The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment

by Dallas G. Denery II

  John’s desire to prevail in his own particular courtly squabbles is not sufficient, however, to motivate the Metalogicon’s composition. He is equally clear that his overarching philosophical ideas must be immediately relevant to life in the court. “Any pretext of philosophy,” he explains, “that does not bear fruit in the cultivation of virtue and the guidance of one’s conduct is futile and false.”53 John’s skepticism, in other words, is more than a set of philosophical theorems. It is, as well, an antidote to the poisonous and deceptive atmosphere of the court, a technique of calculated suspicion and doubt, of wariness and care, that trains the individual to take nothing at face value. John’s fourteenth-century translator, Denis Foulechat, took this to be the Policraticus’s main goal. Describing John’s book as a guide to virtuous living, Foulechat contends that virtue requires wisdom, and true wisdom of the sort required by kings, princes, courtiers, and judges consists of two rules. “In the first book of the Sophistical Refutations,” writes Foulechat, “the Philosopher notes that there are two works of wisdom: to speak the truth without lying about things that one knows and to be able to reveal the liar and his lies.”54 To hear Foulechat tell it, the good prince, like a lamb among wolves, is surrounded by innumerable “subtle liars” hiding under the facade of goodness and waiting for their moment to pounce. Unschooled in the ways of the world, the prince imagines that everyone acts only in terms of what is good and true. As a result, he is easily taken in, and “thinking that he preserves justice, destroys it and, when he wishes to please God, sins dearly.”55 Everything hinges on the good prince’s ability to identify liars. He must be trained in the ways of the deceitful, must understand their plots, their secrets, their treasons, so that they will not lead him to his own self-destruction.56

  It is the faculty of prudence, John contends, that bridges the divide between theory and practice and transforms philosophical skepticism into a strategy for courtly survival. Prudence takes up the tools of the “science of argumentative reasoning” and uses them to discern the truth or, failing that, to determine what is useful and probable when certainty is not possible. As a result, John connects prudence with wisdom, “whose fruit consists in the love of what is good and the practice of virtue.”57 Successfully distinguishing true goods from transitory pleasures has real consequences. The person who mistakes the transitory for the true, the apparent for the real, will find himself oppressed under the “yoke of vice.” Enslaved to morbid desires like Cornificius, John’s loudest critic, he will forget the teachings of philosophy in his mad pursuit of money, deeming “nothing sordid and inane, save the straits of poverty.” He will, in short, become a flatterer. But having said this much, John cuts short his account of flatterers in the Metalogicon. “I will not discuss their ways here,” he explains, “for my Policraticus delves into the latter at length, although it cannot hope to ferret out all their tricks, which would be beyond the powers of any mere human.”58

  ENTANGLED IN LEVIATHAN’S LOINS

  The move from the Metalogicon to the opening books of the Policraticus certainly involves a shift in topics, from a defense of philosophy to a critique of the court, but it is something else as well. It also marks a shift in the deployment of prudence. In the Metalogicon, John defends the importance of dialectic with the tools of dialectical reasoning. He constructs arguments using probable theses, that is, theses approved and accepted by the wise. In the Policraticus, he does something different. He constantly moves from dialectic to rhetoric, from thesis to hypothesis, from general questions to specific instances. John himself signals this difference in the Metalogicon, with his brief allusion to the Policraticus. No one can spell out, account for, or predict all the deceptions, plots, and schemes of the courtiers. Their vanity and avarice know no limits, and the wise man, the man of eminence struggling against the illusory attractions of the court, must always be ready to adapt to each new challenge. Dialectics, with its reliance on generally approved principles, has its uses, but in the daily life of the court, the questions that confront us are always already “hedged in by a multitude of circumstances.”59 Rhetorical practice provides the tools the man of eminence needs to determine the best course of action, not in the abstract, not in most cases, but in this case, at this moment, against these opponents.

