuge of all scholars, the light of our nation.” Poggio claimed that he was weeping as he wrote his letter, and there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of his words: “Express my sympathy to his sons,” he wrote to Niccoli in Florence, “and tell them that I am plunged in grief. This too I want to find out from you: what you think will happen to his books.”