Parody allows Pascal to make mental reservation and equivocation look like the shape-shifting practices of egotistical hotheads and avaricious cowards, but he roots his parody in Augustinian ideas of grace and original sin. Pascal is simply not interested in entering into Scholastic debates about the fine lines that separate licit from illicit speech, concealment from mendacity. Lying for him is less a linguistic or ethical problem than it is a profound spiritual and ontological disorder whose source extends back to Adam and Eve and the Fall. “Man is, therefore, only disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy,” he writes in his Pensées, “both in himself and in regards to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others. And all these dispositions, so far removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.”105 Perhaps the world abounds in moral conundrums, but the real problem rests in our fallen faculties, our imperceptible desires and constant distractions, in a pride and self-love that blinds us to ourselves even as we set ourselves up as gods, judging good and evil. These are the sad consequences of original sin, a punishment we all suffer because of one man’s transgression, a punishment so contrary to human conceptions of justice that it appears irrational and, appearing irrational, remains forever inaccessible to human reason.106
Original sin leaves us no choice but to cleave to God and to his self-revelation in scripture as the only fixed point to which we can secure ourselves and our judgments, and at the heart of scripture there is Jesus Christ, prophesied in the Old Testament, memorialized in the New Testament.107 In opposition to what he refers to as “Jesuit neutrality” toward the world in which reason fits religious doctrine to worldly need, Pascal looks to the first centuries of the Christian faith, when there was an “essential distinction between the world and the church … as between two irreconcilable enemies, such that the one persecuted the other without end.” The Romans savaged the Church so relentlessly that men “conceived a dreadful difference between them.”108 To enter the Church required a commitment to reject the world, to leave it behind and to abandon all its ideas and values. There was little choice. The Church countered Roman pride with Christ’s incarnation and the humility of his crucifixion.109 There can be no middle ground, Pascal contends, no room for compromise nor human invention, for “Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.”110 But all these distinctions, he laments, are now obscured because the Church has made peace with the world, and at the very moment we are born into the world, so also are we born into the Church, the absolute difference between the two lost. Even as we partake in the sacraments, Pascal laments, we “enjoy the pleasures of this world.”111
With the model of the early Church’s refusal to accommodate to the ways of a sinful world, Pascal recuperates something like the purity and simplicity of Augustine’s original prohibition against lies—the unwavering example of the Bishop Firmus, the total rejection of Consentius’s deceptive tactics to root out hidden Priscillianist heretics. But no recuperation is total, if only because the passage of time wearies and shifts that original vision once lost and now inevitably regained from a different vantage point. Pascal, admittedly, says little or nothing about Augustine’s actual prohibition. He condemns Jesuit moral theology as sinful because he believes it condones lies and sets reason up as its own god determining good and evil. Less polemically, Pascal believes the Jesuits credit reason with too much power, too much discernment, that they credit human beings with the ability to determine their own salvation. If our very essence as fallen beings is one of self-deception, if lies and deceit constitute our very nature, then it cannot be enough to ask how reason ought to operate in a deceptive world, nor can it be enough to analyze the fine gradations of culpability among different sorts of lies, between licit and illicit speech. For Pascal, these approaches are fundamentally insufficient because they fail to take account of our inherent sinfulness, the fact that we lie to ourselves even as we confront a world full of liars. Reason is not simply weak, it is treacherous.
Pascal treats the lie entirely as a problem in spiritual anthropology that leaves us incomprehensible and paradoxical to ourselves. This is the starting point of his famous wager, which places us in the midst of uncertainty and confusion while simultaneously appealing to our own self-interest. Should we bet on God’s nonexistence for a possible share of the world’s paltry and finite pleasures, or bet on God’s existence and the possibility of eternal happiness and salvation? If we accept the wager, we will have to enact that crucial, if now lost, distinction between Christian and Roman, Church and world. We will have to act differently than we had before. We will have to submit reason to the will of Christ and give up the “poisonous pleasures” of human glory and luxury, even as we now attend mass and accept the sacraments. We will act as if we believe, even if we don’t, in the hope that someday we will. There are no assurances, and Pascal clearly distinguishes belief from faith. Habit can form belief and prepare us for grace, but grace cannot be earned and comes from God alone. If this seems to verge on the very sort of self-centered hypocrisy he deplores in his Provincial Letters, Pascal doubles down, stressing that whether or not habit leads to belief and belief to faith, the bettor will still profit as his peers take him to be “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend.”112
In this life, the simulation of Christian virtue offers its own rewards, has its own benefits, entirely independent of our salvation. Perhaps the spiritual for Pascal will always trump the worldly, but the worldy benefits remain, calculable, potentially separable.