  John is heavily indebted to Cicero for this conception of rhetoric. In On Duties, Cicero depicts the wise and honorable man as the perfect orator. Just as the orator must always match his words and gestures to the demands of the moment if he hopes to sway his audience’s opinion, so must the honorable man always match his words and actions to the demands of the moment if he hopes to do the right thing. We do the right thing, Cicero argues, when we honorably and appropriately fulfill our duties. This requires a particular sort of knowledge. We cannot know what duty demands of us, what we should do or say in any given situation, unless we know who we are, and who we are, Cicero believes, requires an awareness of the two different roles with which Nature “dresses” us. The first role, Cicero writes, “is common, arising from the fact that we all have a share in reason and in the superiority by which we surpass brutes.” In everything we do, we must always endeavor to act as rational creatures, tied with bonds of love and fellowship to our family and fellow citizens. The second role “is that assigned specifically to individuals.” Each of us has different strengths and weaknesses, peculiarities of character. Some people are smarter, others stronger, still others are more or less humorous, forthright, or conniving.60 We must consider these roles, what demands they place on us, what duties they require from us, so that we can meld our actions together in the most virtuous, seemly, and decorous manner possible. “All action,” he adds, “should be free from rashness and carelessness; nor should anyone do anything for which he cannot give a persuasive justification: that is practically the definition of duty.”61 We must, as Cicero puts it, become “good calculators of our duties.”62

  Quite early on in the Policraticus, John adopts a version of Cicero’s distinction between common and specific duties. “The principles of nature are binding upon all alike,” John informs us, “considerations of duty, upon particular individuals.”63 Appropriate action for John, as for Cicero, depends on self-knowledge. The man of eminence must understand his boundaries, his limits and frailties. He must know “what is within him, what without, what below, what above, what opposite, what before, and what after.”64 Tellingly, John also suggests that he must understand and adapt to the specific contexts in which he seeks this knowledge. Immediately before embarking on his critique of flatterers, John distinguishes between two kinds of self-knowledge, the knowledge we acquire through faith and the knowledge we acquire through learning. While faith trumps learning in the long run, learning cannot be ignored. “Let the rule of faith be deferred,” John writes, “as it will be discussed in its own time and place. Learning then involves knowledge of self, which cannot be attained if it fails to measure its own strength or if it is ignorant of the strength of others.”65

  John’s skepticism compels him, as it would John Rainolds in the sixteenth century, to adopt a fundamentally rhetorical orientation toward the world. “Those things are of doubtful validity,” John writes, “which are supported by authority of neither faith, sense or apparent reasons and which in their main points lean towards either side.” While at first this might sound as if it holds open the possibility for quite a bit of certainty about things, John’s subsequent list of doubtful subjects rather quickly quashes any such hope. We can have no certainty, he tells us, concerning providence, “the substance, quantity, power, efficacy and the origin of the soul,” nor about fate and free will. Nor do we possesses any certainty about an increasingly vast array of moral and ethical matters such as “the use, beginning and end of all virtues and vice, whether everyone who possesses one virtue possesses all, or whether all sins are equal and to be punished equally.” Human ingenuity is also at a loss when it comes to determining the status of “duties and the various kinds of situations w
hich arise in reference to agreements and quasi agreements; to misdemeanors and quasi misdemeanors or to other matters.”66 Lacking universally binding first and certain principles to serve as regulative ideals in guiding our behavior, we are forced to make do with merely probable theses, whose applicability to any given situation is always open to modification depending on the ever-changing situation at hand.

  The significance of John’s adoption of a rhetorical approach to the world and ethics in the Policraticus’s opening books appears in a variety of guises. More often than not, it shows up when John suggests that generally accepted ethical principles be modified or ignored in certain situations. John, for example, goes on at length about the indignity of hunting, referencing such authorities as Horace, Valerius Maximus, scripture, and the Church fathers. Hunting, he informs us, debases noble natures, rendering hunters worse than peasants and barely on par with the animals themselves. Toward the end of this diatribe which, for all intents and purposes, forms something like a dialectical argument from probable principles against hunting, John adopts a rhetorical mode of analysis. Is hunting necessarily bad? Not at all. While it is all too often abused, considered on its own it is a morally indifferent activity. “Therefore,” John concludes, “it is quite possible, depending upon the circumstances, time, manner, individual, and purpose, for hunting to be a useful and honorable occupation.”67 John performs precisely the same move from dialectical to rhetorical analysis when he considers gambling, an activity to be abhorred, “in which one becomes more depraved in proportion as his skill in it increases.”68 This probable moral thesis notwithstanding, John then argues that there is nothing wrong with gambling given the proper circumstances. John writes, “The circumstances that regulate all freedom from restraint are dependent upon a preceding consideration of place, time, individual, and cause. It is this consideration which makes all transactions appear beautiful or condemns them as morally ugly. In each individual case many roles are to be considered since nature, situation, and fortune each invests a man with its own garb and from these he must choose that which in his own case is becoming.”69 Circumstances, when properly concatenated, can override even the most probable of probable theses.

  While few would object to the occasional hunt or roll of the dice, John applies his rhetorical ethics to other, more morally dubious endeavors. Having raged against the flatterers throughout most of the Policraticus’s third book, John asks, in the final chapter, if there is anyone the man of eminence is allowed to flatter. John answers, famously, yes. “It is lawful to flatter him whom it is lawful to slay,” he writes, “and it is not merely lawful to slay a tyrant but even just and right.”70 And so, there are special circumstances in which flattery itself becomes morally appropriate. While the flattery and assassination of tyrants is the most extreme case John considers, the power of circumstances to free us from normal moral restraints against flattery and lying shows up in numerous places throughout the early sections of the Policraticus. Midway through his discussion of flatterers, John abruptly and without warning offers some surprisingly underhanded tips. “The art of flattery,” he writes, “is very effective when you appear to be negligent of your own interests and attend to those of others; speaking of your own profit never or rarely, but always, or at least often, of his whose favor you are currying.”71 Several pages later, he adds, “If you are ambitious to outstrip those who are lavish with promises and gifts, in the esteem of him with whom you are currying favor, you should associate yourself with his financial secrets…. You must worm your way into his secrets at any cost.”72 No doubt these are exceptions to standard moral principles, but they are legitimate exceptions made acceptable by the circumstances.

  John is in no way suggesting anything like a moral free-for-all in which the man of eminence can justify any action whatsoever through recourse to difficult circumstance. Each of us has our duties, our role to fulfill, the moral “garb” that fits us best, and those duties, to ourselves, our fellows, our state, and to God, must determine how we act at any given moment.73 In normal circumstances, perhaps these decisions are easy and recourse to standard and generally accepted moral principles can successfully guide us. Unfortunately, the court, perhaps this entire fallen world, is no normal place. Self-serving duplicitous courtiers (“those whose intercourse is not in the heavens,” as John describes them at one point) surround and attempt to deceive us. To people like these, John contends, we can afford neither “affection nor friendship.”74 John often describes the world as a comedy or tragedy, a stage play in which people have taken on false roles. Just as often, he invokes metaphors of combat and warfare. If negotiating one’s way through the world of the court is akin to combat, then the rules of combat apply, and John wholly approves the use of strategemmata, cunningly wrought military deceptions, in overcoming our enemies.75

  Medieval canon lawyers and theologians had a word for the epistemological condition associated with these sorts of impossibly confused types of ethical conundrums: they called it “perplexity.” Court writers from at least as early as the twelfth century and continuing without interruption for the next six or seven hundred years consistently depict the world as a place in which the individual is in a near-constant state of moral perplexity, in which uncertainty proliferates with every chance encounter, leaving the individual with no morally pure alternatives. Sometimes we must sin to avoid greater sins, to achieve some great good, or prevent some great harm, and sometimes we must sin simply to avoid incurring displeasure, anger, or social embarrassment. In his Decretum, the great legal treatise from the mid-twelfth century, the Bolognese canon lawyer Gratian, drawing on ideas from Gregory the Great and others, suggested that we do indeed face such moments of perplexity when, say, we are caught between lying or breaking an oath. In such cases, Gratian contends, when “an inescapable danger compels us to perpetrate one of two evils, we must choose the one that makes us less guilty.” The glossators whose commentary accompanies Gratian’s work, as well as Thomas Aquinas, argue that such moments of moral perplexity are entirely subjective, “arising only in the mind and from foolish opinion.”76 The glossators assume that any and all moral perplexities can be resolved through analysis of the situation and the options it presents, even if the sinless choice with which we are left is a difficult one.