PART TWO
Courtiers and Women Ask the Question
CHAPTER FOUR
Courtiers
FLATTERERS, WHEEDLERS, AND GOSSIPMONGERS
“The flatterer is the enemy of all virtue,” John of Salisbury warns in the Policraticus, a work he composed in 1159, “and forms as it were a cataract over the eye of him whom he engages in conversation.” With seemingly kind and encouraging words, pledges of love and fidelity, fine manners and concerned gestures, the flatterer blinds his victim, fills his ears with lies, and stokes his vanity. “Men of this type,” John continues, “always speak to give pleasure, never to tell the truth. The words in their mouths are wicked guile which, even when friends are in error, bellows Bravo! Bravo! to their undoing.”1 And there are others lurking around the court, no less pernicious, no less evil. To the ranks of the flatterer, John adds the timeserver, the wheedler, and the gift giver, the actor and the mimic, the pervert, the procurer, and the gossipmonger. The only thing that surpasses their variety, John fears, is their number, “for the foul inundation of their cancerous disease seeps into all so that there is rarely anyone left uncontaminated.”2
Perhaps John exaggerates. The history of social commentary all too often seems like little more than the history of fears and proclamations that the current generation has gone to seed, that corruption runs rampant and morals have decayed beyond hope of redemption. In the 1520s, some 350 years after John despaired of his contemporaries, Baldassare Castiglione, the Mantuan-born envoy for the court of Gonzaga, would blame the elderly for this tendency to believe that “all things imaginable are always moving from bad to worse.” Why? “For myself,” Castiglione writes in The Book of the Courtier, “I think that the reason for this faulty judgment in the old is that the passing years rob them of the favorable conditions of life.”3 As our bodies and minds wither, the world around us seems to wither as well. Whether John was aged or not (he was in his late thirties with more than half his life still ahead of him when he composed The Policraticus), his observations should be taken seriously, since he was as well placed as anyone during his life to observe the “frivolities” or “non-sense” of the courtiers. An emissary for kings and popes, not to mention a fervent letter writer who ended his days as bishop of Chartres, there can be little doubt that John was intimately acquainted with the nature of medieval court life, its forms and foibles, its pleasures and poisons and, e
specially, its temptations.4 “The most dangerous situation … that men of eminence have to face,” John writes at the very beginning of the first chapter of the first book of the Policraticus, “lies in the fact that the enticements of fawning fortune blind their eyes to truth. The world heaps upon them its wealth and its pleasures and thereby kindles and fosters their craving for self-indulgence. The soul, deceived by allurements of many kinds, proving false to its own inner light, by a sort of self-betrayal goes astray as the result of its desires amid the deceptions of the outer world.”5
John was not alone in his depiction of the court as a place of lies and deception. During the first decades of the fifteenth century, Alain Chartier who, among other things, served as private secretary to Charles VII, received a request for assistance from his brother Jean, who hoped to obtain a position at court. Alain was less than thrilled with his brother’s plans and did his best to dissuade him in a letter known as the Curial. Although Alain alludes to the official burdens of his position, to the “miseries” he suffers each day due to his public services, he has little else to say about his onerous civic and political duties.6 On the other hand, he has a tremendous amount to say about life in the court, and nothing he has to say about it is good. The courts of high princes overflow with an assortment of deceivers and bullies, of envious men, flatterers, and false accusers, all endeavoring to hinder and somehow undo “the good will of honest men.” Sadly, human nature is weak and, just like John’s man of eminence, Alain fears that no matter how good a person is when he enters the court, he will all too quickly “follow the habits of others and begin to do as they do.”7 If a man has been studious, rising early each morning, soon he will be out late at night carousing, wasting his time on idle thoughts as he begins to lose “mastery” over himself.8 The court constantly replicates itself, breeding new flatterers and liars as it cons men into exchanging proper morals for prideful dreams. “For the court,” he adds, “nourishes people who by fraud and simulation endeavor to draw from each other such words by which they may persecute them … taking more pleasure in false reports than in true words.”9 His language growing more florid by the line, Alain laments that “to those who understand it well, the court is a gathering of people who, under the pretense of the common good, assemble in order to deceive one another.”10
Alain contrasts the perils of court life with the Edenic pleasures of the country, where a man is free to be himself. “Oh fortunate men, who live in peace,” Alain writes in praise of bucolic tranquillity, “blessed family, where honest poverty is content with reason, without eating the fruits of other men’s labor. O blessed house in which virtue reigns without fraud and strife and which is honestly governed in the dread of God and the good moderation of life. There enter no sins and there is a true and rightful life.”11 Of course, the simple pleasures of the countryside were not enough to keep Alain himself from falling for the lure of the court, nor, as it turned out, would they keep his brother Jean’s attention for long. None of this is surprising. How could the merely Eden-like pleasures of the country satisfy, if the real pleasures of Eden itself were not enough to keep Adam and Eve from transgressing God’s command in favor of the serpent’s illusory promises of power, prestige, and divinity? When John of Salisbury and Alain Chartier describe the dangers of the court and the transformations it works on its victims, they are doing little more than offering an updated version of the oldest story in the world.