  Gratian, by contrast, seems to assume that the world itself is morally ambiguous, offering us few good options, fewer certainties, and all too many situations that require us to sin, if only to avoid worse sins. This is what it means to live east of Eden, in the Devil’s world. Gratian quotes Gregory to describe our predicament. “The sinews of the Leviathan’s loins are entangled because the purpose of his suggestions is entangled with tangled devices,” he writes. “Thus, many commit sins because hoping to avoid one, they cannot escape the snare of another.”77 In response to Gratian’s depiction of a morally perplexed world, the glossators assert the existence of a world whose moral contours are much more clearly delineated. “It must be stated,” they write, “that no one can really be in doubt between two evils in this way. For it would then follow that necessity can make one do something evil. But the canons say that God will never punish anyone unless he has done wrong voluntarily.”78 But this is Gratian’s point entirely: the world itself generates profound moral dilemmas, leaving us with no choice but to sin. “When there are walls on all sides,” he writes in a memorable metaphor, “and the way of escape is closed to prevent flight, the one fleeing throws himself off where the wall is lowest.”79

  While the entire courtly tradition would share Gratian’s vision of a morally perplexed world, it would reject his belief that when necessity compels us to choose the lesser evil, we are still guilty of sin.80 For John, the uncertainties the man of eminence faces justify deceptive ruses and tricks. Lies beget lies, and in the Policraticus’s prologue, John simply notes the wisdom of the psalmist’s observations that “every man is a liar.”81 Occasionally, John will deplore lies and mendacity. More often than not, he ignores
Augustine’s well-known prohibitions and theses against lying, never mentioning them once, while admitting that he himself has had recourse to lies when it has suited his purposes.82 In the Entheticus, his poetic account of twelfth-century pedagogy and life in the court, John argues that “that deception is good which effects benefits, and by which joys, life and salvation are looked after.” The man of eminence must be all things to all people, feigning many things, to draw the sinful from their sins. Often, there is simply no other way. “The work of infiltration,” John notes, again invoking the language of combat and espionage, “recalls from vices those whom simple reason cannot recall.”83

  CHRISTINE DE PIZAN AND JUST HYPOCRISY

  Christine de Pizan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies is a decidedly more practical and streamlined work than anything John ever wrote. A handbook to teach noblewomen how to negotiate the complicated personal, social, and political challenges of early fifteenth-century France, Christine simply assumes John’s entire philosophical and rhetorical framework as she plunges her readers into the maelstrom of the medieval court. Christine is quite up-front and unabashed about her work’s this-worldly orientation, and much of it is given over to the lessons of “Worldly Prudence,” whose “teachings and admonitions are not separate from those of God, but come from them and are based on them.” With her valorization of worldly prudence, Christine rejects those who would utterly condemn the active life in favor of a life of religious seclusion and prayer. There are two paths to God, Christine writes, the contemplative and the active, and while the contemplative life is the better life, the life most agreeable to God, the active life “has more use in the world.”84 Utility, as it turns out, has its value both here and in heaven. “It does not displease God,” Christine writes, “for a person to live in this world morally, and if she lives morally she will love the blessing of a good reputation, which is honor.” Even Augustine, Christine adds, had warned that to live well a person needs both a good conscience and a “good reputation.”85 Christine not only links morality to the possession of a good reputation, she also emphasizes their interconnection. While living morally results in a good reputation, successfully maintaining one’s good reputation is a sign of moral worth.