Scripture reports that almost as soon as Adam took and ate the fruit that his wife had already tasted, their “eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”12 According to the sixth-century Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville, whose account of this event was included and popularized in the Glossa Ordinaria, a combination of shame, cunning pride, and salacious desire motivated the first couple to conceal themselves with leaves and lies. Now fallen, having violated God’s command, Adam and Eve no longer see themselves and the world as they had before. Their nakedness, once the sign of their innocence, suddenly appears shameful to their corrupted eyes. The experience of shame itself is significant, revealing their loss of innocence as “they make girdles, hiding their genitals, that is, hiding their innocence, about which a cunning pride now embarrasses them.” The fig-leaf clothing behind which they conceal themselves signifies the salacious yearnings their souls now “suffer as a result of carnal desire and the pleasure of lying. This is why,” Isidore concludes, “people who love to joke are called liars, because in jokes, deception is key.”13
If deception was the key to humor, it was also the key to courtly life. Already in the eleventh century, the reforming monk and future cardinal Peter Damian discerned the structural element of court society that so efficiently transformed men into liars and the world into a veil of false fronts. Railing against clergy who serve in the imperial courts in the hope of eventually receiving bishoprics of their own, Damian argues that no one can enter the secular courts without falling into sin. Advancement requires that clerics “must both be lavish with their money and not forget to ingratiate themselves with their patrons by fondling them with fawning compliments.” Whenever possible, “he will smother his lord with affable words” and “delight him with fawning flattery.” Having handed himself over in vassalage to the whims of his new lord, the cleric is no longer his own man. No matter what his lord does or says, the cleric must make his approval known, shivering should the king appear cold, growing weary should the king want to sleep, belching should the king have eaten too much. Flattery transforms the cleric into a liar because his only goal in speaking is to please his lord. “For sinners,” Damian warns, “use deceptive words when with flattery they suggest that something wicked be done, or praise you when you have done it.”14 Just as John would warn of the courtier’s self-betrayal, Damian demonstrates how the very dynamics of court society compel its members to take on deceptive coverings, to lie and become someone other than themselves. In keeping with his own reformist inclinations, Damian sees nothing for it but to avoid the court completely.
About one hundred years later, one of John of Salisbury’s students, Peter of Blois, would castigate himself for having ignored Damian’s advice. Reflecting on his own experiences, Peter would bitterly observe that “the life of the curial is the death of the soul, and it is damnable to be a cleric who has immersed himself in courtly and worldly business.” Damnable or not, Peter cannot forget how that business seduced him, how ambition had intoxicated him, how the prince’s sweet promises had undermined him, so that he willingly and knowingly conspired against his own life.15 For medieval writers, the structure of courtly life revealed more clearly than anywhere else the conditions of life after Eden, as it staged unending reenactments of our fall and, fallen, leaving us with no recourse but to lie in our own self-defense like Adam before a questioning God. “Some offering an excuse for their sin and preferring the coverings of the old Adam,” Peter notes, “when asked why they follow after the court, rather than God and salvation, argue that these two ends are not opposed and they introduce examples from antiquity to color and support their ambition. Wasn’t Moses sent to correct and instruct Pharaoh, Jeremiah to Sedechiam, Helias to Ahab, Joiadas to Josaih?”16 But Peter knows this recourse to precedents from antiquity is nothing more than the Devil’s work, contorting scripture to serve one’s own ends. God did not send Peter to court, nor did he send any of Peter’s peers. Just as temptation got the better of Peter, so had Adam and Eve already exchanged the simple pleasures of paradise for the serpent’s sham promises. And the consequences for all of them, for Adam and Eve and for all their descendants, would be the same—a world of pride and envy and lust, of concealment and disguise, deception and lies. East of Eden, Adam and Eve find the court.
EARLY MODERN UNCERTAINTY AND DECEPTION
How should a person, John’s “man of eminence” or Alain’s “honest man,” respond to a situation of rampant illusion, ever-present deception, and cons
tant uncertainty? This is an important question for at least two different, if related, reasons. To begin with, it is an important question because it is a question that matters to John, to Alain, to any number of medieval writers. Peter Damian and Alain Chartier may have advised one and all to avoid the court, but Damian went on to become a cardinal, the head of his own court, and Alain maintained his position long after he had unsuccessfully warned his brother away from following in his footsteps. Even Peter of Blois recognized the need for courtly and secular involvements in a fallen world. Before his own disappointments and frustrations had gotten the better of him, he had defended the role of clerics at court, and he would do so again as offended clerics demanded an apology for the slanders they had found strewn across the pages of his epistolary diatribe against their profession. “I do not condemn the life of clerics,” he would write in a subsequent letter, “who remain engaged in prayer and contemplation, are concerned with the utility of the commonweal and frequently carry out the work of salvation.”17 The court was a necessary evil of a fallen world that required institutions, laws, and armies to maintain peace and order. Avoiding the court was not an option, not a real option anyway, so knowing how to adapt to it in order to shape it toward the good was too important a duty simply to abandon.
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